is alive. It has, indeed, its sacrosanct and incomparable memories, its immense and hallowed store of past spiritual experience. But it has, too, its throbbing, living spiritual experience in the present— deepening, widening, waxing. This living spiritual experience of today partly corroborates that past spiritual experience of yesterdayso far the experience of yesterday survives; this living spiritual experience of to-day partly modifies, corrects, abandons, augments, develops that past spiritual experience of yesterday-so far the experience of yesterday alters or drops away; and theology, the small intellectual reflex of the huge spiritual perceptions, is subject to the same law of waste and repair, of desuetude, continuance, and increase. The law is manifest in other spheres of human advancement. In the great tracts of natural science the scientific experience of bygone generations obtains now just so far, and so far only, as the scientific experience of to-day endorses it. The estimates of Newton, of Linnæus, of Lavoisier, are partly discarded, partly retained, partly amplified; that is, they hold good only so far as contemporary scientific judgment confirms them. So the theological estimates based on then accumulated spiritual experience-of St. Augustine or St. Anselm, of Wyclif or Hooker-are partly discarded, partly retained, partly amplified; that is, they hold good only so far as present theological judgment, based on now accumulated spiritual experience, confirms them.

It is objected: But the spiritual experience, and therefore the theological expressions of Christendom, are, and have been, various, irregular, uneven, self-contradictory, internecine; how, from such a medley of warring and refractory ingredients, can you elicit the peaceful affirmations of a common creed? The answer is: Amid all spiritual vicissitude, amid the ecclesiastical and confessional hurlyburly, there has been, and is, tendency, drift, design; through the long sequence of Church discords may be heard an inner harmony; there is in the Christian brotherhood an inmost interpretation of the Divine presented objects, a spiritual experience which is the same to-day as it was yesterday, and will be to-morrow-this, when articulated, and this only, is the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints.

This Broad Church principle-that spiritual experience is the basis of Christian beliefs-has been borrowed from a distinguished German school of theology. It has been intimated, with admirable point and lucidity, in the often-quoted epigram of Amiel: 'Le déplacement du christianisme de la région historique dans la région psychologique est le vœu de notre époque.' It has been expressed as follows, even more appositely for our purpose, by the Rev. W. R. Inge, the Bampton Lecturer on Mysticism, one of the younger Oxford thinkers likely to impress the English Church:

The greatest need seems to be that we should return to the fundamentals of spiritual religion. We cannot shut our eyes to the fact that both the old seats of authority, the infallible Church and the infallible Book, are fiercely assailed,

and that our faith needs reinforcements. These can only come from the depths of the religious consciousness itself; and if summoned from thence, they will not be found wanting. The 'impregnable rock' is neither an institution nor a book, but a life or experience.

The principle, amid the tremors of Christians for their belief, restores confidence. Spiritual experience is that which draws nearest to God and makes most for righteousness. If, in our or other times, the whole of the contemporary belief is sustained by contemporary spiritual experience, the whole belief is healthy and secure; the vital sap from the ground flows into all its branches. If, on the other hand, part of the contemporary belief, or if any particular interpretation of a part, is not sustained by contemporary spiritual experience, that part, or that interpretation, has done its work and will wither; nothing n the long run can save it. The call to Christendom, alive now as ever, is to trust its own living consciousness, whatever this consciousness, progressively taught by the unveiling Spirit (πνεῦμα ἀποκαλύψεως, Eph. i. 17), may report. 'Sink, O Christendom, in thy soul; yearn to the greatness of the Spirit; rally the truth in the depths of thyself.' (2) An open mind there must be in natural science and in history. Natural science, after years of fierce argumentative strife, has, against obscurant theology, on this point won the day. We Christians are willing now to learn natural science, untrammelled and direct, from natural scientists. But historical science steps forward with an equally just, commanding, and momentous pretension. It claims for itself, for its own unreserved and undisputed investigation, the whole realm of history, and it calls upon theology, as a judge in this domain, to retire. We Christians have only partly yielded here; we are still screening off certain sacred areas of the past, which we desire to protect from that brilliant and discovering searchlight of the historians. Professor Pfleiderer writes concerning Bishop Gore's essay in Lux Mundi: With these concessions to the criticism of the Old Testament the author cannot, of course, escape the natural question, Why, if so much development is admitted in the Old Testament, the same is not to be admitted in the New?'

