how you can possibly have both, I cannot understand. We have, indeed, a quotation from Mr. Goldwin Smith about the desirability of an attainable ideal. If that means an ideal adapted to our nature and faculties, it is right and true enough; but if it means an ideal which ceases to perform the very function of an ideal, which is to lead us upward and onward, I am bold enough to differ. The ideal is never quite realized in art, or science, or conduct: The poet or painter, the thinker, the saint, all "follow on.' In truth it must be so, the ideal is relatively attainable only; if it were attainable absolutely, it would leave no room for growth.

If Mr. Le Sueur surrenders this, he gives up the essential nobleness of human life. And, indeed, I note with regret in his articles an undertone of willingness to be satisfied with 'small mercies' in a moral point of view. If a man is a pretty good fellow to his wife and children, does not tell lies or cheat other people, and shows a readiness to meet kindness with kindness, we are told that life will be 'very tolerable' without the 'excessive self-renunciation' of the Sermon on the Mount. Very tolerable to whom? There are some men who would rather die, and by a very painful death, too, than lose all the heroic and saintly elements from history and the lives around us. Deeds of patriotic heroism or of uncalculating love stir their souls like a trumpet. Their eyes dim with happy tears in the presence of the morally sublime. Indeed, I hesitate to receive Mr. Le Sueur's testimony as against himself, and more than half believe he is of the number.

Very much of Mr. Le Sueur's second article is occupied in the attempt to show that Christianity is a faith hollow, worm-eaten, and rapidly passing away. He that the cry is echoed 'from every pulpit in the land.' I wonder where he goes to church-or whether he goes at all. It

says

is quite true that we meet plenty of this kind of statement in the writings of those who make it evident that their position, on the negative side, is already chosen; and there are not wanting timid souls who, in spite of their fervent desires, fear that what is said with so much persistency may be

true.

For it is just as true that fear renders us insensible to the strength of our positions, as it is that desire predisposes us to a too easy belief. Mill, who has done so much to warn us against fallacies, is as earnest in pointing out the one as the other danger. But if we take the great majority of Christian people-and I speak, not of the ignorant chiefly, but of the thoughtful and intelligentwhile it is true that they are conscious of more or less difficulty in adjusting the different aspects of their thinking so as to form a consistent whole, they are possessed with a firm and unalterable faith that the main truths of the Gospel, as gathered up in the manifestation and work of Christ, will stand every strain, and finally rise into universal and triumphant acceptance. I know the minds of many -very many-of these, and I claim to speak for them with something of authority.

Mr. Le Sueur enumerates what he considers the characteristics of a 'hollow and worm-eaten faith,' and says that these are to be seen if we look around us. One or two of these, as he gives them, are so exactly the opposite of what we see, that one has to exercise some self-restraint lest their flagrant falsehood should unduly discredit the rest of his reasoning. He says a faith is dying, and that this is now the case as to Christianity: When . . . it seems a dangerous thing to so much as touch the text of sacred writings even with a view to bringing it nearer to the exact words of inspiration.' Now I make bold to say that there was never a time when the text of Scripture was handled with one-tenth part the cour

any

age and boldness that it is now, and that by Christian scholars themselves. The most fearless investigation, as rigorous and searching as that of naturalist, is applied to the text of every part of the Bible by the scholars, whether of Germany, of England, or of America.

What does Mr. Le Sueur know of the results of such research but what Christian divines have told him? Simply nothing. Did not the late Dean Alford--to name only one man -spend years over the text of the New Testament? Did he shirk his work or shrink from the frankest statement of what he found? It was my honour and privilege to know his rare transparency of character, and his fearless devotion to truth, and I am only one of scores to whom such an idea is only not outrageously offensive because it is so infinitely ludicrous.

Again, are we to forget that a number of men, chosen for their competent knowledge, are at this moment at work upon the English Bible for the purpose of bringing it into accord with our most exact knowledge of the originals? It is so far from being 'dangerous' to do this, that I have it on the personal authority of two of these revisers, one working on the Old Testament, the other on the New, that their agreement as to the desirable changes is wonderfully easy and perfect. The fact is that a true scientific method is just as desirable and just as fruitful in biblical criticism as elsewhere. We- and I speak now of biblical students-have never been so near together and never so sure of our ground.

