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from the Fetish and the Teraphim to the animal and plant symbols of Egypt and Assyria. It was another great step to Baal, the blazing sun, and Moloch, wielder of drought and sunstroke, and Agni, friendly comrade of the hearth. But when astronomy and physics had reached sufficient growth to master all these wonders, and to predict the solstices and the eclipses, then the fulness of times had come once more; and now the greatest religious transition was accomplished that the human race has ever seen-a transition from the physical, and the brutal, and the astral to the human and the moral, in man's search after a truc (or the to him truest possible) representation of the infinite forces at play around him. In Abraham the Hebrew-the man who made the great transition-this important advance is typified for the Semitic races; for others, the results only are seen in the Olympian conceptions of Hesiod and Homer. For here we have, at last, the nature-forces presided over and controlled after a really human fashion. Crude, and on'y semimoral, after all, as was this earliest humanizing effort; still human it was,-not mechanical or bestial. And it opened the way for Socrates to bring down philosophy, too, from heaven to earth, for Plato to discuss the mental processes in man, and apply them (writ large) to the processes of nature, and for Moses to elaborate with a divine sagacity a completely organized society, saturated through every fibre with this one idea,—the unity of all the nature-forces, great and small, and their government, not by haphazard, or malignity, or fate, but by what we men call LAW. "Thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken." For this word "law" distinctly connotes rationality. implies a quality akin to, and therefore expressible in terms of human reason. Its usage on every page of every book of science means that; and repudiates therefore, by anticipation, the dismal invitations to scientific despair with which the logicians a outrance are now so pressingly obliging us.

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This grand transition, then, once madə, all else became easy. human imagination, the poetic or plastic power lodged in our brain, after many failures, had now at last got on the high road which led straight to the goal. Redemption had come; it only needed to be unfolded to its utmost capabilities. Dull fate, dumb, sullen, and impracticable, had been renounced as infra-human and unworthy. Let stocks and stones in the mountains and the forests be ruled by it; not free, glad, and glorious men! Brute, bestial instinct also had been rcnounced, as contemptible and undivine in the highest degree. And so, at last, the culminating point was attained. The human-divine of

Asiatic speculation, and the divinely-human of European philosophy, met and coalesced; and from that wedlock emerged Christianity. The "Something is" of mere bald analytic reasoning had become clothed by the imagination with that perfect human form and character than which nothing known to man is higher; and that very manhood, which is nowadays so loudly asserted by Positivists and Atheists to be the most divine thing known to science, was precisely the form in which

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the new religion preached that the great exterior existence, the Something Is, the awful "I AM can alone be presented intelligibly to man. For 'No man shall see Jehovah and live," says the Old Testament: "No man hath seen God at any time," says the New Testament; the Son of Man, who is εἰς τὸν κόλπον τοῦ πατρὸς projected on the bosom of the absolute "I am"-He hath declared Him.

Of this language in St. John's Gospel, it is obvious that Hegel's doctrine-echoed afterwards by Comte and the Positivists,-is a sort of variation set in a lower key. In humanity, said he, the divine idea emerges from the material and the bestial into the self-conscious. Humanity presents us with the best we can ever know of the divine. In "the Son of Man" that soMETHING which lies behind, and which no man can attain to, becomes incarnate, visible, imaginable. But it cannot surely be meant by these philosophers that in the sons of men taken at haphazard the Divinity, the great Cosmic Unknown, is best persented to us. It cannot possibly be maintained that in the Chinese swarming on their canals, in the hideous savages of Polynesia, or in the mobs of our great European capitals, the "Something is " can be effectively studied, idealized, adored. No, it were surely a truer statement that humanity concentrated in its very purest known form, and refined as much as may be from all its animalism, were the clear lens (as it were) through which to contemplate the great Cosmic Power beyond. It is therefore a son of man, and not the ordinary sons of men, that we require to aid our minds and uplift our aspirations. Mankind is hardly to be saved from retrograde evolution by superciliously looking round upon a myriad of mediocre realities. It must be helped on, if at all, by a new variety in our species suddenly putting forth in our midst, attracting wide attention, securing descendants, and offering an ideal, a goal in advance, towards which effort and conflict shall tend. We must be won over from our worldly lusts and our animal propensities by engaging our hearts on higher objects. We must learn a lesson in practical morals from the youth who is redeemed from rude boyhood and coarse selfishness by love. We must allow the latent spark of moral desire to be fanned into a flame and, by the enkindling admiration of a human beauty above the plane of character hitherto attained by man, to consume away the animal dross and prepare for new environments that may be in store for us. What student does not know how the heat of love for truth not yet attained breaks up a heap of prejudices and fixed ideas, and gives a sort of molecular instability to the mind, preparing it for the most surprising transformations? Who has not observed the development of almost a new eye for colour, or a new ear for refinements in sound, by the mere constant presentation of a higher æsthetic ideal? And just in the same way, who that knows anything of mankind can have failed to perceive that the only successful method by which character is permanently improved is by employing the force of example, by accumulating on the conscience reiterated touches of a new moral colour, and by bringing to bear from

