But the most remarkable thing is that these universal reasons which ought to unite mankind into a vast Catholic Church turn out to be a disintegrating power, which makes all union impossible by the very nature of the system. The simple fact is, that from the very moment that an infallible authority has been withdrawn, ever since the Reformation left man to the "universal reasons" of which Mr. Hutton makes so much, the belief in the Incarnation has become less and less, till in Germany, for instance, it has almost disappeared. The atoms which, according to this theory, ought to have been held together with the force which forms the diamond, fly asunder, never more to be united. Mr. Hutton foresees this; he trusts so little to his reasons that he is obliged from his very theory to provide the broadest possible church for inevitable dissenters. We need hardly say that he is a latitudinarian of the laxest kind. After all, his Incarnation is his own conclusion, and he is too modest to impose it on the universe. That happens to him which is the fate of all who reach something resembling the truth, through reasoning, without authority. They cannot believe that Christ has revealed His Godhead so clearly as made its acceptance imperative. His universal reasons leave room enough for a huge mass of particular error. A Christianity utterly stripped of dogma and reduced to bare facts, a vague trust in an ambiguous Christ; such is the result. A Gospel torn to shreds and positively honeycombed by rationalistic criticism, so that in the uncertain light no man can tell fact from falsehood, universal reasons without sufficient strength to impose their own truth and not luminous enough to shine by their own brilliancy, and, for the result of all, a Christ with an equivocal Godhead :—this is not a Revelation. This Christ, who reveals himself in a way so slovenly that mankind is, from the very theory of the revelation, incapacitated from ascertaining whether he be God or man, is not believable.

We should do Mr. Hutton injustice if we represented this mass of confusion as the whole upshot of his theory. He has one point of external evidence which is better than this. He points to the history of the Christian Church, and finds there evidence of a new and supernatural life brought into the world by Christ. He argues that a dead Christ, a Christ from whose grave the stone had never been rolled, a Christ who was not eternal and divine, could never have so regenerated earth. "I cannot understand the history of the Christian Church at all, if all the firmest trust which has been stirred by faith in the actual inspiration of a nature at once eternal and human, has been lavished on a dream." The Unitarian Gospel,

as he implies, never did and never could have converted the world. This is all most true and beautifully said; but he should have added, that the Church which did convert the world was a Church which claimed infallibility. The Church which transfused the living stream of His blood from her own veins into those of the earth there can be no doubt, was a dogmatic Church. If he asks us why we believe in the infallibility of this Church, we answer: on the self-same grounds as he believes in the Incarnation. Men believed in Christ because they saw marks of divine mission about the men who preached Him. The same men who told them that Christ was God also told them that the Church was infallible. Why should they believe one and not the other? Belief in Christ and submission to the Church was one act and not two. It was not a successive process of first believing in an unerring Church, and then in a Christ preached by her. They saw marks of Godhead about the whole religion, and accepted all together: its Incarnate God and the Church which He bought with His blood. We too have felt all the yearnings for the living Christ which Mr. Hutton so well describes, and when we ask ourselves how it was that the earth came to believe in Him, how the world was twice converted, first, the old Roman world, East and West, and then the Teutonic, the sole and only answer is: not by a collection of independent units with universal reasons, impotent to produce a universal answer to our anxious question "who is this Christ?" but by a Church which claimed to speak in His name, and to have received from Himself the gift of infallibility. We believe in this gift for reasons of two kinds; because à priori we cannot conceive how it is possible that the Christ's original revelation should have been preserved without an infallible Church; secondly, because in point of fact we find a Church claiming infallibility from the first, as Christ asserts His own Godhead. This Church is believable as Christ is believable. For her men feel the same enmity, for her men feel the same yearning, the same divine longing deep in their inmost heart, as they do for Christ; and if they ask themselves the meaning of this profound feeling, they find that it is a part and parcel of their love for Him, of their thirst for knowledge about Him; for she alone, absolutely alone, who claims to represent Him, has a definite message about Him. We must confess that the history of the last three hundred years by no means disposes us to alter our view. The experiment has been fairly tried, to teach the Incarnation without an infallible Church. If it had succeeded, men might have been inclined to reverse the experience of the first fifteen hundred years of

the existence of Christianity, and to conclude that an adult Christianity could now walk alone without a Church. But what has been the effect of the Reformation on the doctrine of the Incarnation? It has introduced endless confusion. We have sown vanity and have reaped the whirlwind. It has struck away the authority of an infallible teacher and trusted first to external evidence. When the progress of science has fearfully shaken, if not destroyed, this external testimony, then thoughtful and earnest men have sought its proofs in man's inmost nature. They have thus unwittingly destroyed the supernaturalness of the doctrine. Above all they dare not assert it to be so certain as to claim the homage of the world. When a new religion presents itself to mankind, before men accept it, their first question is what are its doctrines? To the question "What is Christianity" no one gives a definite answer but the believer in an infallible Church. The theory which we are considering does not even attempt it. What is Christianity is so far undiscoverable that men must agree to differ, and all are Christians who trust in Christ, whether He be God or not. This is not the "social and the growing religion which converted the world. We could have told beforehand that it never could be social and could never grow. It will never bring back to Christianity a generation fast falling away from Christ.

