reinforce the other, since to work for London secures admission to heaven.

My own conviction is that social justice is a jealous God, and will not tolerate one heart-beat of yearning towards the realisation of any other good. Thou shalt not work for London in order to save souls from a hell after death. Otherwise, as Archbishop of Canterbury, St Alphege might have wrung money from the poor to ransom his life. Appalling to me, accordingly, is the strange blindness of the two camps who are fighting wholly or in part for another world; for they are beginning to affirm that the exclusive identification of religion with the cause of communal life is anti-Christian-nay, is the very form of paganism which Christianity overcame. An instance of the spiritual blindness of those who boast themselves to be on the side of the angels is found in Mr G. K. Chesterton's criticism (in The Nation of May 16, 1908) of my own championship of communal religion in a recent volume entitled National Idealism and a State Church. What I there attempted was a demonstration, sociological and psychological, of the identity of Judaism and Christianity with the moral idealism of nations. But the Judaic element in my synthesis Mr Chesterton mistook for paganism. His own Christianity had so far outgrown its Judaic root as to retain no relation or vital connection with it; my judgment was, however, that to-day we see a new resolving of the agelong contradiction between Judaism and Christianity. Judaism failed of old to realise its national ideal in a political State; but that ideal has survived, in a condition of suspended animation, for two thousand years in the Christian Church-the witness of which is the fact that the Church has retained the Old Testament. And now that for some centuries the nations of the world have been awakening to a new and

more spiritual self-consciousness, a synthesis of Jewish nationalism with Christian universal humanism is beginning to take place. One may interpret this new synthesis either as a return to Judaism, which will some day culminate not only in national churches for the Gentiles, but even in a political State for the Jews on their ancient territory; or as a return to the Christianity which existed before the nationalistic policy of the Christians was buried in the ruins of the Temple of Jerusalem in the year 70. In my book on National Idealism and a State Church I was attempting to lead Christians back to the steps of the Temple of the old Jerusalem; but Mr Chesterton, for all his gift of detecting deeper meanings, was so confused by my seeming paradox as to lose his bearings altogether. While he was walking with me up the Temple steps of the old-and the New-Jerusalem, he imagined I was leading him along the Appian Way to some shrine of Julius Cæsar!

Whenever I read the New Testament with the thought in mind that the cause of communal life here on earth is the essence of Christ's message, I am especially astonished at the error of a professed Christian who would identify the religion of national idealism with pagan teachings. If this identification be not the essence of Christ's message, it is a little strange that not over an individual soul but over a city Christ uttered his tenderest words of pitying love and of personal anguish. But possibly Mr Chesterton may detect paganism even in the words, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wing, and ye would not! Behold, your house is left unto you desolate."

The most striking and significant feature in the recent

It

Pan-Anglican Congress was the bold, intense and general sympathy for the new and jealous identification of Christian faith with devotion to the communal cause. was as if the whole Anglican Church had become animated with the spirit of St Anselm and felt that his was the spirit of Christ. And, in fact, for all England there has arisen of recent years the necessity of a choice like that which presented itself in 1012 to St Alphege. The Church of England feels itself called upon to decide whether or not it shall go on appropriating, for the life of "worldliness, cupidity, clerical ambition, episcopal parade, obsequious class estimates, the lust of the eye and the pride of life," wealth that might put an end to poverty; or, renouncing these, identify herself wholly with the cause of social reform.

There have always been witnesses, as I have said, to the identity of the only true and living God with the advancement of social justice; and the beginning of the twentieth century differs from former epochs only in the degree to which this insight has become prevalent. In order to test the extent to which it has spread, one perhaps cannot do better than to note whether in unexpected connections it spontaneously finds expression. If one comes across it here, there and everywhere, one may trust the inference that the thought is in the air; for no lover of a new idea will get the impression of such prevalence if it does not exist. My own observation is that the sense of the identity of true religion with devotion to social causes is sweeping through the souls of men to-day as did in George Fox's time the thought of the inner light, and in John Wesley's of the immediate experience of Jesus Christ in the heart.

One might perhaps expect to find this sense of the identity of God with the Social Cause in such a volume

b

of essays as has recently appeared under the title Anglican Liberalism. And there it is; in the opening essay passages occur like the following (from which I have already quoted one clause):-" But, I say, learn from the Labour party in social reform grandeur of moral purpose. I was at the large meeting in the Queen's Hall, Langham Place, in February, 1906, soon after the General Election, when Mr Keir Hardie presided over 'London's welcome to the Labour members.' I shall never forget the spirit of that assembly; the generosity of the common emotion; the mental melting of all distinctions of rank and education in the fires of human brotherhood, in the burning intent to help less happy lives and to heal the social woes of England. Never, I must sorrowfully confess, did I find such a spirit at a social reform meeting of Churchmen. We Churchmen must do as those Labour men have done, we must herein get the mind of Christ; we must cast out and hurl over the precipice the demons in our Church of worldliness, cupidity, clerical ambition, episcopal parade, obsequious class estimates, the lust of the eye and the pride of life."

But I will cite, as a test of the prevalence of the doctrine of the identity of God with the communal cause, a passage in a book which had no conscious intent to emphasise the social character of religion, and in a connection which could not account for the introduction of the sentiment, were it not in the air. The book I allude to is by G. F. Bradby, and is entitled Dick: A Story without a Plot. In a chapter named "Sunday Thoughts" occurs the following passage :

I am afraid that in my young days I regarded each individual service [in the chapel], if not as an actual bore, at least as an uninteresting duty; and yet, if I were to go down to my old school again, the first thing I should do

Not

would be to visit the chapel and sit in my old seat.
that I consciously associate the place with any spiritual
crisis in my life. I don't know how it was with others,
but certainly with me remorse for sins committed, or new
ideas of duty, came in the stir and bustle of actual life.
But it was, somehow, as one sat in the chapel, day by day
and week by week, that, gradually and almost unconsciously,
one imbibed that most fruitful of all school experiences, the
sense of unity and fellowship with people whom one hardly knew.
And this leads me to wonder whether, after all, the men
who are responsible for the religious teaching at schools
are quite on the right track. I have often discussed the
question with a clerical friend of mine who was a school-
master before he took to parochial work. He maintains
that the beginning of all religion is a love of God. I hold
that children, at least, only get to the love of God
through the love of man: their parents first; then, in an
ever-widening circle, their fellows. And I hold that the
basis of school religion should be an appeal to duty, to pity,
to the latent sense of responsibility which can be evoked
in any tolerably generous heart. . . . My friend objects
that this is ethics, not religion. But, after all, if the
Sermon on the Mount is not religion, it is something
better than religion; or it may be that Christ knew that
we could only get at religion through ethics, as I imagine
St Paul did.

What do we find here but a reassertion of the principle of St Anselm, that he who dies for righteousness dies for the faith?

My identification of religious faith with the cause of social righteousness has logically involved me in a purely humanistic interpretation of the essential terms of religion. I have presumed to maintain that Righteousness is God; devotion to it, religion; a turning to it, as an active principle in the world, for new inspiration and guidance, prayer; the manifestation of it in persons devoted to the redemption of the world, Christ-because Jesus first exemplified supremely the Redeemer-principle, and was