for you than those hard rocks and all your ologies," no wonder the daughter becomes impatient, and conceives an unconquerable disgust for the proffered harmless diet. On the other hand, the daughter forgets that the mother is still, by divine right, mistress of the house which she holds by hereditary title, and held before Science was born, and will hold, with whatever modification of structure and name, for indefinite time. Society may outgrow this or that particular form of Church life; but society can never outgrow the idea of the Church, and will not, in our day, outgrow the tutelage of religion.

Mr. Wasson, in his eloquent inaugural discourse, "The Radical Creed," has expressed a contempt for the idea of "ecclesiastical continuity," as having its source in the notion of "an inspired institution, which, by its mechanical working, shall grind out divine truth and law." I can by no means adopt this view of the matter. Ecclesiastical continuity is not the perpetuation of an institution which acts mechanically, nor indeed of any institution at all, or any human device, but the recognition and visible representation of a fact. That fact is the progressive, divine education of human society, considered as one organic and continuous whole. The ecclesia is society conscious of its unity and calling in God, -society in its Godward relation; and ecclesiastical continuity is the continuity of human growth and divine education. It is the main current of humanity flowing down from an unknown past, distinguished in different periods by different dispensations, but the same in all; sometimes moving, with fleet foot, beneath the impulse of fresh revelation; sometimes caught in the doldrums of a stagnant sacerdotalism, but never immovably fixed; receiving into itself contributions, affluents, from all religions and civilizations, identical with none, though identified with one or another in each stage of its course, as at present with the Christian, - that being the chief minister of human progress for this millennium. Ecclesiastical continuity is therefore the method of history. Not to recognize it is not to recognize the divine significance of history: it is to want the key to the right understanding of the problem of history. It is to sever, to one's own apprehension, the spinal cord of humanity: it is to make the religious convictions of each period the accidental product instead of the mating of the time. Ecclesiastical continuity means that mankind do not consciously and wilfully foreshape their own future; that history is not the product of human foresight, but divine ordination, education; that we are under tutelage, one schoolmaster after another having charge of the race for a season, and, in fulness of time, delivering up his charge to the next. That schoolmaster for the time being is not an institution, but an idea, or system of ideas, to which the institutions of the time owe their birth. We are under this tutelage of ecclesiastical continuity: we cannot escape it. The individual may think he is rid of it: but his fancied emancipation is only the flight of the aëronaut, who seems to detach himself from the earth when he cuts the rope which held his balloon; but all the while an invisible rope - we call it gravitation - has fast hold of him. The length of his tether is the quantity of gas there is in him. The gas escapes, the tether shortens; the gas all gone, ecclesiastical continuity resumes its sway.

There goes, I fancy, a conceit among that class of secularists whose secularism rationalizes its dissent, that the Church as a power is about to retire from public life, though Christianity as a principle may survive; that Christianity, as an administration of more than a thousand years' standing, must soon deliver up its portfolio, its sacred books, and, if recognized at all, exist as a pensioner of the new regime. It may be so, and it may be that periodical hibernation is mistaken for decrepitude and demise. All along the course of history there have been periods of religious indifference, when forward wits would suppose that the Church of the time was moribund, supernaturalism effete, and philosophy or naturalism about to assume the stewardship of such sanctities as might still command the faith of mankind. In the latter half of the century preceding the Christian era, and the first of the century following, intelligent and cultivated Romans had lost their faith in the popular religion, although the conservative among them refrained from open contempt of the established rites. Yet Cicero, the gravest of conservatives, in his work, De Divinatione, argues with Quintus, his brother, against the possibility of any such knowledge of the future as superstition ascribed to the haruspices. He would have the function maintained as a part of the established religion for religion's and the republic's sake; but "between ourselves," he says, "I don't believe in it." - "Quam ego reipublica causa, communisque religionis, colendam censeo, sed, soli sumus; licet verum exquirere sine invidia, mihi præsertim de plerisque dubitanti." Yet, though he denied for himself the validity of their vaticinations, he condemned the consuls, P. Claudius and L. Junius, for disregarding them: "Parendum enim fuit religioni, nec patrius mos tam contumaciter repudiandus." Yet this cautious conservative could say, in the Senate, that only in poetry and on the stage did the gods intermeddle in human affairs. Other writers of the time concurred with Cicero in relegating traditional religion to the region of popular superstition, reserving for philosophy the natural interpretation or critical elimination of the ancient beliefs. Livy coolly speaks of Numa's religious institutions as excellent devices for influencing, in those days, the ignorant multitude. Quintus Curtius thought nothing so efficacious for the governance of the rude rabble as superstition. Fill their minds with religious nonsense, he says, and they will mind the priest, if they do not obey their secular leaders: "Melius vatibus quam ducibus suis paret." Varro distinguished three kinds of religion, - the mythological, for poets and the stage; the natural (naturalism), for philosophers and wise men; and the ceremonial, for the people. The learned could not accept the crude religion of the stage and the State: they must have a religion of their own. Whereupon St. Augustine exclaims in the "City of God," "O Marcus Varro! thou most acute of men, and without doubt the most learned, thou art still but a man and no god, and hast not been led by the spirit of God to the seeing and proclaiming of things divine, to the furtherance of truth and of freedom. Thou seest that things divine should be separated from human folly and lies, but thou fearest to offend popular opinion and custom in the matter of public superstitions. Thou desirest to worship the God of Nature, but art forced to worship the God of the State."

