To this doctrine, eclipsing as it does the character and government of God, misrepresenting and darkening at once the nature of man and the nature of God, the poet attributes the recoil, which in its fatal backward movement plunges the man into the abyss of total unbelief. The very fact that this doctrine is preached by so many divines as taught by Jesus of Nazareth, and is popularly believed to be based upon his teaching, has obscured in the minds of many men and women of our time the glory of that Divine Life, and made bitter, as with wormwood and gall, the sweet river of His influence. The witness of His perfect manhood to God is thought incredible, and the love and reverence which He has evoked are dried up and withered.

In saying this it is not meant that the Augustinianism which has overshadowed for so long the Churches of the West is solely responsible for the Agnosticism or Secularism, the Materialism or Atheism, which far and near darken all our fields. It would be a shallow interpretation of such facts as these which should seek for their origin and prevalence in a single cause, or even in one set of causes. The conditions are too complex; the web is too tangled and is woven out of too many threads, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual, to admit of so simple a solution. Many and various causes have been at work to produce this partial or total alienation from Theism and from Christianity, on both sides of the Atlantic, in our time.

The destructive criticism of Strauss, in shattering the idol of biblical infallibility, has been too hastily thought by many to dissolve the person of Jesus in mythological dreams, and to thrust God Himself out of the universe. The doctrine of Evolution-though not in fact atheistic, but at bottom profoundly theistic-has so bewildered many that they substitute the order of phenomena for the primal Cause of that order, and for the living force which breathes in it-regarding Evolution not as a divine process, but as itself a blind, unintelligent god. Physical

science is thought to fill the sum of things with atoms and ether, leaving no room for soul or for God. Physiology translates mind into nerve-force, and questions or denies the very possibility of a continued, conscious life after death. Pessimism, child of human misery, clothes itself in the dress of philosophy. Such purely intellectual causes as these must be taken into account when we are striving to understand the attitude of so many towards Theism and towards Christianity. We should be unjust if we refused their due weight to the intellectual forces which, through fresh readings of history and through fresh discoveries in science, are upheaving the world of mind. That a too exclusive devotion to the realism of physical science should shut out from even strong intellects the hemisphere of ideal and spiritual truth, that still more nurnerous weak intellects should become bewildered and rush blindly into negation of all that they cannot touch and see, is the price paid for the reinvestigation of the past and the reconstruction of belief.

But men are not purely intellectual machines. Emotion, too, counts for something, and in matters of religious faith ought to count for something. It is scarcely possible to doubt the fact that what Dr. Martineau calls "the mutinous deserters of church theology," largely swell the ranks of those who doubt or deny God. It is not difficult to gather in any large city of the United States or of England crowds of well-dressed people who are animated by a fanatical hatred of Christianity. Many who would not avow hatred are silently alienated from its faith and worship. Could we learn the secret of this hatred or alienation, should we not find the dogma of an endless hell at the bottom of it? It is indeed a creed of despair which leaves to man nothing to worship but himself or "the brainless Nature," "the idiot Power," which flung on the desolate shore of earth its sensitive and conscious offspring-shipwrecked before they were born to suffer and to die; but even this seems pre

ferable to that conception of the great cosmic Power which knowingly consigns His creatures to a doom in which "the duration of the torment is without end," and to the conception of a world designedly called into being in which "men walk over the pit of hell on a rotten covering and there are innumerable places in this covering so weak that they will not bear their weight, and these places are not seen.'

Dogma like this predisposes men to welcome any philosophy which clears it out of the way. If Christianity has lost its hold upon the conscience and affections-if, in point of fact, what has been taught as Christianity has shocked and outraged both the intellect becomes the ready prey of some philosophy, which, like the telescope of Lalande, sweeps the fields of space and finds no God. Christianity easily comes to be regarded as "the dream of hysterical women and half-starved men." Encyclopædism and Voltairism drew their inspiration from hatred of Rome, and their shallow empiricism was built on antagonism to moral falsehood. Ecrasez l'infâme—the Church, not the Christ, as Carlyle has proved-was a phrase that seemed to justify all hasty assumptions about historical or physical fact. Nor would it be difficult to show how deeper thinkers than Voltaire and Diderot have been biased, unconsciously in most cases, in their philosophy of human life, by their moral revolt against much that has passed current as theological truth. Men like Hume and the two Mills, like the late Professor Clifford, and even so calm a thinker as Herbert Spencer, betray the repellent influence of those misconceptions of God and of Christ, which have rendered their attitude towards religious faith studiously neutral, when not overtly hostile.

The very life-blood of Christianity is the spiritual power with which it appeals to "the hidden man of the heart "—to "the Christ in us "-to those affinities with the Divine and

* Jonathan Edwards, Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God Works, Vol. VI., p. 489. Leeds: Baines, 1811.

the Human in Him which are the deepest springs of our nature. As Mr. Browning has said:

Love, hope, fear, faith-these make humanity,

These are its sign and note and character.

The signatures of our kinship with God and of our immortality are often enough hidden out of sight-buried beneath the sin and the custom

which lie upon us with a weight

Heavy as frost and deep almost as life.

But they are there; and to these the Christ appeals. The dogma, not of a future retribution which a healthy conscience demands, but of an endless hell, counteracts that appeal and must be shaken off before the heart of Christianity shall be set at liberty to win back to God the heart of man.

We have made large use in this paper of the poets-often better and truer teachers than the theologians. We may be permitted to conclude it with a few lines of Coventry Patmore, which sum up our best thoughts of God. The poet has struck his disobedient child, and sent him from his presence "with hard words and unkissed." Visiting his bed, he finds the sleeping child's face wet with tears, and his playthings, "to comfort his sad heart," ranged by his side:

So, when that night I prayed

To God, I wept and said:

Ah, when at last we lie with tranced breath,

Not vexing Thee in death,

And Thou rememberest of what toys

We made our joys,

How weakly understood

Thy great commanded good,

Then, fatherly not less

Than I whom Thou hast moulded from the clay,

Thou'lt leave Thy wrath, and say

"I will be sorry for their childishness."

CHARLES SHAKSPEARE.

THE RELIGIOUS SITUATION IN FRANCE.

YOU

TO THE EDITOR OF THE MODERN REVIEW.

OU ask me to give your readers my views on the religious situation in France. The question is a wide one, very difficult to consider in all its aspects; and it needs some boldness to respond to your appeal. However, I will attempt to do so, if it be only to offer you a proof of my warm sympathy with the work which you have undertaken.

Wellington said, I think, that it is as difficult to give an account of a battle as to describe a ball; for each of the actors in it sees only the very narrow space in which he plays his part. But there at least we have to do with facts, with actions which take place within the range of our senses; whilst the religious evolution of a people, or of a generation, cannot be determined or measured by means of mere outward observation. The things we see or hear may lead us into error; for what appear on the surface are the broken branches and the faded leaves, the institutions or the beliefs, which have fallen to the ground; while the roots of the new plants are hidden deep down in the earth, the germs of the new harvest sleep in the furrow, in the depths of those minds which cannot even give any clear account of the revolution of which they are the scene. The cries of those who are pulling down, or the noise of falling things, startle us, like the wind of autumn, which breaks off the dead branches and strews the ground with yellow leaves,