hidden in the original documents of the faith. Are we prepared to do this?

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Certainly not altogether. It is evidently contrary to our conception of the Deity, as the Eternal Power of the universe- - der da waltet gut und gross — to imagine that his revelation of himself could be confined to one country and nation. If this seems here and there to be asserted in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, we ascribe it to a narrowness which few nations - and our own less than most- are free from. We regard the religion which lies at the bottom of modern civilization as containing elements almost unknown both to ancient Judaism and to primitive Christianity. The scientific impulse is foreign to both, and not less the artistic; and these have come to us from quite other sources. Yet even here, as we have had occasion to remark, the new elements are only additional, not in any way incompatible or discordant with the old. The spirit of joy and nature-worship finds no asceticism to combat in the original religious tradition. It finds the Founder of Christianity separating himself in a pointed manner from asceticism, and dropping at times words which a lake poet might take for his motto. It finds the prophets of Judaism describing nature with free enjoyment. And the zeal against anthropomorphism, though it did not in the Hebrew race lead to science, is yet strikingly in harmony with the scientific spirit. If our men of science wished to give to their favorite conviction about the Unknown and Unknowable an imaginative form in which it might work upon the popular mind, they would find that the work has already been done for them in an incomparable manner by the prophets of the Old Testament. But beyond this and some rude outlines of a philosophy of universal history which are to be discerned in the prophetic books, it is plain that we do not draw our science or our art from the sources from which we draw our Christianity. It is plain, also, that neither art nor science has flourished freely where Christianity has been regarded as the one source of spiritual life. But to avow this and to assert that we cannot do with Christianity alone, is not to abandon Christianity, nor is it to assert that within its own province, anything can come into competition with Christianity, much less supersede it.

centuries has had nothing more to reveal. We believe that those who assert this in words, deny it unconsciously in their actions. Else why do they read new biog raphies with such interest? Why do they crowd with such enthusiasm in every generation round new objects of admiration, the hero, or the saint, or the adored teacher? The ideal of humanity is not so revealed once for all, but that it needs continually to be presented again, that we may see its bearing in the midst of the new conditions into which mankind are brought. But we hold at the same time that it was by and in Jesus Christ that man was aroused — that is, in these western regions

to the worship most necessary to him, to the religion which gives life to morality, and that the introduction of this highest worship was both so made and so recorded that the record is the most precious among all the heirlooms of our race. We hold that though there may arise by chance a Zoilus who has the courage of his stupidity, and will tell the world boldly that he doesn't see it, yet few people would listen to him if their minds were not irritated by the professional pedantry with which the subject has been handled, and if the origins of Christianity were not contemplated through a vista of centuries, in which it was barbarized, and in which it became at times a wild superstition or a childish mythology, though not losing, even in these perversions, its original elevation and tenderness; at times a merciless, though even then, it may be, a necessary and beneficial theocracy. So far from having gained an accidental importance beyond its desert, nothing has been so unjustly misrepresented, SO unfairly judged, or mixed up with so much that it has no concern with, as Christianity, and yet in spite of all this, it remains the core, the best and most precious part of that religion of modern civilization which we have described as extending beyond it. To pretend to be able to dispense with it would be a folly as well as an impiety, even if all the sacerdotalism and spiritual tyranny which have gathered round it, could fairly be laid to its account. But the charges against it fall to the ground when we look back to its original character, and see how deeply penetrated it was with the idea of progress. If the religion of modern civilization is not quite the That province is the province of morals, same thing even in its moral part as the of man's struggle towards his ideal. As-religion of the New Testament, if it has suredly here, too, it is contrary to our principles to imagine that the Eternal exhausted himself long ago, and for many

LIVING AGE.

VOL. XVIII.

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grown larger and richer with the process of time, we may fairly say that it is all the more Christian on that account. It is

what Christianity would be if it had been allowed to develop itself in the spirit of its founders, and of their precursors, the prophets. For in the original plan it is assumed, what sacerdotalism denies, that new light is ever to be expected, and that the divine revelation of one age gives place in due season to the larger revelation of another. With what a singular mixture of reverence, and the sense of superiority, does the young Christian Church look back upon its Jewish parent! It is an inimitable model of the way the ages should behave to each other. There is no touch of rebellion, and yet there is the calmest assertion of freedom. There is no depreciation of the old truth, no denial that it was divine, and yet the finest assertion of the new truth as divine also, and still more divine. Who can doubt that that apostolical age which so treated its predecessors, desired and expected to be so treated in turn by its successors? Who that reads its glowing expectations of the future can fail to see that it did not look forward to a Christianity of timid repetition, a commentatorial age of relig ion, but to an unheard-of increase and diffusion of the spirit of prophecy? Who that knows the ring of original Christianity does not hear it in those words of Milton, "In that day it shall no more be said as in scorn that it was never yet seen in such a fashion, when men have better learned that the times and seasons pass along under Thy feet, to go and come at Thy bidding?"

the world that lay in darkness before it was preached, must now lie in light. But is it true that modern civilization does not resemble Christianity in this respect? that it belongs to a few countries in Europe, among which it has grown up in some way only half understood, and that it can never be communicated to other races? Does it consist merely of certain habits or ways of action which, though convenient, can yet never be referred to any principle so that nothing like a creed or catechism of civilization could ever be drawn up? Because this has, perhaps, never been attempted, it does not follow that it is impossible. We remember that much of what constitutes Christianity lay for a long time hidden in Judaism, passive and unaggressive, and it also seems that the other great aggressive religion of the world, Buddhism, did not begin its missionary course for some centuries after its foundation. May not the same change pass over modern civilization? May not it too have at last its missionaries conscious and devoted!

