original achievements of the New Testament to have brought home to men this conception of the World. A kind of conspiracy of irreligion, or union of all that is stagnant, inert, mechanical, and automatic into a coherent tyrannous power and jealous consentient opinion, this is what the New Testament puts before us as the world; and it represents religion as consisting in renunciation of it and separation from it. Conventionalism, indeed, is the modern expression by which we call that which stands here for the opposite of religion; and we can judge from this in what way religion itself was conceived, for the opposite of conventionalism is freshness of feeling, enthusiasm.

Everything akin to vital energy is inconsistent with the World as it is painted in the Gospels. Christianity there is never brought into contact with anything vigorous or enthusiastic. No artist lost in the worship of sensual beauty crosses the stage, no philosopher consumed with the thirst for truth. How such characters would have been treated by Christianity in its earliest days we cannot tell, perhaps with something of repugnance or hostility. But they could never have been classed with those whom Christianity actually attacked, the demure slaves of fashion and convention. They might be thought to be addicted to a false or dangerous religion, but they could not be called worldlings. Probably they would have been judged with favour, for it accords with the fundamental characteristic of the Gospel to extol vitality at the expense of propriety-those who love much, Magdalens, publicans, prodigals, at the expense of those most honoured by public opinion.

Irreligion, then, is life without worship, and the world is the collective character of those who do not worship. When worship is eliminated from life, what remains? There are animal wants to be satisfied, a number of dull cravings to be indulged, and paltry fears to be appeased; moreover, because worship is never really quite dead, but only feeble,

of an ideal, and a few prudish crotchets in place of virtues. Yet a society may live on in this condition, if political or physical conditions are favourable, with out falling into any enormous corrup tions, and may often in its moral statistics contrast favourably with one which some great but perverted enthusiasm has hurried into evil. Its fault is simply that it has no soul, or to use the old Biblical phrase, has no salt in itself; or again, to use the modern German paraphrase which Mr. Carlyle is so fond of, has no soul to save the expense of salt. Now it is against this condition, we say, against irreligion pure and simple as distinguished from any forms of false religion, that there always has been, and is, particularly in our own time, a remarkable agreement of authorities.

It may, indeed, often appear that the disregard of animal wants and the renunciation of the world preached in the New Testament, are exaggerated. Animal wants in our northern climates and since slavery was disused have become more imperious than they were in ancient times, and the education of recent centuries has led us to approve a certain kind and degree of worldliness. Even prejudices, social conventions, and decorums may no doubt be condemned too unreservedly. But granting all this by way of abatement, the general truth of the New Testament doctrine is clearer now than it has been in many ages (so called) of religious agreement. There has never been a time when the necessity of religion, in the broad sense of the word, has been so clear, as there ha never been a time when its value in the narrow sense has been so much disputed. If, now that Art and Science have attained complete independence of the Church, and the monopoly even of moral influence is withdrawn from her by systems of independent morality, secular education and the like, we give the name of religion to that confined domain which is still left to the Church, it will seem as insignificant as the States of the Church have been in our time compared to the dominion held by Hil

stand that all culture alike rests upon religion, religion being not simple, but threefold, and consisting of that worship of visible things which leads to art, that worship of humanity which leads to all moral disciplines, and principally the Christian, and that worship of God which is the soul of all philosophy and science; if we recognize, on the other hand, that the absence of religion is the absence not of one of these kinds of worship, but of all-in other words, that it is the paralysis of the power of admiration, and as a consequence, the predominance of the animal wants and the substitution of automatic custom for living morality; then we shall recognize, on the one hand, that never was religion so much wanted among us, and on the other hand, that there was never so much agreement about it among thinkers.

It was never so much wanted, because of all nations our own best understands what may be made of the world, and best knows how to make life tolerable without religion. We of all nations most thoroughly see through that false unworldliness which begins in the want of self-respect and ends in mendicancy; it is we who have placed among the virtues our national "self-help," which so absolutely confounds well-being with wealth, and makes the highest object of life to be a livelihood. Providence in these later centuries at least seems to have indulged us in this safe and low view of life; for our insular position has allowed to sleep in us all those high thoughts which have been aroused in other nations by pressing national danger, while our close connection with the New World infects us somewhat with the commonness of colonial thought, and our good fortune in political institutions helps us to keep up a good appearance before the world. Hence we are able with greater complacency than almost any society to indulge in a view of life not so much unchristian as irreligious, a life not so much of perverted ideals and worships, as devoid of ideals and worships. Other nations

other to pieces out of some mistaken devotion; how long is it since we did anything of the kind? Our temptation is not to false religion but to irreligion. It is not the Christian alone who complains that Englishmen can only understand his creed when they have translated it into the language of the counting-house, but the other religions complain of us just as much. The Higher Paganism makes few converts among us, so that artists complain that in England all art is turned into a business, while science, on the other hand, can only make way by disguising itself under the name of technical education, and pleading that it alone can save our manufactures from being beaten out of the market by foreign competition.