Already Lucretius had made atheism popular, - had commended it by the charm of his immortal verse. Enlightened Rome no longer believed in the gods. Even the unlearned, according to the testimony of Juvenal, had outgrown the traditional faith in a future retributory state. Cicero himself says that no old woman could be found so inept as to tremble at what was once universally received. A philosophic observer, from the time of Sulla to the time of Vespasian, would have said that the old religion was utterly effete; that the Flamens must presently doff their fillets, and grave haruspices, for very shame, confess and renounce the solemn joke. But religions die hard: altars that once have burned with the sacrifices of faith do not go out until new altars are ready to receive the flame. Although, fifty years before the Christian era, Epicurus was praised at Rome for delivering mankind from the fear of the gods, and Cicero and Varro and others had promulgated naturalism; though theism and naturalism divided intelligent minds, a half-century before Christ, four centuries after, the Roman Senate, through the lips of her ablest representative, pleaded for liberty to worship those gods whose empire was now invaded by a far more formidable enemy than theism or atheism, the only foe that could ever dispossess them, - a new revelation, a new ecclesiasticism.

To take an example from Christian ages. The revival of letters in Europe was followed by a similar divorce of the intellectual and spiritual life of the age from the ecclesiastical. A courtier of Leo X., or a reader of the Epistola Obscurorum Virorum, might have fancied, not merely that the Church as a polity was tumbling, but that Christianity as a form of faith had sunk into hopeless decline. And again, toward the close of the eighteenth century in France, the encyclopædists and the men of letters deemed Christianity

outgrown, and made enlightenment synonymous with unbelief. Voltaire was tired of the name of Christ; but Voltaire patronized theism, commending the Almighty in sounding verse. Robespierre undertook, with a coup de théâtre, to place it on the throne of a desecrated, disevangelized world. You know the result, - with what refluent zeal, with what fierce regurgitation, the repulsed and insulted faiths came trooping in the wake of the allied armies; with what re-assured consciousness they presided at the treaty of Vienna; and how in France of the Restoration ecclesiastical continuity resumed its sway.

Some thirty years ago, a club was formed of young men, mostly preachers of the Unitarian connection, with a sprinkling of elect ladies, - all fired with the hope of a new era in philosophy and religion, which seemed to them about to dawn upon the world. There was something in the air, -a boding of some great revolution, - some new avatar of the Spirit, at whose birth these expectants were called to assist.

"Of old things, all are over old;

Of good things, none are good enough :
We'll show that we can help to frame
A world of other stuff."

For myself, though I hugely enjoyed the sessions, and shared many of the ideas which ruled the conclave, and the ferment they engendered, I had no belief in ecclesiastical revolutions to be accomplished with set purpose; and I seemed to discern a power and meaning in the old, which the more impassioned would not allow. I had even then made up my mind, that the method of revolution in theology is not discession, but development. My historical conscience, then as since, balanced my neology, and kept me ecclesiastically conservative, though intellectually radical. There haunted me that verse in Goethe's bright song, "The General Confession," as applicable to ecclesiastical incendiarism as it is to political:

"Came a man would fain renew me,
Made a botch and missed his shot,
Shoulder shrugging, prospects gloomy:
He was called a patriot.