of the law of the Sabbath. When this is coupled with the injunction in the Epistle to the Hebrews not to forsake the synagogues, and with the reference in the Acts of the Apostles to the observance of the Sabbath, it is plain that the use of the fourth commandment in our churches as a command to venerate the Lord's day is liable to very serious question.

Filii,

So long as the theologian confines himself to the position-to which in this country the clergy are in the main retreating-" this is what the Church teaches," there may perhaps be but little call for the philosophic moralist or historian. to endeavour to interpose between the teacher and those who are content to accept his teaching. Nor is the mere failure to trace the phases of a transition of which but little of the history is understood, a fair ground of accusation against the divines of to-day. But it is quite otherwise when, for the formula "Hear the Church" is substituted the far more tremendous preface, "In Nomine Patris, et et Spiritus Sancti." The awakening of the echoes of that ancient form of exorcism in our churches has something more than an æsthetic significance. Above all, it is undeniable that what is historically false cannot be theologically true. To bind up Christian dogma with false ideas of natural history or of ethnology is to repeat the error of the Church of Rome with regard to the discoveries of Galileo. Were the discrepancies that now more and more portentously yawn in the foundations of dogmas confined to one branch of study-such, for example, as geology-there might be a sort of short-sighted wisdom in the attempts of Yorkshire deans or supporters of Christian Knowledge Societies to turn away attention from their existence. But such is

The

era.

very far from being the case. education of mankind, slow though its advance, has yet made enormous progress since the third and fourth centuries of the vulgar Hypotheses which were tenable in the days of Origen and of Cyprian are now utterly inadmissible. The horizon of human thought has been widely enlarged. The whole conception of the relation of man to the universe has been profoundly modified. In the patristic cosmology the whole magnificent drama of the universe was made to revolve round a centre of narrow insignificance; and the doctrine of the immobility of the earth itself was only a consistent portion of the general scheme. The belief in the position of the Eben Schatiych, or "stone of foundation," on which the ark was placed in the Temple, and which was the centre of the world, was in full accordance with the narrow philosophy which the early fathers borrowed from the Jews. A conception of that non-progressive nation-described even by their own sacred writers as notorious for stiffness of neck and hardness of heart-as a chosen race, destined to hold forth a lamp of divine teaching in the midst of a dark world, was one of which the absolute justice was long unquestioned. But the more

profound is our study of what Judaism really was, and the fuller our advancing knowledge of the contemporary condition of other nations, the less are we able to accept this idea, borrowed from the rabbis, whom yet the borrowers despised. One of the most learned of recent Hebrew scholars, the Abbé Chiarini, has been so penetrated by a sense of the antihuman spirit of Judaism, which finally raised every hand against a fierce, intolerant, and intractable race, that he has drawn an imaginary contrast between Mosaism,

The

or what he holds to be the teaching of the Pentateuch, and Judaism, or the fuller doctrine of the Mishna. The distinction is unfounded. The national exclusive pride, and the unsparing ferocity which were a feature of the latter, are no less present in the former. The extirpation by the Israelites of the entire race whose land they stole was the direct command of the early prophets. Moses, Joshua, Samuel were as unsparing as Herod or as the Asmonean princes. laws which regulated the relation of the sexes were discussed with a repellant coarseness of nature, and utter absence of modesty, which made Grecian vice less odious than Jewish virtue. It is sufficient to refer to the tracts Niddah and Sotah to justify this appreciation. The most savage mutilations which excite horror on the Assyrian bas-reliefs were practised by no less important a Jewish king than David. The attempt to represent the Jewish character as something notably in harmony with the divine nature has involved theologians in a network of sophisms, from which few consciences can escape unscathed.