Of all those acts of religious selfsacrifice, monastic vows, &c., of which former ages were so full, the true counterpart or equivalent in these days is that a man should not for mere wealth submit himself to a course of life which to him has no spiritual value, and that when any religious vocation, whether to art or to science, or to Christian duty and philanthropy, is strong in him, a man should abandon meaner pleasures to follow such a vocation. Judged by this test, ours surely is the least religious of all countries; for it is the country where the largest number of people lead, for mere superfluous wealth, a life that they themselves despise; the country where vocations are oftenest deliberately disobeyed or trifled with, where artists oftenest paint falsely, and literary men write hastily for money, and where men born to be philosophers, or scientific discoverers, or moral reformers, oftenest end ignominiously in large practice at the bar.

Would you

Or take another test. know whether a man has an ideal? Look what he does with his children, for he will try to fulfil it in them. Themselves, for the most part, men feel to be failures; necessarily, for we carve ourselves while we are learning the art of sculpture. Children are, as it were,

fresh blocks of marble in which if

better chance of realizing it, because we may work on them as mature artists. Look, then, how the English people treat their children. Try and discover from the way they train them, from the education they give them, what they wish them to be. You will find that they have ceased, almost consciously ceased, to have any ideal at all. Traces may still be observed of an old ideal not quite forgotten: here and there a vague notion of instilling hardihood, a really decided wish to teach frankness and honesty, and, in a large class, also good manners; but these after all are negative virtues. What do they wish their children to aim at? What pursuits do they desire for them? Except that when they grow up they are to make or have a livelihood, and take a satisfactory position in society, and in the meanwhile that it would be hard for them not to enjoy themselves heartily, most parents would be puzzled to say what they wish for their children. And, whatever they wish, they wish so languidly that they entrust the realization of it almost entirely to strangers, being themselves, so they say -and indeed the Philistine or irreligious person always is-much engaged. The parent, from sheer embarrassment and want of an ideal, has in a manner abdicated, and it has become necessary to set apart a special class for the cultivation of parental feelings and duties. The modern schoolmaster should change his name, for he has become a kind of standing or professional parent.

All this, perhaps, is generally allowed, and by most it is vaguely regretted; though some think it has been made out by political economy that no man need, or indeed ought, to engage in any occupation which will not bring him in at least two or three thousand a year. And yet our first economist is precisely the writer who has most emphatically denounced this view of life. What Mill calls liberty, or individuality, is precisely what other moralists call soul;

it is, indeed, looked at from the scientific side, what we have here argued to be the essence of religion. To have an individuality, is the same thing as to have an ideal; and to have an ideal, is to have an object of worship-it is to have a religion. To a philosopher like Mill this ideal presents itself in the form of a system of well-reasoned opinions; to the artist it presents itself otherwise, and to the Christian again otherwise. And, as has been said, much depends upon the form the ideal takes; there are great differences between the worship of Beauty, Duty, and Reason. But against those who have no ideal, and who live wholly without worship, against that sect, which numbers so many followers amongst ourselves, who recognize no intrinsic values but only value in exchange, all these worshippers are at one. And they include all who are supposed to have anything to say about the ends of life. What Mill says in the name of philosophy is echoed by Ruskin-however much they may differ on economical questions in the name of art; both have the same enemy in the commonness, the worldliness they see threatening to overwhelm us; and both again are in accord with the voices that are raised in the name of morality, from Carlyle denouncing shams, or Thackeray working out the old Christian conception of the World with inexhaustible detail in Vanity Fair, to the humblest novelist, who could never make out his three volumes without the eternal contrast between conventionalism and genuine feeling-or, in other words, life without worship and life with it; and all alike do but repeat, in these days when it is said there is no agreement about religion, those maxims which have always made the basis of the religion of Christendom-that "there is one thing needful," and that "it shall profit a man nothing if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul."

CHAPTER IX.

COELUM NON ANIMAM.

SIR Acton North had early in life arrived at the conclusion that women were on the whole inexplicable creatures, who lived in a region of sentiment into which no man had ever entered, and who had all kinds of fancies and feelings which no man could possibly understand. But because he could not understand these strange notions, did he consider them preposterous? Not at all. He took them on trust, for the very reason that he could not guess at their origin. He was most considerate towards those women with whom he had dealings; it was enough for him that they did believe so and so, and did feel this or that; he had long ago given up all notion of trying to comprehend their sentiments; and, in short, he simply accepted their reports. Take, for example, the relations between Violet North and her stepmother. Why, he asked himself, could not these two people live in the same house together and be decently civil to each other? The answer was that they were women-they had "sympathies," "antipathies," "secret repugnances," and all the rest of it, which were no doubt of great importance to themselves, but were a trifle unintelligible to others. He himself, now, when a young man, had shared his rooms with this or that acquaintance, whose habits and opinions were very different from his own; but did they quarrel? No; they were two men; they had something else to think of than studying those niceties of manner and expression that seemed to make women either love each other or hate each other as the chance might be. Had he not had to work in daily association with many a man whose appearance, and dress, and habit of speech-in fact every

coarseness and meanness; and yet when Idid either of them find the other's presence in a room an insupportable outrage on the feelings? Women were strange creatures; but they had to be leniently dealt with; for, after all, these peculiar fancies of theirs were doubtless of importance to themselves.

