Try any one of these sublimities in any of the crises of life in which men and women in old days used to turn for help to what used to be called Religion. A human heart is wrung with pain, despair, remorse a parent watches the child of his old age sinking into vice and crime; a thinker, an inventor, a worker breaks down with toil, and unrequited hope, and sees the labour of a life ending in failure and penury; a widow is crushed by the loss of her husband and the destitution of their children; the poor see their lives ground out of them by oppressors, without mercy, justice, or hope. Go then, with the Gospel of Pantheism, to the fatherless and the widow, and console them by talking of sunsets, or the universal order; tell the heartbroken about the permutations of energy; ask the rich tyrant to remember the sum of all things and to listen to the teaching of the Anima Mundi; explain to the debauchee, and the glutton, and the cheat, the Divine essence permeating all things and causing all things -including his particular vice, his passions, his tastes, his greed and his lust. And when social passions rage their blackest, and the demon of anarchy is gnashing its fangs at the demon of despotic cruelty, step forward with the religion of sweetness and light and try if self-culture so exquisitely sung by Goethe and his followers will not heal the social delirium.

We know what a mockery this would be. It would be like offering roses to a famished tiger, or the playing a sonata to a man in a fever. To soften grief, to rouse despair, to curb passion, to purify manners, to allay strife, to form man and society, everything is vain but that which strikes on the heart and the brain of man, stirring the soul with a trumpet tone of command, sympathy, exhortation, and warning. Men on a battle-field may be reached by the ringing voice of their leader; but Madonnas by Raffaelle or sonnets by Shakespeare are not likely to touch them; and a man aflame with greed or revenge is as deaf as a crocodile to the general fitness of things. In agony, struggle, rage of passion, and interest, the suffering look of a child, the sympathetic voice of a friend, the remonstrance of a teacher, the loving touch of a wife is stronger than the Force of the solar system, more beautiful and soothing than a sunset on the pinnacles of Apennines or Alps.

We all know how uncertain is the effect even of the most powerful human sympathy; but nothing has a chance of effect in the terrible crises but that which speaks to human feeling and is akin to the human heart. The Universal Good, the Beauty of Nature, Force, or Harmony are abstractions, ideas, possible in the more thoughtful natures, at the sweeter and calmer moments of life, but lifeless phrases to the mass in the fiercer hours of life, out of all relation with action, and effort, work, and the play of passion. A Power which is to comfort us, control us, unite us—and a Power that is to have any religious effect on us must comfort, control, unite-must be a power

that we conceive as akin to our human souls, a moral power, not a physical power; a sympathetic, acting, living power, not a group of phenomena, or a law of matter. The Theisms in all their forms had this human quality; the gods of the Greeks and the Romans were the glorified beings residing in things; the God of Paul and Mahomet, Augustine and Calvin, was the living Maker of all things and ruler of all things. He was always a person, and a being more or less close to the human heart and the human will. And so every form of faith in which morality, or humanity, or the progress of mankind, or the spirit of civilisation, or anything human, moral, sympathetic, stands for the highest object and ideal of life--all of these speak to man as man in a like moral, social, or emotional atmosphere.

We know how imperfectly even these act, how little men and women are affected by the love of an all-perfect Creator, and the agony of atonement, by a mediating God, or by the Judgment Day, by the hopes of Heaven and the terrors of Hell, when once they have begun to doubt the authenticity of these promises and these warnings, or to find them out of place in the busy work of earth. Where the wrath of God and the love of Christ, and the Passion and Fall and Redemption have ceased to control, and soothe, and unite, it is an affectation to pretend that the pleasure in the world's beauty, or the mystery of existence can take the vacant place. Here and there are found natures of a meditative cast, and of native refinement of spirit, in whom these ideals and subtleties supply real moral and mental food. But for the mass the result is impossible, and can only deepen the anarchy and stimulate the passion and the selfishness. These sublimities of the universe are in essence vague; and what is vague lends itself easily to what is vicious and self-seeking. The energies and passions of men are of force infinitely more massive and keen than are their tastes, their reveries, and their meditations. The deepest of the moral impressions is often not enough to anchor the soul tossed and buffeted in a storm of passion. The mere analogies of the intellect would prove as feeble as packthread.

