It

that persons who break away from old forms, exhaust much of their spiritual constructiveness in so doing, and are consequently feeble in the invention of new means. would seem that constructive work in religious fellowship is never undertaken except when ethical passion has reached the blazing-point of apostolic fervour. But until ethical societies, distinctively so called, do devise as good means of spiritual culture as the Church has done, it will be well for them to remember, with Sir John Seeley, that the Church itself was the first ethical society. It was, no doubt, committed to the intellectual error of tracing moral redemption to superhuman agencies; hence the good in it has been in so far vitiated for the modern scientific spirit; but, luckily, in the formularies of the supreme sacrament there is no requirement of assent to an intellectual creed, nor is the doctrine of transubstantiation or consubstantiation, or any other metaphysical theory, actually embodied in them. Everything that is said, if it may be interpreted according to the canons of literary and historical criticism, is either a plain statement or a poetic embodiment of ethical experience.

It is possible that the organisers of the Church's ritual were prepared to present so purely ethical a sacrament only because they had entrenched their intellectual dogmas in the baptismal and confirmatory rites, and in the Catechism; but the fact that they did so is none the less a happy augury.

Those who believe, as I do, in the ethical efficacy of the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, cannot but deplore the fact that, before one can participate in it, one must submit to the present formularies of the ordinance of baptism. That ordinance is supposed to commit one to belief in the conventional interpretation of the Apostles' Creed, and to bind one intellectually and morally to belief

and trust in superhuman sources of redemption. Anyone, therefore, who counts such belief and trust as lamentable errors, is for conscience' sake self-excluded from the communion table. Yet that he should be forced into this predicament is a spiritual injustice; and the arrogance of the supernaturalists in claiming a monopoly in church membership will some day be actively resented by the best men and women in the nation. Nor will these be content simply to found new ethical organisations, disconnected from those of the past; they will storm the historical Church, until they beat down its barriers of supernaturalism; and the Church itself will then be glad to make room for them at its fellowship supper.

For no sect elect

Is the soul's wine poured
And her table decked:
Whom should man reject
From man's common board?

CHAPTER XIV

THE MARRIAGE CEREMONY

THE Church still regards herself as a restraining influence upon the wayward and excessive impulses of human nature. And there is no doubt that in the past she has for the most part been a power on the side not only of conventional law and order, but of those customs which are of real service to human society.

In former generations, in order to throw her weight into the scale in favour of health and innocent happiness, she needed only to uphold her own doctrines, forms and ceremonies. But the time has now come when those very doctrines are in many points antiquated, and, instead of furthering, are a hindrance to the cause of social purity and innocence. Her form for the solemnisation of marriage, like her Burial Service, bears every mark of an age more external and mechanical, less spiritual and sympathetic, than ours.

The marriage ceremony is itself to a considerable extent accountable for the confusion of thought which prevails to-day as to the meaning and importance of the institution of matrimony. Whoever, therefore, among the upholders of the Church is filled with her deeper spirit and insight and adheres to her ultimate end of social purity and justice, must in the very name of the Church discard her present marriage form.

Yet to-day, more than ever before, there is a jealous insistence upon the inviolability of the Prayer Bookboth its teaching and its letter; and if any revision is immediately undertaken, there is danger that it may be only in the direction of fortifying and intensifying those very characteristics that are out of harmony with the new spirit and the deeper needs of modern life. If tendencies develop as they have begun of late, the clergy of the Church, for the sake of the Prayer Book, will be found defending comparative brutality and laxity in private morals, while the boldest and most self-reliant thinkers of the day, the independent humanitarian reformers who have broken away from the Church, will become the acknowledged pioneers of a more rigid marriage order, of severer laws against waywardness and self-indulgence, and the upholders of a higher standard of personal virtue.

It is a most significant fact that within the last few years bold and independent criticism of social and religious institutions has made a new departure-a right-about-face -as regards its task and policy. Until recently its work had been negative, fault-finding, destructive-if not picking new holes, pointing to those that were there all the time but had been overlooked. Work of this sort has been so far accomplished-there is now such a strong and alert public opinion against errors and barriers which impede health, science and opportunity for a fuller life-that the hitherto destructive critics have felt justified and emboldened to start the work of building anew the institutions which shall replace the old and perform their service better.

This transformation from a destructive to a constructive policy is especially marked in regard to the change of attitude of critics towards the institution of marriage. For many years the effect of pointing out

the anomalies and inhumanities which are harboured and sanctioned by the traditional views of the Church and by the laws of the country was to cast the whole institution of monogamy into discredit. During the last generation the sentiment spread throughout widening circles of society that marriage was a thing not to be reformed but to be swept away; that it was a mere conventionality, upheld in the interests not of virtue but of hypocrisy, and that a conspiracy of silence hushed up the crying wrongs which were perpetrated within the institution and under the sanction of religion. But now the defiant critics of marriage as it is, are also the most powerful and outspoken champions of monogamy; they would make it more rigid. They totally reject the notion that the relation of man and woman is a merely private affair; they maintain that it above all others is the relationship in life in which the community as an organised wholethe State-may interfere. A hundred practices which have been approved, condoned and tolerated, they declare, must now be suppressed as illegal by means of punishments attached, and many evils still rife must be anticipated and prevented by systematic and timely instruction. They declare further that many aspects of a man's life which he has been allowed to account private must henceforth be recorded, through the medical profession, lawyers and others, under State authorities, and that access to these records must be given to such persons as they may vitally concern. These agitators declare that in order to prevent the mental and physical degeneration of the people, the hidden things of darkness must be brought to light. The facts are accessible; those who can record them are already in possession of them and can be constrained to communicate them to the central authorities.

This question, therefore, of the reform by the State