their lives to benefit them, are not satisfied with their cruel or grotesque sacrifices or worship. When their hearts are really touched, and the true human nature is reached beneath all which centuries of degradation and ignorance have done to pollute it, they yearn to love God. Not even a condition of nature in which all evidence points to an inherited guilt, not even long periods of acquiescence in fear and lust and cruelty can blot out that desire.

And what is the cause of the revolt we are familiar with from the theology of Calvin? Why is it that so many earnest and devout minds can hardly bear to face the doctrine of eternal pain and loss? Why is it that the lives of Christian men and women are crippled and distorted by the sense of their inability to grasp the lovingkindness of God? In each case the reason is the same. The mind and conscience rightly revolt against the crude, narrow, unscriptural logic which, with all Calvin's magnificent powers, has made his theology a byword. And multitudes who cannot understand the theological fallacies of his system are alienated because he presented to them a God whom it is hard to love. Eternal punishment is a stumbling-block to such as we have in view because, perhaps through wilfulness, perhaps through the imperfect teaching they have received, they fail to see how they can love the God who has decreed that the penalties of the lost last for ever. The chief horror of the haunting sense that God is cruel or does not care for human pain is that it checks the longing to love Him.

So it is that there is something lacking in human life without the knowledge of the God who can be loved. And the reality of the desire is further shown when we turn to the lives of those who have learned to love Him. Instead of despair there is hope; instead of fear there is confidence; instead of a crippled life there are almost boundless powers of thought and work. Science tells us that the hypothesis which explains most conditions is the hypothesis the mind must accept. That to love God is a fundamental need of man explains what we see in heathen and Christian alike.

The conviction that the will of man is free is inseparable from human life. The idea of duty to perform which an effort must be made, the sense of guilt when wrong has been done, the connexion of innocence with peace of mind, cannot be explained unless the will is free. But the most striking proofs of the impossibility of destroying the belief in the freedom of the will are furnished by those who have denied

The sternest necessitarians will try to persuade others to

what they believe to be for their good, will be full of hope or will be downcast at the turns in human affairs, will use effort about themselves, will praise or blame good or evil deeds. It is not a sufficient explanation to say that all men are inconsistent. The truth is that an inextinguishable belief in his own freewill is in the mind of man. However much he may deny it in words, however completely he may suppose he does not accept it, it asserts itself in his life. And this is illustrated very remarkably by some who, without being necessitarians, have on other grounds under-estimated or denied the freedom of the will. What is it which makes the real meaning of the teaching of St. Augustine on the doctrine of grace so difficult a problem? Even if we allow for a certain amount of development in his opinions on this subject, and consequently for a somewhat different point of view in different writings, a difficulty of a very serious kind still remains. Is not the true explanation that in the great mind of the Doctor of Grace' there was a conflict between the supposed logical necessity, derived from the Epistles of St. Paul and the fundamental truths of theology, of making the direction of the will wholly the act of God and the conviction of the human soul that it is free? We are not so bold as to say that a solution will ever be found of every perplexing passage in the great Father of the Western Church; we have much confidence that the right understanding of his theory of grace will be gained in the direction we have indicated. And, to turn to another writer who, if he represents Augustinianism in a developed form, yet brought to it centuries later powers of the most remarkable kind, we may learn the same lesson from Aquinas. We think it a crude misrepresentation of the great schoolman to say that he taught reprobation. We are mistaken in our estimate of him if there were not, both in his devotion and in his intellectual system, the effects of a conviction that the will is not only free but properly self-determining. Yet to assert this will be to make many passages which seem to be inconsistent with what we have said occur to the minds of those of our readers who are familiar with his writings. In the theology of St. Thomas, as in that of St. Augustine, there is a great problem. The question is too profound to admit of easy solution; we do not think any explanation will satisfy some of its conditions which does not allow for an overmastering conviction in the depths of the soul which, in spite of what was thought to be authority and what seemed to be logic, asserted itself. And Calvin himself, while pushing the opinions he imagined he had learnt from St. Paul and found

in St. Augustine to their furthest extent, could speak of himself as fighting a hard battle against his sins, and as struggling to master the raging beast of his temper.

1

If such a conviction of the freedom of the will really exists, naturalism cannot satisfy human thought. For, on the naturalistic theory, the will cannot be free. According to it the character is affected by many influences. Countless circumstances before a child's birth in parents and ancestors are among them. The conditions which surround him in his infancy, and for many years after-climate, food, the treatment he receives of every possible kind, are other influences. But when naturalism has said its last word, there is no room in it for a self-determining will. Each act of the will is due to, and may be resolved into, some cause or causes not in itself. The character of man cannot escape its destiny. And its destiny is fixed by the joint-action of its ancestry, its past history, and its present conditions.

Naturalism, then, so far from being the legitimate conclusion from the observation of man, is in conflict with two deep feelings of the race-the desire to love God and the conviction that will is free.

