thereby proving the existence of a new set of facts calculated to affect its reckoning and to alter its destination.

We do not, therefore, conceive it likely that the Church of mere Common Sense has much of a literary mission. As soon as it shall betray any deep capacity to discriminate and cherish the rich varieties of human character, it must ipso facto assume some less rigid theological type; the primary Paley stratum would give place to a newer formation and disappear. And that this type of theology must ultimately receive a gracious dissolution, and melt away under the genial influence of literature, we fully believe. Indeed, exceedingly as we dislike that hybrid species of composition of which religious novels almost always consist, we yet believe there is no better sign for the theology of the present day than its disposition to try itself by literary tests. Theology and Literature-the study of God and the study of Man -need to go hand in hand, and are only just beginning to know it. It was not so always. Although it was the return of literature that heralded the free theology of the Reformation, yet in the first era of that theology there was too intense a straining of the newly-recovered sight for the divine love and mercy, to permit any quiet and perfect union between human duties and religious trust. Erasmus and the literary party were also the indifferentist party, who cared for freedom from the Church rather as a release from intellectual restraints than as a permission to love and trust without a priest's artificial intervention. Luther and the Puritans found the only literature they needed in the Bible, and their great yearning was to concede as little hold over themselves to the anxious cares of this life as a Hebrew prophet or a Christian apostle. They desired to drown the memory of human labours in the springs of a divine life; and though they toiled earnestly and loved deeply, it was with a burning thirst for the return of the hour when they might open their hearts to the dews that hang on the twilight of eternity, and be born anew in the healing silence of God. It was not with the affectionate minuteness of joy that human cares and duties were discharged; and human literature was therefore little valued. As the objects of God's love and care, all men were equally precious; as mere human studies, all were equally insignificant. In the one vast thought of free mercy and personal love, all thoughts of the special windings of that love through the varying lives of various men was for a time merged and forgotten. And when the first tide of fresh religious life had rolled away, the new theology, thus separated from special human interests, necessarily tended to become inorganic,-a series of fixed truths as to what God had done, not a revelation of what He was doing.

Literature, on the other hand, set free from the control of

the Church, ran riot in its liberty, and man's image was reproduced in every modification of distortion, until literary genius was almost habituated to regard new specimens of character with as little relation to any standard of character as if each specimen were an independent species of Nature's own making, which it would be idle to compare with any central type. As it is the tendency of theology without literature to recede into a set of distant, discontinuous, inorganic truths, so it is the tendency of literature without theology to lose all trace of unity, and break up into numberless accidental forms of discoloured humanity. The object of literature is not the mere delineation of actual men; it is the delineation of men drawn with a full insight into man. Wherever individual characters are merely copied without reference to any such vision of man,—wherever, for instance, human evil is pictured without the consciousness that it is also human degradation,-wherever meanness is painted without any glimpse of its sadness,-there literature becomes grovelling, decrepit, dead; it chokes and nauseates the mind: it is human literature no longer. And this insight into what man is, and men might be, is but too apt to die out of the imagination, if the diversity of living images be not seen in relation to the one life in which they were made. Indeed, it is the natural tendency of mere literary pursuits to weaken the belief in any unchangeable moral standard of character; and, except in cases of the highest conceivable imaginative inspiration, such as Shakespeare's (in whom there was such fulness of humanity, that no familiarity, however close, with the varieties of human weakness and evil could have disturbed his calm insight into the inexhaustible varieties of possible greatness), it is almost inevitable that the habit of taking up all moral and immoral attitudes in turn must dizzy the brain and confound the steadiness of personal convictions, unless there be a real inward hold on that spiritual image, which is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. No theology, of course, however living and true, will lend the artistic power to paint human character vividly, but it will secure the imagination against the dangers of its own flexibility, -it will tinge with a divine pathos the picture of misery and guilt, it will suggest an inward perspective for grouping the creations of the poet,-and it will involuntarily open new vistas in the tragedy of human story by giving a spiritual transparence to the brooding cloud of calamity, or mixing a watery gleam of unreality with the triumphant sunshine of selfish prosperity. Literature has a right to ask Theology to show that it can assimilate closely with all the various forms of human life, and solve in detail the individual problems of individual lives; Theology has a right to ask literature to show that it aims at some

unity of spirit amid its diversity of gifts, that it has a higher aim than merely to give birth to

"Such souls as shards produce, such beetle things

As only buzz to heaven with evening wings,"

such as only "strike in the dark, offending but by chance," and that it will not shrink therefore from connecting the flying tints of human nature by regarding them with conscious reference to the One presence in whom it is fulness of life that prevents the possibility of change.

