Thus the firm footing of Victorian Liberalism whether in thought or practice has slipped. The revolt of a greater realism has proved its bed-rock of assumptions to be a false bottom. Discussion has gone further and invaded its sanctuaries. It seems as though its representatives sat in a circle in an increasingly hot room and took off their clothes one by one, upon the assumption that a point would be reached when they could sit both in comfort and decency. Their sons. have passed any such minimum point. Some have tried to do with nothing on; others are trying to get either out of their skins or out of the room.

For the heat in the room is thrown off by facts which are not good. It is a greater sensitiveness to cruel and evil facts in the world which puts the sons out of sympathy with the fathers. Somehow or other the rose colour has faded out of Victorian spectacles. The collision between the ideal and the actual, between belief and experience has grown more violent. It was a relatively tame world within whose empirical facts— as T. H. Green insisted-the ideal was to be recognized, "and not in an ideal world of guess and aspiration alongside of the empirical." The world which Science presents to-day as that within which human ideals must find a home is wilder and more fearful. "That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noon-day brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achieve

1 T. H. Green: Works, vol. i. p. 449. Cf. his allusion to the outer world as a "means through which the Deity, who works unseen behind it, pours the truth and love which transforms man's capabilities into actualities" (Works, vol. iii. p. 4).

ment must inevitably be buried beneath the débris of a universe in ruins all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundations of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."1

Such is the "modern" situation.

Doubtless, despite all that has been claimed for this generation, the mass of men in this country-certainly the majority of church-goers-have still to realize it. The many have still to pass through the transition which so powerfully staggered the few half a century ago. Roughly speaking, the average man has still to be assailed by the fear that his general view of the universe derived from Old Testament saturation is obsolete. He has still to follow in the steps of Mr. Wells and "be drawn out of the little world of short horizons and millennial expectations"-the world of the Father in Mr. Gosse's Father and Son-" into another world of endless vistas, of years whose blackness and vagueness are terrifying." He, too, in his measure, "will be smitten by the riddle all this scheme of things, life, force, destiny, which began not six thousand years, mark you, but an infinity ago, that has developed out of such strange weird shapes and incredible first intentions, out of gaseous nebulae, carboniferous swamps, saurian giantry and arboreal apes, is by the same token to continue developing-into what?" He has still to struggle with something of the obstinacy of Victorian religion against the destruc

1 Bertrand Russell: Philosophical Essays, The Free Man's Worship, p. 60; ct. p. 63: "In this lies Man's true freedom: in determination to worship only the God created by our own love of the good, to respect only the heaven which inspires the insight of our best moments. In action, in desire, we must submit perpetually to a tyranny of outside forces; but in thought, in aspiration, we are free, free from our fellow-men, free from the petty planet on which our bodies impotently crawl, free even while we live, from the tyranny of death. Let us learn, then, that energy of faith which enables us to live constantly in the vision of the good; and let us descend in action into the world of fact, with that vision always before us."

tion of the cosmogony which was founded for him on the acceptance of the whole of "the Book as true.

In truth, the biographies and the ecclesiastical history of the last half of the nineteenth century, and the state of mind of Anglican congregations to-day corroborate what we have already said. The engrained dominance of Scriptural ideas in British minds has given them an unnatural watertightness against currents which have been ready to flow into them ever since the time of Copernicus and the Renaissance. Hence the roar of waters as through a broken dam, when the Darwinian. movement brought home the implication of the Copernican revolution. Hence the rapidity of the separation in mind between periods but little apart in time. Hence the ineradicable consciousness to-day of a modern point of view.

No doubt the average man, by virtue of freedom from the sophistications of culture, will be less moved by the force of currents that carried the more academic away. No doubt, too, the fact that others have endured the first shock of revolution will mitigate its effects upon himself. He will be spared the more callow phases of modernism. But he cannot wholly escape he is not escaping-convulsion. He is ever reproducing the experience of a former generation, of being swept by violent tides out of old anchorages, both religious and moral.

II

If such be "the hurt of the daughter of My people," with what balm can it be healed? Who can be the physician?

Not the moral philosopher.

He, no doubt, will come forward to claim that morality is unaffected by these alarms, and that no general commotion can take from men an absolute sense of moral obligation. And yet the moral ideal to

which a man's conscience is sensitive, and the conditions of his struggle towards its attainment, cannot be isolated from what he thinks-from his general view of things. The moral philosopher therefore may, if he likes, sit in his own room composing ethical treatises, but meanwhile the whole house is on fire. He may occupy himself, but he will not interest many others, with morality, while its presuppositions are to seek. The subject-matter of his exercises is man, and while man's place in the world is under challenge, he can moralize about man only to the degree that an artist can draw a model that will not sit still. There is a Victorian ring about the average British citizen's delusion, so familiar to the ears of parochial clergy, that "it does not matter what you think, so long as you do what is right." Here "thinking" means allegiance to distinctively Christian doctrine, whilst "doing" means the carrying out of duties implied in a belief in God, as yet undisputed, or in a morality, assumed to be self-evident.

But how if the undisputed comes under dispute? There are questions about which it does matter what men think if they are to act rightly. The spread of long-accepted tradition and custom has disguised this. There have been things which, in the words of John Stuart Mill, men have "agreed in holding sacred; which, wherever freedom of discussion was a recognized principle, it was of course lawful to contest in theory, but which no one could either hope or fear to see shaken in practice; which" were "in the common estimation placed beyond discussion." A futility reminiscent of placards stating that "Trespassers will be prosecuted" hangs about these words. Discussion, theoretical and practical, has been more vagrant than Mill dreamt. Something impels his successors to abhor above all else an evasion of the worst questions. And as the questions are raised, so, little by little, the weight of once-accepted assumptions, sanctions, self-evidences,

1 J. S. Mill, Dissertations, vol. i. p. 417.

and authorities is reduced, and the range of moral and immoral possibility is widened.

Quo usque tandem? Are they right who say that the passionate and appetitive elements in human nature, ever impatient of anything but present satisfaction, will quickly construe uncertainty about further issues into reasons why a man should eat and drink ere tomorrow he die? It is likely, indeed, that in the cool retreats of segregated English culture the volcanic capacities of human nature have been under-estimated. But where revolt has been really radical and wholesale, as among many in the student world abroad, there such moral anarchy has followed as makes it plain that in the future the side of the angels will be maintained, not by an idle confidence in vague and common sentiment, but by those who have attained to conscious and reasoned convictions about ultimate things.

The moral philosopher then, as such, will not be found in possession of the balm in Gilead.

Nor will the Christian moralist. It is a further sign of the changed times that men can no longer be satisfied with viewing Jesus Christ merely as a gracious moral teacher. That was possible last century for some individuals aglow with the Nachschein of Evangelical pietism. It was possible when foundation truths about God, the world, and man were thought to stand fast independently of any Christian doctrine. Only the slightness of their theological interest in the strict sense of the word-has allowed so many critics to treat the Sermon on the Mount as a purely ethical discourse.

But latterly an anxiety over issues that lie deeper than ethics has destroyed the blindness which overlooked the theology implied in Christ's ethical teaching. It is being realized now that His maxims are inseparable from His ideas of God and man.

Hence a great discord. Just as the colours of a picture toned and mellowed by age stand out in sharpness and brilliance when it is cleaned, so the ethical