particularly as to the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ in the flesh. It is also reported, we believe on good authority, that Mr. Bradley is the author of an obnoxious article in an infidel publication, calling in question such facts as the miraculous conversion of the Apostle Paul, treating other portions of the Gospel narrative as merely "symbolical," and classing the Bible as only one of many Holy Books with equal pretensions to divine inspiration. Privately we believe the Vicar of Fensea upholds opinions even more extraordinary than these. It is for your lordship to decide, therefore, whether he is a fit person to fill the sacred office of a Christian minister, especially in these times, when Antichrist is busy at work and the seeds of unbelief find such ready acceptance, especially in the bosom of the young. Personally, we have no complaint against the Vicar, who is well liked by many of his congregation, and is very zealous in works of charity and almsgiving. But the pride of carnal knowledge and the vanity of secular approbation have turned him from that narrow path which leads to righteousness, into the howling wilderness of heterodoxy, wherein having wandered too far, no man may again find his soul alive. We beseech your lordship to investigate this matter without delay; and with the assurance of our deepest respect and reverence, we beg to subscribe ourselves, your lordship's humble and obedient servants, HENRY SUMMERHAYES, EZEKIEL MARVEL, WALTER ROCHFORD, SIMPSON PEPPERBACK, JOHN DOVE, TABITHA RAYLEIGH, spinster, all of the parish of Fensea. II. From the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells to the Rev. Ambrose Bradley, Vicar of Fensea. Darkdale, May 28. DEAR MR. BRADLEY,-I have just received from some of the leading members of your congregation a communication of an extraordinary nature, calling in question, I regret to say, not merely your manne: of conducting the sacred service in the church of Fensea, but your very personal orthodoxy in those matters which are the pillars of the Christian faith. I cannot but think that there is some mistake, for I know by early experience how ready churchgoers are, especially in the rural districts, to distort the significance of a preacher's verbal expressions on difficult points of doctrine.. When you were first promoted to the living of Fensea, you were named to me as a young man of unusual faith and zeal-perfervid, indeed, to a fault; and I need not say that I had heard of you otherwise as one from whom your university expected great things. That is only a few years ago. What, then, has occurred to cause this sad misconception (I take it for granted that it is a misconception) on the part of your parishioners? Perhaps, like many other young preachers of undoubted attainments but limited experience, you have been trying your oratorical wings too much in flights of a mystic philosophy and a poetical rhetoric; and in the course of these flights have, as rhetoricians will, alarmed your hearers unnecessarily. Assuming this for a moment, will you pardon me for saying that there are two ways of preaching the gospel: one subtle and mystical, which appeals only to those spirits who have penetrated into the adytum of Christian theology; one cardinal and rational, which deals only with the simple truths of Christian teaching, and can be understood by the veriest child. Perhaps, indeed, of these two ways, the latter one most commends itself to God. "For except a man be born again," &c. Be that as it may, and certainly I have no wish to undervalue the subtleties of Christian philosophy, let me impress upon you that, where a congregation is childlike, unprepared, and as it were uninstructed, no teaching can be too direct and simple. Such a congregation asks for bread, not for precious stones of oratory; for kindly promise, not for mystical speculation. That you have seriously questioned, even in your own mind, any of the divine truths of our creed, as expressed in that Book which is a light and a law unto men, I will not for a moment believe; but I shall be glad to receive forthwith, over your own signature, an assurance that my surmise is a correct one, and that you will be careful in the future to give no further occasion for misconception. I am, my dear Mr. Bradley, yours, DARKDALE AND DELLS. III. From the Rev. Ambrose Bradley to the Right Reverend the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells. Vicarage, May 31, 1880. MY DEAR BISHOP,-I am obliged to you for your kind though categorical letter, to which I hasten to give you a reply. That certain members of my congregation should have forwarded complaints concerning me does not surprise me, seeing that they have already taken me to task on many occasions and made my progress here difficult, if not disagreeable. But I think you will agree with me that there is only one light by which a Christian man, even a Christian clergyman, can consent to be directed-the light of his own conscience and intellect, divinely implanted within him for his spiritual guidance. I will be quite candid with you. You ask what has changed me since the day when, zealous, and, as you say, "perfervid," I was promoted to this ministry? The answer is simple. A deep and conscientious study of the wonderful truths of Science, an eager and impassioned study of the beautiful truths of Art. I seem to see you raise your hands in horror. But if you will bear with me a little while, perhaps I may convince you that what I have said is not so horrible after all-nay, that it expresses a conviction which exists at the present moment in the bosom of many Christian men. The great question before the world just now, when the foundations of a particular faith are fatally shaken, when Science denies that Christ as we conceive him ever was, and when Art bewails wildly that He should ever have been, is whether the Christian religion can continue to exist at all; whether, when a few more years have passed away, it will not present to a modern mind the spectacle that paganism once presented to a medieval mind. Now, of our leading churchmen, not even you, my Lord Bishop, I feel sure, deny that