Such a view of the Jewish nation can be consistently held only as a consequence of two profound ignorances. One of these is ignorance of Judaism, the other is ignorance of the sacred books and national history of the surrounding nations. The former has been fostered by the exclusive study of certain portions of Hebrew literature, to the exclusion of a wider range of documents, many of which are of far more importance, both legislatively and historically, than portions of the Hagiographa. No one who has read the works can hesitate as to the much higher importance of the treatise Sanhedrin than of the Book of Esther. While the meaning

of the Law and the Prophets, at least as it was universally held by the Jews contemporary with the writers of the New Testament, has been thus obscured by ignorance of the Oral Law, the general tone of early religions is now for the first time being recovered from the long buried descriptions of Assyria and of Egypt. The language of devout faith was not confined to the Hebrew tribes. It was not the kings and leaders of the Israelites alone who regarded themselves as the chosen servants of Heaven, executing the wrath of the divinity on the opponents of their rule. Omit only the designation of the Deity, and it is difficult to distinguish a Babylonian hymn from a Hebrew psalm: "O, Lord of the earth, of mankind, and of spirits, speak good! Who is there whose mouth does not praise thy might, and speak of thy law, and glorify thy dominion? O, Lord of the earth, dwelling in the temple, take hold of the hands that are lifted to thee. To thy city grant favours. To the temple, even thy temple, incline thy face, to the sons of thy city grant blessings." These are not the words of David, but are taken from a tablet in a Babylonian library. For Zion and Jerusalem it contains the names Babylon and Borsippa. The difference is rather a local than a moral one. If the idea of the essential wickedness of our national or personal enemies inspires all the religious writing of the period, what can be the character of the deity invoked by the worshipper? And yet this is an idea that flourishes greenly even to the present day among not a few members of European nations.

The wholly unexpected increase of our knowledge of the language and history of Assyria and of Egypt is only one of those changes in human thought which are incompatible with the maintenance of

narrow dogmas, framed in times of comparative ignorance. The genuine spirit of religion is something apart from ecclesiastical dogmas. It is too often perverted by the association. But when dogma is based on premises that are shown to be absolutely false, it is only by shaking herself free of such entanglement that any form of religion can maintain a true vitality.

The case is not one of hasty inference, or of evenly-balanced opinion. The tradition that traces ecclesiastical dogma to its source is, as we have seen, interrupted at the most critical period of its existence. The filiation between the twelve chosen witnesses and the church that emerged from the catacombs is one that it is difficult to trace or even to imagine. It is rather to the personal opinions of certain patristic writers than to any other source, that the corpus of dogma is attributable. True, these writers propose to support their views by the Bible or by the Gospels. How far they were competent to understand the former has been intimated above. Nor are the latter intelligible, as they were intended to be understood by their writers, by those who are ignorant of the law, customs, and habits of thought of those writers and of those whom they addressed. literary authority as to text, nothing conclusive ascends beyond the time of Constantine. Of the Egyptian, Accadian, and Babylonian records, on the contrary, we have the original inscriptions on baked clay, on marble, or on papyrus. With regard to all those considerations which are drawn from the advance of positive science, natural history, ethnology, palæontology, philology, lithology-whatever is gained to science is all on one side of the balance. These pursuits were positively closed to the patristic writers.

For

The spirit of honest criticism, and the application of sound method to the investigation of truth, were equally unknown. Literary fidelity was supposed to consist in the alteration, by a copyist, of those phrases in a manuscript with which he did not agree. The Gospel which has most literary form, and of which the writer has more distinctly intimated the sources of his information than had been done by any other Evangelist, is a collection of memorabilia, taken avowedly not from personal witnesses alone. The ὑπηρέται may have been zealous missionaries, but of their sources of information we are told absolutely nothing. Positive, definite, personal testimony is sought in vain; and when we abandon the field of the emotional, of the influence on the heart and life of certain belief and certain forms of worship, and attempt direct logical appeal to the intelligence, we pass from the field of practical religion to that of barren and endless logomachy.

