of that which I assert. Free Will denied, Impulse leaps into the saddle, and straightway it rides towards the abyss. COMPARE AND CHOOSE.

Contrast the old religion with the new materialism. And say which, as a free, high-spirited, affectionate, and resolute young man, the heir of noble ancestors, you will live by!

If you follow the rebels, you take the broad road, from Free Love, which the voice of conscience calls Free Leprosy, by Malthusian degradation, to frivolity, sadness, despair, and death which looks for no awakening. The individual and the nation that walk on this path will perish. There is no hope for them. Is there any? If so, where ? and what is it?

If you follow King Jesus, all good things are possible to you. I have not told you the half. But follow Him! Then shall you possess a clear mind in a clean body, and a heart overflowing with happiness. Your words will be true, your eyes unclouded, your love holy, your marriage a consecration, your home the beautiful place where wife and children, when they pray the "Our Father," will think of you as His dear resemblance. If there be a movement to make the world better, you belong to it already, for you have done that without which all reforms come to naught; you have reformed yourself on the pattern of the best, and bravest, and most heroic Man that ever breathed. Neither need you wait until others begin, or take long to prepare. Begin now, this moment, as you lay down these pages and my voice falls silent. I speak to you as to a brother, a friend, unknown but very dear to me, in the kinship that makes us human. We shall meet on the Great Day. There I will attest that I said these things to you, out of no selfish motive, seeking only your good, convinced that, if you would be free in the face of eternity, you must love and imitate the Son of Man, who is truly the Son of God.

PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY THE CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY, LONDON.

U

THOUGHTS FOR

CREEDLESS WOMEN

BY EMILY HICKEY

Second Edition, 1evised.

THESE thoughts are offered to women who profess to have no creed, or who, without so professing, virtually have none. They are offered also to those who, perhaps brought up in some more or less maimed form of belief, have rejected or let go what in it displeased their feeling or their taste, and have passed or drifted into a sort of vague eclecticism, supposing themselves to have thereby attained to breadth of thought and freedom of life. What the writer of this paper asks is, that such will, in their courtesy, read these few words. They come from one who does not write in ignorance of the position of those who think Christianity incapable of satisfying the needs of the cultivated and advanced, and who suppose that the day of holding a definite creed is over, and that, if all religious belief were entirely shaken, or even overthrown, it would make no difference in the conduct of life.

I cannot address you as what some, half laughingly, half earnestly, like to call themselves; that is, pagans. For no one who has been born and lived in the atmosphere created by Christianity, even if that atmosphere has been vitiated by imperfection of belief and by slackness of living, can possibly be a pagan in any true sense. It takes much more than a generation to re-create paganism, if in a nominally Christian land it be even possible to re-create it

at all.

How can we put ourselves into the position of those who have never seen? Or how can we know what it means to have never heard?

May I not, then, speak to you as to earnest women who would fain do the best they can with their lives, and who think that what is believed or denied is of no importance, belief and action having, in their minds, no vital connection? For, indeed, sometimes professors of religion are put to shame by non-professors, and the fruits of love and righteousness ripen outside the garden wherein we should expect to see them in their perfection; but wherein, to our shame be it spoken-the shame, I mean, of us Christians— too often these fruits are blasted or wilted, and never brought to maturity.

But as the normal order is that true belief truly acted on brings forth the best in life and action, and that all work is best done where energy is least wasted, may I not ask you to consider whether you cannot find in Christianity the great power you seek, for action and control and wisdom and lightbearing? And may I not ask you also to think whether you are not ignoring the force of the influence over you of the Christian atmosphere, however vitiated, in which you have been born, and outside of which you have never breathed: the atmosphere created by that ideal which, though denied or ignored, has been the source, either hidden or manifest, of all the light that has ever been yours, and of all your capacity for the reception of that light?

The Spiritual Sense cannot be Ignored.

However people may reject "dogma" and "creeds," there is no possibility of the general rejection of the acknowledgement of the spiritual sense; and those who put away "dogma and "creeds" very often become

staunch advocates of movements which could not have begun had Christianity not been in existence. There is a perpetual witness to the need we have of religion of some

kind or other, by whatever name we are pleased to call it : a perpetual witness to "the unutterable thirst of man for God." All reverence must be paid to the turning away of the soul from self and the things of self to something outside and beyond. Vague it may be, and undirected and unknowing, yet it is the expression of the tending of the creature toward something which it needs with a need not to be satisfied by the spending of money for that which is not bread; by the giving of labour for that which cannot satisfy.

There are two things for which I specially ask your consideration. The first is The Inclusiveness of Christianity. By this I mean that everything of worth in the various theories or systems by which it is sought to supplant Christianity is absolutely included therein. The second is. The Inseparability of Religion and Morality.

The Inclusiveness of Christianity.

The inclusiveness of Christianity is a subject which demands a treatment infinitely larger than it is possible here even to indicate. I can but set down a few thoughts on lines which I shall only be too glad if any one care to follow out. I make no attempt to ignore, much less deny, the great difficulties which beset modern life, with its complex interests, its enlarged scope, its varied trends of thought and action. I can only indicate what has so often been pointed to as the way whereby the needful strength to meet these difficulties can be found. Herein, too is the finding of the way to rise by them as well as to rise above them.

Justice and Prudence and Temperance and Fortitude are great things; and they are the possession of many. How to retain the possession of them through all difficulties and shocks, intellectual, passional, and spiritual, is known. with certainty only to those who have likewise the ownership of Faith, Hope, and Charity: and these belong, in their entirety, to the religion of Jesus Christ.

It will be found that whatever truths are urged upon people's minds as new light, or as light found in religions other than Christianity, are in the religion of Christ. Often, indeed, these are urged with an exaggeration which tends even to throw them out of their place as parts of Truth itself. In their rightful place, they are necessarily included in the great religion of which all others have been, and could be, but faint adumbrations. God has taught, and still does teach, in many ways: there has been, and still is, no doubt, such a thing as the beating out of truth without human help. But a gift rejected is not as a gift withheld. There is a great difference between using a lamp by night and shutting out the broad daylight in order to work by that lamp. So is there a great difference between seeking truth in ignorance of Christianity and deliberately thrusting Christianity aside.

It is a well-known fact that the over-accentuation of any truth, which in itself is only a part of truth, has often led to heresy just as the exaggeration of any virtue, which is but a part of virtue or goodness itself, has often led to wrong. Familiar literary examples of this latter are found in the story of patient Grisildis and in that of the Nut-brown Maid. We may injure the souls of others, and indeed our own souls too, by patience wrongly exercised, by meekness out of its rightful place; patience and meekness that have. stood in the way of justice and the redressing of wrong. And so we may, by want of balance, err most deeply in doctrine and morals, as in the case of the disciples of Molinos, who, in the contemplation of the beauty of spiritual quietude, lost sight of the express commands of the Founder of the Church. And as the failure to see the inclusiveness of truth has led to heresy, and the failure to see the inclusiveness of virtue has led to moral loss, so the failure to see the absolute inclusiveness of Christianity has led to all sorts of pitiful attempts at finding light and leading otherwise than in the Truth, the Light, the Way.