this authority? The answer must always at last be brought back to the test of the inward Light. No external proofs can avail to establish the Divine inspiration of the Church and of the Bible, without the testimony which is afforded by their harmony with the witness of the Spirit.

In

The history of the believers in the inward Light warns us that there is danger even here. We have seen that neither the infallibility of the Church nor of the Book can be sustained: but is not the Spirit infallible? is not the Spirit God? The example of the early Quakers indicates the serious consequences of trusting to logical reasoning in such matters. The Spirit is God; the Spirit of God works in men; but "the spirit” of the Quakers was, not the pure cause, but the effect of that cause working in the midst of human ignorance, prejudice, and conceit. The influence of the Spirit in the heart and mind of the believer produces as its result, perception of truth, conviction of duty, formation of character. this result we see, not the Spirit of God alone, but the Spirit operating upon human finiteness, fallibility, infirmity. After a time, the Quakers fully realised that trust in the inward Light did not permit them to attribute infallibility to their own judgments. William Penn denies that the Quakers ever did assert themselves infallible; they only asserted "that all who are led by the infallible Light, and live according to its manifestations, are so far perfect and so far infallible in the right way, as they are led by it, and not a jot farther." This however was not written until sad scandals had shown the liability of the Children of Light to be self-deceived, 1 Penn's Works, Vol. V., p. 9.

were not.

and suppose themselves led by the Light when they These examples remain on record to warn us of the necessity of deep personal humility, of readiness to recognise the illumination of the Spirit in others as well as ourselves, and of gratefully accepting the teaching accumulated for us in the Church and in the Bible, so far as this is corroborated by the Light within. "What was it from you that the word of God went forth? or came it unto you alone?" 1 1 1 Cor. xiv. 36.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY.

THE history of quakerism is in some respects a miniature of the history of Christianity. The internal changes in the society of Friends imitate on a small scale the vaster changes of Christendom during eighteen centuries. Our study has brought us face to face with two classes of facts; the divisions, and the mutations, of the Christian religion. Christianity is not an indivisible, immutable unity. The Christian Church is split up into rival, even hostile sections; and these separate sections have undergone important alterations in the process of time. Some of these communities have declined in number and in power, In our own day we are painfully accustomed to hear the confident assertion that Christianity itself is dying, and will soon be dead, buried, and forgotten. It is an era of transition; the old is passing away; the new is not yet clearly discerned; hence men's hearts fail them for fear, and the love of many waxes cold. In such a time the story of the rise and decline of the Children of the Light may suggest an uneasy fear lest Christianity itself be after all only a larger quakerism, a wave of religious excitement of greater intensity and wider sweep, which has rolled across the continents and adown the ages for near two thousand years, which may take another thousand or

two to die away, but nevertheless is inevitably destined to wane and disappear at last. Is this the right deduction from our story?

We cannot forecast the future of Christianity, until we have a clear notion of what Christianity is. When we set ourselves to examine attentively these conflicting currents of thought, these changing aspects of religious life, it begins to be apparent that the nature of true Christianity in itself, and the notion and expression of it in creed and church, are not by any means perfectly identical. Romanism and Protestantism, for instance, are irreconcilable foes; but there is a Christian spirit in the Catholic Church which leaps up to embrace the same spirit in the Protestant Church, defying all the anathemas of the clergy to keep them asunder. St. Anselm, St. Bernard, St. Francis are saints to the Protestant as well as to the Catholic. John Woolman clasps Thomas à Kempis to his heart. St. Elizabeth and Elizabeth Fry are sisters. The good Earl of Shaftesbury, stanchest of Protestants, opens his arms to Cardinal Manning and invites him to an alliance against the common foe.1 In the story of quakerism, nothing surprised us more than the extreme repulsion between the first believers in the inward Light and their Puritan contemporaries. George Fox and John Bunyan clash and wrestle in their lifetime, but we from afar can discern that they were one in spirit, and we doubt not they love each other in heaven. It dawns upon us then that Christianity is not only and altogether, just what each or any one of these thought it to be, but

1 Hodder's Life and Work of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, Vol. III. p. 288.

something common to them all, something of which they were not fully conscious, or to which they did not attach so much importance as they did to the dogmas of their respective creeds. We begin to doubt our former superficial conclusion that Christianity is mutable and divisible. Is not Christianity a permanent and progressive unity just as humanity is? Differences of colour, race, and nationality, cannot destroy the common human nature of the Esquimaux and the Negro, the Caucasian and the Mongolian. Divided by localities, languages, and varying degrees of development, often arrayed against each other for mutual slaughter, in spite of all, mankind is one family; and we recognise these alienations and hostilities as unhappy perversions and mistakes, which delay the realisation of the true universal brotherhood. Is it not so in the Church of Christ? Christianity is a life; the true life of man; the life of the spirit reigning over all the lusts of the flesh; the life of the human spirit in perfect harmony with the Divine. Herein is the will of the Eternal, for man and in man, revealed and fulfilled. Christianity, we call it, because first in Jesus, the Christ, this life was manifested in its highest perfection, in a sinless glory never so much as imagined in connection with any other name. This life, incarnated in Him, propagated itself among the nations and along the ages; we see it around us; we feel it throbbing within us. This life is one and the same in all who know its power, and is inwardly felt to be such, despite all theological differences. Life, and human conceptions of what life is, are not identical. Chemistry and physiology have taught us much about the human body; albeit the mystery of its life is still in