cumstances forced the reformed churches into servile dependency on governments; and governments, in spite of Plato and Dr. Arnold, are essentially utilitarian and immoral. Politicians study peace rather than progress; they say a thing "works well," when ostensibly favouring existing circumstances and interests: and the ideal, which was subordinated in the old theocratic church, seems entirely suppressed in its more emphatically political successor.2 In grasping at the stability and permanency in which it was deficient, Protestantism lost the flexibility and power of self-adaptation3 which so long made Catholicism tolerable, and enabled it to maintain its ground for so many ages.

Meantime the progress of ideas went on under other auspices. The general rights of free thought and toleration so nobly advocated by Spinoza, Locke, and Thomasius, after the desolating wars and persecutions originated by religion in France and Germany, were generally conceded; science advanced in the path of discovery unchecked; and philosophy and history began to operate silently but surely on general intelligence. There resulted a renewal of the old estrangement between theology and knowledge under singularly anomalous circumstances; a barefaced deification of absurdity altogether unprecedented in the history of the world. Churches notoriously based on civil enactment resorted to the desperate expedient of attempting to defend untenable ground, in despite of better knowledge, by reviving exploded claims of theocratic infallibility; and their members were placed in the false and cruel position of official guar

1 See Appendix A.

2 "In the great end of a church," says Dr. Arnold (Life, vol. ii. p. 57), "all churches are now greatly defective, the life of these societies has long been gone; they do not help the individual in holiness; and this in itself is evil enough;-but it is monstrous that they should pretend to fetter, when they do not assist."

3 That is, in virtue of the lofty claim of the old church to be the outward covering or body of the divine spirit. Ephes. ii. 20-22; iv. 13.

dians of superannuated prejudice, of being debarred from teaching and professing what they were not forbidden to learn. They were compelled to be in a sense deceivers by a deceptive system, as well as a people resolutely apathetic and "pien di sonno" as to religious novelties, and obstinately bent on being deceived. They alone remained in anomalous isolation, married as it were to an eternal formulary, without the possibility of divorce, however antiquated or irksome the appendage might have grown; and, while ostensibly directing the highest spiritual interests, inconsistently compelled to wear an iron mask, and to observe the circumlocutory tone which is equivalent to eternal silence. The vice is in the system; making it impossible to attach exclusive responsibility to either of the parties, layman, clergyman, or politician, who are concerned in the result. The layman is for the most part helpless, occasionally, perhaps, exerting a feeble and desultory influence over opinion in exceptional cases, but generally forming the impelling force or dead weight of the machinery, forcing it to work in the old direction, and content, in case of insubordination or default, to do the work of inquisitor or executioner. The others contribute both actively and passively to the dead lock of religious fixture; the one demoralized by the system, and loth to jeopardise a precarious remnant of theocratic assumption by permitting the anomalous intrusion of change and lay interference; the other equally averse to disturb pretensions practically conducive to material interests, and already to a large extent beyond their control. Under such circumstances it seems difficult to imagine how an institution formed for resistance can undergo the angelic transformation into an instrument of progress, without a crisis which must be deprecated, or a previous lay education which it were vain to expect. Fast anchored to the shore, how shall a church teach us to navigate the ocean? 1 See Appendix B.

How shall a mechanical slave of circumlocution abruptly assume the command of the Channel fleet? We have emancipated the negro, the Catholic, the trader, the university undergraduate; the clergyman, it is to be feared, must wait for emancipation until, in despite of untoward influences and obstacles, we have achieved a modern miracle in emancipating ourselves.

Church Theology and True Theology.

