Will men, in the etiolated condition to which they are to be reduced, have lost desire and vanity and perverseness, and all the causes of disorder and immorality, as well as the hopes and interests which have hitherto kept morality alive? Our author can hardly think so, for he observes in one place that the non-religious man of the future "will clutch with a fierce avidity at power or wealth, or at the pleasures which are purchased by the provision of power and wealth" (p. 276).

Perhaps the chief value of this remorseless book is that it brings us face to face with a world to which a God is unknown. The author allows everything to secular morality that its admirers can claim for it, but assumes it to have denied God; and then he exclaims, See how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable all the uses of your world have become! I have mentioned that in one part of the book he develops the thesis that, in the worship of the State, a new religion may grow up to take the place of the older reverences and obligations. But he does not afterwards make much of this. The truth is, that reverence for the State is not possible, unless there is a Divine Power behind and above it. If men see clearly that the State is only themselves, they will not worship it. It is the same with Humanity. It was Quetelet, if I remember right, who, when it was proposed to him that he should worship Humanity, replied, "Worship Humanity? No, thank you; I know the creature too well." We can reverence Humanity, the Church, the State, parents, the family, if we regard them as ordained of God, but not in themselves without God. The old reverence for the family was bound up, as Mr. Pearson mentions, with the worship of the family gods. Patriotism has always had in view more or less consciously the country's gods. When there is a reverence for Humanity, deeper and humbler than philanthropy, it is really evoked, not by the concrete mass of men and women, but by an ideal, by a Divine Nature and Providence manifesting itself in mankind and its history. But to men to whom the visible is all and the grave an end, how is any thing or person or institution to acquire sacredness? And without sacredness we have such a world, perhaps, as that which Mr. Pearson describes a world on which death and corruption have set their mark.

According to "the argument of this book," belief in a living God is doomed. Before acquiescing in this assumption, there are a good many of us that will know the reason why. It was not in this century or the last that "Christianity began to appear grotesque and incredible." Porcius Festus, in A.D. 60, represented a world of men to whom the original Christianity had just that appearance. We are perfectly aware that we are passing through a time of great spiritual perplexity, a time when the heavens are shaken even more than the

earth.

We do not shut our eyes to the crumbling of the foundations upon which our fathers allowed their faith to rest—the two, mainly, of the authority of the Bible and the authority of the Church. And we may surely add to these, as failing to give us dictation which we can accept without reserve, the authority of reason; for the human reason is convicted of a perfectly bewildering incapacity. One defect after another which Divine Providence (for to us it is nothing less sacred), working through historical criticism, discloses in the structure and contents of our sacred books, makes it evident that we.cannot continue to build our faith upon the Bible. If perplexed inquirers are referred to the Church, and they ask, Where is it? no one can tell them where it is, or through what organ its voice is to be heard— no one but the Romanist, who has the satisfaction of seeing his Church distinctly enough in the person of the Pope. And here is Mr. Pearson telling us-though he is not the first to make the discovery that the morality of the State, its interpretation of human duty has proved itself superior to the morality of the Church. That is, no doubt, a trying and awakening discovery to those who have loved and honoured the Church, but there is nothing in it that need utterly discomfit us. Is God the God of the Church only ?-is He not the God of the State also? Yea, of the State also, if so be that God is one. Often has the religious authority shown itself less careful of justice, sometimes even of humanity, than the State. And we are thus warned that the Church, whose office it is to learn as well as to teach, has no commission to be the exclusive or the infallible teacher of mankind. The living God has not resigned his own prerogative as the universal Teacher into the keeping of any earthly authority. When the Church puts itself in the place of God, it is sure to go wrong and to be humiliated. But because the Church, however wanting in faithfulness, cannot help bearing witness

to the Christ of the New Testament and to the Father revealed in

Him, it has the power-a power unknown to the State as a mere expression of the will of the majority or of the strongest-of awakening and feeding the noblest and most vital and fruitful instincts of human nature-the trust, the hope, the love, the selfsurrender, which are the true life of the world.

If we who retain our belief in the God of our fathers try to run before time, and to imagine what is to be, our first feeling will be that it is only with extreme diffidence that we can form any expectations. It has become a proverb, that it is always the unexpected that happens. But that the pursuit of what is just and humane will injure the higher interest of mankind, and accelerate the decline of the civilised world, we shall emphatically refuse to believe. Timid members of society have long been threatening us with the subversive tendencies of Democracy and Liberalism, and for some time they made

Socialism a name of horror to the respectable classes; but the changes that have been promoted by the feeling for justice and humanity have up to this moment amply commended themselves to the moderately well-informed and intelligent, and the most Conservative are now almost ashamed to continue the old predictions of revolution and ruin. No one openly expresses a wish that we should go back and undo the democratic changes of recent times. We may concede to Mr. Pearson that in these days the world-movements are so large and sweeping that we can but slightly control or modify them. We can only go on in faith, careful and resolute that the steps we have consciously to take shall be in the right direction, And we may deny that, so far as we can see, the future threatens to make our faith foolish any more than the past has done.

