Maurice, to recognize, through and in them all, One who is working out the redemption of the time, and unveiling Himself to our age as He did to our fathers' age, through these throes and strivings of the nations.

We are advised on another side to believe in a God who has made the world for "a prudent, steady, hardy, enduring race of men, who are neither fools nor cowards, and who have no particular love for those who are," and are told that the business of religion is, to threaten or bribe the fools and cowards. The chief preacher of this Gospel is another of our instructors to whom Mr. Maurice's theology has been a sore stumbling-block. But we should doubt whether any wayfarer, conscious that the religion in which he has been brought up wants recasting, will care to exchange for this "Calvinism minus Christianity," as it has been well called, Mr. Maurice's teaching, that all prudence, steadiness, hardiness, endurance, are the good gifts to His children of a God of Love, without whom we all, including the author in question, should have been fools and cowards-even as these

masses.

But of all modern schools of thought, the purely scientific, represented by Mr. Darwin (who, I believe, returned fully the warm admiration which Mr. Maurice

felt for him) has most troubled the minds of simple English Christians. A passage or two from Mr. Maurice's writings may, perhaps, lead any such who may read this book to take courage, and look the Origin of Species" squarely in the face-at any rate it will show them that he could do so:

"It has been our wont to speak of man as formed in the image of God, and yet as made out of the dust of the earth. I think those who have used the words have been aware-if not at the same moment, yet at certain moments of their livesof both the facts to which the words point, and have been trying to learn how they are compat

"I have myself little hope that we shall become fully aware of our relation to One who is above us, if from any cowardly self-glorification we shrink from confessing these baser affinities. The more thoroughly we accept the facts which attest our humiliation, the more overwhelming will be the force of the facts which attest the glory of our human parentage. If Mr. Darwin has added new strength to the one kind of evidence-whether he has or not, as I told you before, I have no right to affirm, or even to guess-I can have no doubt whence the discoveries have come, or by whom that search has

been prompted. I perceive that in his last book he speaks with much reverence of the moral elevation which the belief of a one omnipotent ruler of the universe is likely to produce in those who cherish it. I am afraid that in me such a belief would cause more depression than elevation. Mere omnipotence is crushing. Whereas anyone whose heart confesses that every step in the apprehension of nature or man, or the archetype of man, is due to the education of a loving parent, must be sure that no diligence, such as that of Mr. Darwin, in studying the meanest insect or flower, can be wasted; but will also be sure that the processes in the student himself -the springs of his zeal and patience-must have a far deeper interest, must carry us into another region altogether."

"The Newtonian doctrine, with which Mr. Huxley teaches us to compare the Darwinian, was a wonderful blessing to man, inasmuch as it shook the notion that the planet which contained what most concerned them was the centre of the universe. The moral results of that shaking, and of the belief which followed it, have been invaluable. I do not think we have yet more than begun to take account of them. But there was this disadvantage accompanying the blessing, one which has often led the student of humanity to

undervalue it. When the earth took its subordinate position in the universe, it seemed as if man too had been degraded. We began to talk affectedly and dishonestly of ourselves as 'mere atoms in the infinite regions of space,' whilst each man knew that he did not count himself an atom at all; that he did not reckon sun or stars at a higher rate than his own personal being. Great contradictions, enormous fallacies, were engendered by this mode of speaking and thinking. It seems to me that the students of physics are themselves to supply the counteraction to them. Let them say what they will about the origin of man, it is about his origin that all their faculties are chiefly exercised. Whatever may have been his starting point, here he is. Show what atoms he comes from, if you will, and if you can; let any creature you like have been his progenitor, still the diapason closes full on him. More than ever it becomes necessary to look into his actual history; out of whatever egg he has issued, we must try to acquaint ourselves, not so much with the process of his incubation, as with the kind of creature he has become since the shell was broken, and he has acquired a distinct existence."

Is there any want of clearness here? Are these the words of one whose meaning is not plain to

himself, or who has any difficulty in expressing it ?

If the “religion in which we have been brought up" wants recasting, as no doubt in some sense it does, let us first look fairly at what has been done in this direction. A man has been amongst us whose work in life was precisely this. And while his writings have exercised an enormous influence on theological thought, his life has been even a greater witness for the truth which he taught; that life of one “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing;" "poor, yet making many rich;" "having nothing, and yet possessing all things."

Those who have lived and worked with him, cannot but have learnt to know and feel something of the power which transforms men if they will only let it.

He was in those early days, as always," writes one of his oldest friends, speaking of him when he was chaplain of Guy's, "the strongest man I have ever known, if it be strength to do steadily to the end the work which is set before a man, undeterred by any doubts or difficulties, however great and many. Yet I am sure he would have said-and I believe it was true that the strength was not his own, but that of a Higher will than his own working through his weakness. It was the strength, not of self-assertion,