contain evangelical and Divine truths." The establishment of the Evangelical Social Congress in Germany was largely due to the influence of Lodt, Stöcker, and their friends. In a paper read before this Congress in 1898 Pastor Kade gave a series of interesting opinions expressed by German working men on their conception of a Socialistic Christ. "The real Jesus seems indeed," writes Dr. Peabody, from whom I quote this testimony ('Jesus Christ and the Social Question,' p. 64), "to many of these handworkers to have been rediscovered by them, as though beneath some mediæval fresco of an unreal and mystical Christ there had been freshly laid bare the features of the Man of Nazareth." "Christ," answered one German working-man to an inquirer," was a true friend of the working people, not in His words alone, but in His deeds. He was hated and persecuted as is the modern Socialist, and if He lived to-day He would, without doubt, be one of us." "Christ," wrote another, << was a great revolutionist; if any one now preached as He did he would be arrested." "He would have accomplished more," adds a third, "if He had given His efforts rather to economic and scientific ends than to religion." "He was a man of the common people," concludes a fourth, "who fought a hard fight for their moral and economic welfare."

"Besides the powerful influence of religion in the critical and exceptional moments of our lives, the influence of Christ would come full of strength and blessing to the working-men of England, even if they acknowledged Him, at first, in the most articulate of creeds, as the man whom they admired most. 'We used to think that Christ was a fiction of the priests; at all events not a man like us in any way, a different sort of being altogether, one who could do what He liked-so people said— and turn the world upside down if He pleased; and then we could not make Him out at all. Why, thought we, did He not turn the world upside down, and make it better if He could? It is all a mystery to us. But now, we find, He was a man after all, like us; a poor working-man who had a heart for the

poor and wanted to turn the world upside down, but could not do it at once; and He went a strange way and a long way round to do it; but He has come nearer doing it, spite of His enemies, than any man we know; and, now that we understand this, we say-though we don't understand it all or anything like it—"He is the Man for us!" I say that if even this rudimentary feeling of gratitude and admiration for their great Leader could possess the hearts of English working-men-and this is surely not too much to expect-much would come from even this inadequate worship. And for myself, I unhesitatingly declare that I would sooner be in the position of a working-man who doubts about Heaven and Hell, and even about God, but can say of Christ, 'He is the Man for me!' than I would be in the position of the well-to-do manufacturer who is persuaded of the reality of Heaven and Hell and of the truth of all the theology of the Church of England, but can reconcile his religion with the deliberate establishment of a colossal fortune on the ruin of his fellow-creatures" (Dr. Abbott, "Kernel and the Husk," p. 334).

Finally, I may quote the following passage from the report on "Socialism" attached to the Encyclical Letter of the Anglican Bishops issued by the Lambeth Conference in 1899. It may perhaps serve to show that, in thus holding a wise balance between the Christology which ignored the social question altogether and one which finds the social question the very centre of the Gospel, the Anglican Episcopate has learnt, in these modern days, to get behind those traditions of aristocratic feudalism with which it is too often supposed to be still encrusted, and to exhibit much of that manly strength and vigour, of that directness of appeal or rebuke which characterised the representative and fraternal episcopate of the early Church.

"The primary duty of the Church, as such, and within her, of the clergy, is that of ministry to men in the things of character, conscience, and faith. In doing this she also does her greatest social duty. Character in the citizen is the first social

need; character with its securities in a candid, enlightened, and vigorous conscience, and a strong faith in goodness and in God. The Church owes this duty to all classes alike. Nothing must be allowed to distract her from it, or needlessly to impede or prejudice her in its discharge, and this requires of the clergy, as spiritual officers, the exercise of great discretion in any attempt to bring within their sphere work of a more distinctively social kind.

"But while this cannot be too strongly said, it is not the whole truth. Character is influenced at every point by social conditions, and active conscience, in an industrial society, will look for moral guidance on industrial matters.