the Church is in danger, both through attacks from without and through a kind of dry-rot within. Lyell and others have demolished and made ridiculous the Mosaic cosmogony. Strauss and others have demolished, with more or less success, the Biblical and Christian miracles. No sane man now seriously believes that the sun ever stood still, or that an ass spoke in human speech, or that a multitude of people were ever fed with a few loaves and fishes, or that any solid human form ever walked on the liquid sea. With the old supernaturalism has gone the old asceticism or other-worldliness. It is now pretty well agreed that there are substantially beautiful things in this world which have precedence over fancifully beautiful things in the other. The poets have taught us the loveliness of nature, the painters have shown us the loveliness of art. Meantime, what does the Church do? Instead of accepting the new knowledge and the new beauty, instead of building herself up anew on the debris of her shattered superstitions, she buries her face in her own ashes, and utters a senile wail of protestation. Instead of calling upon her children to face the storm, and to build up new bulwarks against the rising wave of secularism, she commands them to wail with her or to be silent. Instead of perceiving that the priests of Baal and Antichrist might readily be overthrown with the weapons forged by their own hands, she cowers before them powerless, in all the paralysis of superstition, in all the blind fatuity of prayer. But let us look the facts in the face. The teachers of the new knowledge have unroofed our Temple to the heavens, but have not destroyed its foundations; they have overthrown its brazen images, but have not touched its solid walls. Put the case in other and stronger words. The God who thundered upon Sinai has vanished into air and cloud, but the God of man's heavenly aspiration is wonderfully quickened and alive. The Bible of wrath and prophecy is cast contemptuously aside, but the Bible of eternal poetry is imperishable, its wild dreams and aspirations being crystallised in such literature as cannot die. The historic personality of the gentle Founder of Christianity becomes fainter and fainter as the ages advance; but, on the other hand, brighter and fairer grows the Divine Ideal which rose from the ashes of that godlike man. Men reject the old miracles, but they at last accept a miracle of human idealism. In one word, though Christianity has perished as a dogmatic faith, it survives as the philosophic religion of the world. This being so, how does it behove a Christian minister, eating the Church's bread, but fully alive to her mortal danger, to steer his course? Shall he, as so many do, continue to act in the nineteenth century as he would have acted in the fifteenth, or indeed in any century up to the Revolution? Shall he base his teaching on the certainty of miracles, on the existence of supernaturalism, on the evil of the human heart, the vanity of this world, and the certainty of rewards and punishments in another? Shall he brandish the old hell fire, or scatter the old heavenly manna? I do not think so! Knowing in his heart that these things are merely the cast-off epidermis of a living and growing creed, he may, in perfect consciousness of God's approval, put aside the miraculous as unproven if not irrelevant; warn the people against mere supernaturalism; proclaim with the apostles of the Renaissance the glory and loveliness of this world-its wondrous scenes, its marvellous story as written on the rocks and in the stars, its divine science, its literature, its poetry, and its art; and treading all the fire of hell beneath his feet, and denouncing the threat of eternal wrath as a chimera, base his hope of immortality on the moral aspirations that, irrespective of dogma, are common to all mankind. This I think he may do, and must do if the Church is to endure. Let him do this, and let only a tithe of his brethren imitate him in so doing, and out of this nucleus of simple believers, as out of the little Galilæan band, may be renewed a faith that will redeem the world. Questioned of such a faith, Science will reply-" I have measured the heavens and the earth, I have traced back the book of the universe page by page and letter by letter, but I have found neither here nor yonder any proof that God is not; nay, beyond and behind and within all phenomena, there abides one unknown quantity which you are quite free to call-God." Similarly questioned, Art will answer-" Since you have rejected what was so hideous, tested by the beauty of this world, and since you hold even my work necessary and holy, I too will confess with you that I hunger for something fairer and less perishable; and in token of that hunger, of that restless dream, I will be your Church's handmaid, and try to renew her Temple and make it fair." Not the Jesus of The keystone of the Church is Jesus Christ. the miracles, not Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, but Jesus Christ, the Divine Ideal, the dream and glory of the human race. Not God who made himself a man, but man who, by God's inspiration, has been fashioned unto the likeness of a God. And what, as we behold him now, is this Divine Ideal—this man made God? He is simply, as I conceive, the accumulated testimony of human experience of history, poetry, philosophy, science, and art-in favour of a rational religion, the religion of earthly peace and heavenly love. Built upon the groundwork of what, shorn of its miraculous pretensions, was a gentle and perfect life, the Divine Ideal, or Ideal Person, began. At first shadowy and almost sinister, then clearer and more beautiful; then, descending through the ages, acquiring at every step some new splendour of self-sacrifice, some new consecration of love or suffering, from every heart that suffered patiently, from every soul that fed the lamp of a celestial dream with the oil of sweet human love. And now, far removed as is man himself from the archetypal ape, is this Christ of modern Christendom, this spiritual Saviour of the world, from the ghostly skeleton of the early martyrs, from the Crucified One of early |