halo surrounds its ritual, its symbols are almost as rigid and mechanically impotent as the Bible Society's tracts in the railway waiting-room. I even doubt if we are capable of recognising a real symbol should we stumble across one. What we

require is a vivid revival of spontaneity. Ruskin has told us that it is not less sensation that we want, but more; and Blake was never weary of saying the same thing; but these home truths shock our modesty. We have made a God in our own image, a God of proper self-respect and starched self-control, and we are obliged to worship the work of our own brains.

The tree must be judged by its fruit and symbols and ritual by the help they give us to become better men and women. Art, in its highest and best and finally its only sense, is the faculty of symbolising our better feelings, and Art must be made to realise its mission. If we grant that Art has this mission, this really religious duty, we must admit that the outward expression of religion, its symbols and ritual, is Art, and that the priest is the artist, and the artist, priest.

It is only a question, since symbols are inevitable, what our symbols are to consist of, and what they are to symbolise or mean. Few savages pay greater respect to their stocks and stones " than the average Evangelical Christian does to his Biblethe actual volume he is in the habit of using. There is no more harm in the respect paid to the book than in that paid to the idol. A statue of the Madonna is a symbol, a reminder of the Madonna and all she stands for; a picture of a saint for the particular

victory or virtue the saint is associated with. The dead bones of a saint, a chip of the true Cross, a Holy Coat, are symbols or suggestions of the persons connected with these things and, therefore, of the virtues supposed to be inherent in these persons. It is of less importance whether the virtues are really inherent in the relics, or whether the stories are really true, than that they should be beautiful and helpful. The tale of St. Christopher is obviously impossible, mythical, miraculous, but it is none the less beautiful and truly helpful and suggestive. Nay! it seems to me that it is all the more so for that very reason.

The reverence paid to relics, to bits and bones and bodies and bibles, may be quite innocent, but is not a high form of worship, because they are seldom works of Art, and have not the inherent value which belongs to real works of Art. It is always well to have our currency cut out of good metal. Symbols are the currency of Religion, and Art is the precious metal they should be cast in. If they have not this stamp, they have at best only the literary or associative value of Protestant symbols. And if they are apt to degenerate into fetishes with superstitious people, it is owing to the fact that most people are as innately superstitious as the Athenians to whom St. Paul spoke on Mars' Hill, and prefer any symbols to none. But the pity consists, not! in the undue reverence paid to such things, but that the Church does not supply beautiful, inherently educational or artistic symbols instead of poor and ugly ones.

The worship of a dead lion, may, however, be less

harmful than the worship of a live donkey. The whole question, I repeat is, whether what we really respect or worship, dead or alive, inside or outside our churches and chapels, is worth worshipping, and whether what we worship inside our churches is the same that we worship outside them.

CHAPTER III

SPIRIT AND TRUTH

MORE plausible objection to the use of symbols seems to consist in their apparent contradiction of the words of Jesus: "God is a Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." But to translate this beautiful aphorism as directed indiscriminately against every external form of religion, or ritual of any kind, is to credit Jesus with the habit of confusing terms in the same slovenly manner as we are apt to do when we approach religious questions. And before we take this popular interpretation for granted, we must be certain that the use of symbols is really opposed to "spirit and truth," or we must approach the question from another point of view, and try to discover how worshipping "in spirit and in truth" may differ from any other sort of worship.

Many people, however, consider every conscious use of ritual an infringement of this law, forgetful that any organisation, sect, church, or body of believers, meeting to confess a common creed, do by that very action admit the necessity of symbols, however simple, and of ritual, however reduced to its most meagre formalities.

But it would be wrong to interpret these majestic

words of the Master in such a narrow sense. Jesus is representative of that supremely intellectual combination between Free thought and Reverence which marks, not by any means, all Saints, but certainly all great reformers. He probed those depths of anarchic introspection and philosophic doubt which afflict the minds of men at times when great changes are imminent. He realised the emptiness of earthly promise, the vanity of wealth, the futility of sensuous enjoyment, of intellectual preeminence or worldly power. These He put behind Him, but instead of seeing only the blankness of despair beyond, and the hopelessness of all effort or belief, instead of cringing before an unsolved and insoluble problem of life, or fleeing from it as an unanswerable and devouring Sphinx, He revealed it to us as a divine Father full of infinite pity, love, and succour. Where other men bowed, He rose erect; where others found death, He found life; where others saw the end of effort, He saw the beginning of it, the secret of all success, the revelation of all mysteries.

The necessity for an underlying faith in what we can never prove by our limited experience, but must always take for granted as well-intentioned to us, never deserted Him, and ought never to desert us. We who pretend to follow Him must accept His statement that God is true and not deceptive, that there is a Providence, a tangible communicative Providence and Law of Life instead of an accidental evolution and adaptation to environment. But neither was the obvious value of external help, or, as we can put it now, the use of symbols