value. Nonconformity may, however, henceforth claim Mr. Herbert Spencer as an honorary member. He affiliates modern Nonconformity to the heresies of every age, congratulates it on the "rebellious movement of the Reformation;" but regrets "the regrowth of a coercive rule," almost as much as he regrets the recrudescence in modern politics of the military spirit:

"Calvin (he reminds us) was a Pope comparable with any who issued bulls from the Vatican. The discipline of the Scottish Presbyterians was as despotic, as rigorous, and as relentless as any which Catholicism had enforced. The Puritans of New England were as positive in their dogmas, and as severe in their persecutions, as were the ecclesiastics of the Church they left behind."

Still Nonconformity is commended for being steadily antisacerdotal, and for having been the cause of the multiplication of sects. Continental writers, according to Mr. Spencer, are quite wrong in reproaching us with this. Philosophically considered, it is one of England's superior traits." As there are this year two hundred and twentyfive sects actually registered, England is to be congratulated on her "superiority.”

In the last two chapters we find Mr. Spencer posing as historian and prophet in one; only, unfortunately, his history is not such as to make us place unlimited faith in his prophecy. In ecclesiastical institutions it is well to know that there will be complete autonomy in each religious

body, and a complete loss of the sacerdotal character. With the transition from dogmatic theism to agnosticism all ideas of propitiation will lapse, but "there will ever be a sphere for those who are able to impress their hearers with a due sense of the mystery in which the origin and meaning of the Universe is shrouded." This, and the insistence on duty, and the conduct of life, will form the subject matter of the sermons of the future. In religion, the process of "deanthropomorphization"-a word which Mr. Spencer has borrowed from Mr. Fiske-will be complete, and we shall be left with a final consciousness of the Unknowable :

"One truth must grow ever clearer, the truth that there is an Inscrutable Existence everywhere manifested, to which man can neither find nor conceive either beginning or end. Amid the mysteries which become more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty, that he is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed."

And, paradox though it may seem, this is the explanation even of ghost-worship. Mr. Spencer and his bête noire the theologians have something in common after all. For they, too, believe that all the imperfect and grotesque forms of worship— even ghost-worship, if there is such a thing—owe their reality to, and find their explanation in, the existence of the One Supreme Object of worship. At first it looked as if Mr. Spencer was saying

just the opposite-viz. that the highest religion finds its explanation in ghost-worship, and ghosts have no reality. Now, we are told that there was a germ of truth even in the primitive conception, and its later developments are not less real, but more real than the earlier forms, because they approximate more closely to the worship of the Unknowable. In other words, according to Mr. Spencer, the worship of the Unknowable is implicit in ghost-worship, and is its ground and underlying truth, though, of course, it is not present to consciousness. Surely the theologian may be allowed to assert the same of "the innate consciousness of God." At all events, he cannot be refuted by the cross-examination of a savage.

XI.

THE DOCTRINE OF HOLY SCRIPTURE AND THE ATTITUDE OF THE CHURCH WITH RESPECT TO WAR.

An address delivered at the Portsmouth Church Congress,
October, 1885.

OUR President has spoken of this subject as a "delicate and difficult" one. I confess I am not greatly troubled by the delicacy of my position. Those who serve their Queen and country as our soldiers and sailors do, will not only allow, they will expect the Christian priest to do his duty. But the difficulty is a very real one. When Christ was born into the world the angels proclaimed "Peace on earth" His legacy to us was, "Peace I leave with you, My peace I give unto you:" when He came among us from the grave He said, "Peace be unto you." The new Kingdom was a Kingdom of Peace; the promised Comforter was the Spirit of Peace: Christ Himself was the Prince of Peace. How, then, are we to explain the teaching of the Bible and the attitude of the Church in respect of War? The Old Testament commands,

the Church allows, that which on any showing is alien from the Spirit of the Gospel.

The solution of this double difficulty is to be found, I believe, in a fuller recognition of two great principles of God's dealing with man, which at bottom are one and the same;-first, that the Old Testment is a progressive revelation; and secondly, that Christianity is a principle of life and growth, not a formal system of conduct. If I had fifteen hours before me instead of fifteen minutes, I might hope to show how those two principles apply to the difficulties before us; and how, in the last analysis, the two are one. As it is, I can only summarize.

I. The Bible is a progressive revelation which culminates in the Gospel of Christ. Not only in its teaching on War, but in its teaching generally, the Old Testament is preparatory and introductory to the New. If, for instance, it could be shown that the Old Testament taught a gospel of war, and the New Testament a gospel of peace, however puzzled we might be by such an opposition, we should still believe that it was somehow the opposition between a lower and a higher revelation. If this is not so, if the Bible has not respect to the gradual education of mankind, if its utterances lie, as it were, all in one plane, I can find in it only a mass of contradictions and inconsistent moralities. But as I listen to those calm words from the lips