The divisions of our day find their parallel in the days of the Apostles; and it is instructive to study an Apostle's attitude towards existing Church rivalries. The little hardly-bestead Church planted in vicious Corinth was eaten to its core by sectarianism. Each chief teacher had his attached following. I am of Paul, I of Apollos, I of Cephas, I of Christ.' The Saviour Himself was degraded to the headship of a sect. It might be fanciful to see in the three human leaders here named Apostolic representatives of the Church Schools' of our day. Firmer ground is trodden when St. Peter is taken as standing for the conservative element in the primitive Church, St. Paul the liberal, while Apollos, trained in Alexandria, reflected the philosophical tendencies of his age. St. Paul's methods, when touching this state of things in the sundered Corinthian Church, may seasonably be contrasted with those of our modern partisans. He does not minister to the sectarian spirit. He does not warn against the peril of following the rival teachers, through whose adherents his own authority is questioned and his own credentials traduced.

He refuses

to recognize any rivalry in their attitude. Himself he co-ordinates with them: What then is Apollos, and what is Paul? Ministers through whom ye believed; and each as the Lord gave to him.' Nay, in his large-souled desire to give Apollos all that is due to him he declares that what he had planted Apollos has watered; so that both‘are one.' The Faith is greater than its exponents and propagators, and its truths fuller than the partial settings forth of any one amongst them. The measure of man's mind' is the measure of the value of their expositions. The Heart of the Eternal,' which is most wonderfully kind,' is the measure of the perfection of that Faith.

It is pertinent now to ask, Is there any point at which without compromise of personal conviction, without the surrender of a single article of the historic creeds of Christendom, members of all schools of thought within the Church's pale may not only meet but even theologically coalesce? We would fain conceive that there is. That point appears to us to be found where the great truth of the Personality

of the Founder of the Faith meets us, in the light of which all other truths are to be interpreted. The Church's task is to interpret the Incarnation. Into living membership with its Divine Head its members by means of the initiatory rite are incorporated and thus become regenerate, and He who has in Baptism been their regenerator becomes in the Sacrament of His Body and Blood their sustenance. The 'How can these things be?' of the curious Nicodemus Christ answers not concerning either Sacrament. Not intellectual analysis, but spiritual synthesis is the supreme question. Christ is Christianity.

Commenting in his masterly discrimination upon the differing characteristics of St. Paul and St. Peter, the late Dr. Bigg may be quoted in this place.

'You will see two streams or tendencies of the religious life flowing from the same source, but not always side by side. Sometimes they exist more or less harmonised in the same community. Sometimes they have sprung violently apart and formed different communities. There are no very adequate names for them ... but they are names of parties, battle cries. What we want is to put away all strife and contentiousness, and get down to the underlying principle, and this we shall find not in any sharp form of words but in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, who makes both one. . . He sits above the floods of opinion: He sees the little brooks and the broad streams: He knows that they are all fed by the same rain: that they all water the earth and make it fruitful. From Him come all the four rivers, but we dwell on the banks of Gihon or Hiddekel, and think that only in our own land gold is to be found. We need to travel up to the great Fountain-head. There we shall learn how all our partial opinions find their completion, and so their harmony, in the Perfect Man.' '

Here, then, is our point of contact with each other. In proportion as we approach it shall we approach each other. But, on the other hand, what may be called our incurable propensity to define- How can these things be?'-has all down the ages created our divisions. The common heritage of truth enfolded in such terms as 'regeneration,'

1 Unity in Diversity, p. 24.

Jork

communion,'

'membership,' 'union,' 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 Theology 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