ECHOES.

Deep streams run still,- and why? Not because there are no obstructions, but because they altogether overflow those stones or rocks round which the shallow stream has to make its noisy way; 'tis the full life that saves us from the little noisy troubles of life." - W. S.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

THE RELIGION OF TO-DAY.

THE wife has told us that when in early days she once lamented the coldness of that view of religion which in her friend's mind had superseded the supernatural faith, he answered her, with a look "half pleading, half pathetic," "Wait, wait till mothers have taught it to their children!" That view of his, that conception of the universe which in our generation has so largely ripened, she came to fully accept; it assimilated with her deepest life; it took on new emphases and nobler interpretations from a woman's character under a woman's typical experiences. And no one could better illustrate than she does that in the best development there is no hostility between the old faith and the new. The best of the old is carried forward and assimilated with the new. The transition may not always be free from shock and temporary dislocation, but in the ultimate result the present is the inheritor of the past. It will be noticed with what fondness and fitness the wife often appropriates the old familiar language of the Bible to the modern forms of thought. She enjoyed this advantage over her husband, that he had in early, unaided youth been thrown into intellectual antagonism with the whole system of Christianity as it was then taught, whereas she was guided by a hand so gentle that she exchanged the old for the new thought at the cost of hardly more than an occasional passing shiver. It was not that change which gave poignancy to the questionings of her later years, it was the confrontal with those tremendous realities of death and

bereavement, whose advent presses home upon the soul the problem of its destiny. Her character and her beliefs, as we see them at the last, suggest a glance at the present tendencies of religion among the thoughtful people of the English-speaking race. On the surface there are stubborn contradictions. We must look below the surface; we must seek the significance of each movement, not in the loudest voices, not in the votes of majorities, but in its deep under-current.

Three words sum up the highest results of modern thought. The word spoken by the church is Christ. The word of science is Evolution. The word of humanity is the Soul.

All the vitality in Christian theology has concentrated itself in the idea of Christ. Christ, from an actor in a mediatorial drama, has come to be regarded as a direct manifestation of the Divine Nature in the form of perfect humanity. Christ, as Incarnate Love, is viewed as the revelation of God to men. This conception shifts into another, that Christ is the ideal of humanity. Viewed as a historic and purely human character, he exemplifies that spirit of fidelity and love and trust and hope which is the true law of human life. When accepted as such an ideal, it matters little though the supernatural features of the story fade away; it matters little that the personality of Jesus may have been enriched by the creative imagination of eighteen hundred years. The conception is reached that the religious life is not dependent on any interpretation of the New Testament story, but that the essence of religion is aspiration and effort toward those traits of character, that moral ideal, which is familiarly and vividly associated with the name of Christ. And further, as any noble and beloved human being impressively suggests some divine source and original, so Christ, as the type of humanity, is felt to be the symbol and pledge of God. Not in a dogmatic, but in a natural sense, the Son

supreme

reveals the Father: all highest humanity mirrors Deity. This Christ-ideal involves a filial attitude toward God, an expectant attitude toward a world beyond this. Are those attitudes justified in the light of our present knowledge?

The broadest result of man's study of the world and its inhabitants is his discovery of an ordered and upward growth through uncounted ages-which we name Evolution. That discovery, made within our own generation, is working a revolution in thought and sentiment, of which we cannot yet predict the limits. It has given the central clue which guides a thousand special lines of investigation. It has touched the mind with a strange blending of awe, hope, exultation, and depression. Filling the imagination with its stupendous drama of the past and future of the world, it has often operated to becloud if not to deny those hopes and fears of the individual which are touched with the greatness of eternity. It brings a new significance to man's individual character and deeds as one element in a mighty whole, but it suggests that the individual himself is transient. It dispels the vagary of a chance world, not less than it displaces. the notion of a world regulated by occasional divine interference. It reveals universal Order - but what of universal Goodness? It sets man in a vast and endless brotherhood but is it a brotherhood in which each member is but a vanishing atom?

From Evolution, the process, the inquiring mind reverts to the Soul, the result. It ponders afresh those experiences of consciousness which have somehow been generated in man as we see him the latest term in the long series of progress. Evolution, studied as a history, does not adequately explain Man as he is. We must study the existing Man, and in the highest phases of his being, if we would understand what the slow creative process means. Darwin essays to explain the evolution of, the eye. But the fundamental fact is that man does see.

He not only has visual sensation, but he receives through it the invincible assurance of external reality. Trace if you can, man of science, the growth of the seeing organ, and the seeing faculty-but, giving to that history its whole significance, is the present fact that man sees.

And so, more fundamental than any exposition of the process by which man came to be what he is, is the fact of what he is. He is, in his highest aspect, a being who thinks, acts, obeys, loves, trusts, hopes. It is in these relations that we give to his nature its name of Soul.

By various attraction, which we call Love, man is united to his fellow-beings. At first he is drawn to one who gives him pleasure then he is won to reciprocate that pleasure. And at last he reaches the height where Jesus says, "Love them that hate you!" His nature expands toward friend, neighbor, enemy even; and at last toward all his kind, in a sentiment whose new birth our age hails under new titles, "the solidarity of the race," "the enthusiasm of humanity." And together with this broadening, the special tie of one individual soul to another, the union of friend with friend, of husband with wife, rises to greater intensity, takes on a profounder significance, and kindles a light which no shadows of fear and the unknown can subdue.

Man trusts some power above himself. That Trust is deeper than any reasons he can give for it, and stronger than any reasons which can be urged against it. His trust when at its best is purely filial — it is a blending of obedience with confidence. It is this element of obedience, the actual submission of the will to the highest law it can discern, which gives the inmost reality to trust, and which can never be adequately expressed in intellectual terms. Beauty and music cannot be fully conveyed in words, can only be hinted at; and so is it with the "peace which passeth understanding," whose springs are not in thought but in life. It is the saint's secret. And