4-2 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES

 
 THE 
 
 Ipiortent of 1Re\>olution. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN JJTTLE JOHNS.; 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'the FLOWING TIDE.' 
 
 ' ENGLAND AGAINST THE WORLD.' 
 
 ' THE FROZEN NORTH.' 
 
 {Translated into Ruman.) 
 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 * 
 
 LAMPETER : 
 PRINTED BY THE WELSH CHURCH PRESS, LTD. 
 
 1899.
 
 5151 
 
 Ll3 
 
 f 
 
 ^<^M^^y 
 
 >■ THIS BOOK 
 
 pe IS DEDICATED TO 
 
 -J MR. JAMES JEFFERY, PONTYPRIDD, 
 
 THE BEST 
 POLITICAL SCHOLAR IN WALES ; 
 WHOSE LIFE IS BOUND 
 UP WITH THE 
 5 PROCLAMATION OF TRUTH 
 
 to IN ITS 
 
 ESPECIAL BEARING UPON THE 
 
 LU 
 
 Q DESTINIES OF 
 
 NATIONS 
 
 '^<^SK5^>^ 
 
 .'i84671
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 I have been impelled to write these observations upon the sub- 
 ject of Disestablishment by the extremely superficial way in 
 which the question is being treated by the members and sup- 
 porters of the Liberation Society. A careful perusal of the 
 .speeches dealing with the matter from the Radical standpoint 
 together with a study of the Articles of the Liberationist press 
 for a period of more than ten years has demonstrated to me that 
 Disestablishment is intended to be secured by affirming that 
 which the Liberationist is afraid to subject to the test of historical 
 ex2)erience and Reason. The conclusions of our Nonconformist 
 friends upon the question of Church and State always precede 
 their premises with the result that hundreds of thousands of 
 persons are being misled who have no time to devote to a con- 
 sideration of the subject. I believe I am right in saying that 
 Reason is never allowed to play its part in a Debate upon Dis- 
 establishment even by Radicals of parts and erudition who 
 should scorn to hanker after a power that they believe can only 
 be secured and retained by pandering to the prejudices of the 
 people. If these pages should succeed in compelling the Libera- 
 tionist to perceive that the Disestablishment of the Churches of 
 England, Scotland, and Wales, may he fraught with gigantic 
 issues to the future history of the world their object will have 
 been achieved. 
 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Ferndale, Nov. 2Sth, 189S.
 
 THE CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Pure Reason ... ... ... .. 1 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Human Will ... ... ... 8 
 
 CHAPTER TIL 
 Environment ... ... ... ... 13 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 How Men and Nations have Received the Truth 
 AND Lost it again ... ... .. 22 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 The Cause of England's Greatness ... ... 33 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Opinion versus Rule of Life ... ... 44 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 What will be the Effects of Disestablisment upon 
 England and the World? ... ... 54 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 The Kingdoms of Providence and Grace ... 61 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 The Potentialities of the Union between the 
 English Church and State ... ... 67
 
 THE 
 
 PORTENT OF REVOLUTION. 
 
 Chapter I. 
 
 PURE REASON. 
 
 The Rationalist tells iis that we must believe nothing that 
 we cannot substantiate by an appeal to the omnipotent 
 powers of Reason. The formula is true, in so far as it does 
 not encroach upon the domains of Faith. For it is certain 
 that Reason and Faith are both required to comprehend 
 the problems of Life and of human history. The capacity 
 of the mind of man has, nevertheless, ever been a Theme 
 for the exercise of the highest forms of thought and 
 contemplation. Some philosophers have become so enthusi- 
 astic in their appreciation of its marvellous powers, that 
 they have accredited it with potentialities that it was never 
 intended to possess. Hence our patience has been sorely 
 tried by the heritical ebullitions of Rationalism, of Positiv- 
 ism, and of the self denominated philosophies of history. 
 We know that Reason is the highest attribute of intellec- 
 tuality, but we also know that it is incapable of compre- 
 hending the strange questions that confront the enquiries 
 of every age and country. Life is not its own custodian, 
 and cannot, therefore, be the interpreter of its own decrees. 
 The function of Reason is primarily to direct the propensi- 
 ties of conscience and to guide its bequests into channels 
 of action. By its empressment we can both contemplate
 
 2 
 
 things spiritual and material, and weigh all that can be said 
 or thought for or against them. Reason should therefore 
 be the mentor of agency in everything, the Ideality that 
 human effort should make the inspiration of its toils. Pure 
 Reason, in every age and clime, ought to be the centripetal 
 force for drawing the world away from its tendency to evil. 
 If employed for the objects for which it was created, it 
 would be productive of a type of conduct that would 
 personify our highest conceptions of Justice in the lives of 
 men. The privilege to think is the inalienable heritage 
 of rational beings, the obligation to think correctly the 
 forgotten duty of men. Life and death are subjected to 
 created material powers, but Thought can prevent itself 
 from being apprehended by any authority that the world 
 can command. What is Thought, and what are the limits 
 of its comprehensions 1 Every thought is the expressed 
 ratification of pure or impure Reason, every act is the 
 complement of a thought, the expression of the correct or 
 incorrect use of the highest faculty of the mind. Virtue 
 and vice may be said to be the materialized issues of the 
 approved or disapproved appeals which Reason has made to 
 behaviour and demeanour. Men are therefore entrusted 
 with a faculty that is capable of guiding their actions into 
 channels of perfection. The quintessence of Pure Reason 
 is Divinity incorporated into the potentiality of human 
 life, completeness designed to make the human race obed- 
 ient to the revealed Will of God. The proper exercise of 
 the Faculty in past ages would have stamped the histoiy 
 of the world with the approbation of immaculateness and 
 perfection. But as the Ideal has proved itself to be beyond 
 the reach of the real, so have the human records failed to 
 reach and to establish their pursuit of thoroughness and 
 maturity. Alas that man should have stumbled across his 
 own capacity, and have tarnished his life records with the 
 issues of his fall. His acts have been widely diversified, but 
 every act has ever been the progenitor of another promp-
 
