WANTED—

A GOSPEL FOR THE CENTURY.

No

THERE have been times when the handwriting on the wall of history was hard to read. But such is not the time in which we live. Daniel need come forth, in his prophet's garment, to tell us that the Belshazzar's feast glorified by some under the name of 'modern civilisation,' and by others loathed as a combination of luxury and sacrilege, cannot last. Mene, Tekel, Upharsin' has been written against it in characters of flame and fire. It is judged and found wanting.

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The whole European system that has grown up since the French Revolution has the air of an interregnum. It seems to be founded on no principle, to fulfil no aspiration. It inspires confidence neither in the Jew money-lender, nor in the paralysed and bewildered Liberal, nor in the mocking Conservative who uses and despises it; neither in the English Churchman, who knows it will not prevent his disestablishment, nor in the Irish landlord, whom it has sent-it unwilling, him unwilling—into the Land Courts for his reduced rental. It appeals to no Gospel. It is divided from the past by the great gulf of 1789. It does not express the facts of the present. It lives from hand to mouth in the violent see-saw of Parliamentary majorities, under the guidance of those who are called statesmen, but who will probably, in times to come, be known as rhetoricians and sophists.

The strong man armed, whose name is Prince Bismarck, keeps his house in peace. Yet, when we look steadily, we shall see that it is smouldering at the four corners. In most other parts of Europe can we say, with a clear conscience, that governments are not a mixture of imbecility and mediocrity, resting on the martial law of conscription, and confronted by a heavy-laden people, discontented workmen, decadent upper classes, and a divided Christendom? It is an age of confusion. The social organism, as we have received it from our fathers, is deeply decayed, and its spirit gone. What man is there but confesses in private that great and unknown changes are hanging over us? But though we cannot foretell them in detail, we may have a strong presentiment of the direction they will take. The present state of society is doomed by its inherent contradictions to pass away. That which once was-feudalism, monarchism, Whiggism-will not return. Reaction is the dream of pious souls sitting by the chimney-corner and indulging in their after-dinner nap. History to such is a sealed volume, else they might learn therein that the past never comes out

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of its grave as it went down thither. We shall not look like of what they dream again. Restorations do not really happen ; and Sancho Panza is the only true prophet where he says, 'Tell me what you sowed yesterday, and I will tell you what you will reap to-morrow.' Given the cause we may anticipate the consequences. The past does not live a second time; but the future is made of it. For my present purpose, I will call the seed of yesterday science. The harvest of to-morrow which it promises to bring forth is a new social order. And I ask, how do Christians propose to welcome that universal change, with blessings or with anathemas? Ought we to continue preaching last year's sermons when a new era is about to dawn? And what are those elements or principles of the Christian creed which will carry it on into the future as an imperial public influence, rather than as a private opinion, or as one sect among many?

I will endeavour to express my meaning as clearly as possible. The faith we Christians have inherited is, like its Object, divine and human. It has prospects out of this world into the infinite Beyond, and thus far is, in the dialect of Kant, transcendental. But as an incarnation of truth amongst men, it makes a tabernacle of the world we see; it lies within experience; it is of the present, and must deal with the material. Its task is essentially to redeem, raise up, interpret, and transfigure those weak and needy elements out of which the visible scheme of things is framed. A religion that was wholly transcendental would be too high for mankind. Theism itself, like pure oxygen, is the breath of life, yet not to be breathed alone. On the other hand, a religion which was merely of the present, bounded by time and the grave—such as moderns have invented and styled the Religion of Humanity'-would furnish neither scope nor aspiration for the spirit which looks through matter into eternal realms and sighs for an ampler ether, a diviner air.' O amare, O ire, O ad Deum pervenire! cried the saints of old. It is the longing of every soul of man. Mysticism, you will say! I do not deny it, but it is a mysticism rising out of experience and by it well warranted. Let Wordsworth and all the poets bear witness that it is not mere fancy.