"Economic science does not claim to give this, its task being to inform, but not to determine, the conscience and the judgment. But we believe that Christ our Master does give such guidance by His examples and teachings, and by the present workings of His Spirit; and therefore, under Him, Christian authority must in a measure do the same, the authority, that is, of the whole Christian body, and of an enlightened Christian opinion. This is part of the duty of a Christian society, as witnessing for Christ, and representing Him in this present world, occupied with His work of setting up the kingdom of God, under and amidst the natural conditions of human life."

NOTE 2, p. 68.

"Under the protection, generally, though not always effectual, of their sacred character, the Prophets were a power in the nation, often more than a match for kings and priests, and kept up, in that little corner of the earth, the antagonism of influences which is the only real security for continued progress. Religion consequently was not there, what it has been in so many other places a consecration of all that was once established, and a barrier against further improvement. The remark of a distinguished Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the Prophets were in Church and State the equivalent of the modern liberty of the

press, gives a just but not an adequate conception of the part fulfilled in national and universal history by this great element of Jewish life; by means of which the canon of inspiration never being complete, the persons most eminent in genius and moral feeling could not only denounce and reprobate with the direct authority of the Almighty whatever appeared to them deserving of such treatment, but could give forth better and higher interpretations of the national religion, which thenceforth became part of the religion. Accordingly whoever can divest himself of the habit of reading the Bible as if it was one book, which until lately was equally inveterate in Christians and in unbelievers, sees with admiration the vast interval between the morality and religion of the Pentateuch or even of the historical books (the unmistakable work of Hebrew conservatives of the sacerdotal order), and the morality and religion of the Prophecies, a distance as wide as between these last and the Gospels. Conditions more favourable to progress could not easily exist; accordingly the Jews, instead of being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the most progressive people of antiquity, and jointly with them have been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern cultivation " (J. S. Mill, "Representative Government," chap. ii.).

NOTE 3, p. 70.

"The value of a truly great man, as I saw it put lately, consists in his increasing the value of all mankind. It is here, truly, that the highest significance of great men lies: to have enhanced, that is, to have progressively given effect to human value-to the value of that race of men which has risen up out of the dull ground of Nature. But Jesus Christ was the first to bring the value of every human soul to light, and what He did no one can any more undo. We may take up what relation to Him we will ; in the history of the past no one can refuse to recognise that it was He who raised humanity to this level. This highest estimate of a man's value is based on a transvaluation of all values.

(Eine umwersung der werthe liegt dieser höchsten werth schätzung zu grunde. German edition, p. 44.) To the man who boasts of his possessions, He says, 'Thou fool!' He confronts every one with the thought: Whosoever will lose his life shall gain it.' He can even say: 'He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal.' This is the transvaluation of values of which many before Him had a dim idea; of which they perceived the truth as through a veil; the redeeming power of which—that blessed mystery-they felt in advance. He was the first to give it calm, simple, and fearless expression, as though it were a truth that grew on every tree. It was just this that stamped His peculiar genius; that He gave perfectly simple expression to profound and all-important truths, as though they could not be otherwise; as though He were uttering something that was self-evident; as though He were only reminding them of what they all knew already, because it lives in the innermost part of their souls" (Harnack, "What is Christianity?" p. 67).

NOTE 4, P. 71.

In illustration of this proposition I may perhaps be allowed to quote from a sermon of my own preached in the Cambridge University pulpit more than twenty years ago. "It is the contention of those who accept the Christian philosophy of History as the true one, that the struggle for liberty in its various forms, which has in effect been the subject of the civil history of modern Europe since the time of Christ, is directly to be traced to the Christian doctrine of the intrinsic value of the human soul as such. That, it may be said, is a spiritual idea. True, but it is a spiritual idea which easily bears translation into a political one. sciousness of freedom,' says the German philosopher Hegel, 'arose first in religion, in the inmost region of spirit. It is the freedom of spirit which constitutes its essence. . . . Freedom first arose among the Greeks; but they and the Romans likewise knew only that some men were free, not man as such. Even

'The con