 ting. Thus have good and evil developed in men from their 
 root relationship to the perceptions of Pure Reason. In- 
 telligencies were intended to differentiate in degrees of 
 capacity, but no Intelligence has ever been sufficiently 
 enfeebled to be unproductive of thought and action. And 
 according to its diversifications, are we permitted to see the 
 results of its toil. So near might our conduct approximate 
 to perfection, that mental transmissions of sin would alone 
 separate it from its approximation to the life standards of 
 angels. But if pure Reason be not able to raise the mind 
 from its association with sin, it is at least able to prevent 
 this perversity of thought froni expressing itself in deed. 
 Its application should be the parent of every labour and 
 industry. Its responses to our appeals should be the guide 
 of every deed. Is it right or is it wrong should be the pro- 
 genitive enquiry of every muniment and achievement. 
 Passion would be thus kept under control, prejudice prevented 
 from obscuring our perceptions of abstract right and wrong. 
 Deliberate acts are generally the results of the behests of 
 pure or impure Reason to a degree, spontaneous acts the 
 expression of our forgetfulness of its legislative capacity. 
 It is sometimes claimed that Imbeciles are the only persons 
 whose actions are unallied to Reason, but who will deny that 
 excitability frequently destroys Rationalism in persons whom 
 we know or believe to be sane. The human character 
 in its fallen state exhibits features that are antithetical, and 
 are therefore but half allied to Reason, as magnanimity and 
 pusillanimity, equability, and excitability, charity, and 
 greed, kindness and cruelty, self sacrifice, and selfishness, 
 blessing and cursing, the facility to maintain, and the 
 facility to destroy. But the conduct of a lunatic is not 
 always necessarily worse than that of a rational man. 
 Iniquity is a feature in the life of both, but the one 
 is spontaneous, whilst the other is a deliberate obscura- 
 tion of the faculty of Reason. The spontaneous 
 ebullitions of the former can be anticipated and pro-
 
 vided for, the designs of the latter manipulated so 
 as to escape detection. Whatever the skill of imbeciles 
 may be, it falls short of the determination to destroy 
 Governments, and introduce anarchical eras, and of 
 the necessity for foreseeing the possibility of being 
 entrapped and discovered. A large proportion of the acts 
 of Rational men are the results of an incapacity for 
 balancing protuberating propensities by the exercise of the 
 faculty of Reason. One of the chief objects of life should 
 be the detection of flaws in our character, of mental pro- 
 jections that mar the judgment, and ally every conclusion 
 to bias and partiality. Few are the individuals whose 
 dispositions are pre-eminently the products of Reason by 
 nature, fewer still those whose pertinacities are willing to 
 be pounded into shape by the ironhammer of pure Reason. 
 Voluptuousness, the most gratifying to the senses, is too 
 frequently pursued with the foreknowledge that its issues 
 must be fraught with evil. Present enjoyment destroys the 
 memory of future retribution, and hands on its perversities 
 of wickedness to succeeding generations of men. It is not 
 denied that pure Reason was created to be the highest faculty 
 of mental, moral, and material appeal, but the world's 
 career is formed in contradistinction to its legislative enact- 
 ments and judgments. Is the perversion of its powers to 
 go on for ever 1 Will civilizations never rise sufficiently 
 high to enforce its Decrees in the formation of individual 
 and national character, and to compel them to coerce the 
 passions that have hitherto produced the records of human 
 history 1 Why were its coherencies not bequeathed to all 
 types of created life, and why was the possibility of mental 
 perversion reserved to man alone ? Pure Reason was in- 
 spired to give him the custody of the world, and enable 
 him to revel in a mental dominion that should transcend 
 ' the bounds of Time, and open up the prospective glories of 
 another world to come. It was created to act as the 
 fulcrum for balancing the tendency of a will that was free
 
 to fall from the meinori;ilH of a life that hud its begiiiiiiug 
 in time, but should have no ending in eternity. Had man 
 availed himself of his inherencies of power, had he resolved to 
 weigh every act in the scale of pure Reason, the histoi-y of 
 the earth would haye been resplendent, as dreamers have 
 pictured it to be. Neither mental, iBoral, nor material 
 delinquencies would have been allowed to cover the pages of 
 history with their burning rccoi-ds of shame. The right to 
 reflect and conclude would not have been interfered with by 
 men who only possessed the powers of men, whose judg- 
 ments they wished to subvert and to overcome. Diversities 
 of conclusions would not have entrenched upon the 
 dominion of thought, but would have acknowledged that 
 their most brilliant inferences and deductions were still 
 liable to be rejected by other men. Mental threats and 
 demands would have been superceded by requests and 
 desires, and by the acknowledgement that all human judg- 
 ment was fallible, and likely to be wrong. The infliction of 
 pain would have been arrested by the memory of the 
 sorrow that pure Reason was created to destroy. The 
 equity, which we only know as an abstraction, would then 
 have encircled the brow of Life with the splendour of its 
 Diadems. The bearing of one anothers burdens would have 
 been transmuted from a high religious duty to the highest 
 pleasure of life. We are not attempting to delineate the 
 character of an uncreated race of beings, for all these 
 possibilities are incorporated in the potentialities of the 
 faculty of pure Reason. What is the foundation of the 
 world's religious belief, but an attempt to accomplish by other 
 means what individual man should always have accomplished 
 for himself 1 What is the severest training of the human 
 intellect, but the expressed determination to restore the mind 
 to the tutelage of pure Reason 1 What are the classification 
 of Society, and the pride of illustrious descent, but the efforts 
 of nature to assist that determination by keeping its 
 courses clear 1 What are the Sciences of mental and moral
 
