heaven or a hell, the enhancement of the religious faculty must remain the one essential effort, and how this can be promoted the one essential enquiry. What, then, is the outcome of it all?

As has been already, with perhaps wearisome iteration, charged, the salient, horrible fact of life is pain. But pain comes attended by a thousand ministers of love and consolation. That the life of charity, as St. Paul understood the word, is the life which, if followed by all, would most diminish pain in the world, cannot be doubted. That the life of charity can be consistently lived in this world of villainy and injustice is doubtful in the extreme. Life must therefore consist of a compromise between charity and self-defence, or, as Mr. Spencer would put it, between altruism and egoism. It does not consist in floating calmly on the propitious waves of evolution, nor need it be darkened by fears of the misery necessary to create selection; but it does consist of a conflict between the human and divine in us that is sometimes difficult, sometimes exhilarating, sometimes desperate. The man who hopes that religion can show him a royal road to perfection or happiness is like the camel that, having to climb a mountain, asked the way to do so across the plain. We must all strive to increase our knowledge so that the soul may know what orders to give the body, and the body be strong to carry out the orders of the soul; and we must strive to keep alive in us that faculty of choice or ability to create the greater inclination which makes us masters of ourselves; we

must be clear that it is by our own efforts that we can work out our own salvation; we must revere the God in us, and the God in those around us; we must seek knowledge, health, courage, and reverence —not any one, but all together—that a man may be teres atque rotundus, with a wholesome mind, a wholesome body, a wholesome, courageous, revering heart.

When religion and science have come together to make up such a man as this, then, perhaps, he may be fitted to undertake self-government on that larger field which, because it is larger, is for that reason more complicated and more difficult, and yet upon which every adult male is now at liberty to break a lance in his own cause as well as in that of the commonwealth-politics.

But before we enter on the subject of politics we have still to consider the relation of the Church to the state.

CHAPTER VIII.

THE CHURCH AND THE STATE.

Two recent books have undertaken to deal with the rôle which the Church has to play in practical life. One of them, penned in the cloistered seclusion of the university, unfolds with scholarly calm the history and mission of the Church universal; it handles the subject with love and reverence; it appeals to the reason and the heart of culture, and concludes in favour of the hope and belief that the Church is destined to increase its command over the consciences of men. The other, pounded out in the turmoil of the city, dictated hurriedly to stenographers during moments snatched from the absorbing duties of a publisher, prompted by the sæva indignatio of one who has seen vice triumph on the very steps of the altar, regarding Christ and the Church as mere pawns in his game, and in a rage to find that they do not prevent a stalemate, seizes that Church universal by the throat; reminds it that it is, or should be, also a Church militant; rates it for not usurping the duties of the state in the suppression of gambling, prostitution, and political corruption; threatens to create a rival civic

church which shall do what the Church militant has failed to do; and closes with a chapter that anticipates time as well as victory in a description of Chicago rid by his scheme of gamblers, prostitutes, and politicians, and converted by a maritime canal. into a seaport, the capital of the United States and the-hostess of the German Emperor!

It would be impossible to conceive of men more different in temperament and education than Mr. Lilly and Mr. Stead; nor would it be possible to treat the same subject more differently than they do; and yet upon one essential point they entirely agree both see and declare that the Church fails to deal with the evils it was instituted to destroy, and both seek a remedy. Mr. Lilly, after an able exposition of the superior claims of Christianity over Buddhism and Islam, traces the influence of this Church through the middle ages, the Renaissance, and our own time. He points out that the history of the world presents us with three distinct conceptions of the relation of religion to human society in ancient times it was national; during the middle. ages it was universal; to-day it has become individual. The great and distinguishing peculiarity of the middle ages is that in them throughout Europe the whole structure of man's life, both public and private, was built upon religion; and as there was but one religion, and the Pope was the head of that religion, the papacy constituted a power independent of national lines, a spiritual kingdom-the Catholic Church, with which Christendom was coterminous.

Guizot is quoted in support of this statement. "It is just at the moment when the Roman Empire is breaking up and disappearing that the Christian Church gathers itself up and takes its definite form. Political unity perishes, religious unity emerges." To quote Mr. Lilly himself upon this point: "Hence Christendom, rather than the particular region of it in which they happened to dwell, was regarded as their true country and the first object of their patriotism. The rigid lines of demarcation which in the ancient world had separated races, and had made the words stranger and enemy synonymous, were broken down. The phrase 'Christian commonwealth' was a reality, and the several European states were sections of it. For the first time in the world's history, as a learned writer has well observed: we see not merely man, but humanity. The citizen and the helot, Greeks and barbarians, have disappeared, and in their place is a family of brothers, with one divine Father."" + The Pope, too, according to Mr. Lilly, was the arbiter of Europe; he was forever interposing between rival states and conflicting parties with the words of the leader of Israel, "Sirs, ye are brethren." The great injury which the Renaissance did the world was to break down the power of the Pope. From that period, what with the abuses in the Church denounced by Luther, the political

* Guizot, sec. xii, p. 230.

Lilly's Claims of Christianity, p. 111.