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We are not to lose sight of this transcendental, or infinite, to which religion points the way. But the human element remains. If there is (as we know there is) a Divine Idea contained and bodied forth in the dogmas of Christianity, none the less is there a Human Idea which it is the hope of reason to attain by scientific methods. That idea, dimly discerned, unceasingly pursued, has given a law and assigned an ever-widening orbit to the movement which, from the Renaissance to the present day, has gone on, though with many a check and through strange vicissitudes, till it has grown into the power we now behold, and which many dread as an emanation from the pit. What is its nature? It is primarily concerned not with the next world, but with this; with the relations of man to his fellow, rather than with those which he cannot but have (and which religion

searches out) to the Cause eternal and unseen. The end to be accomplished, as that idea becomes real in time, is a perfect human civilisation, or Civitas Hominis, from which nothing shall be lacking that men ought to possess and enjoy. Not only comfort, but culture; not selfish individual interests, but sympathy and brotherhood; the increase of every kind of finite knowledge, and a morality founded on the common nature of man-such is the goal of that high emprisean immense movement, which we may not untruly describe as civilisation arriving at self-consciousness, man rising up to subdue and take possession of the earth which God has given him, and convinced that life, even on this side of the tomb, is neither a dream nor a sleep, but is worth living. Let us inquire, should this in any measure come to pass, How is such a world of thought, passion, and energy to be annihilated? What could be gained for God or religion, though it were brought to an end, as some would desire? Ended, I firmly believe, that movement cannot be; transformed so that it shall blend with a larger and yet holier-the 'divine concent' in which all things should agree-it may be.

So to transform it was one chief problem of Christianity from the moment it began with the Renaissance. But the time was unpropitious. Sextus the Fourth and Leo the Tenth might sacrifice to a frivolous humanism the duties of their high office; but it cannot be supposed that they saw the ideal scope of the culture to which they paid tribute. They were unworthy Vicars of Christ, not the founders of a golden age. Luther, trampling humanity under foot, condemned Aristotle in the same breath with Thomas Aquinas, looked on reason as Satan's handmaid, or something worse, and, as might be readily shown-from the pages of Professor Janssen, for instance-retarded or threw back the civilisation of Germany for two hundred years. The Reformation was essentially a protest against science and human reason. It was the work of theological fanatics where it did not proceed from a reason of State; and the scholasticism which Luther imagined that he had scotched, if not killed outright, was revived among his followers with a virulence and obstinacy that neither Realist, Conceptualist, nor Nominalist could have exceeded. On the whole, we may count that three-fourths of the sixteenth, and nearly one-half of the seventeenth, century were lost to mankind in fruitless discussions of which not a single one has been settled to this day. The positive sins of that time were very grievous. I need hardly refer to the names of Kepler and Galileo, which still make the ears of churchmen tingle. But far more disastrous in its consequences was that rage for speculative subtleties, which from Alcala to Edinburgh filled the world with clamour, degraded the Gospel of Christ to an argument for sword-play in the schools, turned the pulpits into chairs of polemic, scandalised the peaceful, and terrified the simple and the weak into an outward and soul-destroying conformity. In vain did the Popes strive, as in the famous congregations De Auxiliis, to

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bring these endless disputes to an issue among their own adherents. They broadened out, or were transmuted by the temper of the times, from school-controversies into quarrels that shook kingdoms and ruined whole nations. Not even the Thirty Years' War could silence the shrieks of spiritual combatants who for ever circling round in a maze of logomachies, of fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute,' made schisms within a schism, and rent what were styled the rags of Popery to shreds and tatters. For the quick-sighted Protestant eye,' which Milton extols, had hardly caught a glimpse of the day of science. Calvin and Chemnitz, Baius and Jansenius, Sublapsarians, Supralapsarians, Ubiquitists, Quietists, Quesnellians—who but a professed antiquarian in this department can rehearse the But once they were names and opinions of this troop of shadows? alive and about; they have filled libraries from floor to roof with volumes now readable by no human creature; they sat in kings' houses; they directed the education of the world. And when they had wrought unspeakable havoc, they flitted beyond Styx and Lethe, leaving to after-ages a Christendom bleeding almost to death, and a persecuted or despised science which had gone its own way regardless of religious traditions. As far as in these men lay, the Human and the Divine Idea had been made deadly foes.