 philosophy, but the codification of Reason's precepts for the 
 attainment of such a noble end 1 The effort has succeeded 
 to a degree, for culture now instructs its devotees to sup- 
 press every emotion that will momentarily or permanently 
 affect the happiness of a fellow man. If pure Reason be 
 the receptacle of Inspiration, and is inherent in human life, 
 why have men hitherto failed to act up to its standard of 
 exhilaration and cheer "? History echoes back the question, 
 and transmits it as a rich heritage to living men. The 
 world's records have been forged by human obliquities, and 
 turned to shame by the destruction of the Faculty of 
 Reason. How few are the records of justice compared to 
 the chronicles of iniquity and wrong ! How spurned and 
 scorned the mighty minds that have arisen to a sense of 
 human potentiality, and to the need for diverting the 
 courses of the world's career ! How outnumbered are the 
 glorious ages that have been blessed with the Socrates 
 and Galileos, the Luthers and Newtons, the Burkes and 
 Hugh Millars, and the other stars, who have asseverated 
 the eternities of Truth that lie hidden in the archives of 
 pure Reason ! Alas, that the proclamations of the Faculty 
 should be disdained to-day as shamefully as in the past, and 
 that the age in which we live should be stamped with the 
 world's of prejudice that are to suV)due the perceptions of 
 posterity. Alas, that the reservation of the discernment 
 of Immortality to man should be the means of making him 
 deny that there is a Life after Death. Our minds are 
 either saturated with prejudice or with l)eliefs that admit 
 of no investigation and en(iuiry. How long shall this 
 iuif|uity continue 1 How long shall the exercise of less 
 capable faculties be accepted as a recompense for the 
 betrayal of the mighty talent that was created to rule the 
 world ? We turn from the contemplation of our 
 responsibility with shame, but with no determination to 
 arraign the soul of mental and moral o})pression to the hell 
 from which it should never have emerged. Prejudice will
 
 continue to be the criterion of our actions until another 
 world's regime shall avert the mental freedom that we have 
 debased. For Pure Keason has taken its final stand upon 
 the maxim that with " wiiat measure ye mete it shall be 
 measured to you again."
 
 Chapter II. 
 
 THE HUMAN WILL. 
 
 If Pure Reason is ever to assume its Province as the 
 human arbiter of individual and national destinies it must 
 be with the aid of the full powers of the human will. For 
 the conception of a Truth is worthless unless we are 
 prepared to abide at all hazards by its decrees. Physical 
 courage is the pride and boast of all men, moral courage the 
 pride and best of none. The weakness of the human will is 
 either the primary or secondary cause of the downfall of 
 human nature itself. Its feebleness is pitiable as a moral 
 spectacle and replete with danger to the Principles that it 
 was created to defend. Education is sufficiently powerful to 
 strengthen certain elements of character, but it is impotent 
 to raise the human will to an appreciation of its obligations 
 and duties. Eighteen years of physical training turned the 
 timid fellaheen of Egypt into heroes, and enabled them to 
 bear the brunt of the Dervish attack at Omdurman, but a 
 century of moral cultivation would not suffice to make them 
 the adherents of virtue and Truth. Few are the men who 
 know their own moral cowardice, fewer still those who 
 venture to acknowledge and to overcome it. Myriads of 
 human beings mistake stubbornness for Resolution, and 
 pride themselves upon a great achievement when they have 
 succeeded in defending some popular prejudice of the day. 
 The characterisation of the human will is generally the 
 crystallisation of stupidity moving in mental darkness and 
 gloom. Human wills in their natural state resolve them- 
 selves into three classes, the effete, the stubborn and the 
 normal. These will be found to correspond to the religious
 
 perceptions of mankind, and to rise and fall according to 
 their moral values. Moral courage in its maturity is allied 
 either to genius or to the absorption of the principles of 
 Revelation, and is only dis})layed by the attachees of pure 
 Reason. The majority of human wills belong to the normal 
 class and protuberate fi'om all phases of common character. 
 The possessors of them are ever the first to defend a 
 prejudice and to challenge its assailant to a combat in 
 which premises and conclusions, causes and effects are 
 heaped together in forms of inextricable confusion. These 
 men believe themselves to be the custodians of intelligence, 
 the preceptors of the mental activities of the soul. 
 Education has been absorbed into their carcases only 
 to develop their pusillanimous ideas, and to make 
 them the trundling products of pride, conceit, and 
 caste. Stubborn wills, however, belong to a species of 
 animalism whose propensities are ignorance of everything 
 in common and of culture in particular. Their weaknesses 
 can always be demonstrated by the expedient of demanding 
 that they pursue their will o' the wisps against the 
 opposition of Time. AVhen tired out they prove themselves 
 to be assinegos in capability, propensity, and power. Effete 
 wills are possessed by persons of the lowest mental percep- 
 tion in the social scale. Thei'r characteristics are either 
 recurring mental aberrations, kleptomaniacies, or a failure 
 to comprehend moral guilt apart from the degree of punish- 
 ment that is meted out to it. Strong wills are as 
 unostentatious as they are rare, and are bent upon the 
 (piiet pursuit of an object that will be far reaching in its 
 effect upon character. Their possessors are satisfied to be 
 pitted against the joint opposition of activity and of Time, 
 and are ever ready to decline a combat in which they are 
 certain to be the victors. As a mouse cannot arouse the 
 anger of the lion so cannot the shouts of a common crowd 
 rouse them to a sense either of approbation or of fear. The 
 majority of men will be found to belong to one or other of
 
 10 
 
 the foregoing psychological classes under all conditions of 
 life. So long as man refuses to defy the opposition of the 
 world in matters of Truth, conviction, and enquiry, so long 
 will pure Reason fail to raise the human race to a per- 
 ception of its Ideal. And yet the human will cannot 
 be nonproductive, cannot be dormantive, quiescent, or 
 mentally dead. So long as blood circulates through the 
 body so long will the untamed will run riot with thought, 
 action, and exploit. It will fulfil the obligations of thought 
 if requested to do so, it will lead the van of perception if 
 left to its own i-esourses. Satan may or may not find 
 some mischief for idle hands to do, but it is certain that the 
 mechanism of the human character will compel it to act 
 intelligently or obstusely, purposeful or objectless, so long 
 as life itself shall last. Time cannot hang listlessly around 
 the transmissions of Intelligence for it is imperious in its 
 resolve either to kill or to be destroyed. Our appi'eciation 
 of volition is capable of an infinity of extremes, of 
 expansions and contractions, of lifting the soul to heaven 
 or of casting it down to hell. Its freedom is both its 
 glory and its shame, its power to make and to undo 
 character, its capacity to raise and to lower the records of 
 human history. If it acts mechanically in its nadir of 
 degradation and lifts the veil of eternity in its prescient zeal, 
 it likewise endeavours to establish by implication that wliich 
 it shrinks from proclaiming to be true. Inherited tradition 
 soon becomes inherited prejudice and engages the human will 
 to prevent itself from being analysed and attacked by tlie 
 forces of lieason. Hence the blood that has besmearcl the altar 
 of hiunan tyranny, the transmitted tendencies to perpetuate 
 the iniquities of injustice and wrong. Hence the establish- 
 ment of religions that have had their origin in the intellects 
 of men, and that would be forced to annihilation if examined 
 by the ethics of Reason. Hence the monuments of fraud- 
 ulent trusts that we are asked to protect and to transmit to 
 posterity. If the freedom of the human will were not
 