above the power of an acknowledged ideal, and (if possible) from around the simultaneous influence of a similarly affected environment? Baptize now all these truths, translate them into the ordinary current language of the Church, and you have simply neither more nor less than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And as carbon is carbon, whether it be presented as coal or as diamond, so are these high and man-redeeming verities,—about the inscrutable "I am," and His intelligible presentment in a strangely unique SON OF MAN, and the transmuting agency of a brotherhood saturated with His Spirit and pledged to keep His presence ever fresh and effective-verities still, whether they take on homely and practical, or dazzling and scientific forms. And the foolish man is surely he who, educated enough to know better, scorns the lowly form, and is pedantic enough to suggest the refinements of the lectureroom as suitable for the rough uses of everyday life. A man of sense will rather say, Let us by all means retain and-with insight and trust -employ the homely traditional forms of these sublime truths: let us forbear, in charity for others, to weaken their influence, and so to cut away the lower rounds of the very ladder by which we ourselves ascended: and let us too, in mercy to our own health of character, decline to stand aloof from the world of common men, or to relegate away among the lumber of our lives the έπεα φωναντα συνέτοισιν that we learnt of simple saintly lips in childhood. Rather, as the SON OF MAN hath bidden us, we will "bring out of our treasures things both new and old; " will remember, as Aquinas taught, that " nova nomina antiquam fidem de Deo significant;" and will carry out in practice that word well spoken in good season, "It is not by rejecting what is formal, but by interpreting it, that we advance in true spirituality."*

II. On the other hand, if men of science are to be won back to the Church, and the widening gulf is to be bridged over which threatens nowadays the destruction of all that we hold dear,-it cannot be too often or too earnestly repeated, The Church must not part company with the world she is commissioned to evangelize. She must awake both from her Renaissance and her Medieval dreams. To turn over on her uneasy couch, and try by conscious effort to dream those dreams again, when daylight is come and all the house is fully astir, this surely were the height of faithless folly. An animating time of action is come, a day requiring the best exercise of skill and knowledge and moral courage. Shall we hear within the camp, at such a moment as this, a treasonable whisper go round, "By one act of mental suicide we may contrive to escape all further exertion; science is perplexing, history is full of doubts, psychology spins webs too fine for our self-indulgence even to think of. Why not make believe very hard to have found an infallible oracle, and determine once for all to desert our post and jurare in verba magistri ?"" It is true that history demonstrates beyond a doubt that Jesus and His apostles knew nothing of any such contrivance. But, never mind! "A Catholic who should adhere to the testimony of

*The Patience of Hope, p. 70.

