after a wider and deeper truth, a larger good, a fuller life, a more completely encompassing divinity.

I

When this movement of progress is contemplated in the abstract, it appears as a thing beautiful and even sublime. When we look at it in the concrete, we find that it has certainly not led us to any Isles of the Blest, where we may bask in the sunshine of a broad and simple faith.

Four centuries ago the Church Catholic had spread out her arms to clasp, if it might be, the entire world in her embrace. There was no part of human life from the cradle to the grave which she did not pretend to control and direct. Her power was the result of long ages of gradual growth, and it had taken a firm hold both of the heart and the intellect of man. The essential characteristic of the Church was the note of the Absolute and the Eternal sounding through her dogmas, her ordinances, her ritual. Thus and only thus must you believe, thus and only thus

must you worship, or you are lost for ever! In saying this, she meant no less than what she said.

The Ideal of such an ecclesiasticism, divested of the dogmas on which in its characteristic Roman form it rested, is the ideal of some of the finest minds of our day, in both the Anglican and the Roman Communions. It may be questioned whether those who cherish this Ideal realize the extent of the gulf that is fixed between the old and the modern appeala gulf which, once crossed, cannot be recrossed. On the further side of it, the claim is a command, the authority absolute, the sanction eternal. On this side, the claim is an appeal, the authority is relative, the sanction is pragmatic.' In other words to take a special case-the claims of a ritual of the Catholic type are urged because with a greater or smaller number of persons they 'work,' that is, they satisfy real or supposed needs, they appeal to the sense of the dignified and the beautiful, and above all they symbolize ethical and spiritual realities. So far as

they do this, they provide the essential thing, and for such people they are the true forms. But such an appeal is relative to accidents of personality and temperament. There are many others whose appreciation of ethical and spiritual realities is no less intense, whose needs are not met in these ways at all; and for such people, these are not the true forms.

By a strange unconscious self-contradiction, we find able and earnest men taking up the claims of different forms of ecclesiasticism, whose sanctions are confessedly matters of personality and temperament, and urging these claims in the spirit of the old absolutism, as though their sanctions were still eternal !

When we turn from the authority of the Church to that of the Bible, we find a similar state of things. Joseph Blanco White said that the Bible is to Protestants a true idol, and they consider the worship of it, as an oracular idol, as the first condition of being a Christian.' This was true of orthodox Protestantism as recently as half a century ago. To some extent, it

is true still. But during that time another reformation has accomplished itself, quite equal in importance to that of the sixteenth century, not indeed attended by so many outwardly dramatic circumstances, but one whose ultimate consequences we who are in the midst of it cannot foresee.

The authority of the Bible as an infallible rule of faith and life has been completely undermined by literary and historical investigation; and with the authority of the Bible, the age of dogma is coming to an end. But there are many who, while accepting in all essentials the newer views of this venerable literature, still urge its claims as supreme-unconscious of the great gulf which has been crossed and cannot be recrossed. On the further side, the Bible is declared verily to be God's Holy Word, and every statement in it to be as sacred as if it had been spoken by the Almighty from heaven. On this side, the Bible is declared to be through and through a human record of human experience, having the 'pragmatic' or working value naturally belonging to a

literature moulded by the powerful religious genius of Hebrew Prophets and Lawgivers and primitive Christian Apostles.

II

The root of the matter is this. Formerly the sources of Religion were not only separated from human life, but regarded as being outside the utmost range of humanity, and were found in infallible persons and infallible books; but now, the sources of religion are sought for in human life itself. The presentation of religion is subject to all the uncertainties that belong to life, with its multitudinous variety, its illimitable possibilities, its unscaled heights and unsounded depths. Here, in this manifold of human life, and here alone, are we to find our answer to the continual cry of the human heart'Show us the Father!' For surely the desire of all the ages is concentrated in those words. We would see the Father at work; see in the blind struggles of men his eternal judgments, in man's persistent effort after wider truth his revealing