Let us ask ourselves what the thing is that has to be done; who the people are that have to be changed; what is the change that has to be wrought before Religion can be said to be doing its work. Religion is not a thing for the halting places and the resting hours of life, for a quiet Sunday afternoon, for the moments of contentment and gentle repose in thought. The strain of religion comes like that of the pilot in a gale, or the captain on the battle-field, of the heroic spirit in agony, doubt, temptation, loneliness. Where pain is, and cruelty is, and struggle is; where the flesh is tempted, and the brain reels with ambition; where human justice, and tenderness, and purity are outraged; where rich and poor hate and war; where nations trample on the weak; where classes rage after gain; where folly, and self-indulgence, and gross appetites for base things, and base aims

settle down on a people like an epidemic; where in crowded fetid alleys, want, and exhaustion, and disease stagger unpitied to their grave, and a heavy voice rises up, 'How long, how long!' from women pale with stitching, and children weary of wheels and bobbins-and no man listens there Religion has to be in the midst or rather ought to be in the midst. And is Religion to come, if it come at all, chanting a hymn to the sunrise, or with a formula about the correlations of the universe?

The main, daily business of Religion is to improve daily life, not to answer certain intellectual puzzles; to raise the actual condition of the great toiling mass; to transform society by making its activity more healthy, and its aim nobler and purer. It has to deal with the sins of great cities and the wants of great classes, the monotony, the uncertainty, the cruelty, of the industrial system. The weak side of the official Christianity, after all, is not so much its alienation from science, its mystical creed, or its conventional formulas, as the palpable fact that nearly nineteen hundred years have passed since the birth of Christ, and the Gospel has been preached by millions of priests, and yet, in spite of it, the practical order of society is so cruelly hard on such great proportions of men, that it is still so far a world for the strong, and the selfish, and the unscrupulous. How is the stir of pleasure we feel in a starry night, or recognition of the subtle homologies which connect Life and Matter-how is the faint sense of these intellectual luxuries to change the fierce, hurried, confused battle of life and labour? And if it cannot act here, it will never be religion.

What, in a word, do we really mean by Religion? It is not enough to say that it is the answer to the questions, 'What is the relation of man to the infinite?' or 'What is the origin of the universe?' or What is the ultimate law, or fact, or power in the universe?' Religion, no doubt, must have something real and definite to say on each and all of these problems. But it means something far bigger, more complex, and practical than this. Religion cannot possibly be sublimated into an answer to any cosmical or logical problem whatever. Suppose it proved that the origin of the universe was found in evolution or differentiation, that gravitation or atomic force was the ultimate law of the universe, protoplasm being the first term of the series, and frozen immutability-the cold obstruction' of the poet-the last term in the myriad links of the chain we call Life; suppose that the relation of man to the infinite is the relation of the I to the Not-I, of the subject to the object, or again that it is the relation of a blood-corpuscle, or a cell, to a living animal, or any answer of the kind. Suppose any of these. Well! it is plain that neither evolution, nor differentiation, nor gravitation could be ipso facto any man's religion. It would be as absurd as to tell us that spectrum analysis was religion, or the persistence of energy, the binomial theorem, or the nebular hypothesis.

Now all these grand generalisations which pass by the general description of Pantheism are at most ultimate ideas of this kind, plus the impression of mystery and power with which we contemplate them-cosmic emotion, in fact. But then how are we to pass from these remote ultimate generalisations, even when lighted up by the glow of admiration and delight, sentiment and poetry-how are these to pass to daily life, to suffering, to sin, to duty?

