existence of a continuous and authoritative revelation in the Church is reopened. You of course believe that that question has been quietly shelved by later developments of thought, and what you see and respect in the various forms of Protestantism is not any dogmatic or ceremonial system, but the process by which the human mind has passed slowly and safely, i.e. without hindering philosophical thought and scientific research, and without destroying religious feeling, into complete mental liberty. But this is because you have had a speculative philosophy which has become the property of all the highly cultivated. To our orthodox Protestant modern history appears in a very different light; and when he perceives what a mass of inconsistencies the creeds of all the reformed churches contain, he may well be attracted by that Rome which, whatever her other faults may have been, is always logical and self-consistent, and can only be successfully combated by an attack upon the principles on which all dogmatic theology rests. We rationalists—'

You call yourself a rationalist then?' I interrupted.

All Englishmen who no longer fully accept a religious creed are more or less rationalists; and the moderate among us look upon Protestantism as more reasonable than Catholicism only because it deals less in marvels and mysteries. The rationalistic element that it contains is welcome to us, because it is a distinct approach to our own point of view, and we hardly realise how entirely it has destroyed the whole spiritual and intellectual foundation of the more positive part of the creed. This was no difficulty for believers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They did not pique themselves on logic and consistency; they had the pretension, and the well-founded pretension, to have, not loosened, but knit more closely, the ties of religion. They gave themselves out not for innovators, but for restorers of the old true faith; they lent new life to Christianity by deepening its sense, by penetrating the individual more fully with it, and they cared little for an inconsistency more or less. Not so an orthodox Protestant of our days, who has, malgré lui, undergone the influence of two centuries of rationalistic science and literature. When he perceives the want of logic, he is driven, if he is a man of honesty and mental power, to an examination of the first principles, and then, we must confess, there is much in the Catholic point of view to attract him. To take only one example. From his earliest childhood he has been accustomed to seek in nature and the life around him the traces of a creating and directing hand; and this habit has become so instinctive that he at first finds it almost as difficult to conceive of the world being purposeless as of its being causeless. So deeply is this mode of thinking ingrained in some minds that many, who have distinctly renounced the idea that being has any aim or meaning which our reason can comprehend, find the old questions returning to them, in hours of weakness, pain, and sorrow, with a force that it is

difficult to resist. It requires two or three generations of freethinkers, such as you have had in Germany, to make men entirely calm and reasonable, and we must not be surprised if in the meanwhile some of the noblest and most logical, together with some of the weakestminded Protestants, seek a refuge in the Church of Rome.'

"I perfectly understand those conversions,' I replied, and I think you might have entered besides on the fact that the Catholic Church affords the freest scope to religious enthusiasm, without ever allowing herself to be guided by it; on her recognition of the highest culture as long as it does not impugn her teaching; on her æsthetical charm; on her consecration of the simplest acts of life; on the surprise that an ordinary Protestant feels when he first realises the unity and self-consistency of her creed, the mystical meanings of her services, and the strange power they have of supplying all the common wants of our inner nature. Now all these great advantages seem to me to result from the fact that this Church is, as we Germans say, an organism—that it has grown and not been made. It is the outcome and the expression of the highest aspiration and the heart-break of well nigh two thousand years. It is a phase of development which we have to leave behind us, which the strongest races have already left; but for my own part, if the adherents of the Church will permit, I desire to do so only with gratitude and reverence. Still we must remember that all this greatness and splendour depend on the theory of a continuous revelation, on the infallibility of the Church. This is the central dogma that lends stability to all the rest, because it implies the whole principle of authority, i.e. the very raison d'être of the Catholic Church. If you can accept it, the whole system follows as a matter of course. You must go in, like Pascal, for the whole wager, yes or no; for if you reject it, you gain nothing by adopting certain parts of her ritual and teaching. These, when separated from the great unity of which they form a part, lose most of their meaning and the whole of their efficacy. They only add a new discordant element to a structure that is already incongruous enough. Thus a belief in the peculiar spiritual gifts and position of the clergy is an essential part of the Roman doctrine and discipline; but there every personal assumption is held in check by other parts of the organisation, the celibate, and the ever present influence of the hierarchy. To insist on the supernatural claims of the priesthood, and at the same time to set the episcopal authority at nought and to allow them to divide their homage between a living wife and the bride of Christ, is not even to advance in the direction of Rome, but to establish a new and monstrous form of Church government. The same is true of confession, which your ritualists seem to have adopted. I understand its great value for the sinner; but nothing seems to me more clear than that, if under modern social conditions it is to be permitted at all, it can only be to a celibate clergy. Your ritualistic priests, you say, are for the most part unmarried, and consider it their duty to remain so.

But this is at most a private resolution; it is not a law of your Church; still less has it become an instinct of your people. If you talk with Catholics, you will find that they regard any sexual connection with a priest with a horror very similar to that we feel with respect to incest. Nevertheless history has proved that this sentiment is not sufficiently strong to prevent the abuse of the confessional; and even this safeguard is entirely wanting in Protestant England. Do not imagine that I wish to suggest that there is any danger your High Church clergy should favour such abuses. They are honourable and highminded men, with, I doubt not, the purest intentions. But they are men, and, if married, they must have superhuman strength to keep the confessional secret from their wives; and even unmarried, they are always innovators, and it is not uncharitable to suppose that if they succeed in establishing their position in your Church, their successors may have less of that earnest and ardent faith which keeps men pure in the midst of temptations. I see besides, by what you said a moment ago in explanation and excuse of the conversions to Catholicism in England, that you are not such an inveterate rationalist and utilitarian as you profess to be. I almost thought you looked upon religion as a perhaps necessary evil, and respected the Churches chiefly as institutions for checking and deadening the devotional sentiment.' "For keeping it in its proper channels, you might have said,' replied my friend, and preventing it overflowing and laying waste all the rest of life. Nor do I look upon religion as an evil. It was our natural nourishment in an earlier stage of our development. But I confess I think the child is now old enough to be weaned, and am glad to see it taking to spoon-meat, though content that the change should be gradual. If I have any preference for the Catholic Church, it is because she reminds me more of a natural mother and less of a hired nurse than any of her rivals. Besides, I am not so alarmed for the fate of our culture as you Germans seem to be, because of some loud conversions to, or the still louder boasts of, that faith. The general movement of modern thought is too distinctly in a secular direction for us to fear any lasting danger from such conversions and such boasts.'

