Church, of the cruder forms of statement that presuppose it. To retain them when the beliefs they represent have no longer any real hold upon the mind is merely to alienate the rising generation and to refuse to the living principle of the Christian religion room within the Church to display itself with all its power.

If the statement of the doctrine of the Atonement in the form required by a more spiritual conception of the nature of God and His relation to the world depended on our own insight, and were something that had to be added from without to Christian doctrine, we might well despair. Fortunately, we are faced by no such difficulty. The true doctrine has, we contend, remained hid with Christianity since its foundation. Stated in its simplicity, it is that, as the sense of sin is the outcome of the development in the human soul of the consciousness of an inward law which is the condemnation of the merely natural man, so the consciousness of reconciliation comes as a further stage in the same process, through the discovery that this law is our life, the entrance to which is through the death and transformation of the life which is merely natural. Whatever it may be that as a matter of history, in the individual or the race, liberates and gives free course to this consciousness, in its essence it is no external and supernatural work accomplished for us by some will outside our own, but the coming to consciousness of the principle on which man's life itself is founded. "As by man came death, by man comes also the resurrection from the dead." Reconciliation is not the result of an external transaction between two separate wills, but of the inner movement of the human will itself whereby its divine and infinite nature is realised.

The deeper spirit of Christianity has from the first refused to regard the Atonement as an event in time, and has pressed towards a view of it sub specie æternitatis. On the one hand, the Lamb has been slain from the foundation of the world; on the other, the process which the sacrifice symbolises exists nowhere else than in the souls of the faithful, who are baptised

into a daily death and resurrection. It would of course be false to say that the historical event of the life and death of Christ has not been regarded by the leading exponents of the Christian religion as a fundamental article of faith. But in proportion as they have penetrated to its deeper meaning they have always tended to represent it as symbolic of a process essentially spiritual-an assurance coming from the external world of perception and historical fact that the sense of relief and reconciliation which the surrender of the soul to its highest ideals (which are also its highest reality) brings with it is no illusion, but is bound up with the divine scheme of the world. How far we shall continue to lay stress on these events may be left to the future to decide. In the past they have served a great purpose (not unlike the service that language renders to thought and feeling in general) in enabling mankind to realise for themselves and communicate to others the process whereby the soul rises to its true life. Nor is there any reason why they should not continue to do so in the future with increasing fruitfulness. What is essential to this end is that the transactions they symbolise should be freed from all suggestion of externality. "A religion which is to take hold of the mind of man must supply its deepest want and act along the line of its deepest stream of tendency." This tendency, we have contended, is in the direction of a conception, on the one hand, of God not as a separate being standing outside the world, but as the principle in which all things find their reality and their unity, and, on the other hand, of human nature as rooted in the consciousness of this unity, and destined through the self-revealing power of this principle to progress towards ever fuller knowledge and realisation of it-all Creation groaning and travailing for the revelation of the Sons of God. In the furtherance of this progress the Church is called to a great task-none other than the interpretation to man of his highest aspirations and proper destiny, the insistence upon the complete self-surrender to the highest within him for which Christianity stands as the condi

tion of their realisation, and the organisation of social and civic life so as to give completest expression to them in the outer order. That it may continue to perform this task in the future as it has done in the past, the chief condition is a clear understanding of the direction these aspirations are at present taking, the view of its own destiny that science and philosophy are forcing upon mankind. Articles like that of Sir Oliver Lodge, springing, as the Bishop acknowledges, from a spirit naturaliter Christiana, are a warning to the present-day exponents of the Christian tradition that they are in danger of forgetting this primary requirement of our time, and in so far as they do so are themselves responsible for the division between science and religion which they deplore.

BIRMINGHAM.

JOHN H. MUIRHEAD.

A CATHOLIC COMMENT ON

"THE RE-INTERPRETATION OF

CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE."

A CATHOLIC PRIEST.

THE widespread interest which Sir Oliver Lodge's article on the the "Re-interpretation of Christian Doctrine has created, may be taken as an indication that thoughtful minds are keenly alive to the immense importance of the subject, and that it is felt to be a source of satisfaction that a man of his high distinction should come upon theological ground.

The article contains several statements of a general character with which both the Catholic and the Protestant theologian would probably be in cordial agreement.

Sir Oliver Lodge acknowledges, for instance, the existence of that flaw-grit, as he terms it-in the order of the moral universe, the recognition of which lies at the very foundation of true Christian teaching, and the right apprehension of which forms the very corner-stone of its doctrinal system.

The Catholic theologian parts company with Sir Oliver when he propounds his views as to the source of this "grit," and when, on the ground of these views, he suggests a reconstruction and a re-interpretation of Christian doctrine. From the Catholic standpoint there can, strictly speaking, be no such reconstruction or re-interpretation, the true explanation and expression of all Christian doctrine having to

be sought for in its authoritative and authentic historic sources, not in the views of any particular period or individual.

But what Sir Oliver quite fails to realise is that, in his attack on Christian doctrine, he is really wholly on Protestant ground, and that he is setting forth as authoritative dogmatic teaching what are merely developments of modern Protestant thought. And this the historical Church, like himself, unceasingly attacks and condemns as unreasonable and contrary to truth.

The Christianity, therefore, which the article condemns, and which it pronounces to be wholly unacceptable to the modern mind, is the Christianity which the Catholic Church too condemns, and against which it has waged war from the very birth of the Protestant heresy. Catholics, indeed, feel themselves much aggrieved that they should be placed in the same category with those whose doctrinal errors and misconceptions they have at all times contended against.

ORIGINAL SIN.

It is, in the first place, wholly unjust to say that the doctrine of original sin (in the sense in which Professor Lodge expounds it) is the invention of monks. Monks are Catholics, and Catholics do not hold the absurd notions which he condemns.

The Catholic Church does not teach that original sin affects our moral nature in the sense in which actual sin does; nor does it maintain that we are punished with a positive punishment or held responsible for the sins of our first parents.

Indeed, the word "sin," applied to this taint of our nature, is almost a misnomer. "Stain" or "taint" are the terms used by the Catholic Church. Thus we teach respecting the Blessed Virgin that she was "sine labe originali concepta."

The Catholic conception is briefly this. Our first parents enjoyed a happier and more perfect state of existence than we do now. The grit, which Professor Lodge admits, and which he wishes us to conceive of as "matter out of place" (which is neither an argument nor an explanation), had got in somehow.