majesty of the Supreme Being, by his presence, by the insufficiency of the human mind, which conceives so little what pertains to its author. When I approach the moment of consecration, I collect myself for performing the act with all the feelings required by the church, and the majesty of the sacrament; I strive to annihilate my reason before the supreme intelligence, saying, 'Who art thou, that thou shouldest measure infinite power?'" 1 1 A creed like this, whatever else it may be, is plainly a powerful solvent of every system of exclusive dogma. If the one essential to true worship, the worship of the heart and the inner sentiment, be mystic adoration of an indefinable Supreme, then creeds based upon books, prophecies, miracles, revelations, all fall alike into the second place among things that may be lawful and may be expedient, but that can never be exacted from men by a just God as indispensable to virtue in this world or to bliss in the next. No better answer has ever been given to the exclusive pretensions of sect, Christian, Jewish, or Mahometan, than that propounded by the Savoyard Vicar with such energy, closeness, and most sarcastic fire.2 It was turning an unexpected front upon the presumptuousness of all varieties of theological infallibilists, to prove to them that if you insist upon acceptance of this or that special revelation, over and above the dictates of natural religion, then you are bound not only to grant, but imperatively to enjoin upon all men, a searching 1 Emile. IV. 243. 2 IV. 210-236. : inquiry and comparison, that they may spare no pains in an affair of such momentous issue in proving to themselves that this, and none of the competing revelations, is the veritable message of eternal safety. "Then no other study will be possible but that of religion hardly shall one who has enjoyed the most robust health, employed his time and used his reason to best purpose, and lived the greatest number of years, hardly shall such an one in his extreme age be quite sure what to believe, and it will be a marvel if he finds out before he dies, in what faith he ought to have lived." The superiority of the sceptical parts of the Savoyard Vicar's profession, as well as those of the Letters from the Mountain to which we referred previously, over the biting mockeries which Voltaire had made the fashionable method of assault, lay in this fact. The latter only revolted and irritated all serious temperaments to whom religion is a matter of honest concern, while the former actually appealed to their religious sense in support of his doubts; and the more intelligent and sincere this sense happened to be, the more surely would Rousseau's gravely urged objections dissolve the hard particles of dogmatic belief. His objections were on a moral level with the best side of the religion that they oppugned. Those of Voltaire were only on a level with its lowest side, and that was the side presented by the gross and repulsive obscurantism of the functionaries of the church. Unfortunately Rousseau had placed in the hands of the partisans of every exclusive revelation an instrument which was quite enough to disperse all his objections to the winds, and which was the very instrument that defended his own cherished religion. If he was satisfied with replying to the atheist and the materialist, that he knew there is a supreme God, and that the soul must have here and hereafter an existence apart from the body, because he found these truths ineffaceably written upon his own heart, what could prevent the Christian or the Mahometan from replying to Rousseau that the New Testament or the Koran is the special and final revelation from the Supreme Power to his creatures? If you may appeal to the voice of the heart and the dictate of the inner sentiment in one case, why not in the other also? A subjective test necessarily proves anything that any man desires, and the accident of the article proved appearing either reasonable or monstrous to other people, cannot have the least bearing on its efficacy or conclusiveness. Deism like the Savoyard Vicar's opens no path for the future, because it makes no allowance for the growth of intellectual conviction, and binds up religion with mystery, with an object whose attributes can neither be conceived nor defined, with a Being too all-embracing to be able to receive anything from us, too august, self-contained, remote, to be able to bestow on us the humble gifts of which we have need. The temperature of thought is slowly but without an instant's recoil rising to a point when a mystery like this, definite enough to be imposed as a faith, but too indefinite to be grasped by understanding as a truth, melts away from the emotions of religion. Then those instincts of holiness, without which the world would be to so many of its highest spirits the most dreary of exiles, will perhaps come to associate themselves less with unseen divinities, than with the long brotherhood of humanity seen and unseen. Here we shall move with an assurance that no scepticism and no advance of science can ever shake, because the benefactions which we have received from the strenuousness of human effort can never be doubted, and each fresh acquisition in knowledge or goodness can only kindle new fervour. Those who have the religious imagination struck by the awful procession of man from the region of impenetrable night, by his incessant struggle with the hardness of the material world, and his sublimer struggle with the hard world of his own egotistic passions, by the pain and sacrifice by which generation after generation has added some small piece to the temple of human freedom or some new fragment to the ever incomplete sum of human knowledge, or some fresh line to the types of strong or beautiful character,—those who have an eye for all this may indeed have no ecstasy and no terror, no heaven nor hell, in their religion, but they will have abundant moods of reverence, deep-seated gratitude, and sovereign pitifulness. And such moods will not end in sterile exaltation, or the deathly chills of spiritual reaction. They will bring forth abundant fruit in new hope and invigorated endeavour. This devout contemplation of the experience of the race, instead of raising a man into the clouds, brings him into the closest, loftiest, and most conscious relations with his kind, to whom he owes all that is of value in his own life, and to whom he can repay his debt by maintaining the beneficent tradition of service, by cherishing honour for all the true and sage spirits that have shone upon the earth, and sorrow and reprobation for all the unworthier souls whose light has gone out in baseness. A man with this faith can have no foul spiritual pride, for there is no mysteriously accorded divine grace in which one may be a larger participant than another. He can have no incentives to that mutilation with which every branch of the church, from the oldest to the youngest and crudest, has in its degree afflicted and retarded mankind, because the key-note of his religion is the joyful energy of every faculty, practical, reflective, creative, contemplative, in pursuit of a visible common good. And he can be plunged into no fatal and paralysing despair by any doctrine of mortal sin, because active faith in humanity, resting on recorded experience, discloses the many possibilities of moral recovery, and the work that may be done for men in the fragment of days, redeeming the contrite from their burdens by manful hope. If religion is our feeling about the highest forces that govern human destiny, then as it becomes more and more evident how much our destiny is shaped by the |