If the beginning and groundwork of Religion is to answer this question, 'What is this world around to me, what am I, this conscious speck, to the world around?'-if this is the groundwork of all Religion, it is but the groundwork. The substance and crown of Religion is to answer the question, 'What is my duty in the world, my duty to my fellow-beings, my duty to the world and all that is in it or of it?' Duty, moral purpose, moral improvement, is the last word and deepest word of Religion. And what is duty but my relation to men, my work towards men for men, my social life; and what is moral purpose, or moral improvement, but social purpose and social improvement? Duty, moral purpose, moral improvement, mean by their very etymology, the relations of man to man, not mere intellectual sympathies, but practical doings and mutual labour. Duty, morality, moral progress, imply a society, masses and groups of men; we cannot attribute them to solitary or transcendental beings. What would be duty, morality, progress, to Robinson Crusoe without his household and his companion, or to an Almighty and perfect God? We cannot use the words of them. Religion is summed up in Duty, and duty implies fellow-men-and much more-sympathetic work with men and for men.

Here is the failure of all the attempts of all the Pantheisms and idealisms of the universe. They cannot compass duty. No man can pass from these theories of differentiation, or world-spirit, or correlations of force, to duty, to social work in the mighty battle of life. You might as well tell a mother to bring up her child on the binomial theorem. Neither electricity nor the Milky Way can make men sob with remorse, or make women smile in grief. There is no common term between the immensities and tenderness, generosity, patience, sympathy. Call to the Unknowable and ask it to bestow on you a spirit of resignation to the dispensations of infinite differentiation.

The old theologies did (or do) in a way bridge the enormous chasm between the infinite and a good deed; for they told us that the good deed was the express order of the Almighty Creator who made the Infinite, and kept it in its place. There was (or is) a certain connection between God and duty, though it was often put to us in a very grim and distorted form of duty, in horribly inhuman, in fantastically unreal modes of duty. Still there was a connection. But between the molecular theory, or the development theory, and duty, there is no practical connection; and none but a casual one

or a fancy one can be made. The molecular theory (or the like) applied to human life may land you in a doctrine of hardened selfishness; the development theory may land you in a practice of selfindulgence or lawless lust. God may inspire duty; humanity may inspire duty. But cosmic emotion can at best appeal to the imagination, never to the heart or the conscience. To ask of it your duty to your neighbour is as idle as to try if by means of a steam-hammer could beat out a sunset into an act of mercy. you

We may use the arguments of theologians without arguing on the side of theology. If there be a real defensive energy in the older orthodoxies as against so much that is vague and unstable in modern scepticism, it is not at all wonderful. The faith of Christ, and Paul, and Augustine and Luther would not have done all that it has done for eighteen hundred years if it did not touch the deepest chords of the human heart. Religion, in a simply human form, will have more sympathy with Theism than with Atheism; more respect for the Athanasian creed itself than for Pantheism; and a firm conviction that Christianity, whatever its destiny may be, will long outlive as religion all forms of cosmic emotion.

Has, then, the wonder and the beauty died out of Heaven like the setting of a sun that shall rise no more? The things that we have seen, can we now see no more? Hath there passed away a glory from the earth? Not so! The worship of nature, the love and wonder at the world, our sense of all the universal harmonies-cosmic emotion so to call it is neither crushed, nor dead, nor dying. It is as rich and radiant a part of our soul's food as ever in the days of Homer, or Hesiod, or Omar Khayyam, or Correggio, or Goethe, or Shelley. Cosmic emotion is not only a very real part of our culture, but it is an imperishable element in religion. Only it is not religion, it is only a small part of it, or rather only the foundation and prelude of religion.

A rational philosophy must include an adequate account of this external world, and its relations to man and the homologies of the physical world without and the spiritual world within. And as rational religion must stand on, or rather must incorporate and be (in part) rational philosophy, rational religion must recognise and contain this cosmic emotion. One common error, as it vitiated all the old theologies, so it now vitiates all the modern forms of materialism, pantheism, and even transcendentalism, whether in its metaphysical form or in its scientific form. No single explanation will cover the whole of the physical phenomena and the whole of the moral and intellectual phenomena, for the excellent reason that there is no single principle running through all, and no logical means of bringing them into one category of thought. Monism cannot cover the field of thought and action, whether it be the monism of evolution or force, or the monism of God or Spirit. The Cosmos in its immensity cannot be stated in terms of God, nor in terms of spirit, soul, or conscious