embraces vaster and more vaster possibilities than he dreams of. To argue from them as they are here and now is to take a number for the series into which it enters. They are facts and outcomes of human nature in its entirety, and must be viewed from this standpoint; it is as vain to endeavour to extirpate as it is to stereotype them: they have always been, and they have been always changing; they are, they will be; but they change, and they will continue to change. This point of view does not lend itself to rhetoric, or subserve the interests of religious or political party; it solves few, if any, of the questions which perplex us; its answer, when these are put to or pressed upon it, is, and must be, for the most part, 'I do not know.' For there are many things of which we must be content to remain ignorant; with regard to which knowledge is given to us in outline only-the detail is not filled in. Again, over and above certain technical studies in history and philosophy, it presupposes what is called a liberal education; the sense of proportion, the power of comparison, the faculty of estimating the nature and value of evidence: hence it is in a sense esoteric, and inaccessible to the uneducated or half-educated—in a word, to the average man. That this

is so is, probably, the chief difficulty that religion has to meet in our time. For religion, though to be distinguished from, is, in the concrete, intimately associated with theology; and to accept the traditional theology in any real sense a certain power of drawing distinctions, of philosophising, is necessary. While the number of well-informed persons— and to these its inadequacy is palpable—is increasing daily, philosophers are, and are likely to remain, few. Hence an intolerable strain and tension. Entre la religion inintelligente et le matérialisme brutal, âme poétique et pure, où serait ta place?' There is no royal road out of the impasse ; step by step the upward path must be trodden: no one can do our thinking for us; we must think and feel each for himself and alone. But if the experience of the past has any lesson it is this: that short cuts are to be distrusted; that direct and simple methods lead us, in the long run, astray. Lucidity is a good; but it is so relatively to the

subject-matter: this admits of it more or less according to its character; the most valid standpoint is not necessarily that which the average man most readily grasps. To forget this is the besetting sin of the French intellect. Its thought is logical; its language perspicuous: and herein, in dealing with the things of mind, lies a twofold snare. A French writer of repute, the story goes, interviewed Hegel, and asked that philosopher to put before him a succinct account of the Hegelian system. 'Monsieur,' was the answer, ces choses ne se disent pas succinctement surtout en français.'

IX. EVOLUTION AND THE CHURCH

A GOOD many years ago, when the English press was disturbed by one of its periodical scares at the prospect of a Russian advance in Central Asia, Lord Salisbury advised the panic-mongers to send for a large map. His meaning was not that the defence of the Indian frontier was a matter of indifference, but that the danger was less imminent than they supposed. There was reason, there is always reason, for precaution; none for alarm. The same holds of religion. Many good men fear for its future. As knowledge advances, faith, it seems to them, recedes. What is gained for the former is lost to the latter; the tide comes up, now clamorous, now silent, but always irresistible, and covers what was once dry land. And, as it rises, the sense of the ideal element in life, they think, becomes atrophied; a practical materialism goes hand in hand with indifference and unbelief.

For this state of mind, in so far as it is distinct from that of the laudator temporis acti'-an attitude which is not peculiar to the old, being a matter less of age than of temperament-there is this apparent justification, that not a few of the beliefs of the past are no longer ours. This fact may be interpreted in one of two ways. It may mean that these beliefs, as such, are dead or dying. Such has been the lot of beliefs so ancient and so widely spread as those in witchcraft and in astrology; we have outgrown them; they have simply disappeared. Or it may mean that the ideas for which they stand are undergoing a process of transformation preparatory to entering upon a new and fuller life. For a religious belief is a

complex, often a highly complex, whole. It takes form and gathers accretions from the various strata of civilisation and thought through which it passes; the reason being that it is not an abstract idea, but a concrete mental fact, existing under definite conditions, in a particular environment, and in the consciousness of individual men who occupy the standpoint of their time and place. Its content, therefore, is variable. It is not easy to recognise the later in the earlier stages, or to predict the future development from the shape in which it appears to-day. Take, for example, the belief in a future life. It is a long way from the thin shades of Homer, or the race-continuity of the Old Testament, to the notion of personal and individual immortality. And now, it seems, this too is breaking up under the pressure of interior contradiction, and revealing a larger conception. To many, individual immortality presents itself as a side only, and that a subordinate side, of the future that awaits us. It is possible, they think, that, while retaining all that is worth retaining in the individual self, all without which this self would become as if it were not and had never been, the individual may be merged in the whole-in God, in man, and in Nature-as a drop in the ocean, penetrated and penetrating. Such a conception does not destroy that of personal immortality, it completes it. Sown in weakness, the original belief is raised in power. The earlier stages lead up to and must be judged by the later; they stand to it as the seedling to the tree.

So with the rest. With regard at least to vital truths, it is their form, not their substance, that is changing; the persistence of force holds in thought as in things. And while it is true that this change is accompanied by risk and open to misconception, that in some it produces perplexity and in others an uncertainty which too easily passes into unbelief, these states of mind are passing. The large map is the corrective. When we look away from the small issues and interests of contemporary controversy to the larger field of history, the conviction grows upon us that we need not be afraid. A premature, indeed,

may be as mischievous as an outgrown synthesis; there are times when the truest wisdom is to know how to wait. But a survey of the past shows that the ideas, the feelings, and the activities which constitute and are the outcome of religion are part of our nature; that in one shape or another they have been with us from the beginning till now. And this necessarily, for they spring from the constitution of the mind and its relation to its environment; from its consciousness both of what is the limit-and of what ought to be the limit overcome. In the opposition between these poles their reconciliation is already given, though implicitly, and as a truth of anticipation rather than of demonstration; as immediate experience to be elaborated in life and mind. It acquires colour, form, and content as generation succeeds generation; but it is present all along in consciousness, and can only be overlooked or misinterpreted in so far as our analysis of consciousness is at fault. It is no doubt conceivable that the universe as known to us is mirage and phantasmagoria; that Nature, our own human nature included, is designed to mislead and deceive us. If a man insists that this is so, we cannot disprove it by reasoning; 'solvitur ambulando' is the only argument by which he can be met. But it is sufficient. By its working in history and in experience we judge that the religious instinct, not indeed in its relative and necessarily imperfect manifestations, whether of earlier or later date, but in itself, as underlying and struggling with these limitations towards complete expression and actuality, at once posits itself and postulates its object. Pragmatism justifies the thought judgment; the real is the rational, and the rational the real.

Professor Pfleiderer's death in an honoured and honourable old age recalls labours for the advancement of religion and learning begun in early life and continued to the end. The ideas which he represented have suffered a temporary eclipse. Other conceptions, complementary rather than conflicting, have come into prominence, for truth is manysided, and perhaps from no one standpoint can it be surveyed as a whole. But in Christentum und Religion' there is