It is true that at this time, by what we do and what we refrain from doing, we may be said to be nursing the prolific inferior races into power. That means, according to Mr. Pearson, that our trade will be wrested from us and our emigration reserves closed to our surplus population. We may prefer to dwell upon the immense increase of the volume of the world's trade which the expansion of the inferior races seems to promise, and on the probability that openings may present themselves which we cannot count upon foreseeing. And I have intimated that, according to all historical precedent, there will be no great developments in the less civilised parts of the world without exciting and destructive wars. Mr. Pearson predicts conditions which cannot fail to issue in war, but does not predict war. Thus he puts the European nations in a position of unstable equilibrium as regards mutual conflict, and assumes that they will not topple over. Each nation is to have a universal conscription and a strong military executive; but the population is to go on within each country feeding itself in animal comfort, shut out from all excitements, and in respect of the nobler interests and aspirations becoming more and more anæmic. This is surely in a high degree improbable. Collisions of a shattering kind would hardly be avoidable. But it is open to us, if we like to speculate on Mr. Pearson's lines, to imagine the States of Europe forming a federation, in the face of the new Asia and Africa, in which there should be real coercive control exercised by the whole body over single members, and which should therefore be able to keep the peace between them all. Nothing but grave danger and the palpable interest of all would make such control possible; and most of us will be unable to foresee any necessities strong enough to drive the European countries into federation. But this may take its place amongst the schemes on which the imagination may exercise itself. It is somewhat surprising, by the way, that Mr. Pearson has not given a prominent place to Australia, or even to North America, in his forecast.

The characteristic sentiment of our time, especially amongst the most religious Christians, includes an extreme shrinking from war. It is highly important that on this question we should "clear our minds of cant," and endeavour to discriminate between the kind of action which Christianity binds upon sincere uncompromising Christians, and that which is the indulgence of sentimental weakness. It is clearly wrong to bring on war, with its inevitable evils, to gratify selfish vanity, or greed, or ambition. But for high objects which appear to be committed to our keeping, it is right for Christians to go to war, and wrong to be deterred by its costliness or its horrors. For such objects, the more Christian we are, the more willingly ought we to prepare ourselves for war, and the more resolutely to go into it when it is forced upon us. It is an essentially Christian estimate, that the shortening by a few years of millions on millions of human liveslives which are so often of little spiritual worth!—is an inconsiderable loss, compared with the loss of anything high and noble from amongst the spiritual possessions of the world. It has been an instinctive conviction of almost all good men, that national existence is an object for the sake of which any number of lives may rightly be given and taken, any quantity of sorrow inflicted on families. Wounds, deaths, griefs-these are not to deter Christians from doing their utmost to preserve a trust which God has committed to them. Contact with war, even through descriptions, may do something to brace spiritual resolution. The reader of such a book as "La Débâcle" may say to himself, "This is too dreadful! Let us submit to any indignity or oppression rather than be responsible for such horrors ! But the Christian will rather say, "In these scenes, and any still more appalling than these, we have a witness to the preciousness of ideal treasures. To fight for the existence and the honour of our country is the way to gain a higher conception of the trust committed to the children of a nation. In this age, more than ever, and for Englishmen more than for the citizens of any other country, it should be a sovereign aspiration that we may help to make the country for which we are ready to die and to kill increasingly worthy of its destiny, a better instrument in the hands of the Ruler of mankind. Christianity imposes upon those who govern the British Empire the obligation of caring little about lives or feelings compared with the security of the Empire and its power to do its appointed work in the world. Mr. Pearson's book is a call to us to prove that to be good is not to be weak; that we know it to be our Christian duty to guard by strenuous effort, and by any required amount of suffering, the priceless inheritance which has been entrusted to us.

J. LLEWELYN DAVIES.

1

THE POPE AND FATHER BRANDI.

A REPLY.

SE

EVERAL years ago, when I was still an enthusiastic young student of poetry and painting, a playful friend of mine once asked me whether I knew Claude Lorraine's painting representing Ulysses delivering up Briseis to her father. On my confessing that it had escaped my notice, he exclaimed, "Well, if you are desirous of seeing a rare example of the admirable perfection with which modern French art interprets that of ancient Greece, a rich æsthetic treat is in store for you;" whereupon I visited the Louvre, prepared to admire and enjoy. Taking my stand before the picture, my astonishment was indeed boundless, and, had my friend been near me at the time, I fancy I should have given vent to it in terms characterised by truth and lucidity rather than courtliness or elegance. A Mediterranean seaport, with the "darkly, deeply, beautifully blue sky" bending over it; one ship majestically sailing out to sea; another anchoring in the harbour, little boats shooting hither and thither; to the right a palace; to the left other palaces and statues; the beach washed by cool-looking translucent wavesall this and much more were made beautifully visible by the magical brush of the artist; but the hero and heroine seemed to have been entirely left out. Far away in the background I could, it is true, discern several dots, dashes, and smudges which to a lively imagination might stand for them, for anything, or for everything. It was evident that the painter, who had not spent a moment's thought upon Achilles or Briseis, had had a laugh at the expense of his public when he was giving his picture a name; and it was equally obvious that my friend had played a trick upon me.*

*

* A joke which, I am informed, is not uncommon in some academical circles in

Paris.