'membership,' 'union,' union,' 'communion,' communion,' 'presence,' 'life,' unite us. Their definitions divide us. Apart from the Person of Christ all are meaningless. The Person of Christ interprets them all.

We would here guard against being misunderstood. Much wholesome discipline of character may result from contact of mind with mind in occasional avowal of our differences. But, while such expression of diversity of view is healthy enough, the unreasonable outcome of this divergence is the mutual suspicion and aloofness, by which the real effective strength of the Church of Christ is continuously sapped. To the ripened Christian character it should be perfectly natural to regard as sacred, in the abstract, all religious conviction. And the measure of the reverential awe with which I hold my own treasured convictions ought to mete out the respect I accord a fellowChristian's. Sympathy with another's should not evidence lack of tenacity in holding my own. To think the worse of anyone on account of his religious opinions argues a condition of mind differing only in degree of rancour from that which in a former day sent him to the stake.

We turn to a reflexion of another drift. In the more discriminative thought of to-day we are learning to dissociate religious faith and opinion. The distinction involves no mere quibble. The cleavage cuts to the deeps of man's spiritual being. There is a character which, without attempting to tabulate its traits or stereotype its manifestations in the actions of the outer life, we agree in describing as spirituality. It is too delicately subtil to yield up its components to a psychologist's scalpel. It is the monopoly of the educative methods of no Church School.' Not the hottest partisan dare affirm that it is the offspring of his party's tenets. Its parentage is infinitely higher. It belongs to the calm heights of the life of faith. Eye hath not seen their scenes; ear hath not heard their mystic sounds. The soul that dwells there has its jealous reserves, uninvaded by the polemics of the so-called religious world. The Pilgrim reached this fat land and large, when Beulah spread its pastures and broached its hills for his comfort

within sight of the City. But he qualified for these ripe regions when in the early stage of his walk the graces of the Palace conducted him to his first night's repose in the chamber whose windows looked towards the sun-rising, and the name of which was Peace.

If we sought an utterly undesigned proof of the symmetry of the lore of the School of Christ we should find it in the fact that the Dream of the Baptist of Bedford yields to patient study not a little distinctive Church teaching. If we sought a recognition of this in the authorities of that Church, it was a few years ago found in the selection of this book to control and feed the silent meditations of the English Bishops during the meals at one of Lambeth's Quiet Days.

When such souls worship in a Church, the ritual of which is unfamiliar, perhaps distasteful, the critical faculty is suspended. Hungry, thirsty, they have no mind to mark the chasing of paten or chalice. To use Milton's glorious image, angels' wings render them blind to these things. The footstool is too near the Throne for eye or ear to wander lower than the Mercy and Justice which Augustine tells us are the Feet of God, and which we grasp when kneeling there.

Some solution there must be of present difficulties. No view of the Church of the Future can bearably include the indefinitely prolonged action of disintegrating forces. In the spirit and tone marking the conduct of our controversies the past thirty years shew a distinct advance. And if this lessening of party bitterness in no way indicates a weakening of hold upon the verities of the Faith; if rather, as we believe, it is concurrent with a quickened sense of the bearing of those verities upon personal conduct, and is accounted for by that quickening; then it surely follows, that the entire eradication of that bitterness will usher in the dawn of a better day than either we or our fathers have seen, when it shall never more be deemed admissible so to contend for the Faith as to prejudice any Christian grace; when it shall be given to all clearly to distinguish between what cannot be conceded without

surrender of the Faith and what cannot be insisted on without dwarfing our love. And signs are not lacking that the number of those is increasing who wait for such a time as they who, casting anchor out into the night, wish for the day; and who endeavour to hasten it by keeping all party topics out of their intercourse with others; who ascend no party platforms, read no party papers, use no party catchwords, but in quietness and confidence do their honest bit of Church work in the strength of a loyal purpose, trying the while to cherish a unity of spirit which is too real to be imperilled by diversity of expression and of form. ALF. BURNLEY.

ART. VII.-THE GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN GOD: AN ESSAY IN APOLOGETICS.

