The divine perfections were reflected through the medium of a perfect humanity, and were thus made near, familiar, and liable to love. The great all-pervading law of human sympathy became directly available for religion, and in linking us to the Divine Humanity, linked us by the same act to God. And this not for rare and exceptional souls alone, but for the common order of mankind. The direct contact, the interior personal communion of the individual with God, was re-established: for human faculties, in their normal action, could now appreciate, and approach to, what had previously been inappreciable and unapproachable. Surely the system I have thus rudely exhibited was ideally a great philosophy, as well as practically an immeasurable boon. To strike out the redemptive clauses from the scheme is to erase the very feature by which it essentially differed from all other schemes; and to substitute a didactic exhibition of superior morality, with the rays of an example in the preterite tense, set by a dead man in Judea, for that scheme of living forces, by which the powers of a living Saviour's humanity are daily and hourly given to man, under a charter which expires only with the world itself. Is it possible here to discern, either from an ideal or from a practical point of view, anything but depletion and impoverishment, and the substitution of a spectral for a living form?

If we proceed to the second question, the spec

tacle, as it presents itself to me, is stranger still. Although we know that James Mill, arrested by the strong hand of Bishop Butler, halted rather than rested for a while in theism on his progress towards general negation, yet his case does not supply, nor can we draw from other sources, any reason to regard such a position as one which can be largely and permanently held against that relentless force of logic, which is ever silently at work to assert and to avenge itself. The theist is confronted, with no breakwater between, by the awful problem of moral evil, by the mystery of pain, by the apparent anomalies of waste and of caprice on the face of creation; and not least of all by the fact that, while the moral government of the world is founded on the free agency of man, there are in multitudes of cases environing circumstances independent of his will which seem to deprive that agency, called free, of any operative power adequate to contend against them. In this bewildered state of things, in this great enigma of the world, "Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? . . . Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat?"*

There has come upon the scene the figure of a Redeemer, human and divine. Let it be granted that the Incarnation is a marvel wholly be

*Is. lxiii. 1, 2.

yond our reach, and that the miracle of the Resurrection to-day gives serious trouble to fastidious intellects. But the difficulties of a baffled understanding, lying everywhere around us in daily experience, are to be expected from its limitations; not so the shocks encountered by the moral sense. Even if the Christian scheme slightly lengthened the immeasurable catalogue of the first, this is dust in the balance compared with the relief it furnishes to the second; in supplying the most powerful remedial agency ever known, in teaching how pain may be made a helper, and evil transmuted into good; and in opening clearly the vision of another world, in which we are taught to look for yet larger counsels of the Almighty wisdom. To take away, then, the agency so beneficent, which has so softened and reduced the moral problems that lie thickly spread around us, and to leave us face to face with them in all their original rigor, is to enhance and not to mitigate the difficulties of belief.

Lastly, it is not difficult to understand why those who prefer the Pagan ideal, or who cannot lay hold on the future world, or who labor under still greater disadvantages, should put aside as a whole the Gospel of God manifest in the flesh. But Mrs. Ward is none of these; and it is far harder to comprehend the mental attitude, or the mental consistency at least, of those who like her desire to retain what was manifested, but to thrust aside the manifesting Person,

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and all that His living personality entails: or, if I may borrow an Aristotelian figure, to keep the accidents and discard the substance. I cannot pretend to offer a solution of this hard riddle. But there is one feature which almost uniformly marks writers whose mind as in this case is of a religious tone, or who do not absolutely exclude religion, while they reject the Christian dogma and the authority of Scripture. They appear to have a very low estimate both of the quantity and the quality of sin of its amount, spread like a deluge over the world, and of the subtlety, intensity, and virulence of its nature. I mean a low estimate as compared with the mournful denunciations of the sacred writings, or with the language especially of the later Christian Confessions. Now let it be granted that, in interpreting those Confessions, we do not sufficiently allow for the enormous differences among human beings-differences both of original disposition, and of ripened character. We do not sufficiently take account of the fact that, while disturbance and degradation have so heavily affected the mass, there are a happy few on whom nature's degeneracy has but lightly laid its hand. In the biography of the late Dr. Marsh we have an illustration apt for my purpose. His family was straitly Evangelical. He underwent what he deemed to be conversion. A like-minded friend congratulated his mother on the work of Divine grace in her son. But,

in the concrete, she mildly resented the remark, and replied that in truth "Divine grace would find very little to do in her son William."

In the novel of "The Unclassed," by the author of "Thyrza," which like "Robert Elsmere" is of the didactic and speculative class, the leading man-character, when detailing his mental history, says that "sin" has never been for him a word of weighty import. So ingenuous a confession is not common. I remember but one exception to the rule that the negative writers of our own day have formed, or at least have exhibited, a very feeble estimate of the enormous weight of sin, as a factor in the condition of man and of the world. That exception is Amiel. Mrs. Ward has prefixed to her translation of his remarkable and touching work an Introduction from which I make the following extract:

"His Calvinistic training lingers long in him; and what detaches him from the Hegelian school, with which he has much in common, is his own stronger sense of personal need, his preoccupation with the idea of sin. He speaks (says M. Renan contemptuously) of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, as if these things were realities. He asks me, 'What does M. Renan make of sin?' 'Eh bien, je crois que je le supprime.'”

The closing expression is a happy one: sin is for the most part suppressed.

We are bound to believe, and I for one do believe, that in many cases the reason why the doctrines of