The principle of authority promises great things-truth, certainty, unity. But it promises only-it cannot perform. It cannot inspire religious belief, for in religion we possess only what we have made our own. Belief is experience: an element of experience, at least, enters into belief. And experience must be experienced: a proposition shot at us, like a bullet from a pistol, remains a foreign body outside consciousness and external to the self. Again, authority and thought are incommensurable. Authority belongs to the surface of life, where, indeed, it cannot be dispensed with. But below this it fails us; lay stress upon it, think it out, and it breaks down. It is powerless to cope with the subtlety of thought—a ghost is impervious to a cudgel; or to keep pace with the advance of knowledge-Canute cannot arrest the flowing tide. Nor is the survival of dogmatic religion inconsistent with this. Dogma is the creation, not the basis, of theology; and theology is the product of many factors-above all, of the spirit of the time. Apparently unchanging, it is of all things the most changeable. With regard to the controversies of the present, those within the Churches differ as much as those without; with regard to the controversies of the past, they agree upon a formula, but behind the formula lies the interpretation. The surrender of freedom is nominal only: the tongue assents; the mind remains, and must remain, free. If, for example, we ask with regard to any given point what the general or average belief of Catholics is, it is easy to answer. But if we go behind this, and ask more precisely what the Church as such teaches us of faith concerning it, it is difficult or impossible: the Vincentian Canon gives way under us like treacherous ice. In the third century the Consubstantiality of the Son was not of faith; in the fourth the eternity of punishment; up to 1854 the Immaculate Conception; up to 1870 Papal Infallibility. In the sixteenth century the deposing power of the Pope could not be denied without suspicion of heresy; till quite lately, by some perhaps even now, it would be thought temerarious, or worse, to question the literal inspiration of Scripture, the direct creation of species, the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, the Davidic of the Psalms-and the list might be extended indefinitely. Are the Encyclicals of Leo XIII. infallible utterances ? In England generally the answer would be, No; in Rome many, if not most, would answer, Yes; and certainly some of them seem to fall under the conditions laid down by the definition of the Vatican

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Council. Again, there are decisions admittedly not infallible which are held, nevertheless, to demand interior assent: there is an obligation, that is to say, to believe undoubtingly what may possibly turn out to be untrue. Communes opiniones nascuntur et moriuntur,' say the canonists; and the maxim is as true in theology as it is in law. But the dead return to life. Jouffroy's Comment 'les dogmes finissent' was followed two generations later by Caro's Comment les dogmes renaissent.' Sabatier's formula is truer than either- Les croyances religieuses ne meurent pas; elles ne font que se transformer.' * But this transformation is so rapid and so complete that a theologian may refuse, and be justified in refusing, to pledge the Church to an indefinite amount of her actual teaching. The day will declare it: those who come after us will know whether it is idea or setting, of eternity or of time. Meanwhile authority is unwilling to commit itself; while obliging the conscience, it remains free. From the point of view of those who cannot bear to doubt' nothing could be more unsatisfactory; it is confusion worse confounded.

In the modern Roman Church dogma is primarily a legal decision, to which submission is demanded. To the question, What is dogma? no definite answer can be given. Instead of a number of dogmas precisely defined and, as dogmas, on an equal footing, we have an interminable series of dogmas, half-dogmas, doctrinal decisions, pious opinions, probable propositions, and the like. Dogma has become a system of law placed at the disposition of the Pope, carried out administratively, and losing itself in endless casuistry.' (Harnack, 'Dogmengeschichte,' vol. i. p. 9.)

Proteus-like, it assumes new shapes under our eyes, and evades our grasp; and here, perhaps, is the outlet from the Polar pack-ice to the open sea. If the claim to infallibility attracts minds of a certain type, the underlying ebb and flow demonstrate its unreality, and provide a way of escape to kindlier climes. For while concerning the fundamental truths of religion-the meaning of life, the distinction between good and evil, God and his kingdom-doubt would be equivalent to mental and moral paralysis, and, consequently, certainty has been given to us, or at least placed within our reach, when we pass beyond them it is not so. Here the evidence at our disposal is often ambiguous and inconclusive: we can better say what the facts are not than what they are. For they are known in part' and seen

* A. Sabatier, Esquisse,' p. 23.

' through a glass, darkly'; uncertainty with regard to them belongs to the discipline of our state. And the claim to knowledge which we do not possess reacts disastrously on religion. Where it is admitted, it emphasizes the non-essential; for it is the clothing of the idea, not the idea itself, that appeals to the senses: where it is rejected, it involves the true and the false in common discredit; for the generality of men do not draw nice distinctions; the structure as a whole is undermined.

