friend. Mr. Harcourt certainly had other ideas of our probable relationship; but he made a mistake. In the next place, Mr. Montgomery is to marry Agnes in January." "Agnes! Why, I thought-I thought" "I know; but you were wrong, as Mr. Harcourt was; and of course (raising her eyes pleadingly to his) "there was a good deal of perverseness on my part, chiefly because I did not quite know my own mind. But when you went away I understood my self and

She was not allowed to say any more, for he had clasped her in his arms and smothered her words with kisses.

"Then you can wait, Dory. My failure is

my success. You can wait a few years till I can offer you a fitting home," he cried in wild joy.

"Twenty years if you will," she whispered, laying her head upon his breast; and they were happy.

There was a very merry dinner-party in Park Lane that evening. Mr. Harcourt was satisfied in spite of some chagrin at the change of programme. The vicar and his daughter were made happy by the determination of William Arnold to give up the idea of writing for the stage; and to the lovers all the world and the future had never before appeared so beautiful.

THE RELATION OF RELIGION TO SECULAR LIFE.
BY GEORGE GRANT, D.D., PRINCIPAL OF QUEEN'S COLLEGE, KINGSTON.

SECULAR life, what does it include? The
life of the senses; family and social life;
industrialism; trade and commerce; politics;
science, opening new pages to its students
every day; art, revealing fresh beauty to each
young age that steps on the old scene; lite-
rature, reaching all classes with its now mul-
tiplying hands.

Religion, what does it include? God, the soul, immortality; more particularly Jesus Christ and His salvation.

What relation can there be between those

two spheres? the secularist asks. Secular life deals with facts; religion deals with words. We cannot demonstrate even the existence of God, much less the peculiarities of any religion. We cannot know that Jesus rose from the dead as we know that good food is desirable. We admit that if we could know the religious as we know the secular, the relation of the one to the other would be that of supreme to subordinate. But we cannot know; that is, we cannot be sure. Let us then be satisfied with the sphere of the knowable.

What shall we say to this? I believe that we can know the truths of religion. Let us clearly understand how, and under what conditions. Intellectually we must be satisfied with probable evidence. This evidence is certainly not lessening. The most destructive modern criticism, in admitting into court the great Epistles of St. Paul, really admits all the historical and philosophical basis required; and each new generation of believers Contributes to the cumulative force that the evidences have as a whole. The sceptic has

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no right to demand more.

The lines traced by Bishop Butler are impregnable here. But, at the same time, I admit at once that probability is not enough. Religion, like morality, must speak in "the categorical imperative." No people ever embraced religion because there was probable evidence of its truth. No one ever "greatly dared or nobly died" in the faith of a "perhaps." perhaps." The certainties of the secular will as a matter of fact be supreme, unless there are more supreme certainties.

And there are. How do we know? By spiritual perception. So have men obtained spiritual certainty in all ages. So must they obtain it still. The senses reveal material things. Experience and judgment correct the evidence of the senses. Direct intuition reveals spiritual things. Reason and conscience purify our intuitions. Spiritual revelations must be seen in their own light. God, says Holy Scripture, "reveals them to us by His Spirit." The Spirit witnesses to our spirits of spiritual truth. No higher certainty than the certainty of vision is possible. When a man is in the light, can any number of men persuade him that he is not?

To what does the witness of the Spirit extend? To no question the decision of which rests with science. which rests with science. Science must continue to toil at every problem that its instruments can reach. Nor does it extend to any of the questions raised by criticism and scholarship. These must be determined by criticism and scholarship. Their solution may be hindered, but certainly cannot be helped, by papal bulls or the votes of Presbyterian General Assemblies. The Spirit wit

nesses to our spirits of God. The Spirit revealed Jehovah to the Jews, and reveals Jesus to us. The Old Testament promise was, "To him that ordereth his conversation aright shall be shown the salvation of God." The New Testament promise is, "If any man's will be to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God or whether I speak of myself." The promise is the same and indicates the condition of the Spirit's acting upon our spirits. The more unreservedly we trust the promise, the more completely is our faith vindicated.

spheres they are not independent, much less hostile, but concentric. They revolve round one axis-have one centre and one law of life.