L. M.-I.-8.

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history, when it appears to contradict the Church, would be goY, A merely of treason and heresy, but of apostasy."* Yes, of treason to Rome, but of faithful and courageous loyalty to Christ "I am the truth," said Christ. "The truth shall make you free." Speak the truth in love, prove all things, hold fast that which is true, said His apostles. How can it ever be consonant to His will that the members of His brotherhood should! conspire together to make believe that white is black at the bidding of any man on earth? The Church of England, at any rate, has no such treason to answer for. Her doctrinal canons, by distinctly asserting that even 'General Councils may err and have erred," and by a constant appeal to ancient documents, universally accepted, but capable of ever-improving interpretation, have averted the curse of a sterile traditionalism. No new light is at any time inaccessible to her. Every historical truth is treasured, every literary discussion is welcome, every scientific discovery finds at last a place amid her system. Time and patience are, of course, required to rearrange and harmonize all things together, new and old; and a claim is rightly made that new "truths" should first be substantiated as such, before they are incorporated into so vast and widespread an engine of popular education as hers. But, with this proviso, Theology accepts every certain conclusion of physical science as man's unfolding of God's book of nature." It is, therefore, most unwise, if any of her clergy pose themselves as hostile to new discoveries, whether in history, literature, or science. It may be natural to take up such an attitude; and a certain impatience and resentment at the manner in which these things are often paraded, in the crudest forms and before an unprepared public, may be easily condoned by all candid men. But such an attitude of suspicion and hostility between " things old" and "things new goes far beyond the commission to "banish and drive away all strange and erroneous doctrines contrary to God's word." For this commission requires proof, and not surmise, that they are erroneous; and the Church has had experience, over and over again, how easy and how disastrous it is to banish from the door an unwelcome guest, who was, perhaps, nothing less than an angel in disguise. The story of Galileo will never cease, while the world lasts, to cause the enemies of the Church to blaspheme. Yet of late years it has been honestly confessed by divines that "the oldest and the youngest of the natural sciences, astronomy and geology, so far from being dangerous, providentially destined to engage the present century so powerfully, that the ideal najesty of infinite time and endless space might counteract a low and narrow materialism." ‡

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This experience ought not to be thrown away. No one, who has paid a serious attention to the progress of the modern sciences, can entertain a doubt that all the really substantiated discoveries which

Abbé Martin: "Contemporary Review," December, 1878, p. 94. + Dr. Pusey: University Sermon, November, 1878.

+Kalisch: On Genesis, p. 43.

have been supposed to contravene Christianity do in reality only deepen its profundity and emphasize its indispensable necessity for man. Never before, in all the history of mankind, has the Deity seemed so awful, so remote from man, so mighty in the tremendous forces that He wields, so majestic in the permanence and tranquility of His resistless will. Never before has man realized his own excessive smallness and impotence; his inability to destroy-much more, to create one atom or molecule; his dependence for life, for thought, for character even, on the material environment of which he once thought himself the master. The forces of nature, then, have become to him once more, as in the infancy of his race, almost a terror. And poised midway, for a few eventful hours, between an infinite past of which he knows a little and an infinite future of which he knows nothing, he is tempted to despair of himself and of his little planet, and in childish petulance to complain, "My whilom conceit is broken; there is nothing else to live for." And amid these foolish despairs, a voice is heard which says, "Have faith in GOD! have hope in Christ! have love to man! Knowledge of this tremendous substratum of all being it is not for man to have: his knowledge is confined to phenomena and to very human (but sufficient) conceptions of the so-called laws by which they all cohere. But these three qualities are moral, not intellectual, virtues. For the Church never teaches that God can be scientifically known; she never offers certainty and sight, but only "hope," in many an ascending degree; she does not say that God is a man, a person like one of us,-that were indeed perversely to misunderstand her subtle terminology,-but only a MAN has appeared, when the time was ripe for him, in whom that awful and tremendous Existence has shown us something of his ideas, has made intelligible to us (as it were by a Word to the listening ear) what we may venture to call His "mind" towards us, and has invited us-by the simple expedient of giving our heart's loyalty to this most lovable Son of man-to reach out peacefully to higher evolutions, and to commit that indestructible force, our Life, to Him in serene well-doing to the brotherhood among whom His spirit works, and whose welfare He accounts His own.

Is not this humanizing of the great Existence, for moral and practical utility, and this utterance (so to speak) of yet another creative word in the ascending scale of continuous development, and this socializing of His sweet beneficent Spirit in a brotherhood as wide as the world, precisely the religion most adapted to accord with modern science?

Yet no one can listen to ordinary sermons, no one can open popular books of piety or of doctrine, without feeling the urgent need there is among Churchmen for a higher appreciation of the majestic infinitude of GOD. It is true that, in these cases, it is the multitude and not the highly-educated few who are addressed; and that, even among that multitude, there are none so grossly ignorant as to compare the Trinity to "three Lord Shaftesburys," and not many so childish as to picture

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