significance and freshness of life-adding and fixing for others new thoughts and sympathies and relations, which would otherwise have been but fleeting visions and momentary impressions, hopelessly lost in the wreckage and futility of what is past and forgotten. The whole world cries to heaven for interpretation. The poetry of life has hardly found expression at all. There have been but few voices and lights to break the silence and dispel the gloom. Patiently the world lies before us, like a great block of unhewn marble, containing within itself, as Michel Angelo said, all the images and secrets that the greatest poet could ever dream of or desire to know.

But, even in the case of the greatest artist and poet, feeling and imagination far outstrip expression. No word or image has limned the heart and soul of man. Voice is itself but an echo, colour a reflection, form a shadow. Art matches poetry about as well as dogma does religious exaltation, or language the reverie of thought. At best it is never more than a miserable representation of the original-a clumsy image of its spiritual counterpart. The symbol can only suggest the light that never was on sea or land.' There is no real equation between what is within and its external makeshift. The countenance, voice and action, how weak and deceptive they can be! Body and soul are generally a hideous misfit. The most eloquent often see more than they can name or depict. The spirit that built and still illuminates the cathedrals and shrines of the middle ages is greater than the buildings themselves. However beautiful, they are only the halting, sepulchral effigies of a vanished dream of the divine presence.

For the spirit of poetry exists apart from any incarnation of it. What, for instance, is more poetic often than mere affinity, recollection, association, reticence? The soul can conceive without the use of language. Thought preceded speech. Poetry-feeling and insight—was in the world long before printing or writing or even speaking were heard or thought of, or any instrument of art invented, and it would survive, even if knowledge of all the arts were completely lost.

And the attempt to arrive at adequate expression has been a long and stuttering course. The rudiments and science of the language of art, the elaboration of signs and the perfecting of instruments, whether in writing, perspective, or notation, were with great difficulty reached, and sounds, pictures, words, and shapes so made capable of fixing and communicating their contents. But the tools with which we endeavour to hack out our meaning are still very blunt and unsatisfactory. Was Swedenborg so eccentric, when he held that our finest thoughts could only be expressed by variegations of heavenly light?' Does not every poet know well how inferior his means of communication are to his inspiration? They are as wild and futile as Romeo's passionate contradictions or Tristan's musical

transports in their efforts to describe love. Like the prophet of old, can we do more than speak of the appearance of the likeness,' the voice of the cry'? The greater the poet and artist is, the nearer will be his approach to true expression of the internal life and import-and so on, until every secret shall be detected and named, and the game of thought and interpretation at an end; but, in the meantime, so poor a thing is expression of any kind, that on great occasions do we not instinctively make no attempt whatever to give utterance to our thoughts and feelings? We foresee and shudder at the awful disparity, and so refrain. Be silent, and know that I am God' sums up many a situation.

VI

Thus have we briefly seen how the whole life and history and circumstances of the human race, from the beginning of the creation to the end, are suffused with the divine breath and sustenance of poetic power.

For God, in truth, is the supreme and only original poet-the Maker or Creator; and His poem-the everlasting Book of Life. He is, too, the great imaginative artist; and the visible universe-His work of art. In splendid style has He shaped the earth into man and beast and every living thing; and man, also, can shape some lovely images and ideas. But the creation of the world was not a masonic act but a spiritual breathing; and man creates and is a poet in so far as he sees and partakes of this divine life and presence. Just as God is Pure Being itself, the poetry of anything is its share of such perennial essence. From the central fire of Life radiate waves of love and light, permeating the hearts and souls of men, and bodied forth in the glorious births of imaginative expression. The poetic artist is like a refracting prism, decomposing the sun's purity into an infinite number of shades of varying force and amplitude, and his works may be compared to the order and nature of the different broken tints of the solar spectrum-red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. On the sensitive retina of one life oscillates into luminous images of colour and light and form and design; on the delicate tympanum of another it vibrates into rhythmic chords of sound; in the cerebral consciousness of another it thrills into glowing words of speech. O to see and to hear! Voice and vision! Light and sound!-undulating through the world in a myriad radial arteries, and exciting to elastic response the throbbing heart and flashing imagination of man!

Thus does a great wave of the divine spirit, which is the eternal life and current of the universe, pass over a dark, unmeaning, arid world, and they drown themselves in it-who haply can. The heavens are opened, and extraordinary inspiration and gifts are showered on the

