proportion of honour-men among them is infinitesimal; too frequently their theological reading before ordination is limited to carefully prepared partisan handbooks, after it to the Guardian and the Church Times. The natural result follows. The men are zealous, often good organisers, assiduous in their visiting, their parish work and their schools. But their pulpit ministrations are vapid beyond bearing :

Their lean and flashy songs

Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw;
The hungry sheep look up, and are not fed.

No one who has been accustomed to attend the services of the Presbyterian Church can be surprised that church attendance is better in Scotland than in England, or fail to note the contrast between a learned and unlearned clergy, a living and a dead ministry of the Word. The best English sermons are of the essay type; preaching, in the sense in which the word is used in Scotland, is seldom heard. With this goes an ostrich-like reluctance and inability to face vital questions. In any but a clerical assembly the discussion on Schweitzer's 'Von Reimarus zu Wrede '1 at the Cambridge Church Congress would have been thought disingenuous; and it is humiliating to reflect that, for one Anglican clergyman who has read or is capable of estimating the book, there are in all probability ten Nonconformists who have studied it, preached on it, and possess a working knowledge of the literature and the tendencies which it represents. It is to be regretted, it is very greatly to be regretted, that this is so. Ideas by themselves neither constitute religion nor guarantee its future. But to ply Englishmen with cautions against ideas is superfluous. We shall take to ourselves, if we are wise, the warning addressed by a great French scholar to his own Church:

La plus sage des politiques, la plus généreuse sollicitude pour les classes populaires, n'assureraient pas chez nous l'avenir du catholicisme, si le catholicisme, qui, étant une religion, est d'abord une foi, se présentait sous les apparences

1 Translated under the title of The Quest of the Historical Jesus. A. and C. Black, 1910.

d'une doctrine et d'une discipline opposées au libre essor de l'esprit humain, déjà minées par la science, isolées et isolantes au milieu du monde qui veut vivre, s'instruire et progresser en tout.1

'Securus judicat orbis terrarum.' The maxim makes not for the past but for the future; it opens before us, if we have eyes to discern it, a vision immense, immeasurable -unexplored continents and unsailed seas.

They speak perhaps more truly than they know who tell us that for the English Church the time in which we live is critical; that she has come to the parting of the ways. The call of Empire is in her ears: she may hear it, and follow; she may be deaf to it, and refrain. In other words, she may resign herself to the distinctive position of Anglicanism, or she may rise to her higher calling, and take her stand for English Christianity as a whole. In the former case Abide ye here with the ass will be her programme. It is a poor one. She will rest on her past; she will appeal to the stationary elements of society-the uneducated, the unintelligent, those who for one reason or another stand outside the main stream. She will continue to influence the imagination and sentiment of a section of the nation; she will probably approximate more and more to mediaval doctrine and ceremonial; by her claim, disputable as it is, to be (in the sectarian sense of the word) Catholic, she may retain a handful of enthusiasts whose natural gravitation is towards Rome. But this road leads nowhere. A Church which takes it may be long in dying, but is on the road to die. In the other case a great, a very great, destiny awaits her-the furtherance of the religious life of the English people at home and beyond the seas. Her characteristic Via Media' is not, and is not likely to become, a middle term between Rome and Protestantism; the changes that are taking place in Latin Christendom do not look her way. But the least reformed' of the Reformed Churches, and inheriting the political genius of the nation to which she owes her distinctive features, she may unite for her own people the best elements of the old order and

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1 Loisy, Autour d'un petit livre, xxxv.

of the new. Should it be so, it is not England only that will be the gainer; the 'vasti luminis orae' will receive increase. Her past has been great; her future may be greater. The latter glory of this house shall be greater than the former; and in this place will I give peace.'

XVI. THE IDEAS OF MRS HUMPHRY WARD

THE novel falls into one of four classes, as it deals with romance, with life, with ideas, or as, lastly, it takes the shape of a work of art pure and simple. Of the great novelists of the last century, Scott, Thackeray, and George Eliot stand for the first three types. For the fourth we look in vain in that period. Mr. Hardy, who embodies it as to the manner born, is of our own generation; and here the name which at once occurs to us for romance is that of Robert Louis Stevenson, for life that of George Meredith, and for ideas that of Mrs. Humphry Ward. The divisions, of course, overlap; Stevenson was a consummate artist, and Meredith had an instinctive faculty for ideas. But they indicate broadly the point of view occupied by these writers; and, in a large sense, the classification holds.

It would be too much to say that Mrs. Ward is not an artist. She is so well educated,' says a recent critic, 'that she knows the proper ingredients for a novel. Picturesque backgrounds are provided; plot is carefully planned; incident does not lack; local colour is thoughtfully wrought up.' But her art is not instinctive. It suggests the collector who knows just what to buy and how to exhibit his collection to the best advantage, but whose motive for collecting lies outside art; or the critic who has made himself master of his subject, and is familiar with the various schools and their representatives, but whose lips are untouched by the sacred fire. If we go a little up stream we shall understand this. Mrs. Ward is the last term of a series. Dr. Arnold was not only a great headmaster, the creator of the modern public school, but a thinker and teacher who, but for his early removal from Oxford and his premature death, would have

exercised as profound an influence on English religion as he did on English education. The author of 'Literature and Dogma' was not only a poet and a man of letters, but a critic who, had he not been in advance of his age, and gifted with a lightness of touch which it viewed with the mistrust of stupidity brought into unaccustomed contact with genius, might have accelerated by a generation the advance of English theology. Mrs. Ward has neither the passion of her grandfather nor the irony of her uncle. But she has inherited the seriousness of the one and the insight of the other; there is an apostolical succession between the three.

Art, it would seem, has come into her life as a sideissue, and acquired no more than quasi-domicile. The Puritan tradition, the introspection, the strenuousness, and above all the marked absence of anything resembling the sensuous in her temperament, have tolerated rather than welcomed the alien guest. Her characters, and in particular her women, are skilfully drawn and often finely coloured. Marcella, Laura, Julie, Eleanor, and above all Catherine Elsmere, are alive. But they do not live for themselves, or because they cannot help living. There is nothing inevitable in them; they are there because they stand for something else—an idea, a moral, an association; they are by-products of thought, not up-wellings of spontaneous life. This is even more markedly the case with her men. Elsmere, Meynell, Raeburn are in the first instance preachers; the message is more than the man.

This point of view, which was that of Wordsworth'I wish to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing needs no apology. It comes naturally to the reflective, as distinct from the merely receptive, temperament. In a fine passage in the preface to 'David Grieve,' contributed to the handsome edition of her collected works, Mrs. Ward explains it.

I am so made that I cannot picture a human being's development without wanting to know the whole, his religion as well as his business, his thoughts as well as his actions. I cannot try to reflect my time without taking account of forces which are at least as real and living as