modes of apprehending and handling questions, and these affect man's attitude to every matter of thought and belief. An idea like evolution changes, not only our notion of the mode in which nature does her work, but also the way in which we study alike her works and manner of working, the methods by which we inquire into the phenomena of life, the order and facts of history, the appearance and meaning of a man. It causes, in a word, such a revolution in our basal conceptions as to demand, in order to mental wholeness and harmony, that they and their related beliefs be restated or reformulated. In a period of transition faith is hard, because religious ideas at once resist formal change and seem to suffer more from it than empirical or scientific; and men hastily or fearfully conclude that the change which is glorifying science will abolish Religion. On the one side, it stands by its theistic idea so related to nature as to feel every variation in men's notions concerning the creative cause, method, moment; and, on the other side, it is by its beliefs, institutions, and life so related to history as to be sensitive to every new historical doctrine, discovery, or process of inquiry. Hence, when the cosmic idea has changed its form, while the religious has not, when a new conception reigns in every department of history save the religious, the chronic difficulties between Science and Religion become to many minds insurmountable, and they cease to believe simply because Religion has ceased to be intellectually relevant-i.e., to belong to the living and growing body of truth, which at once possesses and inspires living mind. Men so situated are men whom no mustering of conventional evidences can convince; to reach or even touch them apologetic thought must seek to construe Religion as scientific thought has construed nature and history. What can make men feel at harmony with themselves and their universe, will always be the system most open to successful proof; what cannot accomplish this, no mass of probable or other evidence will save from ultimate disbelief.

The

It would lead us much too far to illustrate, with all the needed detail, the principles now stated; but two works will show what is meant. The De Civitate Dei is the greatest work in the whole region of Christian apologetics. Yet its form and argument were determined by the conditions and questions of Augustine's own day; these must be understood before its significance and force can be felt. ideas of the time, heathen and Christian, political, social, philosophical, religious, its conflicts, fears, hopes, despairs, must be recalled; the student must fill his imagination with the Roman ideal of the Eternal City; must realize what may be described as its apotheosis by the Latin peoples, the degree in which it was a city at once sacred and imperial, venerable, august, invincible, queen for centuries of civilized man, sole mother of the law that ruled him and the order he

loved, invested with a more awful sanctity than any religious city, nay, as the embodiment of the Roman, the symbol of a universal, Religion, and of one that out of ceaseless war had called universal peace. Once he has made the worship of Rome live in his consciousness, he must conceive the consternation, the horror, and shame that must have seized the Romans when they saw their city stormed and plundered by the barbarians, and the consequent indignation and hate which broke out in the Pagan charge :-"This ruin is but the last and highest achievement of the new religion!" Augustine's apology was the answer to this passion, and to the belief by which it lived; and the answer was as splendid as complete. The new religion was conceived and represented as a new city, which throughout far transcended the old, which came not from a people, but out of heaven, was created not of human ambition and hate, but of divine grace and love, comprehended not a few nations, but the race, produced no evil, fostered no wrong, but formed all the virtues and embraced all truth, a city destined to growth, but not to decay, whose building might indeed proceed in time, but whose continuance was to be eternal. Beside the Civitas Dei the Civitas Romana was made to seem a feverish and shadowy and inglorious dream; the ideal of the celestial rebuked by its very divineness the poor reality of the earthly city. The power of the apology lay in its being a constructive presentation of the Christian religion in a form relevant to the men and the moment; their knowledge of the city that was perishing constituted the very capability to which Augustine appealed; and so accurately does his work in its method and argument reflect the spirit and ideals, the disillusionment and alarms of the times, that the man who does not live through and in these will never see its meaning or feel its power.

Take, again, Butler's Analogy. It was a most relevant book; its relevance was the secret of its strength, and is the secret of its weakness. On its every page, in its every paragraph, we hear the controversies of the time, the freethinker, the deist, the airy rationalist, who will have a religion without mystery and without miracle, appear and deploy their arguments, but only to have them judicially analysed, reduced to their true significance, and finally translated into proofs tending to justify faith in the revealed religion they had been used to condemn. Some things Butler did once for all: his method; his doctrine of nature and man; his proof of the religious worth and work of conscience; his demonstration that religion when most accommodated to the standard of a conventional and unimaginative rationalism becomes only the less reasonable, beset with graver and more insoluble difficulties; the way he used the facts of life to illustrate and verify certain truths of faith, like the doctrines of substitution and atonement, are now inalienable possessions of

apologetic thought. Yet the strength of his argument, taken as a whole, was due to the use of principles common to the belief and unbelief of the day. Grant those principles, and the Analogy is one of the most marvellous structures of solid, cumulative, convincing argumentation ever built by the mind of man; deny those principles, and while the work remains a monument of dialectical genius, it has lost its power to convince. And they are explicitly denied by systems that now confront us; the unbelief of our day is more radical than the unbelief of Butler's, and, in some degree, we have to thank him for its being so. He showed it the necessity of increasing its negations if it was to remain negative at all. Hence our living apologetic must begin without any help from those common principles which were the basis of Butler's work; it must get even nearer the rock, seek a stronger and broader foundation, if it would construct an argument as relevant to our day as the Analogy was to his. And whatever it does it must not seek to relieve the difficulties of revealed religion by deepening those that sit upon the face of Nature, rather it must illumine and transfigure the darkness of Nature by the light of revelation. Religion has need to penetrate and exalt both Nature and man with her own transcendental ideals, that men may have a new sense of the value of life, and win a new heart for braver and nobler living.

