sacerdotal caste, no human being, no Pope of Rome or Llama of Thibet, has the remotest right to claim infallibility. The education of the human race constantly advances. I have just quoted the lines of Robert Browning; but we may adduce the equally emphatic testimony of the other foremost poet of our generation-Lord Tennyson. He wrote— and again— Our little systems have their day; They have their day, and cease to be: Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day: Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. The light is constantly shining on amid the darkness, and "God," says George Eliot, "shows all things in the slow history of their ripening." Since then, the views of every progressive age must differ, in many particulars, from those which prevailed in the generations which preceded it, it becomes a most pertinent enquiry for us, at the close of another century, whether the incessant and unfettered activity of the human mind in all matters of enquiry has resulted in shaking any of the fundamental conceptions in the religion of those millions—amounting to nearly one-third of the entire human race" who profess and call themselves Christians." Obviously considering that no century has been more intellectually restless than this, and in no century has education in Europe been more widely disseminated-it would require not one brief paper, but several volumes, to enter in detail into the whole subject; to estimate the religious effect produced by many epochmaking writings during an age in which "of making books there is no end"; and to define the changes of opinion caused by the discoveries of science during times in which—more than at any other period of the world's history-" many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased." Such a book, written by a student of competent wisdom and learning, and given to the world before the beginning of the year 1900, might be a very precious boon. But to so full an enquiry this paper must only be regarded as an infinitesimal contribution. I First, as to the most fundamental of all enquiries-Has the progress of science, or the widening of all sources of enquiry, weakened our sense of the existence of God? We are, I think, justified in meeting the question with a most decided negative. Judging by all the data open to us, we may safely assert that Infidelity has not increased. It is much less prevalent than it seems to have been in the days of the French Revolution; nor have we in modern society any phenomenon which resembles the state of things in the eighteenth century, when we are told that "wits" and men of the world openly repudiated all religion, and when, as Bishop Butler tells us at the beginning of his "Analogy," the essential truths of Christianity were often scoffed at as though they were exploded absurdities not worth discussion. "It is come,' he says, "I know not how, to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is not so much as a subject of enquiry, but that it is, now at length, discovered to be fictitious. And accordingly, they treat it as if, in the present age, this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and nothing remained but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and ridicule." No one would say that such broad and coarse infidelity is now at all common. It is sometimes supposed that there are many infidels among our working men. I can only say that when I was the Rector of a London Parish, and was familiar with the condition of a large number of working men of various grades, I found many who were addicted to drink, and many who rarely if ever set foot inside a church, but I cannot recall even one of them who had the smallest leaning towards infidel opinions. Infidelity is sometimes confused with Agnosticism, but they are wide as the poles asunder. Agnosticism" is a word of recent birth. It has as yet hardly found its way into our dictionaries. It does not occur either in Latham's edition of Johnson's Dictionary, or in Littré's French Dictionary. It was, I believe, first suggested by the late Professor Huxley in a meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869. But as one who had the privilege of knowing Professor Huxley for many years, and of frequently meeting him, I can say that, so far from being an infidel, he was a man of a reverent and even of a religious mind. Never in his life did he, or Darwin, or Tyndall, dream of denying the existence of God. Their scientific enquiries had no doubt deepened in their minds the sense of the uncertainties of all human belief; the conviction that the limits of truth are vaster and more vague than is allowed for in many systems; the feeling that if the curtain which hangs between us and the unseen world be but "thin as a spider's web," it is yet "dense as midnight." But a reverent and limited Agnosticism is by no means an unmitigated evil. Even the ancient Jewish Rabbis, whom none can accuse of a spirit of incredulity, had the apothegm "Learn to say, I do not know." A sense of our human limitations may serve as a counterpoise to the easy familiarity which, as it has been said, talks of God "as though He were a man in the next room," or writes scholastic folios of minute dogmatism which have about as much stability as a pyramid built upon its apex. "Agnosticism" may be no more than a strengthened conviction that "what we know is little, what we are ignorant of is immense." In the most solemn parts of Scripture we are warned of this truth. In Exodus we are told that "the people stood afar off," and only Moses "drew near into the thick darkness, where God was." "Canst thou by searching find out God?" asks Zophar in the Book of Job. Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection? It is as high as Heaven, what canst thou do? "Verily thou art a God that hidest Thyself," says Isaiah. "How It is fully handled in Dr. Murray's New English Dictionary. An Agnostic is one who holds "that God is unknown and unknowable." unsearchable are God's judgments," says St. Paul, "and His ways past finding out!" For who hath known the mind of the Lord, and who hath been his counsellor? But the greatest and best Agnostic men of science of modern days, even while with the Psalmist they would say of God that "clouds and darkness are round about Him," would nevertheless have been the first to add that "righteousness and judgment are the habitation of His throne." And this gradually became the mental attitude even of J. S. Mill, in spite of the effects of his early training. If he held that we are built around by an impenetrable wall of darkness, and that "omnia exeunt in mysterium," his later writings show that he also believed that man has a lamp in his hand, and may walk safely in the little circle of its light. It may, I think, be truly said that many great Agnostics inclined to believe and did believe, even when they were unable to say that they knew. They would have sympathised with the condemned criminal, who, though he had been denying the existence of God, was heard to fling himself on his knees, a moment afterwards, in an agony of prayer; and they would have been inclined to utter, though without its tone of despair, the wild cry which he uttered on the scaffold, "O God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul!" If, with the late Sir James Stephen, they might have compared life to "a mountain pass, in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive," they would have added with him-in answer to the question "What must we do?"-"Be strong and of a good courage. Act for the best; hope for the best; and take what comes." Next to the fundamental conviction that there is a God of Love and Righteousness, who cares for the people of His pasture, and the sheep of His hands, religious enquiry in our century has mainly turned on three subjects-the nature of Inspiration as regards the Holy Scriptures; the character of future Retribution; and the Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 1 See Rom. xi. 33; Job xi. 7-9; Ps. xxxvi. 6; Col. ii. 2, 3, etc. VOL. IV. -2 II As to the belief in man's immortality and the doctrine of a future life, little need here be said. All that study and criticism have done for us in this direction has resulted in pure gain. The all-but-universal belief in a future life is instinctive in human nature, and has never been shaken. It is a conviction which transcends disproof, and does not depend on logical demonstration. The heart of man cries aloud to God with perfect confidence. Thou wilt not leave us in the dust; Thou madest man, he knows not why; He thinks he was not made to die; And Thou hast made him :-Thou art just! As to the belief in the nature and conditions of our future life, modern thought has inclined more and more to the view that they can only be described in symbols which cannot be crudely interpreted that Heaven does not mean a golden city in the far-off blue, but the state of a soul cleansed from the stain of sin, and enjoying the Grace and Presence of God; and that Hell is not a crude and glaring everlasting bonfire, where those who are the creatures of God's hand writhe in the interminable anguish of torturing flames, but the misery of alienation from all that is pure and holy, which must continue until that alienation has been removed, and God has become all in all. III As regards the Scriptures, enough books have been written in the nineteenth century alone to stock a very large library. Has the time come in which we can form a true estimate as to their general results? 1. Unquestionably the theoretic conception of the manner in which Scripture has been given to us has undergone a wide and permanent change. The notion of what is called "Verbal Inspiration" in its narrowest sense, does not seem to have prevailed in the Early Church. The later forms of Judaism, after the days of Ezra, had indeed made a sort of fetish of the Old Testament, much |