Sir Acton loyally carried out this theory, especially with regard to his wife and daughters. At the present moment he was hampering in a serious manner the performance of his duties in Canada, merely because a schoolgirl had besought him to take her away from England for eighteen months or a couple of years. He did not understand why Violet should hate England, or be so anxious to leave it. He knew she had committed some schoolgirl indiscretions; but surely every schoolgirl did not get into such a passion of remorse when found out in a fault? However, here was his eldest daughter crying, sobbing, imploring to be taken with him to Canada; and so he took her.

Nor was he surprised that, the moment she left England, she should begin to be very sorrowful and filled with a longing regret. That was only another instance of the unintelligible working of the feminine emotions. He cheered her as well as he could; and tried to interest her in the details of the voyage. Fortunately they had a fine passage; there were some agreeable people on board; and Miss North speedily regained her ordinary gaiety of spirits. When they landed on the shores of what was to her a new and wonderful country, moreover, she was full of high expectation. She proved, as she had promised to be, an excellent travelling companion. She was equal to any amount of fatigue -indeed, the girl had a constitution as tough as his own. She made light of delays and inconveniences; she saw

;

through rose-coloured spectacles; such things as were beautiful or delightful provoked an admiration which pleased her father, because it was obviously flavoured with gratitude. Then there was something on the other side. They were not always inspecting valleys, surveying plains, and studying maps. There were pauses of social enjoyment; and Sir Acton North, in taking about with him his daughter, was not at all averse to showing some of his old acquaintances what an English girl was like. And among those families were there not a few young men who secretly admired and longed-who wondered whether it was not possible to fascinate, delay, and subsequently capture this beautiful bird of passage? Doubtless but their wiles were of no avail. She was too busy, eager, and happy-too gay and self-reliant of heart—to attend to imploring glances and sighs. If she had, in resolving to become a woman, thrown aside much of the fractious impatience and rude frankness of her schoolgirl days, she still retained a gracious dignity-a certain lofty audacity of pride in herself-that would not at all permit that she should be trifled with. Those young gentlemen were not aware that she had just been released from school, or doubtless they would have been sufficiently surprised by the fashion in which a schoolgirl could assume all the self-reliant dignity of a woman, keeping them, more especially, in their proper place.

But even Sir Acton's placid concurrence in the vagaries of the feminine nature would have been startled if he had known the sentiment that was gradually growing up during all this time in his daughter's heart. It had been symbolised in a measure by the manner of her leaving England. She was glad to get away from the squalor, the din, the bustle of the seaport-town from which they sailed; but by and by all those objectionable things were forgotten, and, looking back, she only saw her own beautiful England. So now all the harsh aspects and humiliating cir

to get away from were forgotten; and she looked back to the small circle of friends she had known with a tender and wistful regret. She grew to think there was no place in all the world so quiet, and homely, and beautiful as that little garden behind James Drummond's house in Camberwell Grove. The people around her did all they could to please her and amuse her; but they were only acquaintances; her friends were back in that old and yet never-forgotten time. which was becoming so dear to her. She had indeed succeeded in putting a great chasm between her and that bygone time. England was not half so far away from her as were her schoolgirl days. But did she cease to care for the old time, and for the friends she knew then? Not much. Both had grown dearer to her, as England had grown dearer to her; and many a night, when a great lambent planet was shining in the northern sky, she looked up and her heart said to it, "Ah, how happy you must be; for you are able to look across the waters and see my England!"

And as for him who had been her companion in that adventure which was the main cause of her exile? Well, he underwent transformation too. First of all, she was a little ashamed of the whole affair; and did not like to think of him. Then she began to look upon that episode in a sort of half-humorous way; she would smile to herself in reflecting on her own folly; and perhaps wonder what he was now thinking of it all. But as the days, and the weeks, and the months went by-as the continual succession of actual lakes, and mountains, and pine-woods made England look more and more visionary and remote-so that little adventure came to be regarded as the only bit of romance that had ever occurred to her, and she thought of the bright May-day as belonging to a past Spring-time not likely to be recalled in the life of a woman. He, too; had he not been made the victim of her petulant caprice? Had he not manfully gone and taken the blame of that for which he was in nowise responsible? And did