Such considerations as these, and perhaps the fact that theological science, languishing elsewhere, flourishes in the free air of the reformed Churches, have caused a certain set of the tide against the institutional in religion: the ecclesiastical phase is one, it is held, through which Christianity has passed, but which it has now definitely left behind. This is sometimes assumed too easily. It is difficult at times to reconcile the claims of Law and Gospel; but it must not be forgotten that Christianity began in the latter, and was compelled, by circumstances which have not ceased to exist or to be operative, to pass over into the former stage. He has arrived ex errore per veritatem ad errorem' is Harnack's criticism of the ablest and most uncompromising defence of what may be called the anarchic standpoint in religion; the social side of Christianity cannot be overlooked. It was impossible that an organisation should fail to spring up among the brethren; the question was not whether there should be an organisation, but of what nature the organisation should be. Many forms were possible; many were attempted. The communities put out feelers, and proceeded in the way of the least resistance; the fittest survived. Religious, or ecclesiastical, institutions are peripheral, true; but the circle has a periphery as well as a centre in themselves indifferent, when in possession they have in their favour eleven points of the law. Nor is the antagonism between the spirit and forms absolute. The 'spirit, like air or water, can fill any form, if only it is ' received. You may, indeed, have bottles without wine; 'but, if you wish to keep the wine, bottles are useful. Life 'always makes itself a form to dwell in. The body without 'the spirit is dead; but the spirit without the body is vaga'bond.' The Church had reason against the Montanists, though they represented her first traditions more faithfully than she did herself. She adapted herself to her circumstances, suffering loss-and that no small loss-in the process; but self-preservation, impossible at a lesser price,

was her reward. A system adapted to the requirements of a small and enthusiastic sect was impossible for a worldwide society embracing whole and half-believers, fervent and indifferent, strong and weak. To become once more the Church of the Catacombs the Church would have had to return to the Catacombs; to attempt to take the ground of the Church of the Apostles' days is as idle as to pretend to make an old man young. No external order or setting is essential to Christianity: circumstances and expediency, though excluded from the sanctuary of religion, bear rule in its courts, and excess, whether of insistence on or of dissent from what is indifferent, is out of place. They are wisest who conform as though they conformed not; not lingering in the precincts, but passing through them to the shrine. For the vital thing here is not to confound the relative values of the elements that make up our belief and practice. Like the prophet, we are apt to contemplate the less worthy parts of our deities; forgetting that while the idea, if it is to sustain and propagate itself, must be realised in concrete matter, in this realisation it becomes other than itself. Would we see it as it is? We must separate it, in thought at least, from its material conditions; yet remembering the while that, so separated, it is an abstraction; that the Divine Light never descends unclothed.

The religious history of mankind is a unity; it is impossible to cut ourselves adrift from the past. When we speak of a new departure it is a question of more or less. While change is a law of life, to which religion in common with other departments of human experience and activity is subject, the change which Nature enjoins is measured and orderly; it comes about, as the seed grows, while men sleep. The most sincere Catholic will grant that there was need of reform in the mediæval Church, though he may disapprove of the reforms actually effected; the most convinced Protestant will admit that the breaking-up of the historic fabric of Christendom was an evil, though, given the circumstances, it was the means of securing a greater good. Many, if not most, of the questions which have divided Christians would have been met by St. Paul with an impatient 'Doth God 'take care for oxen ?' They belong, it would have appeared to him, to the province of the infinitely small. It is well to take the religious environment in which we find ourselves as part of the Providentially existing social order; a thing which we did not make, and cannot to any appreciable extent directly mend. The perfect commonwealth, we call

it Utopia-No man's land; the Church of the firstborn, without spot or wrinkle, it is in heaven, not here. Yet in neither sphere is it good for us to be alone: we are by nature citizens; in society we give and gain. Mr. Montefiore's Liberal Judaism' is a singularly sympathetic and suggestive exposition of this standpoint. Nor is it as strange as it may appear that such an exposition should come to us from a non-Christian source. It is not in Christianity only, but in religion as such, that these questions are urgent, that the old bottles are straitened by the new wine. Judaism, though not in one sense of the word a dogmatic, is an historical and legal, religion, and it is no longer possible for educated Jews to accept the traditional account of its origins, or that of the ritual observances which it enjoins.

'It is here that people are beginning to ask themselves, "Can we still be Jews?" For the old Judaism taught that God had specially revealed himself to a particular race, and to this race only; that this revelation was accompanied by miracles and wonders, and that the contents of it were contained in a Law which was perfect, immutable, and divine. The old Judaism taught that the words of the Hebrew Bible were all "true," that its "miracles" really happened, that its writers, and more especially Moses, the author of the Pentateuch, were divinely and supernaturally inspired. . . . Now the new Judaism, it must be frankly owned, believes none of these articles. Reason, the source of which is God, creates the disbelief. Thus the new Judaism does not believe that all the words of the prophets are true; it does not believe that Moses was the chief of the prophets, or that the whole Law is Mosaic, and it does not believe that the whole Law is eternally binding upon Jews. It believes that in disobeying and modifying a great deal of that Law it is acting in accordance with reason, and therefore with the will of God.'

Yet, while recognising the magnitude and bearing of these 'differences, we must not exaggerate them. The new or 'liberal Judaism may still, I think, call itself Judaism, and 'not merely liberal and new.'* The essential doctrines of Judaism were proclaimed by the prophets of the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries before Christ; the Law was partly a survival of customary tribe law, partly a construction of the Jerusalem priesthood, dictated by mixed motives, political, personal, religious. That the legal prevailed over the prophetic teaching is one of the paradoxes of history; its triumph was the result of circumstances upon which it is impossible to enter here. But it was secondary in itself;

* Liberal Judaism, pp. 87-9.