As long as discrepancies, such as are invariably caused by the survival of the older forms dictated by imperfect knowledge, side by side with the clearer utterances of more cultivated intelligence, affect matters subsidiary alone, we may trust to the gradual process by which the old forms become obsolete, or come to be held to express a meaning in some way accordant with truth. But when positive error is taken as a foundation stone, the case is altogether different. The choice then becomes imperative, whether the error shall be openly and candidly acknowledged, and the corrections, whatever they may be, due to such acknowledgment, honestly and authoritatively made, or whether the taint of dishonesty shall be allowed to remain, to spread, and to vitiate the entire system of teaching. The man who now, in a

pulpit or in a Sunday-school, bases his exhortations to his hearers on the assumption of their Semitic origin, must be either a man whose ignorance is such as to unfit him for the post of a teacher, or who is something far worse than ignorant. What Cicero said of the augurs of his day applies with full force to those who base their teaching on the doctrine of original sin, as set forth in unmistakeable terms in the IXth Article of the Church. And yet, without this basis, how are the successive steps of formal doctrine to be taken? How is the preacher justified in thundering forth those menaces of eternal torment, to which so much more efficacy appears to be attached by the speaker than by the hearers, when he knows (as he ought to know) that no such idea formed any portion of the Semitic faith, and that it was the idea that the peculiar gift of immortality, special to the Jew, was extensible to men not of Jewish blood, that caused the first fierce contest in the Christian Church, and that was the first missionary message to the world?

That the education of the more cultivated part of mankind has advanced to a stage at which it becomes imperative to reconsider the teaching of the Church on points of history and of physical science, which have been, unfortunately for the permanence of doc

trine, embodied in her teaching, can hardly be denied by any educated man. How far the religious part of any dogma may be affected by the correction of false historical assumption, is of course an inquiry of no light importance. Those who fear the result, fear to come face to face with the truth. Those who hope to stave off the inquiry by hurling anathemas at those who propose it, are like the old woman who tried to keep out the sea with her mop. There is, perhaps, more danger to be feared from an attempt to meet the difficulty by subterfuge than from the resolution to ignore it as long as possible. Unless the guidance of the Spirit of Truth be in very reality invoked, unless the conscientious and patient method of historic, literary, and critical inquiry be at once humbly and persistently pursued, the chief danger of the Christian creed will not come from the efforts of its assailants. It will be those who, in the chairs and pulpits of theology, continue to teach without discrimination what they know, or might know, to be false, and what they think to be true; who are striving to involve, not the Church of England alone, but Christianity itself, in a fatal discredit, which fifteen centuries of assault from without have not been able to compass.

F. R. CONDer.

CHAPTER XXIX.

YRIARTE AND HIS FRiends. THAT evening Mr. Lingen called upon Yriarte personally, for the amount at stake was considerable. The interview was a peculiar one, each giving the other a sort of semi-confidence, and treating him half as a friend and half as an enemy. If Ernestine could have overheard what took place, Mr. Lingen would have seemed to her almost a creature of a diabolic realm; and, had Laura overheard it, she, on the contrary, would probably have entertained a higher opinion of both men than before, for both exhibited those peculiar talents which had made each remarkable in his own line. Yriarte was distinguished for the breadth and depth of his scoundrelism and the extreme smallness of his character in every other direction. Lingen was remarkable for tact, audacity, and a knowledge of human nature, so easy and large as to appear instinctive.

The result of the meeting was moderately satisfactory. Yriarte was abjectly horrified at the idea, suggested by Lingen rather than decisively foretold, of his danger under the law; he was aghast when he found that Dr. Doldy and Laura were quite determined to prosecute him. He had never supposed

Laura's spirit to be so indomitable, while his knowledge was somewhat hazy on that wide province of crime, the obtaining of money through conspiracy. It was rather a new experience for him. He had never driven an Englishwoman quite so hard as he had driven this one; and his horror of physical discomfort was so intense that no revenge on Laura, by revealing her secrets, would afford him any consolation if he were condemned to vulgar punishment. So that when Lingen suggested that if he could bring forward a defence which would be likely to lighten his sentence, it should be accepted by the prosecution on condition that he kept his tongue from evil speaking, lying, and slander with regard to Laura, he was delighted, and very speedily agreed to the arrangement. He was immediately afterwards arrested by a man in plain clothes, who had been quietly sitting in the hall until Mr. Lingen had done his business. Another man was also, with equal unobtrusiveness, taking an inventory of the contents of the house for Mr. Lingen. That gentleman himself, leaving Yriarte to the society of the officer, started off to have a hurried search for Laura's letters. He entirely believed them to be in Yriarte's own possession, notwithstanding the assertion that his