matics,' too sadly reveals. But we shall never understand the spiritual movements of our own or of any other generation, unless we see that God's controversy with idols and idolatries is the main controversy of the world, as in Bacon's and still older days. In all communities, in States and in Churches, whether Established or Nonconformist, Papal or Protestant, Eastern or Western, idolatry is the besetting sin; and God is striking at it here and now as hardly, as sternly, as in the darkest days of Jewish history. Till we all, preachers, priests, and philosophers, understand this, and stir ourselves to destroy the idols of the flesh and of the mind which stand between us and the light of truth, we are walking in a vain show, and Babel' is written over our life.

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Speaking generally, we may say that the written word, which is the mere flesh of the living word, took the place of the word of the Church, which is its counterfeit, and which had come to be a doctrine of lies no longer endurable by honest hearts. The ancient inspiration preserved in sacred records took the place of that present inspiration of which the Church professed to be the mouthpiece, but which had been found to be a lying oracle. We may look upon inevitable that the letter of the word should be exalted to be the supreme arbiter and guide of men, while that enlightened conscience of Christian society is being educated by Scripture and experience, which, higher than Church authority or written document, is the true organ of the Holy Ghost. The vision of this lay behind Hooker's great argument; the truth of it was at the root of George Fox's doctrine; and its development is the one progress for which it is worth while greatly to strive and to hope. Men were in a way bound in the order of their culture to try what power there might be in a written word to rule the disorder and to guide the movements of society. And the very experiment was a wonderful emancipation, inasmuch as it set men to search the Scriptures, and to judge for themselves with a new sense of responsibility to God and to man for the conduct of life. It fell in too with the working of the newborn art of printing, and with the new learning, which was rapidly making all things new in the intellectual sphere. But none the less does the rebuke of Christ lie as sternly against the Protestant as against the Jewish literalist: Ye search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me.'

Then arose in Protestant Europe two great schools of thought or streams of tendency-which took up the inheritance of older schoolsas men pored over the Bible to discover there the guidance which, through the overthrow of the authority of Rome, they had lost. The one, of which the Covenant was the moderate and the Fifth Monarchy the fanatical form, would subject the whole order of things in a Christian State to the express legislation of the word of God as expounded by the competent interpreters. By this scheme the Bible would become

what Mahomet made his Koran, simply a book of directions, bearing similar Dead Sea fruit. The other looked towards absolutism, the supreme authority of the head of the State in all ecclesiastical and civil affairs. The English Reformation, not being primarily the fruit of a popular movement, tended from the first in this direction, but it developed in strong force the antagonist party who held to the absolute right of the word of God. The two ideas of the Christian government of men alike arose out of the need of filling up the enormous gap in the system of belief and the daily conduct of life which had been left by the overthrow of Rome. The one lay behind English Puritanism; it worked itself out into nobler and freer form, and came to the front in English Independency. It passed over the ocean with the 'Mayflower' pilgrims, and had free course in New England, where it attempted the complete organisation and conduct of a political society, with very remarkable and interesting results. In England, though the Independents, whose fanatics were wild for the kingdom of the saints, won the victory, the experiment of a State set trimly square with man's interpretation of the statutes of the written word happily failed of a complete trial, because at the head of the Independents and of England was neither a pedant nor a fanatic, but a far-sighted and strong-handed ruler of men.

The theory of the divine right of kings which was put into clear form by James I.-who, fool as he was in a moral sense, had a keen eye in his head, and a clever knack of putting things into form-was really the child of the Reformation, though it might appear to descend from the Empire. And let it be said for James that the overthrow of the authority of the Church as the supreme regulator, though at last much in the background, of the public life of Christendom, left a gap which the written word as expounded by the divine— and James had known fully what that meant-did not seem to supply. Society craved, as it always craves, a firm authority whereby to guide its steps. Public opinion in these days, when it has room and time to take its complete form--and we have recently watched the process of crystallisation-expresses the judgment of the enlightened Christian conscience. It brings its materials from far, and it digests and elaborates them with sore travail and pain; but out of the crucible comes forth at length the judgment of the 'ermine-robed great world,' that everybody' who is wiser than the seers, stronger than the kings, holier than the priests.

But in those days the very crucible was wanting, and it is not to be wondered at that thoughtful men, seeing the need of a firm authority to which some sacredness should attach, should find it at first in the head of the State. I confess to a tender feeling towards that divine right of kings when it was young, because it is the direct parent of the divine right of peoples, and was the only possible form in that age of the challenge of secular society to the alternative

doctrine of the divine right of priests. The true divine right lies neither with the one nor with the other, but with the truth how and where soever it can get itself established. Each school had its measure of truth to contribute; but secular society would in those days have lost the power to contribute anything if it had not been for the strong-handed authority of kings. And so that 'new monarchy' with its clearly despotic tendencies, of which Mr. Green writes so ably, may have had an important function to discharge with regard to the orderly development of popular liberty. It was the form in which the State was rising to the consciousness of its unity, was feeling its strength, feeding its intelligence, and preparing itself, when it should find out in time that kings could do little more to help it than popes, to take into its own hands the management of its affairs.

'L'état, c'est moi!' said a king once with sublime complacence. That is precisely what a pope has just said of the Church, L'église, c'est moi!' and what the Syllabus shows that he would say of every State in Christendom if he dared. The monarch's affirmation was, at any rate, good against the priest's. It was the sign that secular society had attained to its majority, and it is the line through which we inherit our popular liberties. No sooner was the doctrine formulated than the people began to bring their strength to bear on its limitation and regulation. When it was pilloried as the right divine of kings to govern wrong,' the movement was far advanced which would dethrone the sovereign ruler and enthrone the sovereign people in his room. That process we have now completed; we shall begin to see with what results. It may be that we shall find that the doctrine of the sovereign people, in whose inspiration Mazzini believed as passionately as the Curia believes in the Pope's, has not fathomed the matter to its depths. Neither king, nor priest, nor people, will be sovereign in the final order, the order of the kingdom of heaven.