Historically this has not been their relative position. Christianity too often has been regarded as formal rather than spiritual—as having a department of its own distinct from and over against the department of ordinary life, which has been known--with more or less of accentuation—as "the world." Even when regarded as spiritual the object of Christianity has been held to be, not so much the development of humanity to all its rightful issues in the school of the world, as the deliverance of man from future penalties and his preparation for future bliss. The interests of the present were felt to be insignificant, because the future is eternal and the present only temporal. Consequently the religious man was popularly conceived as trampling upon and despising the present and longing for the future world. It is not to be wondered at that Christianity developed in this direction when the powers of the world were leagued against it, and sought to destroy it by thorough-going persecutions that followed each other in quick succession. And subsequently, when floods of barbarians overwhelmed the monuments of ancient civili

As regards influence on life, the difference between probability and certainty amounts to a difference of kind rather than of degree. To believe that Jesus is risen merely on the testimony of witnesses, who might have been mistaken, is not a working faith. To believe because the Spirit of Jesus also witnesses to our spirits that He is living and dwells in us, is the faith that conquers the world. Whoso Whoso hath this faith, though an angel from heaven preached another gospel, would not be unsettled. To whom else should he go? Jesus has the words of eternal life. No one else can solve for him all spiritual problems. Jesus Christ and Him crucified is for him the supreme verity. This great historic fact has become an all-satisfying spiritual fact. It brings the two opposite sides of God's cha-sation, and the Church, immediately after racter revealed in the Old Testament into the unity of a living Person. It lays hold upon us by the two opposite sides of our character, the self and the not-self, one or other of which all other philosophies of life ignore. We die to the lower, and we find the higher self. Dying, we live. We are born again, and nothing can be more certain than our consciousness of life.

Standing on this foundation, other than which no man can lay, we are on the rock. Unless we can get on this foundation of spiritual certainty, it is useless to expect that religion will influence secular affairs. The current of human life with its manifold interests will sweep on in its course, indifferent to all the appeals and argumentations of priests or presbyters. But, standing on this foundation, all life becomes religious. Life here will consist in following Jesus. Life hereafter will be to see Him as He is, to be with Him, to be like Him.

winning the Roman Empire, had to win and
control hordes who could be appealed to
only through the senses and the imagination,
it is not to be wondered at that religion felt
it necessary to retreat behind mysteries into
which superstition dared not penetrate, and to
present itself to the senses as a vast organiza-
tion more august than the kingdoms of earth.
Secular life was allowed its sphere, sordid,
earthy, brutal, violent. Religion had its own
sphere, unrelated to the other, and where it
was supposed no one breathed aught save
the serene atmosphere of heaven.
disruption of the secular and the religious
Horrible
proved in the end fatal to both.
are the pictures, when truthfully drawn, of
medieval secular life; the all but universal
ignorance, filth, violence, lust, lawlessness,
lit up by the lurid light of superstition.
Equally horrible the pictures of mediaval
religious life even to him who discerns the
soul of beauty and good in those "Ages of
Faith;" developments of unnatural asceti-
cisms side by side with spiritual pride and

But this

Religion, then, is the supreme reality. Its relation to the subordinate realities of secular life is the next point to be clearly under-priestly craft, and a love of power that towered stood. The relation is not of one form to another, but of spirit to all forms. As far as the religious and the secular are separate

to heaven, beside which the ambitions of barons and kaisers seemed contemptible; enforced poverty, enforced celibacy, the hair

lure him by their fascinations from the joys of Paradise? Under the influence of these ideas, at one time or another, religion and industrialism, religion and politics, religion and literature, religion and art, religion and science, religion and culture have stood on opposite sides, or, at best, in the attitude of compromise and bare toleration of each other. It has been felt in a confused kind of way that the Christian should be distinguished outwardly from "the world" by some badge of look, tone, dress, or manner; by something different from that which characterizes ordinary men; that his life should be hedged

the soul had to be on its guard lest the fence round the sacred precincts of religion should be broken down; that the very joys of family life were to be suspected.