Civilization again is often spoken of in a sceptical tone, as if it were only a flattering name which nations give to their own usages which, from mere prejudice, they regard as superior to the usages of foreigners, whereas in reality each nation develops for itself the way of life that suits it best, so that each nation would do wisely to stick to the usages it has inherited.

Assuredly to deal with the last quesThis notion of modern civilization as tion first-it will never do for one nation constituting or as enshrining a religion to set up its own culture as the standard which, though not exclusively, is yet sub- which all mankind should conform to. An stantially Christian, may provoke the fol- absolute civilization, such as might deserve lowing objection. It may be said that civ- to have its formularies and its missionilization is a matter of birth and physical | aries, could only be gathered from a comconditions, that it is to nations what per-parison of the usages of very many nations. sonal character is to individuals, a thing But then when we speak of modern civ peculiar to themselves and incommunicable, whereas Christianity announced itself as something publishable, and to be published to all nations, a gospel or message, the acceptance of which would elevate men to a higher spiritual condition. The world was lying in darkness, and the new religion was to rise upon it like the sun. Certainly Christianity did announce itself so, and it is curious to observe with what helpless automatism Christian teachers repeat the original language, forgetting that what was news when it was first announced, can hardly continue news when it has been repeated with unparalleled reiteration for eighteen centuries; and that unless Christianity has broken its promise,

ilization, we actually mean a civilization of this kind. The usages of nations have actually been carefully compared in recent times; even many nations differing most widely from the European have been studied with sympathy and candor; and in consequence we can and do now speak of civilization without exclusive reference to our own usages. Nothing could be worse than for any nation to preach its own culture as a gospel of deliverance to mankind; yet the English in India may, with perfect modesty, with perfect consciousness of their own woful deficiencies, assert that part at least of the gospel of civilization is committed to them to preach there —for instance, scientific method, for this

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they know is not peculiar to themselves, | ence them much more powerfully if we but belongs to absolute civilization.

ourselves were not so backward in some parts of European culture, if our Christianity were not so dry and formal, and all our religion so much corrupted by worldly views.

those laws of nature upon which health, whether bodily or intellectual, depends, or those truths about institution and government which are the life of society.

This example may show that it is actually not impossible to draw out into a formulary the principles of absolute civilization. An attempt has been made in these papers to give distinctness to some It is easy to trace in the life of Livingof these principles, and in this way to stone, and in other records of modern bring out the conception of a religion missions, that the view here presented has which consists, not of the crotchets of any often occurred to practical men, and that individual, but of those grand views of life there is something very unnatural in sepawhich may fairly be said to have been rating our Christianity from the rest of revealed to our times by the Eternal, our civilization, as if it alone deserved to because they have commended themselves be carried to the heathen as a message of to whole nations, and have then victori- redemption; and as if there ought not to ously invaded other nations, subduing be missionaries to preach to the heathen mankind with large and gradual processes of conviction. And if there exist this absolute civilization, it is certainly not true that it cannot be propagated, but can only be called into existence within a new population by the same inscrutable and gradual influences which created it originally. The culture of a nation is emi-cated within the limits where it is pronently capable of being transmitted to other nations by direct teaching, and by the exhibition of its fruits, appealing to the admiration and envy of those alien to it. We may wonder and conjecture in what way, and through what causes, the old Hellenic culture sprang up, and concentrated itself at Athens; but when this had happened, there was no such mystery about the way in which it could be propagated further. The Hellenizing of other nations went on easily and naturally, because all who saw what Hellenic culture could do, desired to participate in it, and would not be refused their share.

This great modern religion, of which Christianity is the core, requires just as much to be sedulously preached and incul

fessed, as to be carried beyond them. For within those limits it has been corrupted into numberless heresies. There is the asceticism which disbelieves in nature, the obscurantism which shrinks from science, and will not know God as he is, the scientific fanaticism and cynicism which reject humanity. And worse than all these heresies there is the naked irreligion which believes in nothing, that is, worships nothing, and aims only at the getting, or increasing, or consuming of a livelihood.

