of hope for a life after death, the imagination of the mourner is now far less engaged in this direction; the offices of the Church cease to be used on behalf of the dead. The life beyond the grave becomes henceforth, like the heaven of Lucretius and the Epicureans, removed from impact upon us mortals. Because the Prayer Book has scarcely been modified since the sixteenth century, not a step further away from supernaturalism has been taken by the Anglican Church in the centuries that have followed; yet the whole evolution of scientific thought in three centuries has been in this direction, until now all the educated portions of English society have advanced far beyond the stage preserved to us in the nation's manual of religion. The second trend, which is scarcely alluded to by writers on the history of the Church of England, but which marks the transition from Romish to Anglican rites, is that towards social democracy-not only towards liberty of individual conscience, but towards the social fellowship of all communicants as equals. What was the meaning of the Romish withholding of the wine from the laity in the Communion Service but an assertion of the exclusive right of the priesthood to the enthusiasm, the ecstasy, the creative energy, the initiative and authority of religious utterance and control? When the Church of England insisted upon communion in both kinds, it gave a blow of deadly import to princely priestcraft. Social democracy has ever since advanced with increasing mass and momentum, until it has penetrated almost the whole of organised life. At last its pressure is beginning to tell within the Church; and as in the sixteenth century it required communion in both kinds for the people, it will in its full and logical consciousness in the twentieth century strip doctrines, forms and ecclesiastical polity of every vestige of that irresponsible ascendency of priests by which Church government has repressed the spiritual and secular self-realisation of the masses. In citing the return to communion in both kinds, I have given only one of many instances of the movement towards democracy discernible in the changes which accompanied the assertion that the sovereign of England was the supreme head of the Church, and that no foreign bishop should henceforth possess any authority within this realm. It is true that an almost absolute monarch for the moment secured greater domination thereby ; but whoever has eyes can see that the forces that caused it were democratic, and were the very forces which ultimately have established constitutional government, and have shifted the political centre of gravity from the kingship and the House of Lords to the Commons. Thirdly, more marked and more significant—and yet more completely overlooked-is the new emphasis given to morality as a factor in religion. I might specify many instances of this fresh development, but here I must dwell upon the one which I have already mentioned: the Anglican Church, departing from the Roman use, inserted into the Communion Service the most decidedly ethical document of the whole of the Old Testament, and England as a nation enjoined upon all parents and teachers not only to expound this document to the young, but to see that the young could repeat its very words at that crisis in their moral life when the Church called upon them to assume in individual responsibility what in their infancy their sponsors in baptism had vowed for them. Our Church reformers of the sixteenth century were only giving the same pre-eminence to the Decalogue, and only making the same use of it, which those ancient Jewish statesmen had done who first cast it into the form in which it appears in the book of Deuteronomy. The writers of that book believed it would prove a ready and convenient instrument in the moral education of the young of the nation. In Deuteronomy, God is represented as saying of the Ten Commandments, "Thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets before thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thine house and on thy gates." This policy was re-adopted by England when she took from Rome and assumed for herself the responsibility of being the religious educator of her people. But what England thought fit to do then, or even what we may to-day acknowledge to have been fit then, can be no infallible guide to the statesmen of our day. The sole question which should confront us is whether the Ten Commandments are worthy still to hold in a national manual of moral edification the same place which has been assigned them in the past. The question now is: If we were to-day to begin anew constructing a system of ethical culture for the people, and were to take no other principle as our guide than national utility, what treatment of the Ten Commandments would that principle dictate? Should we discard altogether the use of a brief summary of the elemental rules of morality and religion? If we were to retain such a practice, should we formulate a wholly new and different set of injunctions, or should we accept the Decalogue just as it stands, and interpret it as it has been understood from the beginning? Or should we, taking the existing Decalogue as our point of departure, revise it verbally in parts and preserve others as they are, giving to them the old meaning? Or, while retaining some parts, should we re-interpret them? And if they are to be interpreted in the light of our new knowledge of psychology and of the social function of religion, what is the new meaning which they should be understood to possess, and which would prove of most service in training the people to the responsibilities and opportunities of democratic citizenship? A study of the Decalogue in connection with the history and literature of the Old Testament reveals the fact that even in those ancient times it had been subjected to careful and persistent revision. In Leviticus, Exodus, and Deuteronomy are preserved to us three forms of it, representing as many stages in the evolution of Jewish religion. A comparison of them does not reveal the evolution to have been such as is generally supposed. Most writers have maintained that the development of the Old Testament message was from polytheism towards the idea of one infinite Creator of the universe. But if we take the successive forms of the Decalogue as illustrative, such is not the case. In the first place, in no one of them is there a word implying either that God is infinite or that he created man and nature out of nothing. But, in the second, if we compare the successive changes, we find that the crudest and earliest form of the Decalogue, which is preserved to us in the 34th chapter of Leviticus, is just as much and just as little monotheistic as the highest and latest. It begins, as do the other forms, with the commandments, "Thou shalt have no other god," and "Thou shalt make thee no molten image." These words, of course, in no wise imply philosophic monotheism. What, however, we do discover, when the successive differences of the second and third forms are compared with the first, is an increasing emphasis laid upon social justice, and a deeper insight into social justice as a factor in national religion. In the first form of the Decalogue there are no injunctions whatever to the effect that children should respect their parents, and that murder should not be committed, or adultery; or that property should not be stolen, or false witness borne, or the possessions of others coveted. There is not a shadow of condemnation of what we ordinarily describe to-day as moral crimes. The last eight of the ten injunctions are devoted exclusively to details of ceremonial which in no wise imply an ethical character in the deity who commands them. As tabulated by Wellhausen, these eight are : The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, And the feast of ingathering at the year's end. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk. What a significant contrast between such injunctions and those of the two later versions of the Decalogue! Bold indeed must have been the Jewish statesmen and patriots who dared to discard altogether in a summary of the nation's religion these eight ceremonial injunctions, and in their place to introduce six that have nothing whatever to do with the rendering of formal homage to their God. From an ethical point of view, what a midnight of spiritual darkness still prevailed among the Jews when the chief interest of their religious teachers was absorbed in details which had no bearing whatever upon the fundamental duties of man to man! What prevailed |