than that which these crudities have enjoyed, is allowed to the highest and most central verities of the ancient creeds.

IV.

We now pass away by a great stride into the region of Theism. We have quitted the zone, in which all alike adore the name and person of the Messiah; in which Scripture is supreme; in which is recognized a supernatural, as well as a providential order; in which religion is authoritative and obligatory, and based on an objective standard. We have entered a zone in which the subjective instinct, the need or appetite of man for religion, is regarded as its title, and as its measure in which, as far as religion is concerned (not, I presume, in other matters), truth is mainly that which a man troweth and in which the individual, growing towards maturity, instead of accepting and using the tradition of his fathers until his adult faculties see ground to question it, is rather warned against such acceptance, as enhancing the difficulties of impartial choice. We are here commonly introduced, at least in theory, to a new mode of training. In things touching his bodily and his intelligent life, the youth is indeed allowed to profit by the vast capital, which has been accumulated by the labour and experience of his race. But, in respect to the world unseen, and to its Author, he must not be imbued with prejudice; there is no such thing as established or presumptive truth of which he can avail himself; he is doomed, or counselled, to begin anew. What he attains, as it began with his infancy, so it will die with his death. He inherited from no one, and no one will inherit from him.

In making this transition, I confess to feeling a great change of climate. It is not simply that certain tenets have been dropped. The mental attitude, the method of knowledge, have been changed. Under the three former systems, that method was traditional and continuous: it is here independent, and simply renewable upon a lease to each man for his life.

Such a sketch is, I think, conformable to the theory of modern Theism, and such is its goal or final standing point in practice. But this is not the whole picture. It is time to show its positive side. It recognizes one Almighty Governor of the world; and, if it has scruples about calling Him a Person, yet conscious of Him as one who will deal with us, and with whom we have to deal, as persons deal with one another, this Almighty Being has placed us under discipline in the world: and will in some real and effective manner bring it about that the good shall be happy, and that those who do evil shall surely suffer for it. These are truths of the utmost value in themselves. Nay, who shall

:

say that, were the great disease of the moral world less virulent than it is, they would not, of themselves, supply it with a sufficient medicine? But further, most of the Theists have come to be such, not by a rejection of Christianity, but by a declension from it and in quitting their ancient home, they have carried away with them a portion, sometimes a large portion, of the furniture: a deep personal reverence for the person of the Saviour, and a warm adhesion to the greater part at least of His moral teaching: nay, even, as for example in the writings of Mr. Martineau, a devout recognition of its higher spiritual aims.

There may be observed, however, on the part of this school of teachers, not exclusively but specially, a disposition to recommend their system by associating it with what is called universalism, or the doctrine that all human, or more properly all created being, however averse and remote it may now be from God, shall at some future time be brought into conformity and consequent felicity. There can be no doubt of the predisposition. of very many to fall in with a notion of this kind. It gives the sort of pleasure which we may conceive to attend the removal of a strongly-constructed bit from the mouth of a restive horse. But it propounds a belief; and an affirmative proposition must have for its foundation something more solid than a mere sense of relief. In order that a scheme of this kind may attain to weight and authority, as distinguished from mere popularity, it seems requisite that some effort should be made, I will not say to support it from Scripture or tradition, but to establish for it a place among the recognized principles of natural religion; to sustain it by analogies and presumptions from human experience, and from the observation of life, character, and the scheme of things under which we live. When, by a solid use of the methods of Butler, it shall have been shown that a scheme of this kind takes hold of and fits into the moral government of the world, and the natural working of the human conscience, then indeed some progress will have been made towards obtaining a hearing for its claim to be accounted an article of religion. But till that time comes, it will not perhaps be a source to its advocates of great intellectual or moral strength.

Now, we have no right whatever to impute bad faith to the profession of the Unitarians and others, that they cannot and will not part with the name of Christians; that they are the true professors of a reformed Christianity; and that they have effected with thoroughness and consistency that reduction of it to the form of its original promulgation by its illustrious Teacher, which, in the sixteenth century, others were either too timid, or not enough enlightened, to effect.

Since the time of Belsham, considerable changes seem to have

taken place in the scheme of Unitarianism. At the present day it probably includes much variety of religious thought. But I am not aware that it has abandoned the claim to be the best representative of the primitive Gospel as it was delivered by Christ Himself.

The Jews, who, taken together are a rather large community, have hitherto believed themselves the stewards of an unfulfilled Redemption. But it seems that a portion at least of them are now disposed to resolve their expected Messiah into a typical personage, prefiguring the blessings of civilization. It may be doubted whether such a modification as is thus indicated would greatly add to the moral force of Judaism, or make its alliance more valuable to the scheme which I am endeavouring to sketch. Now, since it was the doctrine of the Incarnation which gave to Love, as a practical power, its place in religion, so we might suppose that, upon the denial of that doctrine, that seraph would unfold its wings and quit the shrine it had so long warmed and blessed. But it is not so. Whatever be the cause, devotion and fervour still reside, possibly it should be said still linger, within this precinct of somewhat chill abstractions. There are within it many men not only irreproachable in life, but excellent; and many who have written both in this country and on the Continent with no less power than earnestness, in defence of the foundations of the belief which they retain. Such are, for example, Professor Frohschammer in Germany and M. Laveleye in Belgium: while in this country, without pretending to exhaust the list, I would pay a debt of honour and respect to Mr. Martineau, Mr. Greg, Dr. Carpenter, and Mr. Jevons. See, for example, Mr. Greg's last edition of the "Creed of Christendom ;" Dr. Carpenter's address to the British Association at Bristol; the remarkable chapter with which Mr. Jevons has closed his work on Scientific Method; and, most recent of all, the powerful productions contributed to this REVIEW, in which Mr. Martineau has exhibited the "theologic conception" of the great Causal Will, as the "inmost nucleus of dynamic thought."*