Here, too, at home as well as in the fields of missionary enterprise, it is easy Now the culture of modern Europe to see that the mistake made is that of not those views of life which are matters putting a part of our religion for the whole, of controversy among us, but those in of supposing that we are merely Christians which all who have a high standard agree in the ecclesiastical sense of the word, -is now what Hellenic culture was in the when in fact our religion is something days of Alexander, what Hebrew culture beyond comparison wider. Our religion, was in the time of the early Church; it is what is it in reality but the great system a great religion about to gather all nations of views which supports the higher life in into its communion. It conquers wher- us? And what then in all this system of ever it comes, not so much by argument views can be outside of the province of as by an evident superiority that makes the religious teacher? But our religious argument superfluous. Our missionaries teachers have thoroughly accustomed go out to convert the Hindoos to our themselves to the notion that they have ecclesiastical Christianity, and not without no concern with, perhaps, the greater part success; but meanwhile without mission- of this province. It costs them nothing aries the Hindoos are converted to Eu- to admit that there may be great laws of ropeanism, to that total of views and prin- the universe profoundly affecting the life ciples which is so much larger than ecclesiastical Christianity. They are converted to our science, to our energetic mode of life; so that their old traditional religion seems not unlikely to pass away from their minds like a dream; and we might influ

of man; that there may be elevating thoughts, nay, that there may be noble deeds and noble characters fit to be set up as examples, which nevertheless do not concern them at all as religious teachers, and have no bearing upon religion. "If

of inspiration was said to be closed, of to think chiefly of economical subjects admitting into the creeds and catechisms when they remember him. And even of religion all those truths about God and those who have studied none of his writman which a sacerdotal prejudice has ings except those devoted to these subhitherto pronounced "common and un- jects, will in some degree be able to clean," this work is not so difficult. It understand how this may be. For what need not strain the formularies of any he introduced into these as into all subchurch. It might go forward without jects on which he wrote at all, was life, secession and without schism. And yet animation, the real view of a man who had it is as much more important than the mastered the abstract theory indeed, and other work as it is less difficult. For the attached to it the first importance, but who opposition of science is only formidable cared chiefly to consider its bearing on the to a religion which lacks inherent vitality. facts of the world of business, and the When the prophetic power has gone out manner in which it blended with and modof a Church the boldness of the hopes and ified the transactions of living men. No promises on which it is built ceases to one can have read the financial and ecoappear sublime, and then the world gains nomical papers of Mr. Bagehot for many courage to criticise and to sneer; but years without seeing that the various kinds when she recovers her grasp of reality, of city men, the merchant, the stockand her prophets enrich their eloquence broker, the banker, were all living figures with fresh observation, and warm it with to him, and that he loved to dissect, with first-hand conviction, the peevish negations that realistic humor of which he was a -not of science but of scientific people master, the relative bearing of their disdie away again speedily into inaudible turbing passions and conventions on that instinct of gain which forms the sole basis of economical reasoning.

murmurs.

From The Spectator.

WALTER BAGEHOT.

And it was the life, humor, and animation, looking out of the glance of those large and brilliant black eyes, and often presenting a curious contrast with the sup posed dryness of the subjects with which THE sudden death of the editor of the Mr. Bagehot so frequently dealt, that made Economist, in the fulness of his powers, him what he was to his friends. In spite has been thought of, and will continue to of his detached, cool, solitary intellect, he be thought of, in relation to the public life was the most buoyant of men, the loss of of Englishmen, chiefly as the sudden loss whom is like the loss of sunlight to his of a cool, sagacious, wise, and unusually friends' dimmer lives. As a young man, independent element in the formation of his nonsense was the most enjoyable of the economical and financial opinion of the all nonsense, for with all its extravagance, world to which he belonged. And that it had strong and piercing discrimination assuredly it is. If Mr. Bagehot's mind, for its chief ground; but while always folas a factor in political opinion of any kind, lowing the lead of some true perception, had a defect, that defect was the very un-he lashed out in all directions into caricausual one of its too complete independ- ture of his meaning with all the animation ence of the influence of the thought of high spirits and a bold imagination. around him. He had what Dr. Newman has called "intellectual detachment" in as high a degree probably as any man of his generation, so high that he sometimes found it all but impossible to understand the force of the ordinary currents of feel ing around him and consequently at times allowed too much and at times also too little for those external influences of which he rather guessed than gauged the strength. But those who knew Mr. Bagehot well will probably find it hard to remember in him the economist at all. Much of his time as he devoted to these subjects, and greatly as he influenced the opinion of his day upon them, it will remain very difficult for his personal friends

"The

He was a dashing rider, too, and a fresh wind was felt blowing through his earlier literary efforts, as though he had been thinking in the saddle, an effect wanting in his later essays, where you see chiefly the calm analysis of a lucid observer. What animation there is, for example, in this description of Shakespeare! reverential nature of Englishmen has carefully preserved what they thought the great excellence of their poet,- that he made a fortune. . . . It was a great thing that he, the son of the wool-comber, the poacher, the good-for-nothing, the vagabond (for so, we fear, the phrase went in Shakespeare's youth), should return upon the old scene a substantial man, a person