that produced in France by the Second Empire: a surface unity concealing profound interior disunion, a show of submission covering widespread and thinly disguised disaffection. If to be Catholic is to be with the Pope there is no such thing as a Catholic nation; nor, tried by this standard, is the allegiance even of individuals a thing to count upon. The claims of Rome are so enormous that, like our own Royal Prerogative, they remain unchallenged only as long as they are kept in the background to assert them is to invite revolt. Had Pius IX. seen this, the long issue between the Vatican and the Quirinal, still unsolved, if for the moment in temporary and uncertain abeyance, would have been avoided had Pius X. realised it, the Concordat of 1801 would be law in France to-day. That the Papacy retains what hold it does on the world is due to the fact that, with few exceptions, Catholics have agreed not to take its claims too seriously. In normal times a makeshift policy like this works well enough. But, as long as the antagonism between the two ideas of civilisation, the lay and the clerical, remains, the mine is laid, and a spark may explode it. At any moment a conflict may be provoked in which the one thing certain is that the interests of religion will suffer from their belittling and compromising association with a system that has been tried and found wanting, and to which the world will not return.

One consideration remains. The genius of the Roman Church is not dogmatic. She regards dogma rather as a law to be obeyed than as an article of faith to be accepted: 'the Italian 'is of an essentially untheological cast of mind.' An Italian dignitary was told of the reluctance of an eminent French writer to endorse the condemnation of certain of his works by the Inquisition. He literally could not understand the difficulty. Why does he not say what they want?' he asked impatiently no one asks him to believe it. A Catholic, he argued, accepts the Catholic platform. What this is, is none of his business: the whole thing is a matter of party discipline, with which the individual conscience has nothing to do. Much in the same vein De Maistre, in his famous treatise.

6

'You attach too much importance to the dogmatic side of this religion. By what strange contradiction would you desire to agitate the universe for some academic quibble? . . . If the only point is the establishment of one opinion in the place of another, then 'he is arguing against the Conciliar theory of infallibility- the travelling expenses of even one single infallible are sheer waste. If you want to spare the two most valuable things in the world, time and money, make all haste to write to Rome, in order to procure thence

a lawful decision which shall declare the unlawful doubt. Nothing more is needed; policy asks no more.' *

But a Church cannot live on policy any more than a nation on a paper currency. What does the paper stand for? The question which De Maistre brushes away is fundamentalIs it true?

If the substance of religion has nothing to fear from this question, it is otherwise with much that comes to us in its name and under its authority-the relative, historical, human, call it what we will. This is being subjected to an analysis whose end is not yet in sight, but whose results in their broad outlines are no longer doubtful. In the Evangelical Churches the controversies to which this analysis necessarily gave rise are, if not solved, on the way to solution. The appeal is to Scripture and conscience; and, as the former is better understood and the latter better informed, the friction between the new and the old decreases; a common standpoint comes into view. In Catholicism the situation is more complicated. The appeal to Scripture is supplemented by that to tradition, that to conscience by that to authority in each case the letter encroaches on the spirit, that which kills on that which gives life. The result, apparently at least, is to stereotype an outlook over life which has ceased to be possible: hence to serious and thoughtful persons an increasing and intolerable strain. The Catholic Church is an institution on so large a scale that it is difficult to imagine its falling permanently out of touch with the actual; it is safe to prophesy that a modus vivendi will be found with ascertained knowledge and accomplished facts. Whether such a modus vivendi, inspired by considerations of policy rather than by motives of a higher order, will prove a permanent solution is another question. Life is built on compromise; but there is compromise and compromise: 'it makes all the difference in 'the world whether we put truth in the first or in the second 'place.' The conformity of indifference is fatal to the ends for which conformity exists; and the most religious minds are the first to revolt against it: they stifle, and break away at all costs into a purer air.

Yet that the Church, Reformed and Unreformed alike, is faced by no easy problem must be admitted. Its roots lie far in the past. When religion has been identified for centuries with its theological and institutional setting, the bankruptcy of the latter reacts upon the former. The partnership cannot be dissolved at a moment's notice; and the retreat of the tradi

*Du Pape, bk. i. c. 17.

tional theology all along the line, and the advance of historical and scientific criticism from one position to another, may well suggest misgiving. There is a logic of ideas which carries men in spite of themselves to unforeseen conclusions. And when the historical method has done its work it will be the turn of the categorical proposition: the spirit of the eighteenth century, latent but not extinct, will revive. It will find its ground ready; here Traditionalist and Rationalist see eye to eye. In a striking passage Mr. Morley anticipates what, from the standpoint of pure rationalism, will be the end.