The truth is, that the school consists not of a nation or tribe, with its promiscuous and often coarse materials, but of select individuals, scattered here and there, and connected by little more than coincident opinion. They are generally men exempt from such temptations as distress entails, and fortified with such restraints as culture can supply. It is not extravagantly charitable to suppose that a portion of them at least may be such as, from a happy moral, as well as mental constitution, have never felt in themselves the need of the severer and more efficacious control supplied by the doctrines of the Christian Church. In this sense, under the * March No., pp. 31, 546.

conditions of our human state, goodness itself may be a snare. In any attempt, however, to estimate the system as a system, it must be recollected that the moral standard of individuals is fixed not alone, and sometimes not principally, by their personal convictions, but by the principles, the traditions, and the habits of the society in which they live, and below which it is a point of honour, as well as of duty, not to sink. A religious system is only then truly tested, when it is set to reform and to train, on a territory of its own, great masses of mankind.

Still we should not hastily be led by antagonism of opinion to estimate lightly the influence which a school, limited like this in numbers, may exercise on the future. For, if they are not rulers, they rule those who are. They belong to the class of thinkers and teachers; and it is from within this circle, always, and even in the largest organizations, a narrow one, that go forth the influences which one by one form the minds of men, and in their aggregate determine the course of affairs, the fate of institutions, and the happiness of the human race. What for one I fear is that, contrary to their own intentions, while the aggregate result of the destructive part of their operations may be large, in their positive and constructive teaching, tried on a large scale, they will greatly fail.

It is not their numerical weakness alone which impresses me with the fear that, if once belief were reduced to the dimensions allowed by this class of teachers, its attenuated residue would fall an easy prey to the destroyer. It is partly because the scheme has never been able to endure the test of practice in great communities. The only large monotheism known to historic times is that of Mahomet; and, without wishing to judge that system harshly, I presume that none regard it as competent to fill the vacuum which would be left by the crumbling away of historical Christianity. The general monotheism, which many inquirers, and most Christians, trace in the most primitive times, did not live long enough to stamp even so much as a clear footprint on the ground of history. The monotheism of the Hebrews lived, upon a narrow and secluded area, a fluctuating chequered life, and apparently owed that life to aids altogether exceptional. The monotheism of the philosophic schools was little more than a declamation and a dream. Let us listen for a moment to Macaulay on the old philosophers :

"God the uncreated, the incomprehensible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A philosopher might admire so noble a conception; but the crowd turned away in disgust from words which presented no image to their minds. It was before Deity embodied in a human form, walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that

the prejudices of the Synagogue, and the doubts of the Academy, and the pride of the Portico, and the fasces of the Lictor, and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in the dust.”*

This system then is dry, abstract, unattractive, without a way to the general heart. And surely there are yet graver and more conclusive reasons why it should, in its sickly revival, add another failure to those which have hitherto marked, and indeed formed, its annals. It is intellectually charged with burdens which it | cannot bear. We live, as men, in a labyrinth of problems, and of moral problems, from which there is no escape permitted us. The prevalence of pain and sin, the limitations of free will, approximating sometimes to its virtual extinction, the mysterious laws of interdependence, the indeterminateness for most men of the discipline of life, the cross purposes that seem at so many points to traverse the dispensations of an Almighty benevolence, can only be encountered by a large, an almost immeasurable, suspense of judgment. Solution for them we have none. But a scheme came eighteen hundred years ago into the world, which is an earnest and harbinger of solution: which has banished from the earth, or frightened into the darkness, many of the foulest monsters that laid waste humanity; which has restored woman to her place in the natural order; which has set up the law of right against the rule of force; which has proclaimed, and in many great particulars enforced, the canon of mutual love; which has opened from within sources of strength for poverty and weakness, and put a bit in the mouth and a bridle on the neck of pride. In a word, this scheme, by mitigating the present pressure of one and all of these tremendous problems, has entitled itself to be heard when it assures us that a day will come, in which we shall know as we are known, and when their pressure shall no longer baffle the strong intellects and characters among us, nor drive the weaker even to despair. Meantime no man, save by his own wilful fault, is the worse for the Advent of Christ, while at least many are the better. Then, in shedding upon us the substance of so many gifts, and the earnest of so many more, it has done nothing to aggravate such burdens of the soul as it did not remove, For adventitious, forced, and artificial theories of particular men, times, and places, it cannot be held responsible. Judged by its own authentic and universal documents, it is a remedial, an alleviating scheme. It is a singular puzzle of psychology to comprehend how men can reject its aids, bounteous even if limited, and thus doom themselves to face with crippled resources the whole host of the enemy. For, as Theists, they have, to make all the admissions, to do battle with all the objections which appear to lie against the established provision

Essay on Milton. Essays, i. 22.