or against it? but, How does it work? Such Socialism as we have is academic, not popular. Where it is found in the ranks of labour it is an afterthought a way of accounting for certain pressure, with the disappearance of which it will disappear. Nor, even where it is a greater power than it is or is likely to become in this country, is the Socialism of to-day that which Mrs Ward has in view. The theoretical Socialism of the last century, says a well-informed writer,

'provided an apparently materialistic and rationalist, but, in truth, largely idealistic and often highly irrational vent for the needs and aspirations of the modern German soul. Born of Hegel, and fashioned by the two Hebrew Apostles, Marx and Lassalle, [it] contained sufficient elements of semi-philosophical mysticism to entitle it to rank as a cult-a cult in which "other-worldliness" was replaced by perfervid faith in a miraculous, albeit mundane, "Future State." But into Socialist, as into Catholic and Lutheran orthodoxy, "Modernism" has crept. Belief in the transformation of the capitalistic universe by a revolutionary miracle that should at one stroke abolish riches and misery, vice and wrong, has gradually been undermined by critical exegesis and by a doctrine of relativity known as "Revisionism," upon whose impious heels "Nationalism," as distinct from the old uncompromising "Internationalism," is now pressing hard.' *

In Germany, the Mecca of the sect, the Socialists disclaim the wish to destroy the Empire, and profess to be 'a Nationalist party in the best sense of the term.' If this changes the character of Socialism, it also changes the case against it; and the controversy must be revised.

The Liberal party, as such, comes off badly at Mrs Ward's hands. There is, it seems, an occult connexion between it and want of principle. Wharton and Marsham are examples; neither could be trusted round the corner with a shilling. Her virtuous and enlightened magnates have Liberal, even Radical or semi-Socialist, leanings; they are weak on the Game Laws, and strong on Factory Legislation; their souls are troubled, at intervals, by the contrast between St James's Square and Bethnal Green. But the Liberal party is for them what the Hussite doctrine was for the Reformation; as Duke George put

* The Times,' January 9, 1912.

it to Luther at Leipzig-' Das walt; die Sucht'—' God help us! the plague.' Law and order are paramount; the mystical view of the death penalty in 'Marcella¦' (i, 434) 'I believe that, if the murderer saw things as they truly are, he would himself claim his own death, as his best chance, in this mysterious universe, of self-recovery-might have come straight out of Joseph de Maistre. For him the priest and the executioner were the twin pillars of the social fabric and the aboriginal representatives of the Deity. For us the executioner, at least, is a survival-for whom the most that can be urged is that, till reason comes of age, force, in one shape or another, must act as regent and govern in her name. So, too, Tressady's conclusion, 'Government to the competent, not to the many,' is open to the objection that the two are neither necessarily nor always contraries. Mob-law and Labour tyranny are undoubtedly dangers against which society does well to guard. But the worst evils of both may be incurred under a Government which depends for support upon a combination of disparate and conflicting interests. And the tyranny of finance is a more actual danger than either. It is at once more ubiquitous, more insidious, and more difficult either to shake off or to control.

Mrs Ward's philosophy of religion is likely to be of more permanent value than her contribution to political and economic science. The latter is of the nature of an Interims-Ethik; the former has a value for its own sake. On the one side, it is a weapon against the most hateful of all tyrannies, namely (as she says), 'tyrannies and cruelties in the name of Christ'; on the other, it is mediating and constructive; it destroys to rebuild. On the old site, now cumbered with the débris of falling creeds and departing standards, a new Jerusalem, fairer and more enduring than the old, will rise.

Arnold of Rugby has seldom been estimated at anything like his real value. He was a prophet. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that he saw more truly and spoke more boldly than any English Churchman since the Reformation. The non-committal attitude, characteristic of so much Anglican theology, was foreign to him; he would neither fence nor hedge nor trim. By temperament and conviction alike he was the irreconcilable opponent of

the Oxford Movement; its casuistry jarred on his sense of truth. Had he remained at Oxford he might have been another and a greater Newman: 'a greater scholar, as great a preacher, as imposing a personality, with convictions equally assured and impact equally forcible, he would have formed a rival camp.' It was not to be. The Church went down into the trough of the great wave in whose backwash she is still drifting, with broken spars and rent canvas. Calmer seas, it may be, lie before her; but a belt of troubled water remains to be crossed before they are attained.

