sisters, the needy and stricken ones; whose silent deeds of kindness and sympathy no living soul knows. Whether he be nominally Catholic or Protestant, Jew or Unitarian, I know not; yet he is full of the spirit of Christ, and his saintly life is a rebuke to the self-seeker and to the profane. Here is a religion' indeed, and one without show, or pretence, or self-advertisement. I have never asked him what his creed is. Possibly he himself does not know.

Face to face with the fact of holy living and holy dying we must abandon the superstition of the efficacy of creeds. The biographer of the Jew Spinoza, his adversary in matters theological, but one not blinded by theological differences to the essential sublimity of his life, was constrained thus to conclude his narration: "Blessed be thou, great yea holy Benedictus, notwithstanding thy vagaries in thought and word when philosophising on the nature of the Most High! His truth was in thy soul; His love was in thy life."

By way of contrast, consider the well-attested story of Lord Melbourne, who is reported to have remarked after hearing a sermon : "No one has a greater respect than myself for the Church of England, but to bring religion into private life is to go a damned sight too far."

CHAPTER XIII

The Spiritual Conflict

"Every soul of us has to do its fight with the Untoward, and for itself discover the Unseen."-RUSKIN, "Præterita," ii. p. 120.

IN

N the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, the great apostle presents us with a glimpse of that stress of soul which at times overtook him, as it overtakes all strong and sincere natures, when the will was present with him, but how to perform that which is good he found not. Torn betwixt two, he found a "law" of conflict within himself: when he would do good, evil was present with him. The good that he would do, he did not; but the evil which he would not, that he did.

Nor is the internal warfare between the higher and the lower natures, or between the enlightened moral activities and the sluggishness of habit, the only kind of conflict within the soul. There comes a time when we realise with pain that we can no longer wear the armour which our fathers wore, nor wield their weapons. The pain is not merely that of the wrench involved in breaking with the hereditary past; it is a great strife of soul, when all the holy associations of youth and early faith seem to rise up against the course to which conscience

summons. Fear and horror and dismay seem to possess the soul in fierce alternation with gleams of purpose that drive hither and thither; darkness oscillating with light, and crisis succeeding crisis, till endurance is nigh exhausted. There are hours of agony when all "the stars have set below the horizon of the soul, and a night has descended which promises no morrow." In the valley of decision, the knowledge that multitudes before us have had to pass that way makes the road no easier. Each wayfarer therein must hew his own path, and must fight the spectres of his mind-spectres which are intolerably real while the fight lasts. For oh! the loneliness of the conflict, when never a soul takes pity on the soul in agony, and when pity itself would but kindle fierce resentment. Through the refining fire of decision must the soul pass; to shirk the issue would be cowardice; to turn back would be insanity; to go forward would appear destruction. Without are fightings, within are fears. In the darkness we cry, "Would God it were morning;" yet when day breaks a living death seems upon us, and we are still fighting at odds against forces that seem to stretch out in endless line. Invisible bonds seem to constrain us; invisible foes seem to taunt us; distrust and hesitation make us quail at the moment when firmest decision is required.

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed the birth, or rather the renascence under modern aspects, of sacred doubt. Philosophic doubt has always existed sporadically amongst individuals wherever the mass of religionists has professed an

unthinking faith. Sarcastic and irreverent doubt, flouting the fealties of faith and even the sanctities of the human heart, has never failed to show its ugly head whenever superstition has been permitted to instil itself into devotion, and ecclesiastical tradition to usurp rule over religion of the heart. But reverent doubt, doubt as a sacred duty, had never before been proclaimed as a part of religion, certainly not as a part of Christian religion. Three books may be named, each of which is in its way a characteristic product of the Victorian period of thought, the "In Memoriam," of Tennyson (1850), the "Creed of Christianity," of Mr. W. R. Greg, and "The Great Enigma," of Mr. W. S. Lilly (1892). The last-named, while it is limited by and moves wholly under the foregone preconceptions of the Roman creed, is notable alike for its reverence of tone and for its candid admissions. Tennyson's somewhat self-conscious yet devout revelations of his perplexity amongst the problems of existence, and his passionate pleading for a larger outlook, exercised immense influence at a time when ecclesiastical prejudice was excited in reaction against the advances of modern science, and it applied a much-needed relief by appealing to larger issues and truer ideals. Greg's rather tedious exposition of the decadence of old religious ideas, and of the maladies which threatened to make shipwreck of faith, failed to suggest any real remedy or to present religious belief in a more vital form; it was on the whole too negative in its tone to kindle much warmth of soul, though it remains as a valuable memorial of the age in which it was produced. But the nineteenthcentury phase of thought, and the presentations

of it by Tennyson and by Greg, are passing out of the mind of the present day. No one now

reading these writings will dispute their perfect sincerity, or would wilfully ignore the services they rendered. But they did not solve the problems which they stated; or they solved them for themselves in ways other than appear patently. Nowadays we are not greatly concerned with the quarrel between geologists and Genesis, nor with that between Huxley and the bishops, nor again with the antitheses of Hellenism and Philistinism. Each age raises its own questions, formulates its own perplexities, wrestles with its own doubts. Other times, other problems.

The age which produced sincere religious doubters of such genius as Carlyle, Emerson, Huxley, Ruskin, F. W. Newman, Greg, and Matthew Arnold, all of whom hurled themselves against the stereotyped orthodoxies of their day, is not to be lightly dismissed, though the particular matters which called forth their protests and denunciations be no longer the salient peaks of contention. To-day we are faced with other forces than those which they faced. The complacent and shallow Protestantism which aroused Matthew Arnold's ire, and the shams of pseudo-economists which Carlyle and Ruskin smote, may be still with us, but they are to-day matters of feeble concern. To-day people are more interested in the fantastics of Mr. Bernard Shaw, the topsyturveydoms of Mr. Chesterton, the sonorous cadences of Omar Khayyam, the biting aphorisms of Nietzsche, and the schoolboy bulldogisms of Mr. Kipling; than in all the scholarly and earnest writings of the great Victorians. The conflict of religious