chosen ones. 'The spirit of God shall come over you.' The poet sees that the whole universe is a manifestation of spiritual being and signifiand this insight constitutes distinct poetic creation. To be inspired is to hear, however faintly, the reverberation 'down the ringing grooves of change' of the divine Word-ó Aóyos-which created the world and which still sustains it and is its ineffable oracle. The first and the last and the only word of all creation is: Let there be light. This is how the poet is really'ó πoints, or maker—as God is.. Poetry is the human counterpart of the divine creativeness of the world. It is an unconscious secret force, composing 'the life of things,' which the imaginative genius of man discloses and renders conscious. It is a partial revelation of the creative spirit of the universe, and is itself the creative principle of all spiritual life and understanding. There can be no real religion without a poetic sense-not that the spiritual consciousness of the poet is the same as the dogmatic, spiritualistic faith of the believer. The latter refers to another worldof spirits or in the future-apart from this. But poetry is thoroughly terrestrial and natural to man; it is a present insight into the spiritual in this actual world around us; and, without it, all gifts intellectual, moral, or physical are incomplete, and no man, in any path of life, can be great. The soul should have a sense of poetry as the will has a sense of duty or the mind a sense of logic; but the faculty of expression may be as weak and uncommon as right conduct or true reasoning are. But to the great man the transcendent poetry of life is revealed, and his words and acts abide. Beneath all its shapes and guises, his sympathetic insight discerns and evokes the unchanging spirit of the manifold universe. The mystic unity of life finds an echo in the lonely grandeur of his soul. He sees the universal significance and relationship of what is otherwise dead and meaningless and discordant; and life becomes one harmonious vision.

MARTIN MORRIS.

THE FUTURE OF

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION

THE so-called 'crisis' in the Church of England, which to us on the other side of the Atlantic looks like a very small quasi-political affair, partaking largely of the nature of 'tempest in a teapot,' seems to me to be but one manifestation of that spirit of which I propose to speak, a spirit which, unless I am entirely misinformed, is sweeping over the whole Western world, America included.

In taking, then, a careful view of the state of Christianity, three things seem to me to be absolutely certain:

1. That among civilised nations the form of Christianity nourished by Rome, which is ordinarily called 'Popery,' is making no headway.

2. That the distinctive doctrines of every Protestant reformer are being more and more universally rejected.

3. That there is in all Protestant Christendom (the Anglican Church being, perhaps improperly, included in that category) a distinct movement towards Catholicism and a most evident desire for ceremonialism.

No doubt there can be found people who will deny the truth of one, two, or even all three of these statements; and yet for all that they may be none the less true.

1. Take, for example, the status of the Roman Catholic Church in England to-day. When controversialists of that Church furnish us with statistics, as did the Roman Catholic Bishop of Southwark in his speech recently delivered at Autun, at the St. Augustine festivities,' they are careful to tell us the increase of the number of priests and churches and convents, but they are significantly silent as to the number of souls to which these priests minister, the number of persons who attend these churches, the number of religious who are professed in these convents. And even were the numbers given, they would not prove much unless there was added a further statement as

See supplement to the Tablet, July 1, 1899.

to how many of these Roman Catholics in England are English, and how many Irish, French, &c.

But of the real numbers of the Roman dissenters in England we get a pretty good idea from the marriage returns, and from these it is quite evident that Romanism, so far from gaining in numbers in England, is not by any means able to hold the relative position she had fifty years ago. All this has been frankly admitted very recently by a Roman Catholic writer.2

But what is true of England is true also of most other parts of the civilised world. In the United States, no one who has any information upon the subject will pretend that Rome is making any headway except by immigration, and her own prelates openly confess that they are unable to hold these often weak-kneed Catholics after they come in contact with American institutions, and especially with the so-called 'public-school' system, which saps from the children the root principles of morals and religion. At the laying of the cornerstone of the new Roman Catholic parish church in Philadelphia for the Italians, the preacher frankly confessed that the overwhelming majority of the Italian children were getting no religious training whatever! No one can for a moment doubt that the losses from mixed marriages and other causes far exceed any occasional 'conversions' of ritualistic ladies in New York and of a ritualistic Anglican perhaps birds so rare that the news of their flight, or rather hoppings, is spread by telephone and telegraph all over the country, and is sent by cable and letter even to Europe.

It is true that conversions are being made in Holland and in Sweden, but what are they as compared to the loss of whole families, I might almost say whole villages, in parts of Austria-Hungary and in Alsace-Lorraine ?

But perhaps the saddest of all sights is the spectacle presented by Catholic France, Catholic Belgium, Catholic Spain. The vast number of men in each of these countries who are not only not practising Catholics, but who are actively hostile to Christianity in any form, is positively appalling. Nor is the state of things in Italy much better.

It would seem, then, that the future of Romanism is as black as it could possibly be, and that the alarm of those who say that Rome is swallowing up everything is about as well founded as were the famous Gordon riots.

I would not, however, leave this point without offering my most 2 Mr. Richard Bagot. He says: 'Far from progressing, Roman Catholicism in England has for several years been stationary, if not losing ground' (Vide article in the Nuova Antologia). The Church Times (London) gives the following figures from the Registrar-General's marriage returns. I have no way of verifying them. In 1853 marriages by Roman Catholic rites were 51 in the thousand, in 1857 they were 46 in the thousand, in 1867 they dropped to 44, and in 1897 only 41 in the thousand. These figures must show something.