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obligation of a Tractarian to go to Rome was in the ratio of the obtuseness of his understanding. He however, strange to say, defended Tract XC on the ground that Elizabeth and her ministers wished the Articles to be so framed that they might be subscribed by all who simply disavowed allegiance to the Pope.

The Roman Catholic Church Froude calls the enemy of the human race. The evidence he finds in history. Of the Puritans he wrote, 'We must judge of a creed by its effects on character, as we judge of the wholesomeness of food as it is conducive to bodily health. And the creed which swept like a wave through England at this time, and recommended itself to the noblest and most powerful intellects, produced also in those who accepted it a horror of sin, an enthusiasm for justice, piety, and manliness, which can be paralleled only in the first ages of Christianity.' Froude never lost interest in historical questions and the development of religious influence, but theology was to him in confusion inextricable.

Matthew Arnold was the son of Dr Arnold of Rugby. Three of his books may be named in which he sets forth his interpretation of Christianity with some variations, and many repetitions. These books are 'God and the Bible,' 'St Paul and Protestantism,' and 'Literature and Dogma.' He speaks of the extravagance of German criticism, giving as an instance the exaggeration of the difference between St Peter and St Paul, and the theory that the Acts of the Apostles was written to wipe out the memory of the strife. He also spoke of Bishop Colenso's criticism as destructive and nothing else. Before we take anything away, we should know what we are to put in its place. As a fact of experience man cannot do without the Christian religion, yet it is equally true that he cannot do with it as it is. The Christianity which was planted in Europe was corrupt, but in the state in which Europe then was, this was the only form in which it could have been propagated. Its success is due in part to the belief in miracles, but it was also due to some elements in the personality and words of Jesus.

Popular theology and learned theology are alike founded

on a misapprehension of the meaning of the Bible. The God of popular theology is a legend or fairy-tale. A personal God has to be proved by miracles and metaphysics. Now miracles may be true, but it is impossible to prove that they ever happened. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus may be true, but we have no evidence of their truth. Christianity must be apprehended from another side. We must learn the method of Jesus, His secret, and His sweet reasonableness.

The second book mentioned is preceded by an introduction on the Church of England and Puritanism. The writer was a great admirer of St Paul, but his sympathies were not strongly with the Puritans. Their doctrines of original sin, atonement, justification and predestination are founded on a misapprehension of St Paul. The Evangelicals and Nonconformists perpetuate these false conceptions of St Paul's meaning, and the latter by their separation have cut themselves off from outgrowing their errors. Theoretically they have all made their doctrines the gospel,' and so have lost the faculty of growth, yet practically they have rested in St. Paul's true doctrine, ' Let him that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity.' The kingdom of God is founded in goodness, not in metaphysics. The upright are the orthodox, and the wicked are the heretics.

M. Renan had written of St Paul's doctrine, that after having been for three hundred years, thanks to Protestantism, the Christian doctrine, par excellence, Paul is now coming to the end of his reign. Renan had a distaste for Protestantism, and this extends to Paul. The reign of the Protestant may be coming to an end, but not the reign of St Paul. That is only in its beginning. There are several causes why he has been misunderstood. One is the Puritan principle that to understand the Bible it was not necessary to know any other book. Another cause is taking his emotional language as scientific. Faith for instance, with St Paul is an emotion

leading to action. He was no Antimonian.

The common view of Puritan theology is, calling, justification, satisfaction; but with St Paul it is dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, and growing into Christ. Real life begins with the mystical death which passes from the external

actual, within us 'the law in the members warring against the law of the mind.' The allusion to dying in Adam was merely St Paul's rhetoric. He knew nothing of a sacrificial atonement. The only substitution is that by which the believer in his own person repeats Christ's dying for sin. If the popular theology is found even in the Epistle to the Hebrews it is the fault of the reader rather than of the writer.

The title of the third book indicates the author's meaning. Literature or culture, if brought to the interpretation of the Bible, will dissolve the popular dogmas. The assumption with which the Churches and sects set out that there is a great personal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe, and that from Him the Bible derives its authority, can never be verified. We must find a basis for the Bible in something which can be proved, instead of something which has to be assumed. The true basis is found in the rational side of Christianity, not in miraculous fulfilment of prophecies, but in realising the Eternal, the Not-ourselves, which is working for righteousness.