Thus the greatest opportunity offered to Christian teachers since Alaric blew his trumpet at the gates of Rome, seemed destined to be lost. It was laid upon them, if they would but see it, to baptize this springing world in the service of Christ. An empire, co-extensive with the universe of matter, lay there awaiting its conqueror. Compared with the Renaissance which they passed by, or identified with blank Atheism and left disdainfully to Epicurus, the Reformation was an episode, a backwater in the stream of history. Erasmus saw beyond Luther; Newton the astronomer was many generations in advance of Newton the commentator on the Apocalypse. When Pascal gave up science to become a saint of Jansenism, he apostatised from the revelation which the Eternal was sending down upon mankind. Not the speculative concord of grace and free-will-to which, as an experience, religion testifies every day-but the problems of government, of commerce, of a rational, well-balanced human society, were to fill men's minds as the centuries went forward. And while religion would be more indispensable than ever, syllogistic dreams hanging loose from fact on every side, were sure to be, as in fact they have been, forgotten.

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But see the price we have paid for wanton theorising, for that ‹ insane license of affirmation' which ran riot until men could bear it no longer, and became deists and free-thinkers to escape its fury. Divorced from spiritual convictions, science has advanced, conquering and to conquer. It has multiplied its marvels, which elate the spirit of Mr. Smiles as he enlarges on them, and which drive Socialists and Anarchists to assault civilised society as embodying every ill, and as

deifying brute force, inhuman cunning, and the power of wealth acquired by unrighteousness. Religion, secluded the while in her cathedral stalls, may chant lovely anthems, and wear copes of broidered gold. But where is the multitude that should throng nave and aisles? Outside, I say, brawling, drinking, tearing their bread from one another, working, with despair in their hearts the while, as many hours of the day and night as they can toil and live. Are we surprised that they find no salvation in the name of Christ? The more is the pity, I say. But whose sin is the greater, theirs or that of the sixteenth-century Pharisee and his successors (for they have not failed down to the year we live in) who in the place of bread from Heaven gave them a stone?

It is idle to object that we cannot make the best of both. worlds; that Christianity is an austere doctrine, and bids us to deny ourselves and not to enjoy life. I know that when Pius the Ninth declared that the Roman Church cannot come to terms with 'progress and the new civilisation,' he was understood, in spite of the context, as condemning all progress and every imaginable civilisation. But, however the case may be with other Christians, Catholics cannot renounce their own traditions. Asceticism, though an element in her teaching, does not absorb the Church's life. Her children will never forget the sublime and beautiful pages they have contributed to the story of the past. They can no more disown their Raffaelle than their Francis of Assissi, their Benedict and Columbanus than their Louis of France and Stephen of Hungary. To them belong Palestrina and Haydn and Mozart, brethren, though in so diverse a sphere, of Vincent de Paul, and Peter Claver, and Baptiste de la Salle. Nay, the severe retreats of monasticism were not uncivilised. The Grande Chartreuse adds a beauty to the wilderness. Citeaux and Vallombrosa call up reminiscences of a poetic existence to which the world has been indebted for some of its noblest literature. Though I comprehend the thought of George Sand, when she declines to accept the Imitation of Christ and the Génie du Christianisme as representing one and the same creed, I think she was mistaken on the general argument. The Catholic Church, drawing its origin from the Old and New Testaments, embracing in its wide circle Greek literature, Roman jurisprudence, and the traditions of the northern races, cannot easily be exhausted in a formula. And only those who are too pedantic to be quite human will suppose that, if the genius of Catholicism be ascetic, it cannot be poetical; if contemplative, not acquainted with the facts of life; if learned, not orthodox; if enamoured of the beautiful, not detached from the vanities of time. Before now, Protestant critics have charged upon us sometimes that we set up an unattainable standard, and again that we humour the corrupt inclinations of fallen man. These accusations, which may be left to refute one another, are at any rate good evidence that the Catholic discipline is not simply a mystic flight towards the Unseen.