shirt, the iron girdle, side by side with the forged decretals, interdicts, Canossa, the triple crown. Medieval art reveals the saintship of the Middle Ages; and even when we admire the faith we shrink back from the unnatural manifestations. At length, religion, long divorced from ordinary life, became divorced from morality, and then the common people knew that it could not be religion. When monasteries became the homes of ignorance, and when Borgias issued interdicts, revolt had to take place where no provision was made for reform. Humanity had been outraged intellectually and spiritually. Accordingly the revolt assumed two phases-in by restrictions positive or negative; that the Renaissance and the Reformation. The two movements, sympathetic at first, did not understand each other, and drifted farther and farther apart. They did not understand the full content of humanity. The one ignored. the religious, the other did not do full justice to the secular; and so the two sides of our nature, the two spheres in which we all live, were not harmonized. Religion rejected asceticism, but was still unwilling to admit secular life as divine, or a sphere as capable of being divinized as its own chosen sphere. Was not the world the home of sin? Alas! sin comes a good deal nearer us than that. Sin is within, not without. While reigning in the heart, it enters with us into the sanctuary or closet as readily as into the countinghouse or the opera-house. When cast out of the heart the world is seen filled with divine order and purpose, its laws the thoughts of God, the work of life and relations of society the appointed means of education. It is not to be wondered at that this was not seen all at once. Slowly the education of the race proceeds. Well, too, that it is so. Religion had so long assumed that the world was a desert, the enemy's country, and the body the soul's prison and enemy, that radically different conceptions could not be reached at once. Besides, when the pendulum, having swung so far in one direction, began in the case of general society to swing to the other extreme, religious men dreaded lest their newly-won freedom should degenerate into licentiousness. Therefore, in the chosen parable of Puritanism, the world is pictured as the City of Destruction, from which it is man's only duty to escape for his life. The relation of religion to secular life was thus still one of hostility, or, at the best, of watchfulness. The work and play of life, the attractions of art, were they not unfriendly to religion? Did they not chain the heir of heaven to this base earth, or

It is difficult to say where this identification of religion with the formal has done most harm. We see its evil influences not in Romanism only, but less or more in every Protestant Church; in the popular conception of the Sacraments as talismans; in the conception of Christianity as an arbitrary scheme, rather than light from heaven; in the Church's lack of spontaneity and of heroism; in its timidity in the presence of great social questions where it should speak in a voice of thunder; in its preference of repression over liberty and educational development; in the divorce between the religious and the commercial, political, and international life of Christian nations; in the few and feeble, sometimes namby-pamby, attempts to Christianize literature; in the ignoring of art, and in the too frequent attitude of hostility to science betrayed by tones of irritation, suspicion, or depreciation regarding scientific men indulged in by people from whom better things might be expected.

In giving this sketch of the actual relations. that have existed between religion and the various departments of secular life, it is not intended to depreciate the great ones of other days on whose shoulders we stand. Those who won the Roman Empire for Christ; those who out of the raw material of savage Lombards, Goths, Saxons, Northmen, Wends, Huns, Sclavs, laid the foundations of European Christianity; those Reformers and Puritans to whom we owe the freedom, purity, and power of modern life, no man can depreciate. Criticism itself is out of place, until at any rate our deeds equal theirs. There can be no doubt about the fact that Christianity came as a new life to a world corrupt and dying. The life had to cor tend

