family; only they oppose the Puritanism which sets goodness at an unapproachable height above its sisters, and they are disposed rather to give the highest place to beauty.' Seeley gives us no theory of the beautiful; he only bids us observe that its votaries pursue it in the spirit of the genuine worshipper.

On the Continent, the philosophers who have laid most stress on the æsthetical ground of Faith are perhaps Fries, Novalis, and Cousin. For the first two I will be content to refer you to histories of philosophy, or to the writers themselves. Cousin (1792-1867) is a good modern example of the type which we are now considering. All natural beauty, he says, is an image of ideal beauty, which is realised only in God. The physically beautiful is the wrapping of the intellectually and morally beautiful. Moral beauty comprises two elements, justice and charity. He who is consistently just and charitable is in his way the greatest of artists. God is the principle of all three orders of beauty, physical, intellectual, and moral. Moreover, the sublime and the beautiful meet and amalgamate in His nature.

Enough has now been said to show that in the opinion of many great minds the beautiful is one of the chief avenues to the knowledge of God. I believe that in this country we have neglected it to our great loss. We have been too prone to throw away one of the chief antidotes to worldliness and lowness of aim. Neglect of beauty is stamped on our whole civilisation, which still presents far too many coarse and unlovely features. Commercialism has helped to destroy what might be a source of inexhaustible spiritual wealth. For, like all the best gifts of God, beauty is within the reach of all, and there is no limit to its store. The aesthetical sense refines and gladdens life, making poverty dignified, and wealth no longer vulgar.

But, more than any other type of religion, this needs discipline and true seriousness. 'Romanticism '—the

movement which began with Novalis and survives in many supporters of the 'Catholic revival'-is too often a somewhat frivolous mental attitude, a mode of mild sensuous pleasure. It is most agreeable, perhaps, to those who have time on their hands, and who wish to enjoy their religious sensations. The whole romantic movement, on its religious side, bears the marks of a revival—an imitation of the past. In its earlier stages the most conscientious efforts were made to recover the entire religious atmosphere of the Middle Ages. Just as pseudo-Gothic castles were erected by pacific nineteenthcentury squires and retired stockbrokers, so the ecclesiastical fashions of the centuries before the Reformation were carefully copied, and the beliefs and disciplines of our semi-barbarous ancestors were held up for our acceptance and imitation. The temporary success of so artificial a creation is a measure of the loss which the human spirit feels when worship is divorced from beauty.

The deepest service which Christianity has rendered to art is closely connected with the ground of their frequent estrangements. The Incarnation means that the universe shares man's relation to its Creator. As the world is the living vesture of God, so when the Logos, through whom all things were made, assumed human form, in exalting humanity He ennobled also the whole of man's environment. In proclaiming this truth, Christianity introduced, potentially, a new force and freedom into art. Deeper notes were sounded; discords, formerly ignored, were caught up into a higher harmony. Suffering was recognised as divine, and thereby transmuted; death was faced, welcomed, and conquered. Henceforth the facile grace and symmetry of ancient art were impossible, and each pagan revival has viewed Christianity askance, as introducing ugliness and discord into the new Olympus. But the stone gods can never live again. Beauty is too large and too divine a thing to ignore any part of reality. It was

not given us to use as a decorative adjunct to life. Faith bids us go through the whole of our life in the spirit of a worshipper; and, as in the ancient mysteries, the fairest and fullest visions are reserved for the end of the course. Faith, meanwhile, has to grapple with much intractable ugliness, only secure of her final victory.

CHAPTER XIII

FAITH AS HARMONIOUS SPIRITUAL DEVELOPMENT

We have now reached the last stage of our inquiry into the nature of Faith. We have found that it is a divine endowment of human nature, which operates through our natural faculties. It emerges into consciousness as a vague instinct-a prompting which impels us to look for a meaning in life-to seek behind the veil of ever-changing phenomena some permanent and solid reality which shall be proof against 'the wreckful siege of battering days,' and which, by setting before us an absolute standard, shall give us the right always to aspire. This instinct is of varying intensity, but at first it is without form and void. It seeks for forms, for a mould which it may enter, and generally finds it in one or other of the creeds which are presented to it as authoritative. But whereas it is potentially rich in varied contents, capable of correspondences which link our complex human nature with the divine, and whereas all these correspondences are at first wrapped up and withdrawn from consciousness, Faith can never come to its own except by being lived into-experienced in a life which should be as full and rich and as many-sided as possible. There are no short cuts to a perfect Faith, though there are many provisional and avowedly premature syntheses of which we may and must avail ourselves.

'Faith is life,' as Mr. Skrine says in his beautiful little book, What is Faith? What to the vine-branch is

1 P. 30 sqq.

living, that to man is believing. We, like the branch, are saved if we abide in the Vine, that is, if we are alive. If life is the adjustment of the internal relations of a living thing to the external relations, Faith is the response of the organism which we name the soul, to that environment which we call God. Souls are kept in life by their obedience to one law-their true response to all the forces touching them, which come from God.' A man's salvation is measured by the degree in which he is alive. Is he in definite, full, various, increasing correspondence with God? Is he alive on the side of mind? Does the organ, by which he is sensible to the world of fact, adjust its activities to the arrangement of those facts? Does it mirror things as they are and not as he would wish them to be? Does it weave on the magic loom of consciousness the true pattern of the landscape beyond the window of self? Is he alive on the side of emotion? Is there an answer of the heart to the relations of that nearest environment, Humanity? Has he love, which is the response to the fact of a brotherhood encircling him? Are his sympathies quick, and does a neighbour's grief stir pity in him, and his joy a joy? Is he alive on the side of action? Does the movement of the practical order-the thing that is done upon earth-stir a vibration in his will? Do the things that God doeth Himself-His works seen in the process of nature and in the state-find him a fellow-worker? Does he by his activity propel, and by his passivity smooth, the march of betterment? To do and be these things is to be alive; and to live is to be in Faith.'

I am glad to quote these eloquent words, which express very well the general view of the normal growth and life of Faith which I have upheld in these lectures. All through I have been deprecating that tendency to snatch at some creed or formula or theory which will save us any more trouble. We have found guides who say to us: Take this vague Faith-consciousness as it is. Intensify it