Take another of Mr. Le Sueur's tests When augurs try not to laugh in each other's faces.' Now this either means nothing, or it means that clergymen are insincere in their profession of belief in the Gospel, and that on a large scale. That such a statement is rudely offensive goes

without saying. But it is much more -it is entirely untrue. I know many of these men, some of them humble and imperfectly educated; some of them of moderate knowledge and ability; some illustrious for learning and genius. I say fearlessly that there is no profession in the world which contains so few members untrue to their convictions or unworthy in their lives. If a clergyman is a secret unbeliever, the last face he will dare to 'laugh' his falsehood into is that of another clergyman. I am anxious to write with courtesy, because I have a real regard for Mr. Le Sueur. But I must use plain language. His allegation is false, utterly and preposterously false. Either he knew it to be so, or he did not. If he did know, I prefer not to use the appropriate adjectives; if he did not, he has slandered a class of men of whom he knows nothing, or so little that it amounts to nothing.

It would be easy to show that the remaining tests of Mr. Le Sueur are either irrelevant or not founded in fact. It is not the best mind of the age that is deserting Christianity, but only the mind that is most plastic to the philosophical fashion of the hour.

long.

Even that will not be so for Truth will prevail, criticism will do its work, and what 'cannot be shaken' will remain. It is not very reasonable for any man to ask us to tell him beforehand exactly what that will be. But many of us believe, with a 'full assurance of faith' that it will include all that we most value in our present convictions, that the process will issue in the firm establishment of the Gospel of our Great Master, purged of its foreign accretions, and brought so into relation with the ripest knowledge of the race that it will sway the reason and conscience of humanity with redoubled self-evidence and with all comprehensive power.

THERE can be no question of more momentous importance than that of the true relations of morality and religion. It is not surprising, therefore, that the question whether 'Life is worth living,' without the inspiring and regulative force of religion, should now be attracting the attention of earnest thinkers, and that the controversy should have found its way into the pages of our National Review.

We have had the subjeet already treated with considerable variety of view, that of the comparatively neutral observer who, looking back to the close connection of morality and religion in the past, and considering the apparently loosening hold of both in the present, fears the worst consequences to humanity in the crisis towards which he thinks it is being hurried, that of the Christian who believes that the doctrine of the Cross is still the power of God unto salvation,'-and that of the sceptic who apparently denies that there is any vital connection between religion and morality at all.

Whatever be the position we may feel constrained to assume towards this great question, it is not easy to understand how the last writer can ask, as he does, concerning the second position, to what practical issue is it, or can it be relevant?' If religious and non-religious beliefs are to stand upon their own merits, one of these must assuredly be the moral tendency of each. To influence men's belief by an appeal to their interests is certainly wrong, when by interests' is meant merely the advancement of our

outward life. But in the moral and spiritual region, the case case is quite altered, and, to beings constituted as we are, the fact that a certain belief or faith-tends to advance the truest and highest life of our humanity, is certainly at least a presumption in favour of its truth. The same writer admits this himself in a later paper, naïvely enough, when he says:--‘The early propagators of Christianity had to step forth into a world that was not permeated by Christian sentiment, and had to gain adherents to their cause hy arguments drawn from the nature of what they taught.' If the

6

early propagators of Christianity' might appeal to the nature of what they taught,' and its moral effectfor the two are closely bound together -why may not its modern defenders appeal also to the internal value of that which they hold as man's most precious heritage? If even Mr. Spencer tells us that 'few things can happen more disastrous than the decay and death of a regulative system no longer fit, before another and fitter regulative system has grown up to replace it,' it is, a fortiori, the duty of Christians to show most emphatically the disastrous effect of rejecting a system which they hold divinely fitted to be not only the very best regulative system for humanity, but-what is far more-inspiring also, as no merely human system can ever be. No reasonable human being would ex. pect another to believe, without adequate grounds for belief. But the practical importance which we attach to a subject has much to do with the

upon

amount of consideration we bestow it; and it is no dishonour to Christianity, but the very reverse, to maintain that, on account of its unspeakable practical importance to the moral life of humanity, it is not to be cast aside without a more adequate conception of that importance than seems to be possessed by those who are so ready to reject it.

In the paper entitled 'Morality and Religion,' in the February number of the CANADIAN MONTHLY, the writer thus briefly defines his own position: 'that morality is a thing of natural growth; that it consists essentially of the exercise of certain just and benevolent feelings, with their appropriate outcome in action, towards our fellowbeings, and that no system of religion, past or present, can claim to have invented it, or to be alone capable of maintaining it in vigour.' This definition leaves out of view altogether the larger idea of morality as a choice between good and evil, in obedience to self evident truth. It seems simply a statement of the evolution theory' of morality, and as such is a begging of the great question at issue between the 'experiential' and the 'intuitional' theories, which is not likely to be settled even by Mr. Spencer's 'Data of Ethics.' Into this question, however, it is not the purpose of the present paper to enter, especially as anyone may see it ably treated in Mr. Mallock's article in the Nineteenth Century, entitled Atheistic Methodism.' But no one on either side of the present discussion would assert that either religion, or any system of religion, 'invented morality.' To do so would be to honour neither religion nor morality, and would be as rational as to speak of sanitary systems as inventing the laws of health. Christ Himself made no such claim, when He appealed to the Jews to judge Him by His words and works. Paul made no such claim for even Moses and the Prophets when he spoke of the Gentiles as having the law written in