with all opposing forces. In every age, the life won more or less of triumph. It alone lifted the world, it alone bore fruit. Concerning even our own modern times we might almost say that it alone has been fruitful; fruitful in elevating man, insuring the purity of family life, political order, industrial development, philanthropic endeavours, missionary activity, educational and even scientific progress. There is scarcely a college in the New as in the Old World that does not owe its existence, directly or indirectly, to the Church. That one fact ought to outweigh the foolish words of the more ignorant and noisy section of the religious world. It shows that the Church has been guided by a wise instinct; that it knows that religion must be founded on the eternal principles of knowledge, connected with the highest purified convictions of humanity, and co-extensive with the race. And, as Matthew Arnold, whom no one will suspect of depreciating culture, puts it: "Even now, in this age when more of beauty and more of knowledge are so much needed, and knowledge at any rate is so highly esteemed, the revelation which rules the world, even now, is not Greece's revelation but Judæa's; not the pre-eminence of art and science, but the preeminence of righteousness." *

We are not called upon to praise or blame men. Apart from their deeds or what they left undone, their wisdom or their misconceptions, it is our duty to determine from the central thought and life of Christianity the ideal relation between it and secular life. Here there can be no mistake. To Jesus, nothing that came from the Father was common or unclean, that is, nothing was merely secular. To Him, nature and humanity were embodiments and reflections of the Father's will, to be studied by the man of science, interpreted by the spiritually minded, loved by the artist and by all. He points us to the lilies, the grass, the fowls for teaching. The labours of husbandmen, vine-dressers, fishermen, householders, stewards, traders are His texts. He does not preach like the ascetic or pietist, "Do not seek for money, food or clothes, for you do not need such trifles; attend to the soul; that is the great thing." No; He says, "You do need those things; but have no heart-dividing cares about them. Such cares only hinder work. Your Father knows that you need them, and He will not withhold them from His children." He consecrated nature, and human life, work, and ties. The Manichean view

• "Literature and Dogma," p. 356.

of life, even in the form of petty asceticisms in which it is usually commended to us, divorces the kingdom of nature from the kingdom of grace, and by degrading the former deforms the latter. The Secularist view of life, on the other hand, denies that there is any kingdom of grace at all, and so robs nature and life of meaning and beauty. For "when heaven was above us, earth looked very lovely; when we came down on the earth, and believed that we had to do with nothing but it, earth became flat and dull; its trees, its flowers, its sunlight lost their charms; they became monotonous, more wearisome each day, because we could not see beyond them.” To Jesus, the kingdoms of nature and grace appeared in their ideal unity. The author of the one was the author of the other. He had made the one to correspond with and lead up to the other. Man had broken the divine unity and harmony. The Son of man came to restore that which had been broken.

The relation of religion to the secular then is the relation of a law of life to all the work of life. This law of life is not a catechism, but a spiritual power or influence. Its relation to the secular is not arbitrary but natural; not statical but dynamical; not mechanical but spiritual. Freedom is the condition of its successful working.

Let us define this law of life. It is the old law, old as humanity, and yet new; the law of love, the full meaning and extent of which Godward and manward is shown in and by the Cross. It is the child's love to the Father, and to the Father's children, and to the Father's works and purposes. Love means self-renunciation, and self-renunciation implies the new birth.

He in whom this law of life is supreme, and who carries it victoriously into every department of life with which he has to do, is a truly religious man. Religionists seem to have a theory that it can survive only in the atmosphere of the sanctuary, the prayer-meeting, the conference, the church court, or of directly religious work. Aside from the fact that it is sometimes conspicuously absent from those spheres, perhaps because it went into them unproved, without having had the discipline of common life, it is evident that such a theory dishonours that which it professes to honour. fesses to honour. Both religion and secular life suffer accordingly. Secular life becomes mean; spiritual life hampered and twisted by arbitrary restrictions and minute observances. The resultant type of manhood and womanhood-the true test of the theory-is far from being the highest. It is apt to give