most broad-minded of men, and more modern than the newest of new departures. If it were not so, it would not be the Truth. So big is it that men, in their very insistence upon the sections which their fathers had forgotten, have themselves forgotten what their fathers had remembered; and every age has been more or less partial and heretical. Only a few, saints and seers, have in each generation transcended the limits of custom and seen mighty visions of the Whole; they have drunk of the fountains of God, and through them the mind of Christendom has been enlarged, so that, in spite of the narrownesses and negations of the necessary revivals and reactions, there has been a steady gain, and we are the inheritors of many things. We are inheritors, indeed, of the kingdom of Heaven — the same estate that our forefathers came into; but the population is much increased (for death is only promotion in this kingdom), and the resources of the estate have been enormously developed.

The last century brought us back many lost treasures; not only did its great realisation of the historical principle dissolve many prejudices that had flourished upon false history, and give us a working hypothesis of the universe in the doctrine of evolution (which itself is but history in the larger sense); but the religious movements also of the nineteenth century restored to us in this setting of modern thought some of those great forgotten commands of Christ to which I have alluded. We do not care less about personal righteousness, and personal salvation, and personal freedom; but we

care also about the corporate things, we are jealous for the Church Universal, we have a new love for the brotherhood of man; all parties and sects are far more sacramental than they were and are trying to restore also the beauty of common worship; we are in the midst of a great extension of that missionary activity which was still so feeble even a hundred years ago, and at the same time we are all more tolerant and broad-minded - we appreciate better the truth that is outside us, and we are content to judge men by their fruits. In all this we are closer to the New Testament.

Yet there is one great principle of the Gospel which we have still to restore, and it is with this I propose to deal.

A religion that ignores the physical effects of the Spirit health, that is to say and the spiritual element in healing, is clearly not commensurate with the Christianity of Christ. It is defective, just as a religion that ignores the brotherhood of man is defective. The wonder, indeed, is, not that religion has so weak a hold upon the people, but that it has retained any hold at all, seeing that it has been so ill-armed.

It is beyond controversy that our Lord devoted a great deal of his ministry to healing the sick, that he sent forth his first disciples to carry out the same two-fold mission of preaching and healing · of carrying the new Life to men's souls and to their bodies. Our duty is to take him as our pattern and to be imitators of him. He promised us his Spirit and his Presence; and he told us — not only that we should be able to do what he did, but

that we should be able to do more" The works that I do shall ye do also, yea, and greater works than I do shall ye do." He told us indeed that we should be perfect, because we are the sons of a perfect Father.

How then (you may say) can the Church of Christ have been so faithless to her Lord's commands? But she has not been faithless. As I shall show, the tradition of spiritual healing has been remarkably constant. A wave of materialism did, indeed, sweep over Europe, and this with other good things was dropped by the educated classes in England, where since the reign of Queen Anne there has been no official recognition of spiritual healing till now. But it was not dropped in other countries, and even in England superior people have always been able to point the finger of scorn at what they considered the pertinacity of superstition. Ever since the Reformation we have been very much afraid of this charge, forgetting the profound warning of Lord Bacon that there is a superstition in avoiding superstition. But in every generation there have been pious souls who with the simplicity which is the privilege of common people, and saints, and little children, have taken the New Testament at its word and have practised spiritual healing, rebuking by their faith the unbelief of their age. And when the official Church sank into the lethargy of the Georgian period, movements began to arise outside her, and so have continued till the present day. It is the will of God that the truth should not die, and when 1 See pp. 294, 310.

the historic Church forgets, new bodies arise to remind her.

So this was forgotten with us for awhile. It is not wonderful, for the truth is very wide. We concentrate upon one true thing, and lo! we have forgotten others. And this is always hard to remember. We take up an enthusiasm in a onesided way, and we forget that we have to be armed at all points and zealous for all true causes. These ye ought to have done, and not to have left the other undone."

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CHAPTER II

OUTWARD AND INWARD

THE Christian religion is so broad and so complete, it is able to embrace such opposite poles of the truth and to show that the contradictories of the partizan are really complementaries, for this reason

that it is itself a reconciliation. It has drawn opposites together; and has shown that the truth lies, not in the one side or the other, not in the dull middle-way between them, but in the combination of them all. This is the reason why there are so many sects and parties in Christendom: men are not large enough to appreciate the whole, and they bind themselves together to press certain sides of the truth which appeal to them. So Christendom seems to be sectarian, though its Master's prayer is that we may be one. But we are one already in the communion of saints, and we shall be visibly one some day, for the Church is essentially Catholic that is to say, "over the whole," a federation of all local excellencies.

The natural man is a fighter and a partizan. The spiritual man is a reconciler. Thus is the Truth won. Men are generally right when they affirm, and wrong when they deny. By seeking to understand the positive truth which underlies the convictions of other men, we become partakers in