'Ecce Homo,' or a survey of the life and work of Jesus Christ,' was probably suggested by the many Lives of Jesus which had been written during this century, especially by that of M. Renan. The writer proposed to take no heed of either doctors or apostles, but simply to look at the facts and see what they appeared to warrant when critically weighed. Jesus was preceded by the Baptist who said that He who was to come after him was to baptise with fire. He was to kindle enthusiasm. In themselves miracles are improbable, yet those of Jesus are best accounted for on the hypothesis that they were really performed. The professed object of Jesus was to establish a kingdom. This idea was developed out of the Old Testament. As a matter of fact Jesus founded a divine society which has existed for two thousand years, and is to-day in full vigour. The first disciples had no elaborate creed. That was not possible for them. Christians of the present time believe much more than they did. The object of the kingdom was that God's will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. Of this society Christ was King. The members were to be bound to each other by the closest ties.

While Socrates and other great teachers taught by argument, Jesus taught by personal authority. They worked on the intellect, He on the heart. He kindled the enthusiasm of humanity. The society which he established is not yet perfect, but it descended from God out of heaven.

The author of Ecce Homo' promised a second part which never appeared. In a treatise on 'Natural Religion,' 1882, he spoke of the supernatural as not essential to religion but merely accidental. The theist can dispense with a personal will or with miracles, as he has in nature a most impressive theology, a most awful and glorious God. Nature is infinitely interesting and infinitely beautiful. Here we are in the presence of an Infinite and an Eternal Being. We can only contemplate Him with awe and admiration. It may seem to some that science kills religion and poetry, but as Goethe said, 'It has given back to imagination as much as it took away.' The knowledge of nature is the knowledge of God. It may be said that nature is ruthless and unrelenting, but under the term nature we must include human nature, which to us must ever be the most important side. Natural religion is the worship of whatever in the known universe is worthy of worship. The writer restricts his inquiry to the question of how much science and religion have in common, and how religion is to be preserved when the supernatural is gone.

'Supernatural Religion.' A work in three volumes with this title published in 1874 caused considerable controversy. It was anonymous and report ascribed it to Bishop Thirlwall, who was retiring from his see,' and was believed to be undoing the work of his lifetime by denying the reality of miracles and external revelation. In the belief that it was the work of the learned Bishop, the critics praised it for its great critical skill and erudition. Dr Lightfoot, afterwards Bishop of Durham, wrote a series of papers on it in the Contemporary Review, not so much refuting the arguments as showing the inaccurate scholarship of the author.

The only reason for noting it here is the criticism of some arguments in defence of miracles. The work was described by its author as the result of many years' investigation under

'It has generally been ascribed to a nephew of Dr Pusey, who withheld his name because of the great reputation of his uncle as

taken for the regulation of personal belief. He had not ceased to believe in Jesus in some sense, but it was Jesus without Paul, who is reckoned the author of ecclesiastical Christianity and who is said to have almost effaced the true work of Jesus.1 He saw no significance in the divine life, but concentrated all interest in the death and resurrection of his Messiah.

Ecclesiastical theology which began with St Paul, has been the bane of true Christianity. It is practically abandoned in our popular theology but not explicitly. The miraculous elements, that is all the doctrines which alone constitute the claims of Christianity to be a divine Revelation, are thrown to the wolves of doubt and unbelief. What is left has not one feature to distinguish it as a miraculously communicated religion. It is thus an absurdity to claim a supernatural character for doctrines clipped and pruned down to the standard of human reason. There is no more warrant to abandon that which does not accord with reason than to retain what is reasonable.

The avowed object of the writer is to ascertain whether or not Christianity is a divine supernatural revelation. He finds discrepancies in the doctrines and also in the evidences. Some appeal to the Bible as infallible; others maintain that the great doctrines of ecclesiastical Christianity cannot be deduced from the Bible. If then the Church is not infallible we have no certainty. Ecclesiastical Christianity claims to be miraculous. It is therefore absurd to think that the doctrines can be held while the miraculous is rejected. The author has before him chiefly the arguments for miracles put forward by such writers as Dr Mozley and Dean Mansel. The latter, following the old evidence writers, such as Butler and Paley, makes miracles necessary to a revelation, they must stand or fall together. Mozley's language is even stronger. He says that such a revelation as Jesus professed to give could not be believed without miracles. They are part of the structure and cannot be abandoned without abandoning the whole.

Archbishop Trench maintained that a doctrine must in itself be good before a miracle could seal it as divine, for the