did not so much as approach our positions. He convinced us, indeed, that the Church stood, in one respect, where it had stood of old; that it was as perverse as ever in making assertions against Protestantism, and as stubborn as ever in overlooking any assertions made against itself. If there are such things as facts, and if facts are of validity in the history of the Roman Church as well as elsewhere, it is true, that even that massive and immense organization feels the force of the drift movement to which European thought is yielding. We think we are not mistaken in affirming, that there is a Catholic party in England which makes endeavor to reconcile the dogmas of the Church with the philosophy of the nineteenth century. We believe that this party had an organ, entitled "The Home and Foreign Review," and that this organ declared the opinions of the new Catholic Church.

Of the Roman Church in France, George Sand, in the preface to "Mademoiselle La Quintinie," says, "This new Church, whose countless ramifications run all over and through France, stifling and gagging the simple who stand in its way, marching, singing, praying, mocking, insulting, - does not know what it believes, perhaps believes nothing. Ask it if it believes in the necessity of industrial progress; ask what it thinks of the benefits of science, of family rights, and so forth, it will appear at once remarkably tolerant. For this new Church is, in spite of every thing, bound to human progress by habit, by affection, and, above all, by interest. It should live and flourish by enlarging its sphere, and making ample provision for its material well-being. You need not expect Christian renunciation from it, or Catholic austerity, or the resignation of things earthly, or the complete denial of self prescribed by the primitive Church."

In America, the Paulist Fathers give their annual volume of sermons to a Protestant publisher, and tell the world, in their pages, that Christians may be saved out of the Catholic. Church; that voluntary sin alone damns; that the NewTestament descriptions of hell are figurative; and that there is no such place as heaven.

In fact, to say that any portion of the religious world in

Europe or America stands unaffected by the movement of the times is equivalent to saying, that that portion of the religious world has lost its vitality. For the whole intelligence of Europe and America is sliding. It is not in any one department of mental activity that the advance is apparent: it is in every department. And all the departments are run together. The layers are superimposed, and overlap. The geological peculiarities are intermingled. Every feature of soil and climate is found everywhere. We find saurian and mastodon far away from their natural regions, and we discover marine shells far inland. There is a very promiscuous shifting and shuffling of products. We may pick up our specimens at random, and they tell us the whole history of the period to which they belong. Open a work of fiction, and there is the last heresy in religion. Turn over the pages of a scientific treatise, and you speedily come across the latest discovery in theology. Take up a volume of poetry, and imbedded in the lines will be discovered fragments of metaphysical speculation, bits of spiritual philosophy, the newest flora of ecclesiasticism. Peruse a scientific essay, and the rocks there will be found scratched by the dogmas that have passed that way; and, between the stones, the delicate fibres of some leaf of mysticism may be detected. Whatever field one explores, he explores all fields; for the elements are so interspersed that they cannot be separated.

It is another characteristic of our theological period, that the movement goes on under the action of general forces, working with spontaneous and unpremeditated power. The advance is made as of itself, with a seemingly blind and unintelligent impetus; slow and clumsy, but irresistible. There are no leaders who gather disciples from schools, organize opinions, and direct thought in specific channels. The masses carry the teachers, rather than the teachers the masses. The great minds are collectors and distributors more than originators, interpreters more than discoverers, expositors more than creators. Martineau is a great mind, but he has no school: he either gives eloquent expression to thoughts which have been long entertained by spiritual minds; or he gives

brilliant exposition of ideas native to some foreign clime, and not yet domesticated in England. Parker looked more like a leader than any other in this country. But Parker was no original creator of opinion. We see now that his great influence was due to his powerful personality quite as much as to his ideas; that he founded no school; that, after all, he did little more than give mighty voice to thoughts and sentiments which had long been seething in the popular heart. He was one of the bowlders borne on the glacier's bosom, not the glacier itself. He moved with the current, and in the same precise direction as all the rest. The Broad-Churchof-England men, Maurice, Jowett, Stanley, Williams, and the rest, are reporters, not creators. They indicate the depth and width of the stream; but they do not start it, nor do they turn it far aside. Herbert Spencer is an expositor, a wonderful expositor to be sure; still an expositor of the ideas of a large class of scientific men who have been studying and speculating for years. We have no Abelards or Luthers to-day, who initiate new and startling movements, break out upon the world with grand jets of genius, and congregate men around themselves and around their system. The impelling forces are universal, not individual; as, in a period of such general movement, we should expect that they would be. Stuart Mill is disposed to complain of this: he thinks it a sad omen for the future, that great individualities no more stand out conspicuous above the multitude, educating, swaying, and governing them. But this is one of the features of the period, and as such it is to be accepted as good. We take his word, however, in evidence merely of the fact that it is so; that we are in a drift, and not in a volcanic epoch. Thinkers move with the mass, and in consequence of its moving. The method of the divine grace may be defined as a transpiration, as distinguished from the method of inspiration which other ages illustrated.

