deed," he says, "that much of what is indelibly impressed upon the imagination and the understanding, the heart and life of man, may be traceable and made prominent in those who individually disown it. The splendor of these disappropriated gifts in particular cases, may be among the very greatest signs and wonders appointed for the trial of faith. Yet there is always something in them to show that they have with them no source of positive and permanent vitality; that the branch has been torn from the tree, and that its life is on the wane."

Mr. Gladstone, in one his earlier writings, has illustrated at length the operation of one of those influences auxiliary to that we have so far mentioned, which have led very superior minds into religious unbelief. Some years before the date of this essay, a cultivated and intellectual Spaniard, Blanco White, who had been educated, and for a considerable period had served, as a Romanist priest, having been driven into infidelity by the absurdities and abuses of that form of religion, came to England and attracted much attention in society and in literary circles. He had abandoned his faith in Romanism to become an unbeliever in any form of Christianity. In Blanco White's "Life," written by himself, various testimonies occur to the general effect of a professedly Christian religion, deformed by features so unlike the Christianity of the New Testament and so evil in itself, together with results of his experience and observation as a priest in that communion; such, for example, as the following: "Among my numerous acquaintances in the Spanish clergy I have never met with any one possessed of bold talents who has not, sooner or later, changed from the most sincere piety "-piety, he would say, in his own meaning of the word-"to a state of unbelief." In another of his writings he makes this remark: "I do attest, from the most certain knowledge, that the history of my own mind is, with little variation, that of a great portion of the Spanish clergy." Blanco White was received in England with great kindness on the part of many Christian An essay in the London "Quarterly Review," 1845.

people, and under their influence he seems to have sought, earnestly, to rid himself of the pernicious effect of old associations just alluded to. He died, however, still an unbeliever. In analyzing the state of mind disclosed in the autobiography of this unhappy man-for he who near his death is compelled to say, “I feel as if an eternal existence was already an unsupportable burden laid upon my soul," must be called an unhappy man; in analyzing the state of mind disclosed in the case of Blanco White, Mr. Gladstone speaks of him as "a man who sought, and sought, humanly speaking, with integrity, for truth, and yet almost wholly missed it." Then he adds: “We are disposed to look for the solution of that dilemma chiefly in the fact that the mind of Mr. Blanco White had in his earlier years suffered a wrench from which it never recovered."

It is not intended here to deny that there may be sincere men in the Roman communion, and among the clergy of that faith. Looking, however, at the history of this modern period, in its religious aspects, it is impossible to doubt, what indeed is known to be the absolute fact, that much of the infidelity of the period is directly traceable to the malign influence of a form of so-called Christianity, which while the only form of that faith thousands and thousands have had any opportunity to become acquainted with, has by its cruel persecutions, its superstitions, no less revolting to an intelligent mind than paganism itself, and the scandalous lives of its most conspicuous representatives made faith in Christianity itself seem impossible. The question at this point of view must be tested by the history; we must not allow ourselves to be misled by any indication that the effect of this influence is not now so great. Granting a reason for the prevalence at certain times of the spirit of religious unbelief, we overlook one of the most actual and influential causes of this, if we leave out of the account this to which reference has just been made.

Like things must be said of the disastrous influence, in this respect, of all formal religion, in proportion as "the

power of godliness" is deficient, or absent. English deism had its birth at a time when spiritual religion had almost ceased to exist in the English church. As Lutheranism in other European countries lost the spiritual fervor and the doctrinal fidelity of the great reformer whose name it bears, rationalistic and pantheistic philosophies saw their opportunity and improved it. Rather, perhaps, we should say, the formalism in the Lutheran church has been the very soil in which the seed of such philosophy lay hid, and where the lamentable growth has found nurture. If Christianity had always been true to its own great cause, even during the four centuries covered in these historical studies, how much less a record of victorious progress would infidelity have in which to boast itself!

So far as the influence of infidel science is concerned, we hold it to be temporary, and accounted for in its apparent effect by the manner in which what is novel or startling is always received. Even the fact that its atheism does not revolt and repel as was once the case, is due, not to any weakening of the hold upon the human consciousness of the great fact of a personal divine existence, but to the circumstance that cloaked in the garb of some novel theory in science, such atheism only half reveals its repulsive face. Meantime it is to be said of this as of all those other influences and causes to which religious unbelief in its many phases is due, that like all the rest it has its period of prominence and its opportunity of mischief. Like them it will in due time belong to history, and men will wonder that learning and genius could be so blind.

If, then, we recall once more a question near the beginning of the former paper on this general theme, we conclude from all that comes before us in the inquiry that if religious unbelief, even in its extreme forms, is less an occasion of surprise or of censure at present than once it was, that is not because the Christian religion has a less firm hold upon the mind of the age than it once had, or that its evidences have become so discredited as that to question them is a matter of course.

Men are familiar, as they once were not, with religious unbelief as a phase of human thought and teaching. The thoughtless and the worldly drift into it because it is the now open sea into which the currents of worldliness and frivolity flow. The real strength of the Christian position is in the Christian position itself: not at all to be estimated by the number or the strength of those who, with greater or less degrees of hostility, and with various weapons, assail it.

There is one thing to regret in the results of this conflict, occasion and opportunity for which have been afforded in the free thought and utterance of the new age. This is the spiritual damage and the infinite loss suffered by those who have been betrayed by false teaching and insidious example into unbelief. Let the German poet, Schiller, speak for the multitude of such. To the friend who had brought him thus calamitously under the rationalistic influences which grew out of the philosophy of Kant, we find him writing thus: "Thou hast robbed me of that faith which gave me peace. Thou hast brought me to despise that which I worshipped. A thousand things were venerable to me before thy gloomy wisdom exposed them. I saw multitudes flocking to church. I heard their fervent devotion expressing itself in united prayer. 'Divine must be that doctrine,' I exclaimed, 'which the best of mankind profess, which conquers so mightily and comforts so wonderfully.' Thy cold reason quenched my enthusiasm. 'Believe nothing but your reason,' you said. "There is nothing holier than the truth.' I obeyed, sacrificed all my opinions. My reason is everything to me now, my only assurance of God, virtue and immortality. Woe to me, henceforth, if I find this assurance contradicting itself!"

It is the voice of the deceived soul, arraigning the pitiless author of its delusion and its ruin.

XVI.

MODERN EVANGELISM.

THE subject of this concluding paper could hardly be omitted from the series without leaving it seriously incomplete. We have in previous pages occupied ourselves in studies of the origin and outcome of that great movement near the opening of the sixteenth century which, the more we contemplate it, seems more entitled to be styled an era in the religious history of mankind. Indeed, whatever topic we take up, connected with the religious annals of the postreformation period, we might almost say its annals of every kind, gives us occasion in some way to see how the events, the tendencies, the most auspicious changes, the most fruitful achievements of this period either grew directly out of the Reformation, or were more or less fostered by influences and causes which the Reformation set in operation. What could science and philosophy have done, with the incubus of Romish intolerance still weighting them down? Where would have been free constitutional government if the despotic principles of the papacy had still prevailed, as an example to tyrants and a fatal barrier to every movement in the interests of popular freedom? What could religious thought have achieved, if the Bible must still have been read at peril of the dungeon and the stake, if books had been banned with papal curses and threats, if free thought and honest utterance had been still a crime? What we have traced in the course of these studies has simply been the onward, widening flow of a stream whose spring-heads were at Wittenberg and Geneva,