Sankey are masters of the philosophy of history. Men are not mistaken in thinking that Christianity has done them good, in loving it, in wishing to listen to those who will talk to them about what they love, and will talk of it with admiration and gratitude, not contempt and hatred. Christianity is truly, as in 'Literature and Dogma' I have called it, 'the greatest and happiest stroke ever yet made for human perfection.' Men do not err, they are on firm ground of experience, when they say that they have practically found Christianity to be something incomparably beneficent. Where they err, is in their way of accounting for this, and of assigning its causes.-God and the Bible.

PHILOSOPHICAL RADICALS.

If the matter were not so serious, one could hardly help smiling at the chagrin and manifest perplexity of such of one's friends as happen to be philosophical radicals and secularists, at having to reckon with religion again when they thought its day was quite gone by, and that they need not study it any more or take account of it any more, but it was passing out, and a kind of new gospel, half Bentham half Cobden, in which they were themselves particularly strong, was coming in. And perhaps there is no one who more deserves to be compassionated, than an elderly or middle-aged man of this kind, such as several of their Parliamentary spokesmen and respresen

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tatives are. For perhaps the younger men of the party may take heart of grace, and acquaint themselves a little with religion, now that they see its day is by no means over. But, for the older ones, their mental habits are formed, and it is almost too late for them to begin such new studies. However, a wave of religious reaction is evidently passing over Europe; due very much to our revolutionary and philosophical friends having insisted upon it that religion was gone by and unnecessary, when it was neither the one nor the other. Obedience, strange as it may sound, is a real need of human nature ;-above all, moral and religious obedience. Undoubtedly, there are in the popular classes of every country forces of piety and religion capable of being brought into an alliance with the Church, the national society for the promotion of goodness, in that country. And of no people may this be more certainly said than of ours.-Last Essays.

A HISTORICAL PARALLEL.

It is often said: If Jesus Christ came now, his religion would be rejected. And this is only another way of saying that the world now, as the Jewish people formerly, has something which thwarts and confuses its perception of what righteousness really is. It is so; and the thwarting cause is the same now as then :-the dogmatic system current, the so-called orthodox theology. This prevents now, as it did then, that which righteousness

really is, the method and secret of Jesus, from being rightly received, from operating fully, and from accomplishing its due effect.

So true is this, that we have only to look at our own community to see the almost precise parallel, so far as religion is concerned, to the state of things presented in Judæa when Jesus Christ came. The multitudes are the same everywhere. The chief priests and elders of the people, and the scribes, are our bishops and dogmatists, with their pseudo-science of learned theology blinding their eyes, and always,—whenever simple souls are disposed to think that the method and secret of Jesus is true religion, and that the Great Personal First Cause and the Godhead of the Eternal Son have nothing to do with it, eager to cry out: This people that knoweth not the law are cursed! The Pharisees, with their genuine concern for religion, but total want of perception of what religion really is, and by their temper, attitude, and aims doing their best to make religion impossible, are the Protestant Dissenters. The Sadducees are our friends the philosophical Liberals, who believe neither in angel nor spirit, but in Mr. Herbert Spencer. Even the Roman governor has his close parallel in our celebrated aristocracy, with its superficial good sense and good nature, its complete inaptitude for ideas, its profound helplessness in presence of all great spiritual movements. And the result is, that the splendid promises to righteousness made by the

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Hebrew prophets, claimed by the Jews as the property of Judaism, claimed by us as the property of Christianity, are almost as ludicrously inapplicable to our religious state now, as to theirs then.-Literature and Dogma.

CHRISTIANITY WILL SURVIVE.

CHRISTIANITY will survive because of its natural truth. Those who fancied that they had done with it, those who had thrown it aside because what was presented to them under its name was so unreceivable, will have to return to it again, and to learn it better. The Latin nations,even the southern Latin nations,-will have to acquaint themselves with that fundamental document of Christianity, the Bible, and to discover wherein it differs from 'a text of Hesiod.' Neither will the old forms of Christian worship be extinguished by the growth of a truer conception of their essential contents. Those forms, thrown out at dimly-grasped truth, approximative and provisional representations of it, and which are now surrounded with such an atmosphere of tender and profound sentiment, will not disappear. They will survive as poetry. Above all, among the Catholic nations will this be the case. And, indeed, one must wonder at the fatuity of the Roman Catholic Church, that she should not herself see what a future there is for her here. Will there never arise among Catholics some great soul, to perceive that the eternity and universality, which is vainly claimed for

Catholic dogma and the ultramontane system, might really be possible for Catholic worship? But to rule over the moment and the credulous has more attraction than to work for the future and the sane.

Christianity, however, will find the ways for its own

future.

What is certain is that it will not disappear. Whatever progress may be made in science, art, and literary culture, however much higher, more general, and more effective than at present the value for them may become, Christianity will be still there as what these rest against and imply; as the indispensable background, the three-fourths of life. It is true, while 'the remaining fourth is ill-cared for, the three-fourths themselves must also suffer with it. But this does but bring us to the old and true Socratic thesis of the interdependence of virtue and knowledge.-Last Essays.

RELIGIOUS RECONSTRUCTION.

In the same spirit in which she judges Bishop Colenso, Miss Cobbe, like so many earnest liberals of our practical race, both here and in America, herself sets vigorously about a positive reconstruction of religion, about making a religion of the future out of hand, or at least setting about making it. We must not rest, she and they are always thinking and saying, in negative criticism, we must be creative and constructive; hence we have such works as her recent 'Religious Duty,' and works still more con