phy alike deny and exclude the ancient truths of Faith. Of two contradictories, both cannot be true. Panphysicism, in affirming its own doctrines, denies those of religion; but the affirmation is the essential thing, the denial the accidental. What has so positive a purpose deserves the respect of those who seek the truth, and labour to establish it. A constructive is ever nobler than a critical spirit—the one but wishes to expose error, the other to find and reveal reality. And the nobility of its spirit is manifest in the most distinctive creations of Modern Thought. Faith never had a worthier antagonist, and must become and attempt its best to be equal to its foe.

Again, Modern Thought must be characterized as most religious and reverent. It is too positive to be profane-too conscious of the mystery of the being it seeks to explain to be impious. The men who now stand not so much opposed to Christianity as without it, are not coarse infidels who denounce religion as priestcraft, worship as the unveracious flattery of the strong by the weak. They are men who recognise the value and permanence of the religious element in man, and proclaim the necessity of religion and worship to his highest moral and intellectual development. The Positivism which is to many in its relation to religious truth simply a comprehensive and coherent system of negations, has instituted the worship of Humanity; and he must be blind indeed who fails to see how it has quickened some of our noblest spirits to noble enthusiasm in the cause of the ignorant, the suffering, and the oppressed. Certain of our best known and most bellicose physicists delight in their more eloquent moods to express their awe and

exaltation in the presence of the mysterious Power which weaves in the roaring loom of time the manyhued garment nature presents to sense. The later Strauss thought that the old reverence for the Eternal might live in the new feeling for the universe, with its invariable order, its immensities of space and duration, its silence, its progress, its severe yet holy beneficence. And the new thought is as wishful to preserve old forms of belief as the ancient spirit of reverence. One of the most brilliant apologists of the Positivism that knows neither God nor Spirit has amazed the physicists and delighted the transcendentalists by his splendid invective against Materialism. The old faith in immortality has been transfigured, and in its new form glorified by one who is by right of rare culture and imagination a pre-eminent teacher of the age.

"O may I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence: live
In pulses stirred to generosity,

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

For miserable aims that end with self,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues

This is life to come,

Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow."

And so we may say that Modern Thought, even when it stands in sharpest antithesis to the ancient faith, is grave, earnest, religious; and can neither be rightly understood nor wisely criticised unless by spirits as grave, as earnest, and as religious.

The Thought that now concerns us may still further

ITS ETHICAL SPIRIT.

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be described as eminently ethical in spirit and in aims. Many of our modern thinkers are men possessed with the enthusiasm of humanity, men who are anxious to lift man to a higher level, to purify and improve society, to dispel ignorance and create knowledge, to enlighten, if not organize, beneficence, and make our individual, commercial, social, political life wiser, nobler, and more humane. Their ethical theory may be inadequate; but the duties it involves can be, if not authoritatively enjoined, forcibly inculcated. It has been the moral creed of men who have been among the most unwearied workers in the cause of human progress and enlightenment, who have without ceasing laboured to create our liberties, to reform our laws, to extend and improve our education, to cure our miseries, lessen our vices, increase and ennoble our virtues. Some of the most powerful and persuasive appeals to England to be commercially honest and politically honourable in her dealings with lower races have come from,disciples of Comte. And it is simply right that the humane and ethical spirit of men who belong to no church should be recognised by every church. The churches have no longer a monopoly of humanity-it exists without them as well as within; and till they know what this signifies they can never do their duty either by Modern Thought or the modern world.

IV.

But this discussion of the most characteristic qualities and aims of Modern Thought raises the question, How ought the representatives of faith to behave in its presence? How can they best be

faithful to the trust they have received from the past and hold for the future? How vindicate their principles and positions against so formidable an antagonist? These questions concern not simply the continuance of the Christian Churches, but the very being of the Christian Faith. For a reliigous society to be blind to their importance is but to prove itself effete and moribund.

One thing is evident, thought must be met by thought, reason alone can encounter and conquer reason. The days when authority was stronger than argument have passed, and knowledge can now be as merciless to it as it was once to knowledge. Faith is confronted by tendencies that have the spirit, the methods, and the consciousness of science, and it must be as they are if it is to prevail. Where an antagonist is neither simply sentimental, nor æsthetic, nor moral, but in the higher degree rational, he must be met by reason if he is to be met at all. And the reason that meets him must be the spokesman of a system as comprehensive as his own, must espouse principles higher, more evident and rational than their antitheses. The thinker when he needs to be answered must be answered by thought, not by being prayed at or preached at, not by a command to believe, or an exhortation to repentance, or an admonition that broadly hints that a place too hot to be comfortable is prepared for him, but, to use Cudworth's fine phrase, by "an intellectual system of the universe," a system that shall show not only that the religious idea can be expounded into an intellectual theory of things, but that it is the theory that can give the best reason for the existence alike of itself

WHAT FAITH MUST BE.

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and the universe. In short, if Religious is to conquer Modern Thought, it must not fear to face and attempt its problems, must, without shrinking, challenge a comparison of their respective solutions, and do so in the spirit that appeals to reason prepared to abide by its decision. In essaying this task Faith is doing no new thing. It has done it before, and can do it again, certain that its continuing to do so is a necessary condition of its continued life. Yet the new work is not a repetition of the old. Human thought as ever progressive is ever changing, widens with the process of the suns. Our religious beliefs can never be dissociated from our conceptions of the universe; and as the latter grow larger and truer, the former must be transfigured that they may live and shine in the new light. Hence it is not by affirming the faith in the forms fixed by the past that living thought is to be penetrated and possessed by religion, but by carrying the religious idea into the regions that thought explores, proving its right to live there, its claim to be the only rational interpreter of the universe. To do so, it must work along the lines and possess the characteristics of Modern Thought, in a degree, too, that will compel the confession that while ancient as Faith, it is as thought as modern as living mind.

Our religious thinkers, then, if they would be equal to the needs of the day, must not fear to formulate anew the truths of faith, to deepen and broaden the basis of religion, and to build from the rock sheer upwards. Conservative religious thought is as to its own claims too simply assertive, and in its attitude to the men and systems it opposes too purely critical;