 11 
 
 sometimes reminded of its responsibilities by the Kingdoms 
 of Providence and (Jrace, it would turn tliis world into a 
 hell. If the resources of civilization can never be exhausted, 
 neither will they ever desire of their own accord to cease 
 from defending the prejudices of the fallen human will. 
 Few are still the nations that will allow Reason to prosecute 
 its appointed functions and decrees. The Rationalism that 
 would make the world independent of God is only akin to 
 the will that crushes will by the aid of material powei's. 
 How sepulchral must our boast of modern scientific achieve- 
 nients sound to constellations that know the trend of 
 inlinities together with their relationship to Reason and the 
 human will. We are glad that some men have fought for 
 the freedom of the human will, and established it in the 
 councils of thouglit. We applaud Socrates as he drinks his 
 cup of hemlock, Vigilantius as he scorns the wrath of the 
 Vandals, (ialileo as he smiles at the ignorance of the mighty 
 council, Ridley and Latimer as they plunge into the fires 
 that are to escort them into the sky, and (laribaldi as he 
 spurns the accumulated hatreds of a fanatical foe. These 
 are the men who have held aloft the heritage of the human 
 mind, and defended the unity of Truth as the arbitrament 
 of the woi'ld's order. The example that they have left 
 behind will one day bear fruit in the encirclement of the 
 human will with the power to perpetuate its decrees. Men 
 will not always carrj^ their prejudices to the grave, The 
 majority will not constantly be accepted as types of the 
 nations character, nor will their capacities be eternally 
 subservient to the casualties of abandoned human wills. 
 What are Poverty, ignorance, and crime but the reservations 
 of nature's judgments for the abuse of her stern and un- 
 bending decrees 1 Would not the complete mastery of self 
 by a single genei'ation abolish them from the economies of 
 the world ? If the potentialities of the hunian will be so 
 great, why have they not been utilized by the majority of 
 men in the past 1 Is it because the mental strain necessary
 
 12 
 
 to the enforcement of their behests is too great for mortal 
 man to ]:)ear 1 If so, by what overpowering faculty have 
 they been crushed and overcome 1 If Pure Reason be the 
 most competent mentor of life, and if the human will be the 
 guardian queen of its decisions, why has the history of the 
 world been produced in contradistinction to its manifestoes 
 and precepts 1 Let the question be answered by the twelve 
 hundred millions of living men who have sold their birth- 
 right to an abstraction and a miserable dream.
 
 Chapter III. 
 
 ENVIRONMENT. 
 
 The faculties of Reason and the human will should have 
 been the guardian queens of thought and action throughout 
 the ages, but they have been allowed to lie dormant and 
 dead as if allied to the world of dreams. The centuries are 
 the inheritors of beliefs that have not been forged by the 
 craftsmanship of equity, that have no place in the archives 
 of Revelation, and that are fraught with increasing danger 
 to the welfare of the world. The currents of history have 
 been diverted from their appointed courses ; the Alpha and 
 Omega of Time divided by a purpose of intrusion that was 
 never their own. The heritage of the human race is largely 
 a forgery whose Decretals are powerful to assuage the 
 inhibitions of the mind, but whose issues are the touchstones 
 of disease and death. Three quarters of the peoples of the 
 globe are the jealous custodions of deception, the con- 
 servators of energies that have subverted the functions of 
 the intellect of man. The pi'ocess of decay develops from 
 age to age only to cover the virgin soil of Time with its 
 infamies and decrees. We live in a vortex of prejudice, and 
 have resolved to die amidst its billows too. Fanatics have 
 arisen to sell their souls for power and to enslave generations 
 that are still unborn. Infallibility is proclaimed by a 
 council of men, and resolved into a creed by the destruction 
 of the faculties of Faith and Reason. The influences of 
 environment have become supreme in the art of forming 
 character and of establishing creeds. Men are what their 
 surroundings have made them. The phases of their lives
 
 14 
 
 are the reduplication of the phases of their encompassments, 
 the accidents against which they have stumbled and fallen. 
 Those who are born in savage countries become savages, 
 those who enter civilised states become civilised men, those 
 who make their appearance in places that partake of 
 Savageries and Civilizations become the materialised products 
 of both alike. As civilizations are appurtenances of degree, 
 so are the characters of the men whom they produce appur- 
 tenances of degree also. Nature demands this result from 
 the use that we have made of our faculties, and from the 
 fact that mental coherencies are rarely controlled by the 
 Kingdoms of Pi-ovidence and Grace. Conduct, volition, and 
 creed are alike the reproduction of the influences of environ- 
 ment. Truth and falsehood are generally proclaimed by 
 the working of the same laws, and are dependent for success 
 upon the same contributions of life. Revelation and mental 
 creation will continue to run on the same track until a Fiat 
 of eternity shall have robbed us of the mental freedom 
 that we have debased. A man born in a Mohammedan 
 country becomes a Mohammedan, a man born in a Confus- 
 cian state becomes a Confuscian, a man born in a Buddhist 
 province becomes a Buddhist, a man born under the aegis 
 of Christian influences becomes, in the majority of cases, a 
 nominal Christian, and what is true of the whole is likewise 
 true of its parts. A man born in Persia will be a hater of 
 a fellow Mohanmiedan born in Turkey because his ances- 
 tors could not agree about the question of Prophetic 
 succession. A man born in a Roman Catholic state will 
 become a Roman Catholic. A man born in a Protestant 
 country will become a nominal adherent of Protestantism. 
 The exception to this proposition, as to every other thing, 
 only proves the rule. Froude very properly reminds us 
 that whether we regard Christianity as a miracle from with- 
 out, or as developed from within, out of the conscience and 
 intellect of man we perceive, at any rate, that it grew by 
 natural causes, that it conunended itself by argument and
 
