market and the house; they met in the discussions of the schools; they met in the institutions of political government; and in each place the Church was triumphant.

In this way Christianity asserted, once for all, its sovereign power among men by the victory of common life, by the victory of thought, by the victory of civil organisation. These first victories contain the promise of all that later ages have to reap.

This victory of thought is the second, and not the first, in order of accomplishment. The succession involves a principle. The Christian victory of common life was wrought out in silence and patience and nameless agonies. It was the victory of the soldiers and not the captains of Christ's army. But in due time another conflict had to be sustained, not by the masses, but by great men, the consequence and the completion of that which had gone before.

The dis

It is with the society as with the individual. cipline of action precedes the effort of reason. The work of the many prepares the medium for the subtler operations of the few. So it came to pass that the period during which this second conflict of the Faith was waged was, roughly speaking, from the middle of the second to the middle of the third century.

Origen's whole life, from first to last, was, according to his own grand ideal, "one unbroken prayer," one ceaseless effort after a closer fellowship with the Unseen and the Eternal. No distractions diverted him from the pursuit of Divine wisdom. No persecutions checked for more than the briefest space the energy of his efforts. He endured " a double martyrdom," perils and sufferings from the heathen, reproaches and wrongs from Chris

tians; and the retrospect of what he had borne only stirred within him a humbler sense of his shortcomings. In Origen we have the first glimpse of a Christian He was conspicuous even from his cradle;" a great man from his childhood" is the judgment of his bitterest enemy.

boy.

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Writings are but one element of the teacher. method is often more characteristic and more influential than doctrine. It was so with Origen.

The method of Origen, such as Gregory has described it, in all its breadth and freedom was forced upon him by what he held to be the deepest law of human nature. It may be true (and he admitted it) that we are, in our present state, but poorly furnished for the pursuits of knowledge; but he was never weary of proclaiming that we are at least born to engage in the endless search. If we see some admirable work of man's art, he says, we are at once eager to investigate the nature, the manner, the end of its production; and the contemplation of the works of God stirs us with an incomparably greater longing to learn the principles, the method, the purpose of creation. "This desire, this passion, has without doubt," he continues, "been implanted in us by God. And as the eye seeks the light, as our body craves food, so our mind is impressed with the characteristic and natural desire of knowing the truths of God and the causes of what we observe." Such a desire, since it is a divine endowment, carries with it the promise of future satisfaction.

In our present life we may not be able to do more by the utmost toil than obtain some small fragments from the infinite treasures of divine knowledge, still the concentration of our souls upon the lovely vision of Truth, the occupation of our various faculties in lofty inquiries,

the very ambition with which we rise above our actual powers, is in itself fruitful in blessing, and fits us better for the reception of wisdom hereafter at some later stage of existence. Now we draw at the best a faint outlinea preparatory sketch of the features of Truth; the true and living colours will be added then. Perhaps, he concludes most characteristically, that is the meaning of the words "To every one that hath shall be given;" by which we are assured that he who has gained in this life some faint outline of truth and knowledge will have it completed in the age to come with the beauty of the perfect image.

It seems to me that we have more to learn than to fear from the study of Origen's writings. With all his faults and shortcomings, he is the greatest representative of a type of Greek Christian thought which has not yet done its work in the West. By his sympathy with all efforts, by his largeness of view, by his combination of a noble morality with a deep mysticism, he indicates, if he does not bring, the true remedy for the evils of that Africanism which has been dominant in Europe since the time of Augustine.

Augustine was a Latin thinker, and more than a Latin -an African. He looked at everything from the side of law and not of freedom; from the side of God, as an irresponsible Sovereign, and not of man as a loving servant.

The centre of his whole dogmatic theory is sin.

In his greatest work he writes "Of the City of God," and he draws at the same time the portraiture of a rival "City of the Devil," equally stable and enduring.

We must regard the teaching of Origen as not so much a system as an aspiration. Welcomed as an aspiration, it can, I believe, do us good service.

We are inclined to underrate the practical effect of

wide thoughts and of great ideals. But life is impover

ished and action is enfeebled for the lack of them.

"THE spirit of man is the candle of the Lord." The

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phrase, "over-frequently quoted" by Whichcote, as his opponents alleged, at once brings before us the central characteristic of his teaching. For him reason was "lighted by God, and lighting us to God-res illuminata, illuminans." What," he asks, “doth God speak to but my reason? and should not that which is spoken to hear? should it not judge, discern, conceive what is God's meaning?" "I count it true sacrilege to take from God to give to the creature, yet I look at it as a dishonouring of God to nullify and make base His works, and to think He made a sorry, worthless piece fit for no use when He made man."

For Whichcote truth was the soul of action. "I act, therefore I am,' was the memorable sentence in which he echoed and answered the cogito ergo sum of Descartes.

But I act not as my own maker, not as my own sustainer, but as the creature and servant of Him who is original of all and will be final to all; who is "to be adored as the chiefest beauty and loved as the first and chiefest good"; who hath given us "a large capacity which He will fulfil, and a special relation to Himself which He will answer."

"The idolatry of the world," as Whichcote profoundly remarks, "hath been about the medium of worship, not about the object of worship." The testimony of conscience—" our home-God," as he calls it—still remains. Great hopes and great aspirations contend in the human heart with the sense of weakness and failure.

'Heaven,” as he tersely says, "is first a temper and then a place." "Heaven present is our resemblance to God, and men deceive themselves grossly when they flatter themselves with the hopes of a future heaven, and yet do, by wickedness of heart and life, contradict heaven present."

"We must be men," he writes, "before we can be Christians."

"The reason is the only tool with which we can do men's work. If God did not make my faculties true, I am absolutely discharged from all duty to Him.”

"They are greatly mistaken," he argues, "who in religion oppose points of reason and matters of faith; as if Nature went one way and the Author of Nature went another."

"If you see not well," Whichcote writes, "hear the better if you see not far, hear the more. The consequence of truth is great; therefore the judgment of it must not be negligent."

"He that is light of belief will be as light of unbelief;" and "of all impotencies in the world credulity in religion is the greatest.”

"That is not an act of religion which is not an act of the understanding; that is not an act of religion which is not even human.”

It ill becomes us to make our intellectual faculties "Gibeonites"-in Whichcote's picturesque phrase-mere drudges for the meanest services of the world.

"Faculties without any acquired habits witness for God and condemn us;" and in spiritual things the paradox is true, that which is not used is not had.