if its whole intellectual doctrine is in a fluid and crum

bling state?"

We would say this to earnest men yearning to see some good of a visible and fruitful kind accomplished in their time,-"What can be the practical good of a religion which, as the problems of life and complex societies grow wider, more and more resolutely declines to admit them into its sphere, and more and more yields the field of practical human improvement to science, experience, and worldly wisdom?" When the people are to be taught, a secular Board takes the place of the parson; when a pestilence arrives, we look to no ecclesiastical exorcism, but to biological research; in grave social struggles of class against class, we do not ask Churchmen to interpose, but appeal to the voice of social economics and practical politics. Daily, the gospel as delivered to the Apostles retreats further and further into some remote corner of the world's work and thought, less and less pretending to direct industry, or politics, or art, or science, or even education. What is the practical good of maintaining a sort of Sunday God, a Heaven for the rare hours of solitary meditation, a Church which has nothing to say about the daily problems of life, nothing special to teach about social duty, no pretension to offer an opinion about the progress of thought-in fact no function at all, but to urge men to get quickly forth from this vale of tears, and to be deaf and blind to all its concerns, so long as they are doomed to linger in it?

Why do we make efforts so desperate to maintain creeds which define in philosophic abstractions mystic ideas about the Universe and its Triune Creator; why need we struggle for Churches, liturgies, and ceremonials, if the progress of science has so altered the canons of intellectual assent, and the course of civilisation has so transformed the wants and conditions of practical existence, that there is almost no point of contact between the daily life of modern man and these superhuman sublimities? Man sorely needs a religion to make life more spiritual in this world. And the priests only offer him gratuitous guessing about another world.

See what realities men neglect for the sake of these imaginations! The vast edifice of science is steadily covering the whole field of knowledge, the moral and social life of man, as well as his dwelling place and the world around him. And out of his new consensus of all human ideas, on a common plane of law, there has risen up the revelation of the life of all races of mankind knit up into one story through countless ages— so that we grasp the sense of a Humanity as a guiding and protecting power over our lives, real, and unmistakable in its nature, relatively to each of us feeble ones a vast, beneficent, and abiding Providence; so that the intelligent service of this mighty organism has become plain to us as a creed of human duty.

Behold then, whilst men's eyes were vaguely wandering round the skies in search of a vanished light that grows ever fainter and more dim, there has grown up

in the meantime a visible Power on earth, less dazzling in its brightness than the light in Heaven of old, but far more clear and solid, and amply able to inspire a noble life of work. Thus common sense and religion at last teach the same lesson; and the saving our own souls turns out to be the good old rule of doing our duty in this world in the way that Humanity both shows and enables us now to do it.

Common sense, science, religion, have at last found one creed and teach the same lesson. There is no longer any conflict with religion. Far more than this: there must be a great revival of religion, and the old spirit of orthodoxy has much to teach us still. To those who have parted for ever with the ancient Churches, to those who have come over definitely to us, or are in sympathy with positive ideas and not with theological, we would say this: "Remember how much each of us owes to orthodox Christianity, how strong are the ties that bind us to what remains of life within it, to a large part of its history and many of its leading institutions!"

Our antagonism is one mainly of thought, of science; it is intellectual, but not practical. We do not repudiate the inner spirit that called them into being, nor discard their institutions with scorn. We abandon them simply because we find them obsolete; obsolete from the course of modern science, modern history, obsolete from the inevitable growth of civilisation.

We cannot forget this:-that these Orthodox communions (I include them all, Catholic, Protestant, es

tablished, non-conforming, old and new, great and small) have, each in their degree, some noble remnants of their old spiritual force, a history that enshrines some of the most memorable records of human nature in its purest form, immortal works of human genius-that they still nourish within them exquisite sources of pathos, of heart-history, love and wisdom, which those whose lives are absorbed in the practical whirl of life and the doctrines and associations of physical science have more or less lost touch with that these ancient communions retain institutions, traditions, instincts as to the beauty of holiness which are necessarily beyond the dream of any non-orthodox movement, and will continue to be beyond its dream for generations and generations to come.

These orthodox communions, are still most obviously in command of the field; they dominate great sections of society and control familiar institutions. They have their schools, congregational organisation, their charities, their good works on a thousand sides, their good lives and spiritual examples that none can deny, and no honest man would underrate. Theirs is a zeal for what is commonly understood by spiritual life. And all this we most unfeignedly acknowledge to be wholly beyond the reach of a handful of seekers after truth (and we cannot presume to count ourselves as more)-but rather we should be false to our principles if we failed to support it and to imitate it in the spirit of humbleness and generous recognition.

CHAPTER III

DEISTICAL CRITICISM

I TURN to consider those schools of thought which hold by the idea of God, as the Absolute Creator of the Universe, but have abandoned any scheme of Revelation, of inspired creeds or Churches, the scheme of Redemption and personal salvation through Christ, the Incarnate Deity. And, with all this, they have naturally abandoned all ecclesiastical organisation and institutions, except those of a most simple and also most elastic sort.

Many of these schools give up almost everything that the Orthodox Churches regard as vital in Christianity. They hold neither by any divine institution of the Church, nor by the divine inspiration of the Scripture, nor by the efficacy of any ceremonial institution; they believe not in Trinity, nor Atonement, nor in any mediation between Creature and Creator; they turn aside from all the forms of the Creed and they make no attempt to formulate a creed of their own. It might be supposed by some who know little of our views, that since these Deists have abandoned so much which Positive thought cannot accept, the bond between Positivism and Deists, Theists, or Unitarians, was closer than the bond between Positivism and the Orthodox Churches. This is not quite so! Strange as it may sound to