2. But now there is another point that must be emphasized :the need for a constructive apologetic does not so much arise from the speculations and criticisms of a few active intellects without the Churches, as from a common intellectual tendency or drift, which causes a shaking and unrest, a sense of insecurity and change within them. This is what tempts men either to break with the old beliefs, or to doubt them, or to demand that from them a new spirit shall come forth. The Churches are now face to face with the gravest questions that have confronted Christianity since her life began ; questions not simply doctrinal, political, or social, but fundamental and final,-whether men are to be Christians any more, or indeed in any tolerable sense theists. These questions exhale, as it were, difficulties, which diffuse themselves everywhere, stealing into the best disciplined homes, pervading the most rigorously organized and jealously guarded Churches, pervading the atmosphere in which thought lives and breathes, touching our finest spirits with the slow paralysis of doubt, or the hesitancy which is the death of all enthusiasm. The men have not created the difficulties, or raised the doubts; they have sought and found the men; they are the creation of the time, and spring from the characteristics and achievements of its thought, its wider knowledge, its vaster outlook, its new methods of interpreting nature and history, its deeper insight into the way of Nature's working, and into the affinities of man and his universe. They are

utterly misunderstood when traced to an evil heart of unbelief, or any taint or sin of will, or any other source than honesty and integrity of intellect, the determination to be as clear and scrupulous in the realm of spirit and faith as in the region of experience and experiment. Scientists who have studied Nature and become so possessed by the ideas of law and energy, continuity and development, as to feel unable to reconcile them with their older ideas of God and His creative method, are men whom the Churches are bound to help to a solution. Scholars trained in the newest critical methods, literary and historical, cannot forget them when they turn to the study of the Bible, and of Hebrew and Christian history, and cannot pursue them without raising questions they have a right to submit to the Churches, and to require the Churches frankly and honestly to answer. Mr. Lilly's vindication of the attitude of his Church to the" higher criticism" seems to me its severest condemnation. She is to "wait until the higher criticism" has really established something certain, and then she will consider how far the "traditional thesis" taught in her schools should be modified in consequence (p. 279). There is here the abdication of the highest functions of the Church; she ceases to be the teacher of truth, and leaves it to men, whom she bans the while, to be its discoverers; and then the truths they with pain and loss have discovered she will reconcile to her tradition. In harmony with this, he, with special reference to the question what would happen to a Catholic priest who should teach his people certain critical conclusions-some of them conclusions certain enough-says, such a one "would richly deserve suspension," for "his business is to watch for men's souls, not to unsettle their faith" (p. 278). But his business ought to be to teach the truth; and if in the process faith is unsettled it will only be to the greater saving of the soul, The primary right of every man is to the truth, and the best truth his teachers can give him; the primary duty of the teacher, especially of the collective teacher called the Church, is to communicate the truth, not speaking with authority or certainty where certainty is not. A Church that is true and the infallible teacher of truth and guardian of souls, can in no way so well justify its claim and its being as by teaching the truth to souls perplexed. These souls are seeking the truth, and would be saved by it, but they are simply mocked if a Church says to them, "Find out the truth on those critical and historical questions which are matters of life and death for you, and to speak honestly, for myself also, and then I will tell you how it is to be reconciled with my traditional thesis.' The men whose doubts come from brave thought and honest inquiry have the highest claim on the best consideration and clearest light of all the Churches and all their thinkers. Doubt never appears without reason, and the removal of the reason is the only real way to the

removal of the doubt. The Churches that do nothing to reach and purify the source but help to muddle the stream.

II.

1. Constructive apologetic is thus at once the highest work of living religious thought, and the common duty of all the Churches. In it the Roman Catholic must bear its part. It is too wise to trust here to its infallible authority, matchless organization, rigorous discipline, and jealously guarded education; indeed, experience has thoroughly well taught it how little able these are to keep down or keep out the critical and sceptical spirit. It is but natural that the Church which most taxes faith should most provoke unbelief; but it ought not to follow that the claims that most challenge criticism are claims that can as little recognize as bear the criticism they challenge. It is the simple and sober truth to say that no Church has begotten so much doubt and disbelief as the Church of Rome. History bears here an indubitable and incorruptible witness. Of the Middle Ages we need not speak, or of the Renaissance, when the educated intellect of Italy almost ceased to be Christian, and became at once sceptical and pagan, or of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with such notable figures as Giordano Bruno and Vanini, and tendencies so significant as those impersonated in Montaigne, Bodin, and Charron, but we may glance at our own and the previous century. The eighteenth was the century of Rationalism, and it is customary to credit England with being its nursery and home, where, as Deism, it assumed its most anti-Christian and aggressive form. But English Deism was, from a literary point of view, a poor and vapid thing compared with the Free Thought of the France whence Protestantism and Jansenism had been expelled, that the Catholicism of Rome might have it all its own way. In England we had a host of obscure writers, now well-nigh forgotten, irrepressible men like Toland, men of mediocre ability and culture like Anthony Collins, vulgar men like Chubb, only two illustrious names, Hume and Gibbon, the one embodying his scepticism in the subtlest of English philosophies, the other distilling his into the stateliest history in the English tongue. But the active intellects of France, the men who give name and character to the century, were either sceptical or infidel. It opens with Bayle, the father of critical Rationalism; the man whe stands above all others, and shadows all beneath, is Voltaire. The men who form and express the mind of Paris, then the head and heart of France, are Diderot, D'Alembert, and the other encyclopédists; the lion of its salons is Rousseau. And while the literature of France was vehemently anti-Christian, the Church of France was not strenuously apologetic, as was the English Church. Here, men like Addison, Clarke, Butler,