What happened in the past? Who will tell us? Will Church authority? Tradition? Decrees of Councils? Opinions of ancient Fathers? Discussions of modern clergy? Consensus of the devout unlearned? The wayside preacher? The peasant on his knees? The nun in ecstasy? Will these tell us what happened in the past? No! These agencies or agents all deserve our respect; some of them deserve our reverence. But they cannot tell us what happened in the past, for they do not know; they have not been trained to find it out. Historical science will tell us what happened in the past. The mass of Christian people will be told; they will not tell. You and I will have

For instance, the minatory clauses of the Athanasian Creed are withering.

no voice in the narration. The proper and equipped investigators are hard at work. They are surveying largely and scrutinising minutely. The ascertainable facts of our human story will not escape them; and the facts will be marshalled and interpreted according to the verified and approved laws of human chronicles. On important points of the Christian origins the inquiring experts are not yet agreed. Until they are agreed the rest of Christendom cannot be agreed. When they are agreed they will tell the rest of Christendom the decision, and the rest of Christendom will have to accept it. Ah! our eyes are intent on this exploring, and the heart's desire of some among us is for a conservative issue. Meanwhile, however, we must disentangle the eternal certitudes of our religion from those historical hesitations; we must labour that the Church of Christ, whatever restorations of its historical walls corrosive change may demand, shall, imbedded and erect on the spiritual rock, still stand in its ancient, awful, and inviolable repose.

(3) Wide sympathies must reign in the heart of the English Church. (a) They must break through the hard rind of exclusive Anglican temper which externally shuts out Nonconformists from appreciation and fraternity, and which internally represses surging hopes and patient prayers for reunion. (b) Nothing but sympathy can discover the great wanted service in the churches of our land-the service which shall hold and elevate, not depress and repel, the masses of the people. The Book of Common Prayer contains not such a service within its covers. Superb, sublime, the final word for the initiated, to the great untouched crowd of working-people it is irrelevant; it is not the easy and natural expression of their desires; they are without the range of its chaste and lofty diction. The imperious want, once, at least, on every Sunday in poorer parishes is of a people's service which shall be homely, pertinent, opportune, vivid; which shall engage attention, and lend wings to poor, slowly mounting aspiration, and condescend to humble, unaccustomed minds. Nothing but sympathy, penetrating with sensitive feelers into the devout needs of the heart of the multitude, can learn the secret, and inspire the forms, of this future popular worship. (c) The half-believer, the doubter, the agnostic, often of a surpassing sincerity and religious to the core-is he not to be caught in the great protective embrace of the Church's sympathy? Is he to be allowed to deem himself an outsider? There are no outsiders. The circumference of the Church's regard is the circumference of mankind.10 And, in our disturbed and anxious age, the Church fails immeasurably if, while staunch to her own essential "The writer has here borrowed phrases and sentences from letters of his to the Times on this subject in August 1898.

9

10 It is wider, if the consideration were to the point. It comprehends, in humbler regions, man's earthly dumb companions, e.g. the horse, the dog, the pigeon; in higher realms, the spirits of the blessed human departed, and the numberless ranks of unknown, but dimly apprehended, celestial beings.

doctrines and persistent in edification of her own fideles, she cannot, by the enthusiasm of her humanity, the amplitude of her compassion, and the infinity of her resource, also minister with healing medicine to the innumerable company of the perplexed, and cannot disclose to their dejected outlook gleams of the beatific vision. Et Jesus dixit illi: Respice.'