 If) 
 
 example, that it was received or rejected according to the 
 moral and mental conditition of those to whom it was 
 addressed. The pu])lic (jiiestions of the nineteenth century 
 must be settled upon a recognition of tiie facts of history. 
 Faith may outstrip its functions and make re(piests to the 
 Alniighty that Reason itself was created to grant, but its 
 cries will not be heeded in Heaven. Revelation and exjjcr- 
 ience must be allied for the better government of the world. 
 The talents of men must continue to co-operate with Faith 
 and Providence until the advent of the millenium. We 
 need not, however, despair. Falseho(xl will not be allowed 
 to race upon terms of etjuality witii Truth for ever. The 
 possession of the faculties of the human mind will one 
 day be arrested by the Hand of a Dictatorship, before 
 whose mandates solar systems will pass away. The 
 noblest of intellects will not always be tortured by their 
 own enquiries or be allowed to pine for some manifestation 
 of Divine authority in the counsels of the world. We shall 
 not be under a perpetual obligation to surmount the facts 
 of existence, or to frame our courses as if man was the sole 
 arbiter of this grand old globe's career. Let Reason and 
 Faith issue their proclamations a little longer and the 
 human intellect will be freed from the portentous 
 responsibilities that have borne it to the ground. That 
 Christianity is a Revelation is evidenced by the continuation 
 of identical Jewish life, but it is nevertheless true that it is 
 allied to common sense to a far greater degree than is any 
 other Religion in the world. It does not spurn the laws of 
 evidence so far as its credentials are concerned, but it claims 
 to be not of this world in respect of the deducements that 
 be beyond the ken and grasp of human reason. If its 
 Divinity were established by miraculous interference with 
 the laws of nature the faculties of the human mind would 
 by siich an act be rendered null and void. We must evolve 
 the freedom of the world by the concentration and adapta- 
 tion of all the talents that we possess, for not until these
 
 16 
 
 have fought and lost the battle can common sense demand 
 that Eternity shall interfere. Every generation has to play 
 a conscious or an unconscious part in the human drama ; 
 every age must lead the world nearer or further away 
 from God. It was the perception of this fact that caused 
 the ancient Greeks to formulate their thoughts under the 
 various classifications of Philosophy, and to hand them 
 down to the generations who were still to come. What is 
 true of national idiosyncrasies and creeds is also true 
 of individual characteristics dispositions and castes. 
 Environment has subverted the functions of Reason in all 
 ages and countries. National conceptions of justice and 
 morality are but the conformations of its decrees, whilst 
 individual pi'opensities are the materializations of the very 
 air that they breathe. The muniments of society are but 
 the incorporated appointments of dead men, the criminal 
 instincts of the lowest social orders but the reincarnations of 
 the prejudices of the grave. And what is true of the extremes 
 of society is likewise true of the whole of its parts. The child 
 is father to the man only because the man will not avail him- 
 self of his talents to rid himself of the prepossessions of the 
 child. If the nursery atmosphere be saturated with atheism 
 and lies, the children will become atheists and liars in their 
 turn. If the parents be evil livers the children will be 
 evil livers until circumstances compel them to change their 
 environment. If the family escutcheon has not been 
 tarnished for centuries, it will not be tarnished for centuries 
 to come. When nations and individuals appear to rebel 
 against their environment they direct their efforts against 
 its more galling burdens, and not against the influences of 
 environment itself. The new environment will have the 
 same power as the old, and will affect character in the same 
 way. Thus has no nation ever been known to rebel against 
 a national religion that affected their mhids, whilst leaving 
 their bodies alone. A great mind may sometimes arise to 
 destroy an environment that he believes to be inimical to
 
 17 
 
 the interests of the people whose character it has formed, 
 but the successes with which h.e has temporarily awakened 
 the wills of men to a sense of their servitude will be but 
 co-existent with his own life. The new enironment will 
 work upon the same bases as the old. Luther may rise 
 superior to his surroundings to destroy the Catholicism of 
 Germany, but succeeding genei'ations of his countrymen 
 will not generally be able to say why the Pope's religion 
 has been superceded by a purer faith. The influences of 
 environment are never questioned with regard to others, 
 but are indignantly challenged when applied to ourselves. 
 It n)ay almost be safely said that the Thought can only be 
 specifically endowed with a perception of its powers by the 
 occasional affront that alone will draw out a part of its 
 resoiirces. There are an environment of body, and an 
 environment of mind. Correct deportment is more the 
 product of accident than- of Reason. Orthodox beliefs 
 are held and defended by men who have never questioned 
 their titles to honour. The Scions of noble families fre- 
 quently conform to Truth, because their patrimonies would 
 be forfeited by the surrender of it. Better that Truth 
 shall be thus defended than abandoned, better that conduct 
 shall be mechanically correct than that it shall be wrong. 
 The life of man is chiefly a life of accident, because of the 
 transmitted tendency to subordinate mental toil to the 
 acquisition of peace and ease. We shrink from the labour 
 of thought, because it implies a strain that the human will 
 is too weak to bear. Original thinkers form but a small 
 proportion of the worlds inhabitants, and few ever of these 
 bring their theoretic conceptions to the practises of life. 
 The thunders of Spinoza, of Comte, and of Spencer, are but 
 stage mechanisms, and are outclassed as values by the 
 martial strains of Atbara and Omdurman. Historians fire 
 the world with their depictions of human tyranny, bat leave 
 the work of Reform to other hands. And what is true of 
 conduct, is particularly true of religious belief. Few men
 
 18 
 
 believe ought save what their fathers believed before them. 
 Truth and falsehood are handed on by the same laws, and 
 expanded or contracted according to the degree of applied 
 material power amongst which they obtain. They can be 
 gauged by their willingness or unwillingness to submit 
 themselves to an examination by the faculties of the human 
 mind, and by their appeal to the higher faculty of Faith. 
 Neither can the postulate be questioned because Christian- 
 ity differentiates between a nominal and an incarnated 
 profession of Truth. The assertion is both true as applied 
 to religious belief itself and as applied to the subdivisions 
 of creed. The Turks and Persians both adhere to the faith 
 of Mohammed, as aforesaid, but hate each other because 
 their respective ancestries could not agree about the appoint- 
 ment of the Prophet's successor. Dervishes will continue to 
 torture themselves so long as the custom is allowed to survive. 
 The Juggernaut will not pine for victims until its wheels 
 shall have ceased to revolve. The Hindoo will continue to 
 make caste an object of worship and of fear until the voice 
 of Reason shall have called the sword of Christendom to 
 strike his fanaticism down. The Spaniard will only learn 
 that there is no visible body on the face of this material 
 globe to whose decrees men must submit in the matter of 
 private judgment, when his mental slavery shall have been 
 destroyed by the avenging armies of pure Reason. But 
 even those whose faculties have been trained to examine 
 every proposition upon its merits, are frequently the slaves 
 of a form of environment. Is the law of love fulfilled in the 
 the lives of its professors, and do they treat their enemies as 
 if they were their friends ? Is Revenge less sweet to them 
 than to devotees of baser creeds, and are they satisfied to let 
 the spirit of Retaliation rest in its grave. It is said that 
 the nineteenth century of the Christian era is the most 
 accomplished of the centuries of time. We are told that 
 Gibbon was wrong when he declared that if a man were 
 called upon to fix the period in the history of the world
 