2

their hearts.' It is assuredly true that, as Mr. Goldwin Smith has told us, every religion worthy of the name 'has been the basis of moral life, and especially of the moral life of the community; each of them after its fashion has been the support of righteousness, and the terror of unrighteousness; that, even though 'overlaid and disguised by fable, ceremony and priestcraft,' the moral element has always been present in everything that could be called a religious system.' But the connection between religion and morality must be, to every theist at least, a far closer one than that of either inventing morality or enforcing it. Morality, in its larger sense, as the choice between good and evil, must include religion, and religion, as an influence, must be the very source and well-spring of moral life.

By religion, however, let it be understood that we do not mean theology, viz., what men have believed or thought or fancied about God, though undoubtedly the truth or falsehood of this must materially affect the value of their religion; but we mean the active principle which binds the soul to God, which leads it to look up to him with love and reverence, and to draw a portion of His life into its own. Now, as to the theist, God is the source of all life, a fortiori must He be the source of moral and spiritual life. Unless this be true, we can have no theism which has any practical interest or bearing on human life at all. And so, through all degrees, from almost total darkness to the perfect light, we may trace

The mystery dimly understood
That love of God is love of good.
And chiefly, its divinest trace,
In Him of Nazareth's holy face;
That to be saved is only this,
Salvation from our selfishness;
From more than elemental fire
The soul's unsatisfied desire,
From sin itself, and not the pain
That warns us of its chafing chain.'

But the Christian theist has no need

to go far to discover the connection

6

between religion and morality, or even to discover what the essence of morality is. To him it is no cold philosophic abstraction called 'altruism.' It resolves itself into the dear familiar name of love. Mr. Le Sueur himself admits that the true moral law' is 'summed up' in the sublime definition given by Christ Himself - Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.' This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it :-'Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.' This is the morality of Christianity. It is religion and morality fused into one. And if this be essential morality, which no theist, at all events, can consistently refuse to a lm't,-then, assuredly, that force which can most strongly develop love to God and man, must be the most mighty moral agent. It is this transcendent power, and nothing else, that we claim for the Christian faith.

For no one will deny that love, i. e., love to a person, is the very strongest motive power which can be applied to human nature. Love to a cause is strong in some natures of the higher sort; but we cannot love an abstraction as we can love a person. In its full strength it calls forth every latent capability, every dormant power, and makes easy what had seemed impossible. It is stronger than death, for it overcomes even the love of life. And when the object of the love is a noble one, the love grows nobler and ennobles the whole nature. 'For a good man some would even dare to die.' History affords no glimpses of human nature so sublime as those which exhibit the supreme devotion of men tɔ a noble leader, or a leader who at least to them appears noble. And when the hallowing touch of a death of self-sacrifice for others adds depth and sacredness to the love, there can be no emotion in all the range of merely human feeling so tender and so strong.

But there is more still. All merely secular moralists appear to ignore, at

least, one hemisphere of our being, and that unspeakably its nobler one -our spiritual nature. Were man, indeed, the mere transitory product of blind material forces, owing no allegiance and feeling no aspirations beyond these, with nothing either to draw him upward or to draw him downward from the inevitable progress of his being through the action of his 'environment,' like a mollusc on the sea-shore, with no perception of spiritual beauty or of spiritual need,-no sense of warfare between that which his higher nature admires and that which his lower nature is impelled to do; ther, indeed, his so-called 'morality' might develop as instinctively as his senses or his passions, and religion, and indeed anything worth calling virtue, would be alike superfluous and inconceivable. If, in short, we lived in a world of the secular moralist's creation, his theory would be unexceptionable. But we do not! We live in a world where the need of God has always been one of the most urgent needs of humanity, and the thought of God its strongest controlling power; facts which such moralists utterly ignore. Miss Bevington, a writer of this class, informs us that the utility of religion is made up of material wholly belonging to the earthly life. Were there no sickness and no earthly hopelessness or joylessness, there is nothing to show that there would be any need of, or any demand for, celestial comfort.' Is then the deepest consciousness of humanity 'nothing?' Or is it a delusion that has forced from the noblest hearts the cry, My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God? No! the delusion lies with those who, apparently for the sake of a favourite theory, throw away their noblest birthright.

6

But how is the thirst for God to be satisfied? How are we to love with all our heart and soul, and mind and strength' the Unseen and Unknownthe Absolute and Unconditioned? Him whom humanity had more or less dim