By the same age and the same influences, working in another direction, the power of the preacher was developed. The pulpit became a recognised and powerful institution in Protestant communities, and made a vigorous effort to take into its own hands the conduct of all mundane affairs. Behind Puritanism, which leaned strongly to Presbytery, there lurked the notion that a State governed by magistrates under the direction of an assembly of divines would present the fairest image of the kingdom of heaven. That notion the Independents shattered, and it is one of their noblest services to English society. And there was sore peril of its being tried at one time. Baillie, who saw plainly enough how the matter stood in the Westminster Assembly, wrote to Scotland, with amusing frankness, that they did not propose to meddle in haste with Independency, 'till it please God to advance our army, which we expect will much

assist our arguments.' But there was hidden from his unprophetie eye the crowning mercy of Worcester,' and that flash of the sun out of the rain-clouds, as the Psalm, 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered,' rolled down the ranks of the Ironsides on the morning of Dunbar.

The preacher rose as the expositor of the new law which was in every man's hand, and which was recognised as supreme. We can hardly realise in these days the intense interest with which the men were observed and followed, who were able to bring forth the riches of this new treasure to the world. The desire for knowledge is the most sacred and consuming appetite of our nature. The troops of poor, ragged, starving scholars, who followed a man like Abelard to gather even crumbs of the bread of thought, were the heralds of the throngs who in the next great age of revival hung upon the preacher's lips, hungering for a yet more precious bread. And the preacher's realm was a wide one. Our modern sharp division of secular and sacred had hardly in those days dawned upon the minds of men. And, let me add, it would never have dawned on ours if those men had not so persistently amalgamated them in the crucible of their words and deeds. We talk loftily of the confusion of things secular and sacred in the life of those struggling generations. But it is just that confusion which has evolved our modern order. We can keep the two spheres fairly disentangled, simply because what we call secular was thoroughly leavened in the kneading-trough of those centuries with the ideas and influences of spiritual truth. So the skilled expositors of the Bible attained at once and most naturally to a position of recognised dignity and influence, which, through many shocks and changes, they have retained to the present time. The question arises, Is it now passing away?

The medieval Church knew how to make a mighty use of the preacher, and some of the greatest movements which have shaken society have owed their birth to the power of the word on a preacher's lips. But the pulpit as an institution can never occupy the most prominent place in the system which attaches such supreme importance to the discipline administered by the priest. And the Protestant Churches which adopt a formal order of service and rite can hardly place the pulpit on the level which it occupies in Churches adopting a freer order, and holding the Pauline view of the power of a preached gospel. Some of the very noblest works of English literature are by divines of the Anglican Church; but the preacher is, on the whole, mainly to be looked for in the free and unestablished schools. We must not follow him to New England, where he held a position of exceptional advantage while the gristle' was growing to 'bone' in the infant State. There the State grew out of and round the Church, as in Israel of old, with very curious results on which we have not space to dwell. But the preachers were great powers in the State

until they lost their heads and their Christian hearts in the witchcraft panic. After that storm had passed, their influence was never fully restored.

In the old country, too, they played a notable part in the great drama of our history. Preaching ran mainly in the Puritan blood. The lectureships in the City churches were filled chiefly by men of the Puritan school, and they became a great power, and did much to nourish that spirit of civil and religious independence which made London the backbone of the Parliamentary party in its struggle with the Crown. Laud saw how they were working, and conceived from them a distaste of sermons.' Again, after the Restoration, the preachers on both sides of the pale told powerfully on their times. But the men who could stir and shake the souls of the masses must be looked for, on the whole, in the ranks of the Nonconformists. And naturally enough, for the pulpit was the citadel of their strength. They too were in opposition.' They had to do with that class of the people which is the core of strength in every State; and they stirred their hearers to an energy and interest in public questions which made them a kind of vanguard in the army of progress. The battle of our liberties has been largely fought by the religious element in the community, greatly helped, no doubt, by the thinkers. Neither the polish of Erasmus nor the benignity of Melancthon,' Heine says, could have carried the Reformation, but it needed die göttliche Brutalität of brother Martin.' So, in our history, the hand that has struck and conquered has been mostly strung by religious enthusiasm, though the nervous currents have no doubt been reinforced from serener springs.

Nobly on the whole, during those generations, the preachers wielded their power, and strenuously they wrought by it on and for their fellowmen. That great outburst of evangelical zeal which marked the last half of the eighteenth century in England was truly a form, and a very blessed angelic form, of that movement towards the poor and wretched, the tormented and oppressed, which in France took the form of the Fury of Revolution. We have yet to measure the magnitude of the work of those indomitable preachers in saving England from a dread baptism of blood in that fierce revolutionary time, by kindling some belief in a God who cared for men, and some loving trust in men who cared for men, in the heart of those vast classes who are verily the dangerous classes in such crises as these. The danger lies in their misery and despair. Those who can bring solace to their misery and preach hope to their despair save them and save society. It was thus that Christianity saved a world which was literally perishing of despair and wretchedness, and it was thus that the evangelical revival in the age of revolution helped greatly to save our State. The hope which its preachers kindled, the charity which they quickened, the brotherly relations