 19 
 
 during wliich the condition of the human race was most 
 happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name 
 that which elapsed from the death of Domition to the 
 accession of Commodus. If the declarations of scientists be 
 correct our age should Ije free from the prejudices that have 
 tarnished the thought of other ages, and from the possibility 
 of living under a wrong belief by the operations of environ- 
 ment. 15ut is it so ? Look at our schools of thought 
 and see whether it is not true that the wildest theories 
 have but to be publicly proclaimed to be believed. A 
 popular Statesman turns his back upon the cardinal 
 principles that he has professed for more than sixty years, 
 and hundreds of his followers not only applaud his 
 tergiversations, but endeavour to make us believe that he 
 never held contrary opinions at all. Our Universities were 
 organized to impart systems of knowledge that should 
 always be open to attack by the batteries of Reason, but 
 what are the majority of the men whom they turn out but 
 benefactors of the prejudices that obtain within their walls. 
 Crowds of graduates would only think of questioning the 
 Truth of their Tutors' opinions when the Tutors happen to 
 be minors in the academic scale. The same characteristics 
 are exhibited by all educated men, and frequently to a 
 greater degree. They adopt the opinions of their Authors 
 with unconscious alacrity, and trot them out as their own 
 under every form and phase of discussion. The majority 
 of academicians are only trained animals turned adrift to 
 propagate the prejudices of their several schools. The 
 Undergraduates who came under Newman's influences, 
 never coi;ld remember that he was only a fallible man. 
 Narrow and intolerant colleges will continue to produce 
 narrow and intolerant men. The Spaniards and Swedes 
 will continue to be the products of their surroundings so 
 long as the present mental regime shall endure. The former 
 are everywhere bigoted and cruel, the latter, as naturally 
 cultured, affable and kind. No trained animals before the
 
 20 
 
 footlights ever exhibited the influences of environment 
 better than the nations referred to. As it is with systems, 
 so is it with the social traditions of society. Rich men pro- 
 ceed almost instinctively to Yale and Oxford, intellectual 
 men as instinctively to Harvard and Cambridge. Non- 
 conformity is bitterly opposed to agnosticism and atheism, 
 yet a transmitted prejudice has caused its adherents to work 
 for a common political object with its foes. The pro- 
 clamations of mental iaptitude have burned their fires into 
 our lives, and have cast us into the arms of the portent of 
 Revolution.
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 HOW MEN AND NATIONS HAVE RECEIVED THE 
 TRUTH AND HAVE LOST IT AGAIN. 
 
 Human history is generally the record of man's attempt 
 to subvert the eternal purposes of God. Those purposes 
 were conceived before Creation was begun, and they will 
 last when Time shall be no more. The deep echoes of 
 eternity proclaimed that worlds should be suspended upon 
 pillars of light to become the custodians of an Incarnation 
 of Thought that was to typify the higher life of man. 
 Majestic as was the spectacular expansion of atoms unto 
 worlds, the efFulgency of reflected thought was more 
 resplendent still. The exercise of its capacities would 
 ena'.Je man to soar above the attributes of Angels, and to 
 encompass the career of a world that was bequeathed to 
 their care with enduring monuments of its destinies. 
 Human thought could surround the human zone with the 
 highest objects of its ambition, and could begird its resolves 
 with Ideas that should transcend the limits of Death. 
 The expression of desire was to become the parent of action, 
 the morning star that should demonstrate to the world the 
 trend of Immortality. The human Intellect was formed to 
 portray the consciousness of a Life that should become the 
 guardian queen of the graces of eternity. Reason might 
 torment the questionings of Faith in Time, but its enquiries 
 would certainly be superbly answered in the world to come. 
 The soul is a fire that can burn the portents of its 
 destinies into the why and wherefore of our being, and lead 
 us on to an appreciation of the enternal purposes of God. 
 Men and nations may come and go, but those purposes will 
 go on for ever. Human systems may rise and fall, but the 
 purposes of Creation will not heed the echoes of their 
 exhilarations and despairs. Aeons of freedom may be
 
 22 
 
 succeeded by ages of tyranny, but the first great cause will 
 move towards its goal aniid the blessings and cursings of 
 their advancements and ruins. Civilizations and barbarisms 
 may struggle for the supremacy — their ashes will but kindle 
 into new forms of Life the everlasting pui'poses of Heaven. 
 Human history proclaims in fiery lines that the triumphs of 
 wrong shall not go on for ever. Nations' destinies shall not 
 always appear to be the fortunes of chance, or the arbitra- 
 ments of artificial supremacy. It was decreed before the 
 first chapter of the human annals was penned, that the 
 greatness of the world's empires should be subservient to 
 the objects of their careers. Napoleon conceived Providence 
 to be on the side of the big battalions, but the thunders of 
 Waterloo awakened him from his reverie, as they demanded 
 a just recompense for the fires of death that he had kindled 
 in the world. England and not France was destined to be- 
 come the modern human arbiter of the world's career. We 
 return the cynical smile that confronts our insular prejivdices 
 as we point to the Empire jewels that blaze amid the 
 dazzling lights of the British Crown. It was not chance 
 that enabled a lieutenant from Aden to forestall a French 
 fleet by a few hours in hoisting the English flag on Perim. 
 It was not fortune that enabled Bass and Flinders with a 
 boat's crew to secure Tasmania to England by arriving there 
 just before Bougainville's great French expedition made its 
 appearance. It was not Fate that enabled Governor Phillips 
 with his convicts to save Australia to England by hoisting 
 the English flag at Port Jackson two days before La Pereuse 
 came within view of the place. History is full of eccentri- 
 cities that Philosophy cannot explain, and that have no 
 connection with the idiosyncrasies of Fate. Men and 
 nations have perceived the true purposes of Life and have 
 lost them again, and men and nations are still entangled in 
 the nueshes of the san^e luiperceived enquiries. The per- 
 ception of the eternal purposes was lost by Adam even after 
 he had received it directly from God. The family of Abra-
 
