ces, the sacred observances of all kinds by which the outside Powers, seen or unseen, are compelled to obey man, are religious; the oath by which man. binds himself to them is also religious in its turn. The root-meaning of religion is not covenant, but bond. It is not a treaty, but a conquest, not an agreement, but a fetter.

It was the knowledge of the fetters by which they could be bound, of the laws which they themselves obeyed, in short the knowledge of religion, that the Elohim in the story grudged to the Man.

IV

If the Men Outside did not resent man's control they would not be human. When Prospero asks his servant sprite,-" How now, moody, what wouldst thou?" Ariel answers,-" My liberty,' It is their sleepless dread lest man should master them by his conjurations that leads them to withhold their names from him, like the Red Indian who goes through life under a pseudonym to baffle the malice of his enemies. An enchantment, it should seem, like a medieval writ, must call the defendant by his right name, or the whole process is null and void. So Moses does not dare to ask the Man in the burning bush for his true name, but only for some name by

which to call him; and the Man answers still more guardedly "I am who I am. The Third of the celebrated Ten Commandments witnesses to the same belief.

As we have seen, it is not altogether a false belief. The Name has an unexplained power in the Mystery. Well did those old Hebrews hide the true name of their God, calling him Lord and King and Bright One. We, for our part, call him the Good One. We do so by way of compliment, as our peasants still speak of the spirits of flood and fell as the Good People. They hope by doing so to coax them to behave like good people. In the meanwhile we have not yet learned the true name of the Man Outside.

In most religions the ritual and the moral law, the spell and the tabu, are intermingled, though in most of them words count for more than deeds. Heresy is a greater sin than homicide in every wellregulated church. The view that Pure Religion is visiting the widow and the fatherless in their affliction is put forth in the epistle which Luther condemned as an epistle of straw.

The tabus come under the influence of the old belief. The Church of Rome keeps a banking account with God. So many masses said, so many fasts and mortifications, so many orphans fed, so many Protestants burned,-and so many years struck off the purgatorial sentence. If the saint leaves a balance to his credit, God is debited with that balance in the general account of sinners. As soon as God's balance is on the wrong side a soul escapes from Purgatory, like a drop of water overflowing when the tank is full. These dynamic laws work

even more thoroughly in earlier religions. In the Ramayana a wicked man who wishes to destroy the world sets himself to practice unheard of austerities in order that he may be able to compel the Gods to execute his purpose. The dismayed Gods hold a council. They cannot evade their obligations. Enough fasts endured, enough gashes self-inflicted, and they must destroy the world. And so, as the sole resource, one of them goes down to earth, and forcibly interrupts the pious exercises of this mechanical moralist.

That is the sequel to the story of the tree of knowledge. It was in their own defence that the Elohim forbade the knowledge of their own laws to the Man. They behaved just like the Philistines who forbade the Israelites the use of iron; just like the Christian Powers who forbid the heathen the use of magazine rifles.

Perhaps it is also in their own defence that other personages have shown a like jealousy of knowledge ever since.

V

To-day, Theology, driven from every other corner of the field of knowledge, is sheltering itself in its

last ditch under a shield borrowed from the enemy. The theologians are claiming to be specialists. They are saying to the Materialists,-" Each of us has his own department: you leave us alone, and we will leave you alone."

,

The Materialist may accept that apology. The Idealist cannot. For it is, alas! in their own department that the theologians are at their worst. Their Hebrew scholarship is a hundred times worse than their Latin scholarship. Their maps of Heaven are far falser than their maps of earth. The grand fault of the theologians is, not they have known nothing about man, but that they have known nothing about God.

The sad thing is that all this divinity is at bottom only diplomacy. All this Talk about God ends. in talk about the government of men. Every priest is still at heart a king, and every theologian a lawgiver. Catholic Theology has not been building a house of cards all this time, with its Andronican words. It has been rebuilding the Capitol. The Man who hides in so much language is not Jesus of Nazareth, but Caesar. The crowning Dogma, the topstone of the edifice is this, that all the world shall kneel and kiss the toe of whomsoever rules in Rome; and all Roman Catholic Theology however honestly it may be written, is a means to that end.

Word of the Black Man. 6. The Puritan.

5. The

One of those poets who receive honorary degrees from Oxford, and peerages from England, and pensions from Royal Funds, one of those idealists who are found foregathering with archbishops in Metaphysical Societies, gave the last generation this advice:

"Leave thou thy sister when she prays

Her early Heaven, her happy views. It is well-meant advice. It is kindly advice. It is the advice which the kind-hearted Idealist is always being tempted to take. The question is whether it is for the benefit of mankind that he should take it.

If that kneeling sister were nothing but a Sister, if when she rose from her knees her life were to be spent in a cloister or in the holier cloister of the homes of the widowed and the fatherless, ministering to them in their affliction, who is there so sure that he has