'We will not attack you, as Voltaire did; we will not exterminate you; we shall explain you. History will place your dogma in its class, above or below a hundred competing dogmas, exactly as a naturalist classifies his species. From being a conviction it will sink to a curiosity; from being the guide to millions of human lives it will dwindle down to a chapter in a book. As history explains your dogma so Science will dry it up . . the mental climate will gradually deprive your symbols of their nourishment, and men will turn their backs upon your system, not because they have confuted it, but because, like witchcraft or astrology, it has ceased to interest them. The great ship of your Church, once so stout and fair and well laden with good destinies, is become a skeleton ship; it is a phantom hulk, with warped planks and sere canvas, and you who work it are no more than ghosts of dead men, and at the hour when you seem to have reached the bay down your ship will sink like lead or like stone to the lowest bottom.'

We do not believe that the atmosphere of rationalism any more than that of Ultramontanism is one in which men can breathe. We must make for truth' with the whole man.' The radical defect of each is over-abstraction, the substitution of dead syllogisms for the flesh and blood by which men live. We live by nature, not by theories of living. And nature postulates itself the faculty presupposes the function, the appetite its object, though this may be, and often is, other than we think it more distant, vaster, more real. Such a faculty is worship, such an appetite is that of the Divine. Argument is as powerless against it as against love or any other primitive fact of nature: the non in dialectica of St. Ambrose is a particular instance of a general law. In vain is the alternative, all or nothing, set before us with the persuasiveness of rhetoric and the necessity of deduction; we cannot, perhaps, answer the reasoning; but, guided by a true instinct, we disregard it and 'pass "on. The fallacy of logic is perhaps the most fallacious of the fallacies. When we leave the surface of

*Miscellanies, i, 81.

life symmetry of form means suppression of content; to the weather-wise a perfectly clear horizon forecasts rain. Not in the rationalising, constructive or destructive, of religion lies its strength, but in its spiritualisation, its emancipation from material interests, from social and political alliances, from the philosophies and theologies of the past. The idealising tendency of the best thought of our time points in this direction-its recognition of the One in the Many; its indifference to the setting, if only the substance be retained. The society of the future, economists tell us, will differ widely from that of the present. The same may be said, and with equal certainty, of religion. The simultaneous movement of thought in all the Churches, and its substantial identity under their various surroundings, are as calculated to excite the attention of the observer as were the signs which announced the break up of the imposing fabric of European society more than a century ago. And we may apply to the former the words used by Burke of the latterthe wisest perhaps that he ever wrote of the great event in question:

'If a great change is to be made in human affairs the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in opposing this mighty current in human affairs will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men.?

ART. II. THE OLD AND THE NEW ALCHEMY.

1. Les Origines de l'Alchimie. Par M. BERTHELOT. Paris: Georges Steinheil. 1885.

2. Die Alchemie in älterer und neuerer Zeit. Von HERMANN KOPP. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. 1886.

3. Histoire de la Philosophie Hermétique. Par N. LENGLET DU FRESNOY. 3 vols. Paris. 1742.

4. Das Letzte Aufflackern der Alchemie in Deutschland. Von E. SCHULTZE. Leipzig. 1897.

5. Lives of Alchemistical Philosophers. By ARTHUR EDWARD WAITE. London. 1888.

6. Radio-Active Transformations. By E. RUTHERFORD, F.R.S. London: A. Constable. 1906.

TIME

'IME does indeed 'bring in his revenges.' Old Horace knew it, and we are experiencing the truth of his Multa renascentur. Thought, like the planets, has its 'stations and retro"gradations.' Now and again, its course seems not unfitly symbolised by the mystic ouroboros, or coiled serpent. The head has overtaken the tail. Yet we do not really get back to the starting-point. There are no closed circuits in human affairs. The very earth progresses spirally. It wheels round a sun on the march, and returns no more on last year's track.

Modern physicists have not then reverted to the precise theories of Stephanus of Alexandria, still less to the practices, however legitimate in their time, of Friar Bacon or Cornelius Agrippa. But they have gained a point of view from which the search for the philosophers' stone appears less aberrant from reason than it did to their confident predecessors in the Victorian era. The attitude of science has been notably changed by the disclosure of electronic activities. Possibilities are now taken into serious account which, a very few years ago, were either ignored or derided. Especially as regards the constitution of matter, ideas have come to be prevalent which may literally be termed 'revolutionary,' since they curve backward irresistibly towards those entertained two thousand years ago. Thus the dogma of the immutability of material species can no longer be upheld. The chemical elements are subject to the ravages of time, and engender, through their decay, other substances equally entitled, to all seeming, with themselves, to be described as as 'elementary.' These processes, however, which the alchemists of old sought to command, we are content