beliefs, is one which no science can bridge. Respect "the deep irony of God," which baffles every attempt to fix his idea by scientific demonstration.

But, waiving all this, the proper element of religion, the only element in which religion can thrive and be a power in society, is an element of mystery and faith, the very opposite of positivism. Explode that element, and you have a caput mortuum, intelligible enough, but soulless and powerless, a mummy instead of a living organism. For here especially it is true that.

"Our meddling intellect

Misshapes the beauteous forms of things
We murder to dissect."

The world of knowledge and the world of faith are principially distinct. They are not even concentric circles. The world of science is a little epicycle which rides the deferent of an unknown orb.

It is a great mistake to suppose that religion is the offspring of theology. On the contrary, theology is the offspring of religion. Science would never give it: scarcely will science recognize it. Even now, in some of its prominent representatives, science prefers an atheology instead. You may substitute science for religion; but you cannot identify them, you cannot square them. It is like squaring the circle, an insoluble problem. Therefore I say, " The Bible or the Mathematics," the spirit or the flesh, as the basis of preaching.

“Theism and atheism," it is said, "are in the scales, and Science holds the balance." The saying reminds me of many things. "To-morrow, gentlemen, I shall make you a God,” said Science, speaking through the lips of a German professor. And certainly Fichte was as well qualified for this species of manufacture as any Positive philosopher of our time. Carlyle once told me of a man who came to him with a cherished project. The age had lost its God, he said; thence all the woes of this evil time. Something must be done, and that straightway. He had hit upon a plan for remedying the difficulty, — a cheap magazine, to be called the "Elah." Would

Mr. Carlyle be a contributor, and so aid the good work of restoring God to the people of Great Britain?

Heinrich Heine, whose sarcasms had not always so legitimate an object, has satirized the application of science to theology, alike in its negative and positive results. He likens Kant to Robespierre, and thinks the former the greater terrorist of the two.

"The Critique of Pure Reason' was the sword with which Theism was beheaded in Germany. "You French are tame people compared with us Germans. The most you could do was to behead a king, and he had lost his head already before you cut it off. And, in doing that, you made a drumming and a screaming and a trampling with the feet that shook the whole earth. Really, it is doing Maximilien Robespierre too much honor to compare him with Immanuel Kant."-"Kant far exceeded Robespierre in terrorism; but they had much in common. In both there was a spice of cockneyism. Nature had designed them to weigh coffee and sugar; but Fate willed that they should weigh quite other things, and placed for one a King, for the other a God, in the scales." "Since Kant's polemic, theism has been extinct in the realm of speculative reason. It will take some centuries to disseminate the doleful tidings; but we philosophers have put on mourning long ago. You think you can go home now. Wait a bit. There is another piece to be performed. After the tragedy comes the farce. Hitherto Kant has shown himself the inexorable philosopher. He has stormed heaven and earth, and made the whole celestial concern walk the plank. The Sovereign of the universe lies weltering in his blood, unproved. There is no infinite mercy, no fatherly goodness, no reward beyond the grave for continence here. The immortality of the soul lies at the last gasp. Everywhere death-rattle and death-moans; and old Lampe [Kant's servant] stands by, a mournful spectator, with tears in his eyes. But now Immanuel Kant has compassion, and shows that he is not only a great philosopher, but a good man. And he says to himself, half good-naturedly, half ironically, 'Old Lampe must have a God, he can't be happy without; and man was made to be happy. So says practical reason. Well, then, let practical reason vouch for the being of God.'"

Alas for mankind if Science holds the balance between theism and atheism! I have a notion that He who "hath

comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales," himself holds the balance, where Science, with her shallow theisms and atheisms, the one as shallow as the other, are in one scale, and the everlasting Mystery in the other; and I rather think that wise men at present, after the example of Lessing, will cast their votes into the latter scale.

The first attempt to apply positivism to theology, according to an ancient myth, was made by a youth at Sais, who sought certainty behind a forbidden veil, and found death. The meaning of the myth is fitly expressed in the phrase “dead certainty." A very significant phrase! We say a calculation is reduced to a dead certainty. Observe the fatal propriety of the word "dead" in this connection. Absolute certainty belongs to the past, — fait accompli. And the past is dead. Dead certainty,—- the death of inquiry, the death of expectation, the death of hope.

Do you want absolute certainty in religion, the understanding's ultimate? You want death. Will you look into the sepulchre for the Lord of life? He is not there, "he is risen." Behold, he re-appears! Will you pin him now with your inquiries? A cloud receives him out of your sight. Will you peer into the blue for the vanishing assurance? Why stand ye gazing up into heaven?" Go to work; and the Comforter, Truth, will come down out of the heavens, and work by your side.

The scientific mind of the age has fallen out with its ecclesiasticism. Whose is the fault? No blame to either party. It is a mutual misunderstanding, such as will sometimes arise in well-regulated families. For both belong to one family after all, — Christian society. A temporary misunderstanding. Mutual jealousy of each other's rights. Ecclesiasticism, good mother, refuses to perceive that her full-grown daughter, Science, having now arrived to years of discretion, can no longer be kept in leading-strings, and fed on pap, but must be allowed to judge for herself, and to regulate her own diet. And when the fond dame pursues the strapping lass with bib and porringer, "Here, my love, is the sincere milk of the word, better

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 recog nized 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