1. Theism. By R. FLINT, D.D. Ninth Edition. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood and Sons. 1895.) 2. Introduction to Philosophy. By O. KÜLPE. Translated by W. B. PILLSBURY and E. B. TITCHENER. (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd.

1897.)

3. Outlines of the Philosophy of Religion. By HERMANN LOTZE. Translated by G. T. LADD. (London: Dickinson. 1887.)

4. Natural Thcology and Modern Thought. By J. H. KENNEDY. (London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1891.) And other Works.

I.

By the expression grounds of belief,' which constitutes part of the title of this article, is meant the causes and motives, as well as the logical reasons, which actually incline men's minds to the attitude of conviction, belief, or certitude. We have, however, chosen this broader and more inclusive term 'grounds,' in preference to the narrower word 'reasons,' only in order to emphasize at the outset that other factors besides those of the purely logical or exclusively intellectual kind practically always play a part in leading

men to embrace and to cherish religious beliefs. As a matter of fact a very considerable number of believers hold their faith in God, and hold it very tenaciously, who have given little or no consideration to the question whether their belief is reasonable or logically justifiable in itself. They receive it upon authority or through tradition which they have trusted from childhood and which they have never had occasion to suspect or to question. And perhaps all of us are swayed in our persistent adherence to a faith that is tried, it may be, from within and from without through difficulties and doubts, by other motives than consciousness that the evidence in favour of our belief preponderates over the evidence which may be alleged against it. That faith in God enables us to live a fuller and richer life, that it satisfies our highest moral and aesthetic aspirations and desires, that it makes us happier, better and more strenuous men; these experiences and others similar in kind to them always influence our minds, especially at such times as the purely intellectual light appears by itself insufficient, and dispose us to believe in spite of obstacles.

But having thus recognized the plain fact that belief, as a frame or attitude of an individual mind, is, more commonly than not, motived or caused by mental processes other than the exclusively intellectual, and that it is perhaps never solely due to an intellectual process, we do not propose to deal further with the factors of feeling or emotion, aspiration and will, as grounds of religious belief. The writer would henceforth use the term 'grounds' in its logical sense the sense in which it stands for reasons alone and not at all for motives; for the grounds of objective truth, communicable to all and appreciable by all, and not for the grounds of subjective certitude or personal conviction, which may or may not be communicable and objective, logically justifiable or reasonable.

In making this restriction we shall not be impoverishing the content of religion or minimizing the argument for belief in the Being of God. We shall not be impoverishing religion, because one may fully recognize the truth that religion appeals to, and is also the expression of, the whole

human personality and all its faculties, while insisting on the truth that intellectual reasons for belief can alone be valid and cannot reasonably be replaced by other grounds. Conscience, emotion and will have indeed their place in religion; intellectual assent, and nothing more, is not religion. But conscience, emotion and will cannot fulfil the functions of the understanding and reason, though they are equally factors of the complete personality, any more than the hand can perform the offices of the eye, though it is equally a member of the same body. And again, we shall not be minimizing the arguments for theological belief in restricting ourselves to the consideration of purely intellectual reasonings; because the motive power derived through conscience, feeling and will, however influential in actually producing subjective conviction in innumerable individual cases, does not bring about this effect by any process which constitutes an argument or which can be justified by logic, the only real court of appeal on such matters. When Pascal said that the heart has its reasons that the reason knows nothing of, he used a very unfortunate mode of expression, and one which has perhaps been responsible for a great deal of confusion in thought. The heart has its motives, not its reasons; and that is a very different thing. Truly the understanding does not work in vacuo, or without an interest and an end; but it does not follow that it has not its exclusive part to play, the most fundamental part of all in this connexion, and one which cannot be discharged by any other faculty or special activity of the spirit.

Before we can have religion, then, we must have belief. 'He that cometh to God must first believe that He is.' And before it can have belief the normal and fully awakened mind must have its intellectual reasons or logical grounds. Faith is indeed not knowledge; its grounds are not coercive, as we shall presently see more fully; faith outreaches knowledge and partakes of the nature of a venture. It is here that the non-intellectual elements which work so diversely in different individuals come in. But if faith involves a leap, it must be a leap from terra firma. Faith,