on our part, and to that of history without any preference for the just ruler above the tyrant. Man could never have made a beginning of natural philosophy if he had not come to it with that high prepossession, the idea of Law; and, as Bacon reminds us, the prudens interrogatio is necessary if we would elicit from Nature more than the fool's answer. If prepossessions are thus preconditions for natural and for moral philosophy, are they intrusive in a religion which has lasted for centuries, and moulded a world?

As superficial is another allegation often made-viz. "Religion but solves the riddles of existence by resolving them into another riddle as inexplicable." Were it true that it only resolved the many into one, it would so far have followed the aspiration of philosophy, which is to resolve phenomena into laws, and laws into a single law, and which knows that the ultimate ground of all must remain inexplicable to science, the craving of which is limitless, and to which an "ultimate" would be defeat, not triumph. But this is the least part of the sophism. Religion does not substitute riddles for riddles. She answers a thousand painful riddles, each of them a sphinx ready to devour us, by lifting them into a higher region; and she resolves them, as has been well said by Auguste Nicolas,1 into one sunlike Mystery, which, if itself too bright to be scanned with undazzled eyes, yet irradiates the whole world besides. The ages and nations bear witness to that mystery; it is the mystery of power and of healing, 1 Etudes Philosophiques.

VOL. II

Q

of life and of love. The knowledge that God exists ratifies conscience and enlightens it; consecrates reason yet humbles it; sets the will free by teaching it to substitute for the thraldom of petty motives a glad submission to a sacred law. It is the mother of progressive wisdom and of spiritual civilisation; it gives man the power to act righteously and to bear patiently; it changes an anarchy of warring passions into a royal commonwealth of graduated powers. For ages it has dried the eyes of the widow and guided the orphan's feet. Yet these are but its lesser gifts, for its higher boast is that it creates an inner world of sanctity and peace, a “hidden life" of the creature with the Creator, the pledge of a glorified life with Him. The spleen of an ungrateful and hasty time may fancy that it can sweep such gifts away; but a true philosophy will rebuke a revolt so self-destructive and so dishonourable. Whatever the theorist may affirm or deny, Christianity professes to be essentially a life, the life of individual man, and of social man; and, despite the scandals bequeathed by those who have but taken religion's name in vain, experience has attested her claim. We live in an experimental age: a contented sceptic would do well to become an experimentalist, and test religion by living it. Amid his inquiries he should include a careful one as to whether he has been a sincere and a reverent inquirer. We have been told, and not untruly, that "honest doubt" has in it much of faith. But doubt is not honest when it is proud, when it is reckless, when it is as confident

as if resolved negation were solid conviction, or as apathetic as if Divine Truth would be less of a gain than the "struggles that elicit strength." We have been told, in disparagement of creeds, that Life is Action; but it is in the light, not the darkness, that brave and sane men act and struggle. It is the Christian Faith that brings that light; and it was the Christian Life that first claimed to be a noble warfare. The warrior must have solid ground beneath his feet.

And yet the defender of religion must ever end with a confession. If all who believe had but been true to their trust, religion must in every age have shone abroad with a light that would long since and finally have conquered the world to itself. It is an eye keener than ours that sees how far each man has used his wealth of faith rightly, or come by his poverty honestly. If in many a case unbelief means a defective, perhaps an evil will, in how many is it not the malady of a bewildered time? How many a one who is tossed from doubt to doubt may yet, in the depths of his being, resemble St. Augustine when he was drawing nigh to the truth, and knew it not! God alone knew that in him the love of the good and of the true had never ceased, and that, however dry and barren might be the surface of his soul, there still remained, far down, the dews of past grace-and the tears of Monica. Almost to the last in what strange confusions did not that great soul remain, reserved as it was for a career so arduous and an expiation so noble from the moment that peace of heart had fitted him for the

militant life of the Christian, that the darkness which paralyses strength had been chased, and that a divine light had "given the battle to his hands." His conversion came quickly at last. Yet the process had been slow. He had learned that the enemies of religion disputed chiefly with the creations of their own. fancy; that their difficulties were but those found no less abundantly throughout the course of nature than in the lore supernatural; that their warfare was one against the heart of man, with all its hopes and its aspirations all that can give security to joy and a meaning to pain. Yet still he wavered. Few things earthly helped more to his conversion than the philosophy of Plato; yet just before that conversion he seemed on the point of committing his life in despair to that of Epicurus. So strongly does man's pride contend against man's greatness; so perseveringly does his ingenuity evade his good! But the happy hour came, and the ages have found cause to rejoice. In becoming a Christian, St. Augustine became also a true Theist-that is, one who not only believes in God, but loves Him and adores; for love, like humility and faith, is learned at the foot of the Cross.

XIII

A SAINT1

THIS work, the first in a new series of Lives of the Saints, is as delightful as it is unpretending. Its great charm is that which it derives from the character of the Saint it records—a character which it illustrates with a skill shown frequently in wise and deep reflections, and everywhere in the felicity with which the most characteristic incidents of a career as beautiful as it was brief are selected and commemorated. That character suggests a few remarks, all of them connected with a single line of thought, and therefore by no means exhausting the subject, which tend to illustrate at least the Veneration of the Saints,-to illustrate only, as more is impossible without entering the thorny and commonly barren region of polemical controversy.

Sanctity is at once the simplest and the most "many-sided" of all things. The characters of the Apostles, even after Pentecost, remained distinct one

1 The Life of St. Aloysius Gonzaga. Edited by E. H. Thompson. London: Burns and Oates.