Yet after all there are noble accents to be heard in Mr. Hutton's pages. It is a noble hope that Christianity will still, in spite of all, bring an element of the divine into the "vulgar modern life of England." It was an attempt worthy of a deeply religious mind to bring all the acuteness of a singularly subtle intellect, and the eloquence of a master in the art of writing, to serve the cause of Christ, sorely imperilled among scientific men. It is a fearful moment when men who long to believe, see, or think that they see, that geology and history and criticism sap the foundations of their faith. It is a fearful moment when men come to ask themselves if facts be against faith, what then? Mr. Hutton describes himself as one who is "fully alive to the force of the literary and scientific scepticisms of the day." He certainly in the very volume before us shows how deeply he feels the havoc made by criticism on the Bible. His essay on the Fourth Gospel speaks of the difference between the Evangelists in terms which startle us. A sort of Quixotic candour comes over him under the disguise of a chivalrous acceptance of fact, whenever he meets with any of the rapidly shifting theories raised by criticism about the Scriptures. Yet, after all, who would deny that the present state of critical science has brought with

it certain supposed facts at this moment difficult to answer? What is our attitude towards them? We can look them in the face with the utmost calmness; we can dispassionately master all facts, and give their due weight to objections, for we are perfectly certain that whatever turns out to be the truth will not be against the faith. We can afford to wait. We can trust the Church, who herself is waiting. The state of science at this moment is such that all decisions are premature; for the theories, nay the facts of yesterday, are perpetually met by the counter facts and theories of to-day. It is too much to ask the Church to decide on perpetually shifting evidence. How can she build in the crater of a volcano or establish herself on an earthquake? Meanwhile we feel perfectly sure that the Church, which at first discountenanced the heliocentric theory, and then altered a traditional interpretation of Scripture to suit it, when once it became evident, will not be narrow-minded in her appreciation of proved facts and will judge unerringly when she judges at all.

To sum up the whole of what we have said, it appears to us that there can be no chronological division of philosophy into good and bad. Scholasticism and modern philosophy need only differ as two methods, scholasticism leaning to the ontological and deductive, modern philosophy to the psychological and inductive method. Each method may be wrongly used; as modern philosophy has its Kant, so scholasticism had its Occam. We are scholastic to the backbone, for we consider the only chance of obtaining a definite philosophy to lie in the acceptance of the Aristotelian system as a basis. But a king of thought can only be brought back by willing minds, not by a coup d'état. We would deprecate with all our might any attempt to thrust scholasticism. down the world's throat as the only possible mould of truth. Important questions have arisen of late years which the schoolmen did not contemplate, and which have to be faced manfully. If we were asked what we thought about the future of philosophy, we should say that we do not dread the influx of physiology. It will only end in the return to the old doctrine that the soul is the form of the body. To bring about this consummation we must do justice to our enemies; we must master their theories, not attack them by ridicule or contempt. Above all, we must make the old philosophy intelligible and attractive to our contemporaries. It is not enough to say to ourselves that we possess the truth, and that it must make its way by its own weight when it is brought in contact with error. Truth may be dull and error may be brilliant. It is even within the bounds of possibility

that an evil-minded undergraduate might prefer the brilliant falsehood of Huxley to the truth of some conceivable advocates of the scholastic revival.

A kind critic has forwarded to us the following objection :-

"In order to show that the principle of matter and form is not necessary for Christian philosophy, it is not enough to show that it cannot be demonstrated by mere reason. It is necessary besides to show that it is not necessarily presupposed for certain dogmatic truths."

We answer that a truth which cannot be demonstrated by reason is not a truth of philosophy at all, and belongs to another science, that of theology. Our plea was therefore sufficient for our subject, which is scholastic philosophy. We agree, however, with our critic so far. A proposition which is a necessary premiss implied in a dogmatic truth ought not to be contradicted by philosophy. What truth, however, do we contradict when we say that the principle of matter and form is not binding on the conscience as the only explanation of nature? The Church, indeed, has said that the living body has a form, viz. the soul; it does not follow from this that all natural objects are composed of matter and form, which is what the scholastic philosophy asserts. The Church has committed herself to the truth of the distinction of matter and form in the case of the human individual, and in no other. In the case of the sacraments the use of the terms is clearly analogical. Even if it were not so, it is plain that no conclusion as to the physical composition of the universe can be drawn from supernatural entities.

In order to prevent misunderstanding, we also hold that it is the business of Catholic philosophy to show that any given philosophical doctrine, not provable by reason but required by theology, cannot be proved to contradict reason. We, however, contend that the scholastic view of matter and form is not required by theology, except in the case of the soul.