 23 
 
 ham lost it aftor tlie Promises had been repeatedly made 
 and reserved to himself and his children. The nation of 
 the Jews lost it when reconnoitring the fact that their 
 history was a splendidly sustained miracle. And their for- 
 getfulness was destined to affect the fortunes of human 
 history as they had never been affected before. It was 
 immortalized by the Divine refusal to allow them to drive 
 out all the nations from Canaan, and by the transposition 
 of those nations into instruments of punishment and death. 
 It was subdued majestically by the captivities and by the 
 i'oundation of the succession of mighty Empires that were 
 to be requisitioned to carry out their more terrible develop- 
 ments in the future. The Advent of the Messiah was 
 timed by its deathless memories, and attached by the final 
 rejection of his claims to the mighty scenes that were to 
 end' in the dispersioji of the Jews throughout the countries 
 of the globe. The thunders of the commands of Titus and 
 Hadrian still break upon our ears as they portend the 
 Revohitiou that was set in so many centuries of Jewish 
 blood. Rome fell when its work was done, whilst out of its 
 ruins have been carved the national preponderancies that are 
 HOW seen to have synchronized with the perception of the 
 everlasting purposes of God. The processes of devolution 
 are still going on ; Empires are rising and falling like stars 
 that n^easure the orbits of the Eternities. But Rhetorical 
 effects are not the objects that we wish to achieve. Gener- 
 alizations carry no weight when unsupported and allowed to 
 rest alone upon their merits. The records of Jewish apos- 
 tasy by the powers of environment have a grand bearing 
 upon the political policies of the age in which we live. So 
 enfeebled did the Jews become, as the result of their sojourn 
 in the land of the Pharaohs, that they could with difhculty 
 first remember what Moses meant by the God of their 
 fathers. They knew the meaning of idolatry only too 
 well in the abstract, but they could not summon the will 
 power that was necessary to obscure the material and
 
 24 
 
 sensible Images by which they were surrounded. They 
 fell into idolatry whilst their Leader was tempoi'arily 
 absent receiving the sacred ordinances from the liand of 
 God. Joshua perceived that environment would frustrate 
 his purposes if once his followers rested before the remnant 
 was driven out of the land. And after Joshua there arose 
 another generation which knew not Jehovah, nor yet the 
 works which He had done for Israel. The worship of Baal 
 begun to be practised, and the idols of the country to 
 become the objects of Jewish veneration. The apostates 
 were given into the hands of enemies whose gods they had 
 made their own. The worship of Baal was soon publicly 
 practised, and the people did not scruple to avow their 
 readiness to display their zeal for the object of their love. 
 Even David, whose life and history, says Carlyle, are the 
 truest emblem ever given us of a man's moral progress -and 
 welfare here below, allowed his Reason to be repeatedly 
 overthrown by the influences of his surroundings. Achish, 
 the Philistine, put such confidejice in the captured David, 
 that he summoned him to join in a grand attack which the 
 Philistines were preparing against Israel, and David sank 
 so low as to boast of the couinge he would display. Nor 
 was Solomon sufficiently wise to maintain his Faith against 
 the attacks of environment. The law of ritribution for 
 sinful acts by their natural effects, we are told, worked in 
 him from the very first, and the wise man married an 
 Egyptian woman only to become a participant in her idol- 
 atry. Rehoboam likewise demonsti'ated the tendencies of 
 environment, for tlie luxury in which lie was trained gave 
 him a headstrong character in which his fathers precepts 
 were soon thrown away. Both he and his peophj 
 declined into idolatry and practised the most abomin- 
 able vices of the nations around. Jeroboam also fell to 
 become the creature and creation of his surroundings. 
 He resorted to the idolatry which he had witnessed in 
 Egypt, and likened his Maker to a grazed ox. Omri
 
 25 
 
 founded a dynasty in Saniiiria, which surpassed all that had 
 gone before it in wickedness, so that his statutes became a 
 byevvord for a coarse that was opposed to the law of 
 Jehovah. Ahab was purely the slave of his environment 
 for he established the worship of Baal throughout Israel, 
 and brought on the darkest night of Israel's spiritual 
 declension. Elijah was compelled to slay the Priests of 
 Baal because they were apostate Israelites who had for- 
 gotten the Law, and had brought themselves under the 
 penalties against idolatry. Jehoram first of all put down 
 the worship of Baal, l)ut when he married Athaliah, the 
 daughter of Ahab and Jezebel, he soon imbibed the 
 idolatrous spirit of that evil house. Ahaz, the twelfth 
 King of Judah, likewise plunged into all the idolatries of 
 the surrounding nations, made molten images for Baal, 
 sacrificed his children to Moloch in the Valley of Hinnom, 
 and offered sacrifices in the high places, one on every green 
 hill and under every green tree. Manasseh's idolatries 
 included every form of false religion and abominable vice 
 that Israel had ever learnt from the heathen nations. The 
 captivities may be truthfully said to have been occasioned 
 by the necessity for desti'oying the influences of environ- 
 ment. We are, nevertheless, enabled to cite Isaiah, Jere- 
 miah, Ezekiel, and Daniel as examples of those who stood 
 firm against its awful encroachments and powei's. When 
 Ezra applied himself to the work of Reformation, says a 
 distinguished writer, he found the people already infected 
 with the evil that had proved the root of all the 
 former mischief, inter-marriage with the idolatrous nations 
 around them. The sins of the Jewish nation henceforth 
 took a direction altogether different from the open rebellion 
 and apostacy of their fathers, but they were still subservient 
 to the formative influences of character. The more 
 scrupulous their observance of the law, the more did they 
 make it void liy their traditions, and subversive of all that 
 was noble and good. When Herod appeared upon the scene
 