Matthew Arnold was cast in another mould. He was without his father's intensity, but he inherited his literary instinct; the one made Rome, the other made Israel, live. The first English critic of his time, his criticism was a song before sunrise; the old order was extinct, the new unborn. His contemporaries never quite understood him. They were practical party men, writing up their own side, writing down the other fairly, no doubt, and in accordance with the rules of the game. But the practical temper has its limitations. Only think of all the nonsense which you now hold quite firmly, but which you would never have held if you had not been contradicting your adversary in it all these years.'† Neither father nor son adopted the ecclesiastical standpoint; yet, were a man asked about the genuine position of the English Church, he might do worse than refer the enquirer to the Arnolds. For the father the Church was nothing less than the nation viewed from the standpoint of religion; the son criticised, with what was perhaps to some an unwelcome candour, the reason given by Dissenters for their refusal to conform. The type of Dissent which he had in view is a thing of the past; and the Church of to-day is less in touch with the general mind than was the case a generation back. Whatever the reason, the non-episcopalian churches seem, at least for the time being, more successful in dealing with ideas than the episcopalian; a Scottish congregation would make short work of such preaching as is acquiesced in by the average English churchgoer. But, historically, the National Church has been more

* Pretractarian Oxford,' by W. Tuckwell, p. 121.

+ Culture and Anarchy,' xxviii.

spacious than the so-called Free Churches; it has stood for a larger tradition and diffused a sunnier air. It was Matthew Arnold's distinction to have seen this, and, by his insistence upon it, to have recalled attention from the fact to the idea. To understand Mrs Ward it is well to bear in mind her heredity. Of a later generation, her knowledge in certain fields is greater than that of Dr Arnold; of a naturally graver temperament, her seriousness of purpose is, if not more real, at least more obvious than that of his distinguished son. But she owes much to each, and has carried on the work to which they addressed themselves; the great line, 'Quasi cursores vitai lampada tradunt,' holds of all three.

6

The inception of Robert Elsmere' was due to a Bampton Lecture given in 1881 by a then prominent High Churchman-the late Bishop John Wordsworthon the connexion between unbelief and sin. The lives of believers are, unfortunately, sufficient evidence that the lecturer's thesis, as Mrs Ward understood it, was at least not an exhaustive account of the matter. Iliacos intra muros' peccatur 'et extra': to live irregularly, it is not necessary to disbelieve. The association of ideas rang false.

'Is this all that a religious teacher at the centre of English intellectual activity, whose business it is to make a study of religious thought and of the religious life in man, can tell us about that great movement of the human mind against the traditional Christian theology, which is to many of us the most important fact of our day and age? Does he see no further, does he understand no more than this?'*

The object of the book was to place the question of the divergence between the traditional and the scientific in theology on its true ground. The Pauline distinction between the 'natural' (vxixòs) and the 'spiritual' (πveνμATIKòs) man is of importance in this connexion. † There are certain antinomies, God and the World, Good and Evil, Life and Death, etc., which remain unsolved for us, not because they are in themselves insoluble-this would be an assumption-but because our minds are so constituted that the understanding cannot come into touch with them; it seems to be

Robert Elsmere,' introduction, xxvi.

+ 1 Cor. ii, 10-15,

grappling with air. Were the intellectual solution, then, the only one possible, we could not get beyond an admission of ignorance-'I do not know.' The practical, however, comes to the aid of the pure reason-so it is held by an important school of thinkers; we are enabled to meet the difficulty, not indeed by the logical understanding taken separately, but by the knowing faculty (of which it is only a part) as a whole. Here learning has no prerogative. Knowledge of the central truths is not a matter of scholarship, but of the spiritual faculty which St Paul calls faith. But, when religion passes over into theology, and this is made to cover what are called 'dogmatic facts,' it is impossible to withdraw these developments from the province of science or to exempt them from its tests. A Christian poet tells us of truths which 'sages would have died to learn, Now taught by cottage dames.' But these truths cannot include the Synoptic problem, or the history of Christian ideas and institutions. Here we must have recourse to scholarship; and the decision must rest with those who know. In 'Robert Elsmere' Mrs Ward has brought this into clear relief. The task that lies before the enquirer is, she urges, in the last resort, the analysis of testimony-its various values, degrees and kinds. This

""makes almost the chief interest of history. History depends on testimony. What is the nature and the value of testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand, or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And, if not, what are the differences, and what are the deductions to be made from them, if any?"

"It is enormously important, I grant-enormously."

"I should think it is," said Langham to himself, as he "the whole of orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance."' ('Robert Elsmere,' i, 358.)

A generation has passed. It is not now argued, at least by Bampton Lecturers, that Liberal theology connotes vice and Conservative theology virtue; nor is it denied that criticism has revised what were formerly looked upon as 'dogmatic facts,' and changed the perspective in which they present themselves to us. 'Robert Elsmere' has counted in this result; Mrs Ward's service to religion -and it was one of the first importance-was to have