It is by such oft-quoted lines as these that one can best explain the sacramental idea; and they are so often quoted because our age so greatly feels their truth. So, too, with Tennyson's famous epigram, which sums up our conviction that sacramentalism is scientific, and that science is sacramental. Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Art, then, has always been what Christianity is sacramental; for both are true to life and appeal to man in his completeness. The artist has always felt intuitively what Christianity has revealed as a principle. Neither true art nor true religion has been much troubled about matter — though they may both sometimes have to war against it when it is "in the wrong place ❞— for they take man as he is conditioned in this life, and they do not find matter an obstacle, but use it as an instrument. To them it is a vehicle of the spirit; and they reach a higher spirituality through it. The sculptor is not disgusted with the stolidity of a block of marble: he makes it Beauty. The Christian is not distressed at the existence of the body he makes it Love. He knows that the Word was made flesh; and he knows that the body profiteth nothing because it is the spirit that justifieth. The body would be nothing without the spirit; and that extension of the Incarnation where in the Christian receives spiritual grace through the eating and drinking of common manufactured articles would be nothing if it were not for the real presence of Christ. Thus the Christian by the very habits of his religious practice is trained to see through the material. He understands that a good man is the embodiment of one part of God, and the universe the embodiment of another and a lesser part. To him a flower is a wayside sacrament, and the kiss of lovers a holy sign of inward grace; disease is a warning, pain a messenger, and death a journey. To him nothing is common or unclean, for everything must be in the essence divine: "Raise the stone, and there shalt thou find me; cleave the wood, and there am I." 1 And the organ with which he sees this is faith an instrument which every act of his sacramental life is strengthening. For faith is just the organ of man's spirit; it is to the spiritual world what the eye is to visibilities and the ear to sounds. It is the sixth sense, or rather the first; for it is the highest, and psychology now tells us that we have more than five besides. We need not plunge into the deep waters of metaphysics, where those who have not learnt to swim are apt to be drowned. Religion is for ordinary people, practicable and potent in the ordinary experience of life; and it has cohabited in comfort with many philosophies. Every religious man knows that the supreme reality is spirit, and 1 Oxyrhynchus Logia, 5. These recently discovered sayings claim to be from the lips of Christ, and not without probability. that faith is the highest way of knowing truth. Philosophers are not likely to agree as to what degree of reality matter possesses; but the Christian knows that whatever value it has is due to the spirit -to the spirit of which it is an expression and to the spirit by which it is discerned. Matter is the visible sign, and for this reason is unstable, transitory, and mortal: it is the spirit that endures. The things that are seen are temporal: the things that are not seen are eternal." Material things are not bad or worthless; they are indeed beautiful and good but they are unenduring. The picture must perish one day, but the beauty which it expressed can never die; the heavens shall themselves be rolled up as a scroll, but the word of the Lord endureth for ever. 66 It is easy to understand this now - easier than it was even in the prescientific days. For natural science, which thirty years ago was thought to be occupying the territory of religion, has itself shattered the atom and placed matter in a new light. The idealist philosopher may not care, since he never set much store by such phenomena, but it is a great deal to the ordinary man that he should be told that matter only exists as a form of energy. It at least serves to inoculate him against the crude, popular materialism which has been a mere parody of the work of science. For we know now, not only that organic matter is the result of something immaterial (it was always fairly obvious that the lowest one-celled organism is what it is because it is alive, and it was no surprise to learn that it can perceive and will though it has no brain); but we know also that all matter (a stone, for instance) is made up of atoms, each of which is but an invisible centre of energy, so that, could it be magnified to the size of a house, it would appear as a spherical space in which a few tiny particles were revolving with indescribable rapidity.1 Thus mass, formerly thought indestructible and invariable, is now believed to depend solely on the velocity of negative electrons. If this be true, then matter, regarded purely as matter and as "nothing more," is itself but the holding together of never-resting forces, below the furthest limits of vision and almost beyond the limits of imagination forces so immense and so minute that any other age than ours would have regarded them as incredible. From this follows the stupendous conclusion that, if electricity 2 were withdrawn from the universe, the earth would not melt or crumble up, but would disappear, like a ghost. Without dust or vapour the planets and the suns would slip into nothingness, and our place would be occupied by the invisible, imponderable waste of ether. Thus what we used to assert as a principle of theology is now asserted also as a principle of physics: matter is but the symbol of power, the outward sign or sacrament of invisible energy. It is easier to realise God as the Creator than it was when men rested in the analogy of the potter 1 Sir Oliver Lodge has pointed out that, if the space contained in a church 160 ft. by 80 ft., and 40 ft. high, represented an atom; the electrons in it would appear but as a few hundred dots no larger than the full stop of ordinary print. 2 At present we know this as electricity; but it would be safer, perhaps, to say "energy," since electricity may turn out to be but a special form of the all-pervading energy. and his clay. Easier to realise the presence of God in creation, when we see that his Hand is energy, energy everywhere and in the heart of things. Easier to conceive of the superior reality of spirit when we know that matter itself, merely as matter, is but the outward and visible sign of an intense and inconceivably potent activity. Into this One Thing we shall probably have to resolve the three supposed entities of matter, ether, and energy: these three are near to being finally proved but forms of the One persistent Power. It is like what we know of God in the higher planes of his work that in this plane of dead matter he should use but one means, and that an Energy. Matter even within its own realm is but the apparel of power. It is, again to quote Wordsworth, whose prophetic thought is being so fully justified to-day, "An active principle," which subsists In all things, in all natures, in the stars It circulates, the soul of all the worlds. 'And in our realm it is the vehicle of all we know. For we are conditioned by a material body and a sensible environment, and we can only see through the visible by making it sacramental of what is within and beyond. Man is in fact himself a sacrament, of which the body is the outward sign and the soul is the inward grace; the countenance is a clear index of the |