Of course they do and why? Because these are the men who give relief to the mind and conscience of the age, by supplying it with positive knowledge and expressing its profound distrust of the current theology-and it is only with the help of such as these, that is, with the aid of best thinkers, that this or any age can rediscover and restate morality and religion. Their failure is not that they have done so much to demolish, but that they have done so little to reconstruct; but by rights they ought not to be called upon to reconstruct at all.

10. Religious reconstruction is not the province of Science or Philosophy, it is the province of Theology. If science and philosophy clear the ground, saying, "Repent," "Turn ye," it is enough. They are the forerunners, they purge and cleanse, but their baptism is of water alone, after them comes one mightier than they. Theology, with its eye for spiritual facts, with its open vision, and its inner consciousness, steps in at every such crisis at the propitious moment, like a new Avatar, with breath of the Spirit, the baptism of fire and of the Holy Ghost.

11. These are hard sayings, to some of course they must appear superfluous in the last degree. Just as in Elizabeth's time there were thousands who could not conceive what any one could want with a religion better than that of the Pope, or what there was to find fault with in the Mass and Seven Sacraments; so thousands now, and in every age, not moved by the spirit of the age, but still living mentally in the past, resent bitterly any interference with established religious opinion.

But look at the children, look at the young men, and the young women. They drink in the new opinions like mothers' milk. An air we still find some difficulty in breathing is their native air. Whilst we have been fighting and stifling doubt, a generation has sprung up in the last twenty years which takes for granted what we bungle and stammer over, and try to veil, and at last admit grudgingly and of necessity: such as, for instance, that the rainbow was not made by God at the time of the Flood, and that the sun didn't really stand still, and that the Athanasian Creed is not so clear as it looks, or so infallible as it sounds, or the books of the Bible written straight off by the

people whose names they bear, and so on ad infinitum.

And the slowness and timidity of religious teachers has resulted in this, that the rising generation of the upper and middle classes are slipping out of their hands, and that the great mass of the working classes, who have nothing to gain by conformity to established religion, have slipped out altogether.

Instead of the priests being in the front of the battle, they stop behind to cut down the deserters.

The business of restating and resettling opinion and restoring religion, the same in spirit, but changed in form, is not an easy or always a comfortable and pleasant task. All are not called upon to do it, but those who are professed teachers of religion must not shrink in a body from it, for that is their appointed task. Still less must they hinder those who, having put their hands to the plough, refuse to look back.

12. We are not all prophets. I and you may be able to do but little in the great work of religious reconstruction. The strength of some

who are devoted to religion may even be intellectually to sit still and be useful and good in their lives, in their parishes, in their institutions, rather than to actively teach religion.

But religion has to be taught. The work has to be done. The Ark of the Covenant has to be cared for and repaired, or the glory is sure to depart; and if we the clergy will not do this, others not the clergy, not the Pharisee, not the scribe, will spring up and become the religious teachers of the people, for religious teaching the people will have.

13. It is because the Established Church of England, whilst representing the organic stream of the national religion, allows me to say this: to proclaim aloud its history, to watch and chronicle the signs of the times, to plead for the enlargement of its boundaries and the reform of its doctrines; to do for religious truth, in however small a degree, in the present what prophets and apostles have at the risk of their lives done in the past—it is for this that I love, in its height, and depth, and length, and breadth, the Established Church of England.

But neither that or any other Church can

stand, unless the foundations upon which prophets and apostles built are still seen to be safe. No one who knows anything at all about the thoughts and feelings of the best and wisest men now living, can be blind to the fact that these foundations have been rudely shaken. And these foundations are two-GOD and the SOUL.

GOD.

14. The negative teaching of modern science is too clear to be mistaken. It is in effect this: Of God, if there be a God, we know and can know nothing.

The proofs from design are illusory, natural theology is altogether unreliable. It is doubtful whether we need even assume life, still less intelligence, for the construction of the universe. Life and mind are the latest products of matter and force. Man is therefore, as far as we know, the highest example of life and mind hitherto developed.

15. Nothing can be more distinct than the two theories of the universe known as Materialism and Spiritualism.