but after a time its ideas were exhausted. It afforded no universal range of subjects. Some way or another, human as it was, it was not human enough to enable it to last. It was of Greece, it was not of mankind. The religion of Mohammed shut out all painting and sculpture of living forms from its sacred architecture. But the Romanesque and Gothic builders, with a strange instinct that in Christianity there was nothing irreligious, and that every act of human life, if done naturally, or for just ends, even if it were such an act as war, was a religious act, and that all the world, animate and inanimate, was holy to the Lord in Christ, filled porch and arcade and string-course with sculpture of all things in earth and heaven, symbolised the revolving year, made parables of beauty and of terror, and threw into breathing stone the hopes, the passions, the fears, and the faith of Christian men. This was but one field of the immense space which Christianity opened to religious art. No limitations were placed upon it by the religion; it was left to each nation, according to its genius, to develope it in its own way. It was the same with poetry as with architecture ; it lost nothing by the addition of the Christian element; it gained, on the contrary, a great subject. And that subject, in its infinite humanity, in the way it has of making those who grasp it largely interested in all things, in the majesty which belongs to it, does not prevent men from rising into the grand style that style which makes a man feel himself divine as he reads. On the contrary, of the three poets who since Christ have possessed this style in perfection, two employed all their power on subjects which belonged to Christian thought. The majesty of the subject reacted on their power of expression. They proved at least that Christianity does not exclude, but is expansive enough to include, the art of poetry. Moreover, a religion which appeals to human feeling, which is nothing apart from Man, whose strongest impulse is the enthusiasm of humanity,' can never be apart from an art like that of poetry which withers, corrupts, and dies when it is severed from the interests of men. One may even go further. Christianity has to do with the insoluble, with visions which love alone can realise, with questions to which the understanding gives no reply, with feelings which cannot be defined, only approached, in words. It is the very realm in which half of the poetry of the world has been written. There is nothing then to prevent Christianity existing in harmonious relation with all true poetry from age to age of the world. In itself, it gives a grand subject to poetry, and both it and poetry have similar elements; their common appeal to, and their death apart from, human interests and feelings; their common life in a region above the understanding. I need not dwell on the arts of music and painting; let us pass on to science. Supposing Christianity had committed itself to any scientific statements or to any scientific method, it could never have been fitted to expand with the expansion of knowledge, to be a religion for a race which is continually advancing in scientific knowledge. If it had bound itself up with the knowledge of its time, it would naturally be subject now to repeated and ruinous blows. If it had anticipated the final discoveries of science and revealed them, nobody would have believed it then, and nobody would probably believe it now. Christianity committed itself to nothing. 'Yours is not my province,' it said to science. 'Do your best in your own sphere with a single eye to truth. I will do my best in mine. Let us not throw barriers in each other's way. The less we obstruct each other, the more chance there is of our finding in the end union in the main ideas which regulate both our worlds in the mind of God.' Foolish men have mixed it up with science and endeavoured to bind each down upon the bed of the other, to make science Christian and Christianity scientific, but the result has always been a just rebellion on both sides. The worst evil has been the unhallowed and forced alliance of the doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Bible, or of the infallibility of the Church to Christianity. The moment science was truly born, war to the death arose against a form of Christianity which violated the original neutrality of Christianity towards the pure intellect and its pursuit of its own truths. But get rid of this alliance, and how is Christianity in opposition to science? what is to prevent its being a religion fit for man in that future when the youngest child will know more than the philosopher of to-day? It is no more in actual opposition to science than poetry is. The river glideth at his own sweet will; I suppose no scientific man would run a tilt at that. Its thought, its feeling, the impression it is intended to convey, are all out of the sphere of science. Nevertheless, the natural philosopher recognises that it appeals to his imagination. He receives pleasure from it; he accepts it as true in its own sphere. But if he were told that the writer claimed infallibility for his expression, said that it expressed not only a certain touch of human feeling about the river, but also the very physical truth about the movement of the river, he would naturally be indignant. "You have left your own ground,' he would say to the poet,' where you were supreme, and you have come into mine, where, by the very hypothesis of your art, you are a stranger. You claim my obedience, here, in my own kingdom, the absolute surrender of my reason in a realm where reason is the rightful lord. You may be a poet, but you are denying the first principles of your art.' Precisely the same might be said to those who are ill-informed enough to connect the spirit and life of Christianity with efforts to suppress physical science or historical criticism as tending to infidelity, or as weakening Christian truth. It might be said to them by a wise scholar: "You may be Christians, but you are doing all the harm you can to Christianity. You are endeavouring to bind an elastic and expanding spirit into a rigid mould in which it will be suffocated. You are fettering your living truth to physical and historical theories which have been proved to be false and dead, and your Christianity will suffer as the living man suffered when the cruel king bound him to the corpse. Your special form of Christianity will grow, corrupt, and die, for it attacks truth.' But if some Christian people have gone out of their sphere, there are not wanting philosophers to do the same. 'I know nothing of God and immortality,' says science, and with an air as if that settled the question. 'I should think you did not,' Christianity would gravely answer; 'no one ever imagined that you could, but I do; I do know a great deal about those wonderful realities, and I have given my knowledge of them to millions of the human race who have received it, proved it through toil and pain, and found it powerful to give life in the hour of death.' Proved it,' answers science, not in my way, the only way worth having, the way which makes a thing clear to the understanding.' But there are hundreds of things which are not and cannot be submitted to such a proof. We cannot subject the action any of the passions to the explanations of the understanding. By reasoning alone, we cannot say what an envious, jealous, self-sacrificing, or joyful man may do next, nor explain his previous actions. One might far more easily predict the actions of a madman. of We cannot give any reason for love at first sight, or, what is less rare but as real, friendship at first sight. We cannot divide into compartments the heart and soul of any one person in the world, saying, This is the boundary of that feeling; so far this quality will carry the man in life. For the understanding is but a secondary power in man. It can multiply distinctions. It cannot see the springs of life where the things are born about which it makes distinctions. Night's candles are burnt out, and jocund day |