These demands of literature on theology, and of theology on literature, are more and more recognised, and give rise to many unpleasant, because ineffectual, struggles to reconcile irreconcilable forms of life and faith. The only writers who as yet have been completely successful in the task, have been one or two ladies, with characters yielding enough to bend wholly to the high Anglican theory, and intellects sufficiently delicate to inlay plenteously with the stored grains of a rich imaginative experience the painful symptoms of feverish debility which they identify with the highest religious trust. The Anglican works we refer to are painful only because they are so successful; because they really do show what a consumptive air we should have to breathe, what a hectic glow it would constantly be our fate to feel, if the sacerdotal conceptions of the legitimate anxiety of conscience, and the duty of detecting a captivity for the will where it does not offer itself, were engrafted on the genial trustfulness of Protestant faith. No other form of faith has yet been able fully to reconcile its practical ideal of life with its spiritual theory. Evangelical stories are mere forms; you see every where that the life consciously or unconsciously believed in, and the life inculcated, are totally distinct; and in the best evangelical biographies, like Chalmers's, all the hearty enjoyment remains distinctly apart from the spiritual grace. Human nature is a "narrow vessel," which has a strong capillary repulsion for the Calvinistic doctrine which it is sometimes compelled to hold, and nature provides for the incompatibility by allowing the doctrine to fill the vessel without any close union at all. Mr. Kingsley has done much to indicate the type of manly religious life in which faith and nature may be fused into a living whole-that true "nature" which alone Bishop Butler recognises as nature at all; but, aiming at something far nobler and healthier than the Anglican school, he has not succeeded so conspicuously in reaching his aim.

Literature has not yet become so fully conscious of the necessity of admitting the religious side of life into its circle of thought as Theology has become of the necessity of testing it

self by its general power to enter into and strengthen individual character in those crises of life which literature loves to delineate. Only in our higher poetry has the fusion been perfect and natural. Wordsworth and Tennyson have done much to make men feel that it is all but death to poetry to parcel it off into secular and religious; that to treat nature and life with the large and true insight of a poet at all, you are compelled to recognise at innumerable points the indissoluble relation in which earthly life must for ever stand to both Heaven and Hell. In the other departments of literature the same truth is not yet recognised, and some of our greatest writers still ignore religion with a timidity which robs their sphere of thought of its noblest province, and obliges them to be rather painters of manners than painters of men.

In this great want of the day,-the want of a clear insight into the points at which real religion strives, whether successfully or vainly, to enter the hearts and lives of ordinary men, -the Church of Common Sense have not deeply participated. Their acutest and sincerest members are apt to shrug their shoulders at so much fuss about the different aspects of religion in different minds, and to state with some impatience that it is "plainly nothing more" than the strong conviction of "the candid understanding" that the testimony of miracle and history proved Christ to be the Revealed Word of God, coupled with the unselfish dedication of the will to the work of bringing the world to a like faith. 'Of course they know that character is not the same in all, and that in many the affections take the start of the reason; but to them it seems there is little solid reliance to be placed except on an understanding convinced by proofs that do not vary with varying seasons and feelings. However, it is not for them to judge others; and though they cannot but wonder how a rational mind can prefer 'instincts' to evidence, or can fail to see that the rough reason of the world will not be convinced without historical proof; they can only rejoice that some attain the peace of conviction by processes incomprehensible to them, and that others who have not attained that conviction can show so much evidence of practical goodness that they must believe their scepticism is in some mysterious way compatible with God's favour.

So speak and think the nobler members of the Church of Common Sense. Not so speak and think the exponents of the Hard Church. They seem to have concentrated all their strength on the task of sweeping away the "cobwebs of philosophers," and exhibiting how many counterfeit theologies are in contact with our actual life, instead of finding out the points where true theology breaks in upon those counterfeits. We do not

depreciate in the least the services of those who expose shams; but we do deeply believe that he does pure harm who delights in "studies" of shams, without bringing them into living relations with the real wants which they pretend to appease. Mr. Carlyle in spite of his mournfully hopeless no-reply to such wants-has done whatever good he once effected (and it was not small) for the thinkers of England, not by a cold skill in painting shams every where, even where they were not to be seen, but by showing them in sad contrast to the famishing spirits to which they were offered as nourishment. The Hard Church, though they do reserve a private theological solution for the problems of life, are crueller and more useless teachers to those whom they think it their duty to assail. They go about like theological detectives, without any care or compassion for the sins (imaginary or real) of the defaulters they arrest. They "expose" shallowness and weakness, or hypocrisy, in the spirit which seems to say, not only "Here are men deceiving themselves with an imposture," but "Here are men who have no deeper wants, no deeper life that is left unsatisfied by this imposture; here are men who have completely imposed on themselves." They paint, not only the sham clothing of men's minds, but sham minds altogether-and give you the impression that God has retained no witness of Himself in the spirits of more than half his children. They even give no sadness to the tone of their delineations. It is coarse triumph over the wretchedness of supposed error or real evil. This is not the style of exposure that makes men look into their own hearts. It is the style that makes men hurl back the charges at their accuser. A section so mischievous as the Hard Church, Christendom does not contain. It is wise and useful to tear away the veil from all imposture, intellectual or spiritual. But it is neither wise nor useful, for it is untrue, to tear away such a veil and show no human nature beneath it, restless under its unreality, and bitterly seeking to dissemble ease.

A more painful specimen of Hard Church libels on men has seldom appeared than the novel of Perversion. We do not think that there are many of these sketches that may not be in their literal details taken from real life; many of them clearly are either newspaper facts or sketches of personal experience; but we do not know any one of the miserable shams which pass in such quick succession before us, from the very beginning up to the 121st page of the 3d volume, which, if it had been painted by a man deeply feeling the meaning of what he was delineating, would not have had either far lighter and more mixed colours, or a far sadder tone. The sketches are, most of them, like the ugly series of masks that used to be depicted as a frontispiece to