right either on the one hand to deny their reality, or on the other to refuse to endeavour to understand them. Religion as a fact of human consciousness is a proper subject for scientific investigation.

Yet far more important, at least for the present writer, than the scientific investigation of religion as a fact of human consciousness, is that other problem, how, when scientific investigation shall have done its work, to apply the results to the advancement of mankind. If, indeed, mankind were not thereby advanced, where were the advantage of any religious study or of any religion? Given the discovery of any spiritual law, however simple, then the immediate problem is how to take advantage of that discovery. Who shall Who shall put it into action and apply it? What motive shall incite mankind to act upon it? The barren discovery of a law of spiritual action would be a tantalising prospect if there came not with it the discovery of some means of putting it into operation. For the development of character in man there must be some development of motive within him. If that development of motive took the shape of a mere code of morals or a mere declaration of beliefs, how little would it avail! Creeds and codes are alike powerless in the face of the complex perversity of human nature. Not there will the potent motive arise.

But in this strait the religious faculty again comes to our aid, since it has from the first borne into the soul of man a conviction-a conviction not to be explained away by the ethnologist or the psychologist that the entity outside ourselves but in which we share, the invisible, indestructible,

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immaterial environment is something in which we live and move and have our being; in other words, that it is the supreme essential in that which constitutes life that itself is a life. The elemental qualities of pity and joy, of justice and mercy, cannot by any possibility be predicated of actual matter, of abstract intellect, of codes or creeds; and the very perception of these living qualities, particularly in moments of elevation, burns into us the conviction that the supreme entity in which we live and move and have our being must in some way, in some sense that we do not yet fully understand, have the quality which we ourselves have, of life, of existence as a living entity. And if, penetrated by this conviction, we in the limitations of human thought and language dare to frame as best we may, the phrase "the living God," who shall say us nay ? What, precisely, we shall further import into our ideas by exchanging the impersonal relative pronoun which into the more personal whom, when we say " in whom we live and move and have our being," we may perhaps not understand all at once. Personality is after all not so easily defined as some might think. But can we altogether dispense with the exchange? I venture to think not yet this is perhaps in some cases as much a matter of temperament as of conviction. But the gain, at least for the practical ends of religion, is immeasurable. By recognising, in this sense, a living personality in that supreme entity by which our own personalities are dominated from the cradle to the grave, and not our personalities only but the personalities of those who came before and of those who follow after, we find new and potent springs of

conduct. Of all ancient nations the Hebrews rose the highest in their conception of the Almighty. To the polytheists of neighbouring nations they were far superior. It may be admitted without damage to this statement that doubtless many of the Jews, possibly a majority, had no greater conception of Jahveh than as a purely tribal god : doubtless also, the conceptions denoted by the various names Elohim, El Shaddai, Jahveh and Emanuel were divergent, the adoption of usage of a new name corresponding to a new apprehension, or manifestation of the divinity. It is not without significance that we find in the books of the Bible traces of a tendency counter to the anthropomorphic ideas commonly attributed thereto; for while the account in Genesis of the actions of El Shaddai describes him in purely anthropomorphic terms, the language of the later writers, notably that of the Psalmists, is much less anthropomorphic, and in the New Testament the anthropomorphism has been almost completely transferred to the Son of man, the Son and sent of the Father, whilst the Paraclete or Comforter, a third presentation or hypostasis of the divine, is represented in language almost purely impersonal.1

Amongst the religions of the world the particular group which collectively receives the name "Christianity" is distinguished by its adherents holding as a fundamental article, not accepted by the followers of the older religions, that some nineteen hundred years ago there was a specially human revelation of God to mankind, in the life

1 Certain early divines were doubtful whether the Holy Spirit were not a feminine form of the Deity.

of Jesus Christ, who is variously represented to be a man in whom dwelt all the fullness of deity corporeally, a son of God, the unique son of God, God Himself made in the likeness of man. Endless controversy has raged about the attempts, mostly unwise and all futile, to state in precise terms the degrees in which humanity and divinity should be attributed to the unique person of Jesus Christ. It is very easy to dispute over a transcendental question such as this, and to discover at the end of the disputation that the very terms "humanity" and "divinity" ought to have been defined beforehand. Deity clothed in flesh, condescending to human form, voluntarily self-subjected to human limitations, is a conception that can scarcely be discussed without falling into metaphysical mazes of words; and any such discussion here would be idle. Vain questionings of this sort rose into importance in the Christian Church just as soon, and just so far, as the true spirit of Jesus Christ and the essence of his teaching was overlaid with sacerdotalism, and forgotten in the clash of political pretensions. At the culmination of the strife they rent the Christian Church in twain. The victorious party labelled itself and its particular metaphysical propositions as orthodox, and ever since has vindicated its political triumph by stigmatising as heretical all those followers of Christ who would not or could not concur in them. But the triumph recoiled on itself, since within the pale of orthodoxy there reared itself the vast fabric of hierarchical machinery to dominate men's beliefs, employing an ecclesiastical policy, often intensely unchristian, giving rise in the Middle Ages not only to wild traditional perversions

of history and teaching, but to hideous corruptions. No one can read Milman's History of Latin Christianity without an appalled sense of the utter paganism which ruled, as well as of the utter profligacy which accompanied, the triumph of the faith called "orthodox." The reactions which followed, first in Germany, then in England, later in France, were political quite as much as religious. The Reformation in Germany certainly turned more on political considerations than the corresponding movement in England. Both were alike a revolt against a dominant "Christianity" that was essentially unchristlike in spirit.

If the spectacle presented to-day by the immense. variety of sects with conflicting doctrines and practices, all claiming to be the true exponents of Christianity, does not sicken the earnest seeker after truth, assuredly it saddens him. He finds the exclusiveness of the Particular Baptist as vain a pretence as the claim of the Roman or Anglican priest to grant remission and absolution for sin. The doctrines of the Plymouth Brethren and the Salvation Army are as impossible for him as the dogmas of the Greek Church. The shining eloquence which draws to the City Temple tends as little to his edification as the ethical paradoxes of South Place Institute. He looks in vain to Saint Peter's or to Saint Paul's; for at Saint Peter's there is a shrivelled pallid old man playing at holding the keys of heaven, yet himself ruled by the Curia; and at Saint Paul's there is a gorgeous performance attended by comfortable canons who are not exactly like the fishermen of Galilee. The spirit of the real Peter and of the real Paul are