Philip, "and it sufficeth us."

To this hour, there goes

up the same aspiration of humanity-to this hour, Job's question is repeated.

That so many are seeking for an answer to it, is a hopeful sign of the present day. The search may not be flattering to orthodoxy-because it says as much as that the Churches' creeds and regulations have not satisfied the spirit of man, and for this reason, orthodoxy is naturally enough prejudiced against any new object, with which it is sought to appease man's aspiration and any new answers offered to his question.

The great, almost feverish interest, shewn in these answers, whenever they appear, is proof that thoughtful minds are not at rest in their position and would fain feel firmer ground, below the beliefs of childhood, some of which are sinking, inch by inch, into fabledom. For this reason, it is for every seeker after truth, to give due heed to the new teachers and to try their work of what sort it is. For unless ignorant superstition be a nobler and more divine thing than a thirst after the true, he is nearest to God who wrestles till the rising of the sun with one mightier than he, eternal truth itself, and who, conscious of his own weakness, can yet find strength to gasp, "I will not let thee go, unless thou bless me."

Not only do these attempted answers bear witness to the existence of the yearning which has marked man from the beginning, but they shew how the same

answers are offered in one age and another, just as men suffer themselves to be led, by one only, of what -for want of a better name-must be called the senses of the soul. The fact of such answers having failed to convince mankind thousands of years ago, will prepare us to find that in our own day, among our own people, the like oracular responses leave the old burden of unrest on the shoulders of a wearied humanity.

Yet there is no lack of earnestness, no want of sincerity and ability, in the answers which are being given to the soul's questionings; those from whom they come are too much in earnest to be deceived by ready-to-hand, meaningless utterances, and too true to accept words and phrases from which the life has departed.

We may listen and be thankful for the new teaching; none the less so, if it fail to satisfy; for the more it is studied, the more plain will it become where and why it fails; the more determined will be the search for "reasonable satisfaction to the religious sentiment in the nature of man."

Recalling the more striking of recent attempts to give the satisfaction demanded, there is first one, which calls itself Christian Pantheism. It boldly challenges science to do its worst. Appealing to that predisposition of humanity, to believe in a cause which is more permanent than any existing or known effects, to find abiding power under changeful

appearances, it conceives of this abiding power as an eternal life, of which all things are but the phenomena. This life is an unutterable unity,-the sense of all that is. Advancing a step, it claims as the offspring of this unutterable unity, not only all natural, but all mental and spiritual phenomena; the yearning after the good no less than the susceptibility to the beautiful. It finds the moral impulse for the individual in the thought, "I am not my own,-I am wanted or I should not be here, for all things serve aught else—my life's work is to play my part, according as the divine forces without and within me teach, not for myself, but for the widest good I can conceive.”

The hand here is the hand of an Englishman, but the voice is the voice of a Greek. We are carried back to the porticoes of Athens, where immensities and unutterable unities were household words, before they inspired the utterances of to-day. But whether Pantheism be English or Hellenic, its source is in that one sense of the soul, the sense of beauty, which can pierce through the rift of a glowing sunset splendour to the abiding power beyond, but which shrinks from the touch of pain, as out of harmony with perfect beauty, and turns away in loathing and despair from the courts of the city, where "the poor are hovelled and hustled together, each sex, like swine."

To a man educated and cultured, with a body free from pain and care, a man satisfied with dilettantism,

revelling in sensuous pleasure, to such an one,

Pantheism,-to call it Christian Pantheism, is an anomaly,—may answer all questions, for he can say with truth,

I built my soul a lordly pleasure house,
Wherein at ease for aye to dwell,

I said, "O Soul, make merry and carouse,
Dear soul, for all is well."

But, and if through that soul, in time and in the course of the eternal love, there should flash "the riddle of the painful earth," down must she come from her palace towers, "so lightly, beautifully built." She must face something more than yearnings after the good and susceptibility to the beautiful: aye, even deeds of loathsome crime, ugliness and deformity within her and around. Will it satisfy her then, to say, "Play your part according to the divine forces without and within you?" What and if

"She howls aloud, 'I am on fire within.'

There comes no murmur of reply.
'What is it that will take away my sin,

And save me lest I die.'"

What if the soul, getting its answer from this philosophy, turns round on it with a bitter curse and says "You tell me to play my part, as the divine forces without me and within me teach. Without, are your relentless forces, from which the weak and helpless get no mercy: I must perish, if there is no pity, no tenderness. The forces within, can they be divine? I know of but one such force, the force of heart

brokenness, of self-contempt, and it is from this that I asked to be saved." So-called Christian Pantheism has this reply, and this only, "Believe in an unutterable unity," in "the sense of all that is." As well and perhaps better had "Christian Pantheism" remained written in Athenian Greek, than offered to toiling, sorrowing men in the nineteenth century the guidance of the sense of beauty, as their one interpreter with the Eternal; as their refuge against the attacks of Atheism; as the key to the enigmas. of life, the source of victorious strength over the sin that chokes them.

A second reply to the question of mankind is of a very different character to the foregoing. Catching inspiration from the Roman tongue, it yields itself up to that sense of the soul which is occupied with system and order. Right-doing, the appeasing of conscience, becomes the object of deification, and to the soul thirsting for the draught eternal, is offered a power not ourselves, making for good conduct. Mr Arnold reminds one of a sailor who, hardly hoping that he can get his ship through the shoals, throws overboard everything possible. Calvinistic theology goes with an evident relish-the miraculous element in religion is sacrificed without a single misgiving, as "a fairy tale,"-the cherished belief of a million others in the kingdom of God is parodied in a vulgar way, by the high priest of culture, who spices his revelation with all the sallies of a brilliant humour, against two un