The grand movements of modern thought in religion, as in every thing else, are started by the action of universal forces. One of these, not the principal one by any means, though in time it may become so, is popular education. The instruction

of large bodies of the people in letters, the training of the mental powers even to a low average of discipline, the opening of science and literature and practical knowledge to even an ordinary degree, effects a change in the whole intellectual and spiritual attitude of the people which cannot be overestimated. Nothing less than a new world is opened, and the whole mind awakes to the admiration of its beauty and the exploration of its wonder. A knowledge of the alphabet shakes prejudice to its foundations, and undermines all theology. It is not so much that people doubt and deny, as that they lose their interest, and forget. The older thoughts are not repudiated: they are outgrown. Instituted ideas are not discarded: they are set adrift. The book, the magazine, the pamphlet, the newspaper, are all so many levers which the mind, instructed in the alphabet, uses to pry dogmas from their resting-place, and unseat the mighty masses of creed which have lain for centuries, like portions of the mind's primeval structure, on the surface of intelligence. There is no intention to disturb or dislocate the existing order, on the part of the world's educators. They may purpose something exactly the reverse of that. Their motive in educating the people may be to make them conservative of established thoughts. But the effect is always unsettling. The mind cannot move without moving whatever lies on the surface of the mind.

A more powerful disorganizer than education is the active intelligence which is generated by universal industry. Nothing quickens the intellectual faculties like the work that calls on them, and uses them. An industrial age, in which all men must earn their own livelihood, and in which all men of genius, talent, perseverance, may become distinguished, will inevitably be an age of inquiry, of experiment, of inventive resource, and quickness of self-reliance and self-assertion; and these qualities will not be limited to any sphere. The mind that thinks for itself will think for itself on all subjects. The will that asserts its own independence will assert its independence in every sphere. The reason that moves freely amid sensuous objects will soon insist on moving freely amid

supersensuous objects; and one kind of authority will be as easily dislodged as another. No aggressive temper need come in. As the tide of intelligence rises, Church and Creed will be lifted from the Rock of Ages, whereon they seemed to repose, and will begin to float lightly down stream. Facilities of communication assist this tendency of general intelligence. The railway, the cheap postal system, the frequent lines of steamships from place to place, rapid regulations of trade, local and national exchanges, the electric telegraph, are so many conductors by which these funds of intelligence are equalized and distributed, and the great stream of thought widened.

With these grand agencies, local agencies conspire. The central stream has tributaries. In Germany, the political system that prevailed drove men of large capacity for thought into the fields of speculative inquiry, abstruse philosophy, criticism. The consequence was that an immense force of intellect was brought to bear directly on the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. The industry, patience, research, sagacity, genius, that in other countries are turned to practical affairs, spent themselves in historical and literary investigations. Eichhorn, De Wette, Paulus, Strauss, Schwegler, Baur, and the rest, put their shoulders against Church, Creed, Bible, and pushed them out into the current of general thought. They started with no purpose of unsettling the traditions of Christendom. They did not deliberately meditate the loosening of any bonds or associations. Their work was done because it was the only work they were permitted to do. They did it to save their sanity; and they were rather disturbed than otherwise when it came to them, that they were detaching any portion of the common people from their landmarks of faith. The state of society in Germany is responsible for "The Life of Jesus," "The Post-apostolic Age," the "Theologische Jahrbücher." But the movement now started went on till it affected the whole intellectual world, and heaved the old Bible everywhere from its place in the regards of thoughtful men.

In France, the scientific spirit spread through all depart