pronounced because it comes as the last word of a science of Nature, for the wall which once separated physics from metaphysics has given way, and positivism, when it is not the paralysis of reason, is but a temporary resting-place preparatory to a new departure. We are not surprised, then, that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds that 'the infinite and eternal power that is manifested in every pulsation of the universe is none other than the living God,' and who vindicates the belief in a final cause because he cannot believe that the sustainer of the universe will put us to permanent intellectual confusion,' should instinctively feel his kinship with Athanasianism and vigorously contend against the view that any part of the universe is godless'!" (Aubrey Moore, on "The Christian Doctrine of God," in Lux Mundi, 1st edition, pp. 99, 100; "Idea of God," cf. sec. v. and pp. 105-110).

NOTE 3, p. 170.

"These are a few broad results of our comparative survey of religions. That religion, however humble the mode of its first appearing, is yet universal to man. That it progresses through the agency of the great individual, the unique personality, the spiritual genius, while popular influence is a counter-agent and makes for its decay. That its various developments have all been partial, and therefore needed completion, if the cravings of the human spirit were ever to be set at rest.

“And all this is in perfect harmony with our Christian belief in a God who, from the day of man's first appearance in the dim twilight of the world, left not Himself without witness in sun and moon and rain and storm-cloud, and the courses of the stars, and the promptings of the conscience and the love of kin; and who the while was lighting every man that cometh into the world-the primæval hunter, the shepherd chieftain, the poets of the Vedas and the Gathas, the Chaldæan astronomer, the Egyptian priest, each, at least in a measure, to spell that witness out aright; ever and anon when a heart was ready revealing Himself with

greater clearness, to one or another chosen spirit, and by their means to other men; till, at length in the fulness of time, when Jews were yearning for one in whom righteousness should triumph visibly; and Greeks sighing over the divorce between truth and power, and wondering whether the wise man ever would indeed be king; and artists and ascetics wandering equally astray, in vain attempt to solve the problem of the spirit and the flesh; the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. The pre-Christian religions were the age-long prayer. The Incarnation was the answer.

"But when all this has been said, there is a lingering suspicion in many minds, that even if the details of the doctrine of development are not inconsistent with Christianity, its whole drift is incompatible with any system of opinion which claims to possess finality. And if Christianity were only a system of opinion, the objection might be plausible enough. But its claim to possess finality rests upon its further claim to be much more than a system of opinion. The doctrine of development or evolution, we must remember, is not a doctrine of limitless change, like the old Greek notion of perpetual flux. Species once developed are seen to be persistent in proportion to their versatility, their power, i.e. of adapting themselves to the changes of the world around them. And because man through his mental capacity possesses this power to an almost unlimited extent, the human species is virtually permanent. Now, in scientific language, the Incarnation may be said to have introduced a new species into the world-a Divine man transcending past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process to subsequent generations of men. And thus viewed there is nothing unreasonable in the claim of Christianity to be at least as permanent as the race which it has raised to a higher power, and endued with a novel strength.

"The Incarnation opened heaven, for it was the revelation of the Word; but it also reconsecrates earth, for the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. And it is impossible to read history without feeling how profoundly the religion of the Incarnation has been a religion of humanity. The human body itself, which heathendom has so degraded, that noble minds could only view it as the enemy and prison of the soul, acquired a new meaning, exhibited new graces, shone with a new lustre in the light of the Word made flesh; and thence, in widening circles, the family, the society, the state, feel in their turn the impulse of the Christian spirit, with its 'touches of things common, till they rose to touch the spheres.' Literature revived; art flamed into fuller life; even science in its early days owed more than men often think to the Christian temper and the Christian reverence for things once called common or unclean. While the optimism, the belief in the future, the atmosphere of hopefulness, which has made our progress and achievements possible, and which when all counter currents have been allowed for, so deeply differentiates the modern from the ancient world, dates, as a fact of history, from those buoyant days of the early Church, when the creed of suicide was vanquished before the creed of martyrdom, Seneca before St. Paul. It is true that secular civilisation is, as we have seen, in the Christian view, nothing less than the providential civilisation and counterpart of the Incarnation. For the Word did not desert the rest of His creation to become Incarnate. Natural religion and natural morality and the natural play of intellect have their function in the Christian as they had in the pre-Christian ages; and are still kindled by the light that lighteth every man coming into the world. And hence it is that secular thought has so often corrected and counteracted the evil of a Christianity grown professional, and false, and foul" (J. R. Illingworth on the Incarnation and Development, in Lux Mundi, pp. 205, 207, and 212).

NOTE 4, p. 172.

There are those who think, and not without reason as it seems to me, that it would not be too much to say that it was the doctrine of Maurice, rather than that of Pusey and Newman, which for forty years-Maurice began his work in 1835, he died in 1872-"kept the whole forward movement in the social and political life of the English people in union with God and identified with religion." It is his doctrine, moreover, which, idealised and transfigured by the two great poets of the century, Tennyson and Browning, dominant in the teaching of the Cambridge schools of Lightfoot and Westcott and Hort, assimilated, as it would seem, almost unconsciously by the younger Oxford theologians of the Lux Mundi school, has during the last twenty years turned so wisely the current of our English Christianity to the consideration of the great social problems of the age, and is at this moment so profoundly affecting, moulding, inspiring, transfiguring the social ideals of the present.

NOTE 5, p. 173.

"Coleridge was to England, both in theology and literature, what Schleiermacher and Goethe were to Germany. The same antecedent influences had entered into his being. Growing up under the traditions of the eighteenth century, he had undergone a revolution in his spirit as he yielded to the magic power which was transforming the age. He read Plato in the light of his Alexandrian commentators; he studied Kant, and more especially Schelling; he also was thrilled by the prospect of a great future for humanity, of which the French Revolution had seemed to him a foretaste; he bent before Spinoza, receiving the full significance of his thought, and yet discerning more clearly than Schleiermacher had done wherein lay the deficiency of the doctrine of 'the one substance.' It has been said of him that, taking up a volume of Spinoza, he kissed the portrait of

his face, and said, 'This book is a gospel to me'; but he immediately added, his philosophy is nevertheless false.' The weakness of Spinoza's teaching, he went on to affirm, lay in his beginning with an 'it is' instead of the 'I am.' In his desultory poems, where the truth of the Divine Immanence is seen inspiring his thought, he reveals also the process in his mind accompanying its reception, as though such a belief were better suited to humanity in its present stage of existence. There are passages, however, in Coleridge's poetry which assert this conviction in language so unqualified that, if we did not know how deep and unshaken was his adherence to the personality of God, we might think them the utterances of undisguised pantheism confounding God with His creation :

'Tis the sublime of man,

Our noontide majesty, to know ourselves
Part and proportions of one wondrous whole.
This fraternises man, this constitutes

Our charities and bearings. But 'tis God

Diffused through all that doth make all one whole;
This the worst superstition, him except

Aught to desire, supreme Reality.'

Or again, speaking of nature in its relation to God:'And what if all animated nature

Be but organic harps diversely framed

That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps
Plastic and vast one intellectual breeze

At once the soul of each, and God of all?'

"So, too, the spirit of Wordsworth's poetry bears witness to his consciousness of the larger revelation which God was vouchsafing to his age. In his light he saw humanity clothed with a new dignity even the lowliest and most common things were invested with a sacred charm, because all things were viewed as if in God: