utter misconception of what religion really is. True, it is a matter of emotion; and of sentiment, if you choose to call it so. And it would

not be good for anything if it were not. A religion which was simply a set of mathematical formulas might appeal to a man's brain, but it would not change his life.

But the emotion of true religion must rest on a solid basis of truth, fact, and reason. The true religion, at bottom, is not imagination, but knowledge; and knowledge, not of one fact or another, isolated or disjointed, but logically connected and thoroughly consistent; with no paradoxes or absurdities in it; knowledge, in short, of the kind that is properly called science. It is as truly a science as any one of the excellent branches of knowledge which are so named; different, however, to some extent from most of them in the way it is developed; and from all of them, in being of all the most impor

tant.

If you ask seriously, why, if this is the case, women and children take more to religion than men?—I am afraid the true reason is that religion has rather an intimate connection with morality, and that women and children, as things are now, take more kindly to that. A life of solid virtue is the best preparation for religious truth; but still, every one can receive it, if only he will; and a man if he is virtuous,

is apt to be very solidly so. Virtue, by the way, really means, in the Latin from which it is taken, manliness; it would be well for all men to think of that.

Try, then, to free yourself from this idea, rather prevalent at present, that reason and religion do not go together; or what comes to about the same thing, that they are two separate apartments of the mind, and that you must step out of one before going into the other. Indeed, is this idea, in itself, reasonable? You know that both reason and religion are worth having; indeed the first is obviously indispensable, and the second, you must at least acknowledge, has done and is doing a great deal of good, and you cannot shake off the respect you have for it when it seems to be genuine. You feel that at any rate there is some truth about it; and if you would think a little harder, you would see that what there is true about it cannot be inconsistent with reason, for two truths cannot be inconsistent. It cannot be necessary to abandon one before taking up the other.

I say, you feel that there must be some truth about religion; and I use the word "truth" in its strict sense, as meaning a correct statement of facts. Perhaps you deny this. But you must at least admit that every religion rests on some statements which it holds to be true; some dogmas, as such statements in the matter

of religion are properly called. It is merely nonsense to talk about a religion without any dogmas. The very emotion which you perhaps think the principal part of religion must rest on them. One can't get excited or deeply moved about nothing. Even a lunatic is joyful or melancholy about something; something which he thinks is a fact, though we may see clearly that he is all wrong about it.

Take away the dogmas of any religion, and there is nothing left of it. Excitement and emotion may be all very well; but there must be something to get excited and emotional about.

Excitement and emotion, then, rest on some supposed fact. I said just now that they may be all very well; but they are not very well, indeed, they are not well at all in the long run, if the supposed fact is only a supposed one. They are really only a sort of lunacy, and more or less dangerous.

You have no respect for lunacy, but you have for the Christian religion; and generally speaking, you do not regard it as dangerous, but rather good for society. You are a Christian, or you would like to be so if you could see your way to it; but surely you do not call yourself a lunatic, or want to be one.

What is the reason? It is that you have. sense enough to see not only that the emotion

of the Christian religion, which you know tends to virtue and happiness, and which you yourself may have felt, must and does rest on some fact or facts supposed to be true, but also that you are pretty sure that this supposition is not altogether wrong.

Here you are, then, right face to face with a question which you ought not to trifle with. Five minutes' thought will bring you, and must, it would seem, bring any man of ordinarily clear head, up to it. But most men seem to go no farther.

The question is, how much of the Christian. religion is true? Some of it must be true; but how much? Some of its dogmas must be correct; which are they?

Mind, as I said at the beginning, I am not talking to Buddhists or Mohammedans; nor to absolute atheists, if such persons there be, nor to universal sceptics; but to those who call themselves Christians, or would like to do so.

Now, if the Christian religion, or anything calling itself so, undertakes to teach you that two and two make five, of course you can't accept that. We can't dethrone reason to make way for religion, or for anything else. Or if it should teach you that the world was made in six days of twenty-four hours each, I can certainly see that you may find that quite hard to believe. Of course that might be so; I take

for granted that you believe in God, and if you do believe in Him, and therefore in His omnipotence, you must see that He could make all these formations on the earth, which seem to have been the growth of time, in six days, or in six minutes, or in six seconds; but still, such action on His part would seem like a trick played to deceive us, and I can readily see how you would rather look somewhere else for the truth.

Now, perhaps you think that the Christian religion does require beliefs of you which are contrary to reason, or to well-ascertained fact. But if you do, this is just where I blame you. Why don't you examine a little or even a good deal more, and not conclude that you know all about it?

But you say, where shall I examine? where shall I begin? The Christian religion is split up into so many denominations, and teaches so many different things, even irreconcilable with each other, that I don't know what I am to look at first.

Well, of course if you have been brought up in any particular one of these denominations, it is quite natural that you should examine first into that. But if you have done so, and have found the result unsatisfactory; or if you want to approach the subject, as it were, from the out