'I quite share your confidence,' I replied, but is there not another danger? Do not forget that your whole culture is a Western culture, i.e. a rationalistic one at the bottom, not a speculative one like ours. Is it not probable that, if what the representatives of secular science cannot but consider as systematised nonsense is preached with the intention of stifling all free research, if Roman Catholicism becomes more and more powerful in England, they will turn against the religious spirit itself with the animosity and intolerance which characterise the continental freethinkers in wholly Catholic States such as Italy and Spain? Catholicism there has become a thing very different from what it is now in England, where it has still all the freshness of a new creed. The religion of the continental Roman Catholic has

indeed degenerated into a thing quite external. There is nothing fervent about it; all the idealism which you Northerners lend to the Italian poor in their churches is mere fiction. Religion is a habit which accompanies life, but does not penetrate it, does not even influence it. The brigand who is on the point of committing murder invokes the Virgin, and the girl or the unfaithful wife who has just been to the confessional gives a rendezvous to her lover in the church. The service itself is not a serious, grave thing, an opportunity for collectedness, but a gay fête, the occasion of merriment, the ceremonies are mechanical customs which never awaken thought in any of those who conform to them. Things are somewhat better-or worse-in Belgium and France, Austria and Bavaria; still it is only a difference of degree. Even those who hate religion hate it for extra-religious reasons; and this is the point I wanted to come to. These reasons are intellectual or political. The leaders of the scientific movement, in spite of their implicit belief in the survival of the fittest, think that the fittest ought not to fold his arms because he is confident he will have the best of it in the long run; that he ought to struggle, not only by the invincible weapon of scientific evidence, but also by attacking the enemy of light directly, to leave him no unnecessary advantage in the struggle, to take away from him the schools in which he drills the minds of the young and makes them unfit for original thought and personal observation. On the other side the political liberals declare war on the Church as an extra-national and almost always conservative power, and their followers, as well as those of the thinkers, naturally exaggerate their principles, often without measure and taste, always without reverence. A coarse irreligious tone is introduced into this warfare, and the spirit of tolerance quite vanishes. This does not prevent their calling the priest in articulo mortis and asking his absolution, for at the bottom of their hearts they have never been entirely free. Now, I am afraid of something similar for England if ever Roman Catholicism should again get hold of her. But even without that highly improbable eventuality: given the rationalistic turn of your secular culture both in the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, the more your Protestantism externalises itself, the more you will be exposed to that contrast between the two extremes which we witness in the Catholic nations of the Continent.'

That is precisely why I myself,' said my friend, look upon the spread of religious scepticism amongst us beyond those classes whose lives are devoted to philosophical and scientific inquiry as an unmixed evil. To demand that the peasant and the artisan shall form his own opinion in such matters is to ask him to pronounce judgment in a case on which he neither knows the law nor can understand the evidence. After a period of doubt, perplexity, and mental pain is passed, he will receive the new teaching as he did the old, simply on authority, and his science will then be as confused as his theology now is; but the one

little window by which he has hitherto, looked out upon the infinite will be closed to him. Yet it is in its presence alone that our highest nature lives and moves and has its being. Every true workman in any intellectual field is brought constantly into contact with it. He lives perpetually in the presence of eternal law, and is thus made conscious at once of his personal littleness, and of the power to grasp and follow out its manifold manifestations. He may not recognise

that there is anything devotional in his awe; he may not call

L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle

by the name of God; but he feels that he is subject and yet akin to it. Now this is the element in science that can never be popularised, and so our intellectual conceptions lose their highest virtue in the process by which they are adapted to an undisciplined understanding, and what is a great truth to the teacher is to the hearer a mere fact.'

"This is undoubtedly the case,' replied I, 'in a Catholic country, and it would be so in any country where Protestantism became a quite mechanical worship and found itself face to face with pure rationalism. Not so in nations like the Greek, who never lost the faith because they never had it, and who lived entirely and contentedly in the present without thinking of the future life. Nor is it so in nations like the German, who have outgrown their faith instead of turning round against it, and whose secular culture has never been a purely rational one. With us that part of the middle and lower classes who have not been exposed to the rationalistic and democratic influence which has spread all over the world since the great French Revolution, simply follow the lead of the intellectual classes. They have become entirely indifferent to religious forms, and they give not even a name to their deity. They neither accept nor reject any theological creed; they simply pay no attention to such things. And I, for one, belong to a class and a generation of Germans in which the theological sense is entirely atrophied; just as I have no ear for music, I have no organ for religious forms, and so I keep away from church for the same reason that I avoid concerts. And that is precisely why I am so curious to know something about the faculty which was so developed in our forefathers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.'

'But if you are really so devoid of that organ yourself, had not you better give up writing history altogether, or at any rate confine yourself, as you have done in the past, to the history of countries and times where theology is dead?'

'Perhaps you are right, and I will think it over; but it is midnight, and for a man who confesses himself a rationalist, and another who has no sense for theology, it seems to me we have talked enough about religion.'

KARL HILLEBRAND.