It must be womanly too. But
In the streets of Rome you may

(4) Our religion must be manly. effeminate or sickly it must not be. see double rows of walking, black-cassocked youths, set apart, indeed, for a lofty purpose, and often inwardly burning with the fervour of selfsacrifice, but pale, pinched, demure, unhealthy; they are pupils of the seminaries, the future priests of the Roman communion. The English race, well thinking over the matter during the 300 years of religious change which we call the Reformation, decided not to have persons of that kind for their clergy. They decided to have persons of another kind. They are not likely to revert from that decision; they are likely to abide by it. The theological colleges which, progeny of the Oxford Movement, have lately sprung up in our land have wrought one mighty benefit for the ministry of the English Church: they have insisted on the sovereign importance of prayer, meditation, retreat. On the other hand, they are beset by one perverting temptation-the inclination towards seminary ideals and habits; the disposition to rear as English clergy, not a body of unworldly and consecrated men, who are human, companionable, domestic, but a thin, superior, implacably separate, priestly caste. In building up the minds and morals of English clergymen, if the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola has, no doubt, a formative value, it may be well to recollect that so also has Tom Brown's Schooldays, Westward Ho! or Mr. Midshipman Easy.

(5) Our religion must be English. Christianity, indeed, is universal, yet is of a most gracious particularity. It knows no distinction of sex, yet it appeals differently to the man and to the woman. It knows no distinction of learning, yet it speaks in one tongue to the educated, to the ignorant in another. It knows no distinction of race, yet it approaches the Teuton otherwise than the Latin. The universal religion will mercifully adapt itself to our English needs, as the illimitable ocean incessantly conforms itself to our English coasts. The Anglo-Saxon character is tough and conspicuous, prone to grave temptations, endued with God-given virtues, summoned the world over to strangely grand and arduous responsibilities. In spiritual things it has a native simplicity, dignity, depth, independence of its own. It is this AngloSaxon soul, not another, which, by methods congenial to it and effective, the Holy Catholic Church in this land has to take and to imbue, amid the common affairs of daily life, with the purpose, strength, and glories of Christian sanctity. Ars est artium regimen animarum.'

To be a Broad Church clergyman is, within the Church, at present

to be unpopular." The tide is against the man. The ecclesiastical powers that be are amicably deterrent. His clerical comrades, High and Low, who in private life are his constant friends, exert against him in ministrations of the Church a gentle and dissuasive boycott. The position exacts a sacrifice of personal advancement. But, happily, a clergyman cannot even kneel at the sick-bed of a poor old woman and say a simple prayer for her as he ought unless he has first cast out of his own soul that one busy and particular devil-ecclesiastical ambition. A sacrifice here, or, indeed, in a hundred other ways, will do the Liberal clergy no harm. It is the moral pre-requisite of duty and achievement.

Liberal clergymen must also be champions of prayer. The exercise has not, perhaps, in late years been their forte. They have appeared to think that intellectual rectifications and enlightenment will do instead. But sermons, essays, books, of however corrective and inestimable a rationality, will not do instead of prayer. These things are required, too; but secondarily. They are physic; prayer is breath. They are about religion; prayer is religion. The religious folk of England want to pray; they want Christian ministers to teach them to pray, to lead them in prayer, to uplift them in prayer. In order to rise to the height of this great obligation the ministers themselves ought, individually and together, in prayer to be practised and tremendous. Let us pray for the Church of England:

Home of Thy saints,12 O God, in our native land, may the fires of a reasonable, holy, and living faith burn ever brightly on her hearth, for the warmth, illumination, and eternal safety of this people, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

HUBERT HANDLEY.

11 Broad Churchmen, since Maurice and Kingsley's time, have lacked organisation and union. There are but small cohering and attractive nuclei. The C.C.C., a private debating brotherhood of forty clergy, mostly Liberals, was founded by Maurice and is thriving. The Churchmen's Union, though some of us might differ from it on important points, is a valuable society for public discussion among Churchmen of rife and fundamental religious problems, and in this respect is honourably bearing the brunt of the Liberal battle.

12 This expression is largely true of the English Church, in the letter, on a long retrospect of our history; is, to a Churchman, wholly true in idea and aspiration, though he remembers with admiration and gratitude the multitude of God's saints in England without the technical boundary of his own communion.