progressive religious thought is too fluid, too much. penetrated by sentiment, too little possessed by reason, more receptive than creative in its spirit. Neither is quite satisfactory either in character or conduct. To defend our own position by criticism. of our assailants, is certainly neither a brave nor a sure method of achieving a victory. Criticism may be a greater service than disservice to an enemy, may help him to improve his position, while it does nothing to mend our own. His weak places ought to be confronted by our strong, and the thought spent in discovering where he can be assailed might be still better spent in making ourselves proof against his assaults. And an attitude too receptive is as bad as an attitude too critical. The religious ought to be a creative thinker, not allowing his idea to be modified from without, but causing it to develop from within, using it to interpret nature and man, not meekly permitting it to be interpreted by aliens in heart and speech. The so-called Broad Church is becoming more and more a Church without breadth -is losing the large and positive and constructive spirit of its earlier masters, and becoming too much a creature of the present to be a creator of the future, too much a thing of sentiment and aspirations, too little a system coherent and comprehensive, a nearer approximation to a true interpretation of God and man than the systems it wishes rather than seeks to supersede. The thought that is to live must be thought in earnest about the roots and realities of things, resolved to get face to face with them, to see them clearly, and to speak plainly and strongly what it has seen.

Again, religious thought must be constructive, must not be satisfied with developing doctrines and defending Churches, but courageously attempt the interpretation of the universe from the standpoint of religion. Apologies defensive of details are often more injurious to faith than to doubt; aggressive is ever stronger than apologetic thought. There is no theory of the universe so rational as Theism, and there is none that so little need fear an appeal to reason. The great constructive systems have ever been the most powerfully promotive alike of theological progress and religious life. The creative thinkers of the Eastern Church were the best apologists of ancient Christianity; the completest answer to Neoplatonic criticism was the conception of God-and therefore of the world-formulated by Athanasius and the Alexandrian theologians. That conception can never be intelligently or even sanely criticised unless as the antithesis of the philosophy that lived in the city and at the time of its birth. In modern times no system has had a more potent practical influence than Calvinism. It is a system of splendid daring, of courageous consistency in all its parts, in premiss, process, and conclusion. It was a reasoned system, reason could understand it, and the reason that understood it, it could control. It was the universe in its making, in its rule, purpose and destiny, explained by a given conception of God; and, though the conception might not be the most generous, the men who held it felt as if they had their feet upon the last and highest reality, as if they had, not simply a way of salvation, or a path to peace in death, but a system of absolute truth, that helped a man to look

at all things as if it were from the standpoint of their Maker. And a faith so strong and comprehensive made strong and commanding men. It entered like iron into the blood of nascent and incoherent Protestantism, and braced it to the most heroic endurances and endeavours. It made the men who in France fought the noble battles of the Huguenots; the soldiers and citizens who in the swamps of Holland resisted and broke the cruel and tyrannical power of Spain; the Puritans who in England and the forests of the Far West formed all that was and is bravest, brawniest, manliest in our religious life; the Covenanters who in Scotland, through years of persecution, held aloft and nobly followed the blue banner that proclaimed the sovereign rights of Christ. And what we need is a system as constructive, comprehensive, and sublime as Calvinism, but more generous-an interpretation of the universe through our higher idea of God. Men cannot live in these days by a faith which touches them only at one or a few points; they need a faith that embraces, penetrates, and possesses their spirits, and enables them to feel in harmony with ultimate and universal truth. Only as Theism is proved to give the best reason for the becoming of the world, the best explanation of its history, and the surest ground for all rational hopes as to its future, can its right to be be fully justified.

But there is need also to develop the elements in religion that can satisfy the nobler aspirations and more reverential feelings of man. It can lift the heart above the littleness and worry of life, fill man with emotions that exalt while they humble. No reverence may feel for nature-for the infinities that embosom

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REVERENT AND ETHICAL.

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our finite, for the order that, without break or pause, rules in the physical universe, can equal, or in any way be compared with, the reverence that can be evoked by our faith in the Eternal Father, the unsleeping, inexhaustible, personal love that made our being and is making our blessedness. The power of humanity to awaken our adoration is but impotence compared with the power that lives in the Christ, who stands before us idealizing the human, realizing the divine, showing how their natures are akin, how through man God can reach men, and men reach God. Christianity, too, can make us conscious of much in ourselves that deserves reverence, of a nature full of divine affinities, of a being capable of immortal progress along all the sublimest paths of knowledge, feeling, and action. Were all these elements lifted into their rightful prominence, Christianity would stand forward the peerless religion of reverence. It ought to scorn an appeal to the sensuous, which is ever the mark of a decayed and declining faith; and live by its power to evoke and satisfy the highest aspirations of the spirit, the noblest admiration of the reason.

But another necessity deserves to be noticed: the ethical element in religion ought to be lifted into its proper place and made to do its proper work in relation to life, individual, industrial, commercial, social, and political. Christian teachers have never done even common justice to Christian ethics. Our Our age has a peculiar reverence for moral teaching, due, perhaps, to a sense of its peculiar needs. There is no living teacher that has exercised so immense and so righteous an influence as Thomas Carlyle,1 simply because he has 1 66 Living" now no more! We have had since his death criticism enough of

more than any living man enforced hatred of shams, love of reality, worship of the true and heroic, loyalty to duty, however commonplace, admiration of the manhood that strives after being and doing right. Matthew Arnold's "Stream of Tendency," inadequate as it is through its illogical impersonation to fill the throne of a conscious and active Deity, has yet been commended to many minds by the way in which he has declared that it "makes for righteousness." The Churches of to-day owe him much for the persistency with which he has attempted to interpret the old Hebrew idea of righteousness and to translate it into our living English speech. We need to go back to the old prophets to learn what they have to teach our age. We have been too anxious to find them seers of the future, to prove their words predictions; and too indifferent to what they were and said as preachers, speakers for the living God to living men. They knew that a righteous man could alone worship a righteous God, and so insisted on a service expressed not by rites but by righteousness. Where they were right, a living teacher cannot be wrong. Christianity is full of untouched ethical riches; its mines of moral teaching are almost unwrought. In the person, words, work of Christ, in His ideas of God's Fatherhood and man's brotherhood, in His Spirit, in the spirit He created in His disciples, in the words and deeds of His

him, of his melancholy, harshness, uncharitableness, and other sins graciously set down to his "dyspepsia." No man was ever unhappier in his literary executor, or in critics too consciously honest, or too meek in speech and judgment to be altogether just. The time must come when the attempt will be made to get behind the manners and the speech to the gentle and chivalrous soul within. Meanwhile, let men not forget that the very labour he underwent that he might perform his work was a lesson to our age. Not simply the genius but the toil he put into his books, notably his Friedrich, makes him the master of us all.