Yet the better impulses of human nature defy arbitrary limitations. The religious nature of man is a perennial tendency towards perfection. What are fame, family, science, but tangible subordinate phases of that Infinite which religion looks for absolutely, and in itself? Moral beings are essentially progressive; for morality is but the regulated pursuit of an end or good, and all human good is relative, all attainment provisional and imperfect. Genuine theology must therefore have a progressive character. Considered in its true sense apart from conventionalism, it can only be another aspect of education and philosophy; meaning pursuit of the good and true, unlimited aspiration supplementing in a particular department the actual imperfection of human nature. The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being is not a system of creed, but, as Socrates said, an infinite search or approximation. It is no unalterable quantity or form of doctrine, but a continual growth, whose temporary image and expression is the best opinion of the best informed persons of the day. It is never ending and "ever learning;" like the apostle, whose strength was perfected in weakness, it makes a boast of insufficiency and uncertainty, never hesitating to admit an error, or to recognize in each successive discovery the conditions of a new problem. False theology is a formula adopted from common opinion or tradition to suit the indolent ill-educated majority. It

It

stereotypes the relative as if it were the absolute. shuns the admission of a mistake, or the correction of a formulary, as if it were annihilation. It shares the qualities of the institution from which it emanates. It resembles the church, which, according to its own favorite hypothesis, has no movement or history; whose deliberate aim is to replace the energies of intellectual life with a sterile finality and unwholesome repose; which, instead of effectually quelling the tumultuous waves of controversy, only increases the risk by denying the existence of the storm, and administering an opiate to the crew.

And yet, notwithstanding the obstinacy of churchmen, theology has never in actual fact stood wholly aloof from the influences of advancing intelligence. It arose out of the necessity of attending in a degree to the suggestions of reason, and of appropriating the resources of secular knowledge. Its ostensibly immediate object was doubtless self-establishment and defence; to secure, certify, and prove its favorite beliefs. Its first overt act of signal importance was the patristic effort to define its fundamental ideas, and to defend them against heresies; the next was the scholastic one, that elaborate endeavour to maintain the truth of these carefully defined axioms argumentatively by aid of formal logic. In each case reason was treated as the handmaid, and the attitude of theology was avowedly conservative. But this is only one part of the subject. Religion primarily belongs to feeling and intuition. Its first theological effort is an attempt to select out of the unsifted heterogeneous stores of reason and imagination what appears best suited to express those feelings, and thus to form a popular creed. Churchmen then make the prematurely consecrated formulary into a perpetual and universal limit. They "must obey God rather than man;" and hence, whenever clerical hands interfere with education, assumption tends to usurp the place of reason, an arbitrary tone is propagated downward, education

merges in instruction, and the school assumes more or less the functions of the seminary. And yet in the midst of this characteristic arrogance and narrowness, theology could not entirely belie its better nature, or resist the silent operation of the law leading on even the most reluctant to something higher and nobler; the spirit which in time overcame the obstinacy of the Jew, and revolutionised the form of Christianity. Animated from the first with the wish to attain a more distinct knowledge and mastery of its own conceptions, it began to discriminate, to enquire; as St. Paul, the first Christian theologian, more accurately defined the true relation of the Christian ideas to those preceding them. Doubtless the process which gradually substituted the work of intellect for that of feeling, tended, in course of time and under the peculiar circumstances of theology, to paralyze the free emotional flow of religious aspiration in rigidities of system. Still the impulse was in itself salutary; it was the ineradicable desire of the intellect to enrich faith with knowledge. The very effort to analyse and defend the current ideas of religion, placed them in a new light, and changed their relative import. And then why such anxiety to certify and prove, if the believer was fully certified already? why ransack human philosophy and learning to complete a really self-sufficing creed, or to fortify impregnable truths to be maintained at all hazards regardless of misgiving?

The fact is that the conservative and defensive attitude of theology is only secondary; its primary tendencies are sceptical and critical,-a desire for self-purification and amendment, engendered by the lurking sense of obscurity and insufficiency. However irritably jealous of interruption and contradiction, it is the unceasing agitation of a problem, a perennial process of self-regeneration. Each of its many varieties led slowly but surely towards a more thorough transformation; and when the modern growth of thought and science challenged rivalry, theology too began