III. We may not stop at this point in our argument. If the position we have hitherto maintained is sound, it follows, not that Revelation has been imagined by man, but that the objective fact of Revelation is in harmony with the instincts inseparable from man's being. We are at the parting point of the ways. It is not reasonable to suppose that a feeling so fundamental as we have seen the desire to love God to be can exist or be developed without something to create it or call it forth. Every analogy from beast or man would contradict such an idea. It is but reason to say that the desire implies the existence of a personal Being who has implanted it. And if so, it is reason again which looks for a word from God. The mother does not elicit her child's love in order that she may thwart it. It is not ignorant imagination, but due attention to the most profound laws of our being, which makes us anticipate the Revelation of God. We are but following the indications of the deepest human thought when we say that the desire has been, by whatever means, implanted, and that He who put it there will make its satisfaction possible. And how shall we love God unless we know

1 The general position on this point is not affected by the difference of opinion on the subject of the possibility of the hereditary influence of acquired character between followers of Professor Weismann and some older Evolutionists.

Him? And how shall we know Him unless He reveals Himself?

In a sad world there are few things more pathetic than the literature of ancient Greece. We never read a Greek play or an ode of Pindar, or part of an epic poem or the argument of a philosopher, or even the work of one of the historians, without the sense of a nation that has failed. The most perfect development of the most splendid natural powers only makes the greatness of the pathos. Why is it that beauty and skill and logic and abilities of almost every kind, should leave this mark? Surely the reason is that God was unknown. And He was unknown because He had not revealed Himself. We may weigh well and estimate highly the products of Greek thought, but we must end by saying that Revelation is not here.

And we turn from the magnificent intellects of Greece to some of those remarkable religious writings of the East which the industry of European scholars has made easily accessible to students, and amid all that excites our wonder or moves our sympathy we cannot say we have found God's Revelation. The blank despair of Buddhism, the failure of the Vedas either to remain permanent influences or to pass into higher devotion, are fatal to any claim which these might make.

It is different when we begin to consider Judaism and Christianity. The nation of the Jews, whatever its faults, had its clearly defined purpose and its clearly expressed hope. The Old Testament can show in the writings of the prophets and the poetry of the Psalms the most wonderful knowledge of God and nearness to Him, and it contains a whole literature which remained as the law of a race and was able to take its place in a new dispensation. The Old Testament in its own land might well claim to be the book of Revelation; when it is transplanted to the West and continues to live the claim is strengthened. Some thinkers have supposed that the idea of a Personal God is a Shemitic notion in which an Aryan race can never rightly be at home. Such a theory may be proved to be untrue, but the fact of its being held illustrates the force of the argument derived from the influence which Jewish writings possess in the West.

As we reach Christianity let us put aside for the moment the New Testament, that we may not be said to be begging the whole question by assuming a view of critical questions which are in reality matters of dispute. Let us take the Christian faith at a time when there can be no doubt at all about its main features, the age of Athanasius and Augustine,

and let us consider it in the light of its subsequent history. We shall find a great doctrinal system which investigation shows to be the legitimate expansion of the Jewish religion; which bases its claim to teach and command entirely on its being a message from God; which has been able to survive the fiercest and most persistent attacks from without and the greatest difficulties within; which has lasted until the present time, and has influenced in the most marvellous ways those who have accepted and obeyed it. If we had only the history of the Christian Church there would be strong reasons for the opinion that its teaching was the result of God's Revelation; when we consider that the living force which Christianity has proved itself to be exhibits the fulfilment of the hope to which Judaism looked forward, and of the prophecies of which the Jewish sacred books are full, and of the purpose which made the race of the Jews different from every other nation in the world, the reasons are stronger still.

And what of the work of Christ? Still keeping away from the critical arguments which, as we believe, are able to show that, however much different ages may differ in phraseology, the faith of Nicea is the same as the faith of St. Peter and St. John and St. Paul, we ask what Christianity itself, as it undoubtedly is seen in history, implies? Is it not that in Christ was God's Revelation? For it is unreasonable to suppose that a system which is and has done what Christianity may be proved to be and have done should be fundamentally wrong about its source.

We are thus led simply by the consideration of a fundamental desire and a fundamental conviction of man in the light of history to see the probability of a Revelation from God in the Jewish religion, in the faith of the Catholic Church, in the teaching of Christ. If, as we believe, the statements we have made in the course of our argument will bear to be tested by facts which are known, there are good grounds for the assertion that God has revealed Himself, and that the Revelation which has been made is to be found in the theology of Jews and Christians.

But this is not all. We are driven on to ask who Christ is. And we are driven on too to the answer that, unless the anticipations of Judaism were of the most misleading kind, and unless the life of the Christian Church ever since the days in which it is a certain fact that the Godhead of Christ was part of the faith was based on a delusion as its central and most characteristic belief, He reveals God because He is God.