 26 
 
 the sacred name had ahiioat disappeared from the Jewish 
 recollection, but it was resumed for the Idumaen usurper to 
 reunite the nation, to heathenize its government, and to 
 prove the need and smooth the way for the advent of the 
 Messiah. The holy hill, to which David had carried the 
 ark of God, was allowed to look down upon a theatre and 
 amphitheatre, in which Herod held games in honour of 
 Augustus, nuisical and dramatic contests, horse and chariot 
 races, together with the bloody fights of gladiators and wild 
 beasts. The eternal purposes seemed to have been forgotten 
 by the Israelites, but they were destined to blaze forth in a 
 new triumph by the departure of the sceptre from Judali. 
 The effort to maintain a guardianship of the Truth proved too 
 much for the Jews, as it has since proved too much for some 
 of the nations who have succeeded to the heritage that they 
 fain would have destroyed. ' Will ye also go away,' asked 
 the Messiah of the Disciples as He perceived the OA'er bear- 
 ing attitude of environment upon the assem ly before Him. 
 ' Though all men should be offended yet will not I,' was an 
 impulsive declaration that soon developed into the denials, 
 imprecations, and curses that shewed the weakness of the 
 speaker's will. ' Demas hath forsaken me,' said St. Paul 
 because he hath loved this present world.' The same 
 environing propensities that estranged the enthusiastic 
 Demas from the paths of Pure Reason afterwards captivated, 
 estranged, and heresied a large part of the early Church. 
 The sad truth, says an ecclesiastical historian, is that as 
 soon as t!hristianity was generally diffused, it began to 
 absorb corruptions from all the lands in which It was 
 planted, and to neglect the complexion of all their systems 
 of religion and philosophy. The philosophy and vain 
 deceit, according to the traditions of men, by which some 
 had begini to spoil the Church of Colossae, were of the same 
 kind as the profane and vain babblings, and opposition of 
 Knowledge falsely so called, from which Timothy was ui'ged 
 to turn away. Corruption crept in because environment
 
 27 
 
 not bo kept out. St. John knew the power of it when he 
 determined to refuse the heretics even the intercourse of 
 social Hfe. In our age the sweet and saintly Keble followed 
 his example to remain sitting in the porch of a house 
 at which he intended to call, because a heretical member of 
 the family unexpectedly happened to be at home. But the 
 subjugation of the Jews and of larga numbers of the early 
 Christians by the powers of environment has also been 
 succeeded by the failure of Christian states to maintain even 
 the semblances of Christianity. It is of supreme impor 
 tance to a correct perception of the trend of contemporary 
 events that we should miderstand that the majority of the 
 Mohammedan countries of to-day were once professors of 
 the Christian Faith. The laws of nature are uniform 
 throughout the world, and are imconscious of changes in 
 the conditions and ages of human life. Like causes will 
 continue to produce like effects so long as Time itself sliall 
 last. What a contrast do northern Africa, Asia Minor, and 
 Eastern Europe now present to the mighty records of their 
 past. Where are now the Apologists of Tertullian, Cyprian, 
 Augustine, Athanasius, Basil, and Chrysostom? Are they 
 to be found in the lands that gave these Christian Fathers 
 birth 1 What has become of the countries in which they 
 laboured, and why do they no longer add recruits to the 
 noble army of martyrs 1 History affirms in her most im- 
 pressive tones that a change of environment produced a 
 change of Faith, amongst the peoples whom they taught 
 and loved. Persia, Arabia, Egypt, Abyssinia, Northern 
 Africa, Turkey, Asia Minor, all lend semblance to the great 
 truth that the majority of men and nations will become the 
 products of their surroundings so long as the human will 
 shall continue to be free. The early Christians of Persia 
 are known to have sustained a glorious thirty years perse- 
 cution and to have cheerfully died for the Faith. Their 
 enervated and enfeebled and debiliterated successors, how- 
 ever, paid a tribute of two million pieces of gold to Islam
 
 28 
 
 as the price of their fidelity and their shame. Baneful 
 would be the memoi'ies of their treachery if we belonged to 
 a different species and were influenced by different natural 
 laws. Did the sage who beheld the primitive lustre of St. 
 Sophia at Constantinople, and who enumerated its colours, 
 shades, jaspers, and porphyries, its balustrade of the choir, its 
 capitals and pillars, its 40,000 pounds weight of silver, and 
 its holy vases of pure gold enriched with inestimable gems, 
 believe that the day was coming when that Queen of 
 Churches woiild despise the shame of the Cross ! Do the 
 people of to-day reflect that their political acts will be re- 
 incarnated in history, perhaps to denounce the intentions that 
 gave them birth 1 The atmosphere is surcharged with laws 
 that take no rest and that victimize the actions of Civiliza- 
 tions and Barbarians alike. Modern Kingdoms are moving 
 heedlessly along and are establishing and perpetuating 
 principles whose issues they neither foresee, nor understand. 
 Proofs of the continuity of like historic results can be seen 
 in the maintenance of national prejudices to-day. One is 
 tempted to smile at the superficial attempts that have been 
 made to quash the cause of Ireland's recurring hatreds 
 and discontents. Irish character cannot be changed so long 
 as it continues to be produced by its present environment. 
 If Ireland's religious conceptions are right, she would be 
 false to truth, if she submitted to the supremacy of 
 England. She is justified by tlie covenants of her creed in 
 concenti'ating all her energies for the overthrow of Anglo- 
 Saxon heretical power, and establishing herself in an alliance 
 with some nation, that has not rejected what she believes to 
 be the Will of (iod. Why did Ireland reject the Protestant 
 Reformation when it had been accepted by England, Scot- 
 land, and AValos'^ Was it because Ireland's i)erception of 
 Truth was more brilliant than that of the Sister Kingdoms 'I 
 If so would not the Kingdoms of Providence and Grace 
 have compelled Great Britain to submit to the Dictatorship 
 of the Emerald Isle, and to assist Ii'cland in making its
 
 29 
 
 creed that of the larger British Empire 1 We believe that 
 Ireland was not converted to Protcstanism, because Irishmen 
 xoere appealed to in a lanf/uar/e that they did not understand. 
 The Reformation was accepted by the Bishops of Meath, 
 Limerick, and Kildare, but rejected again because the rude 
 Kerne's of Ireland overpowered the appeals that had been 
 made to Ireland's Reason, and to the intellectualities of 
 Irish individual and national life. Had Archbishop 
 Browne's promise to translate the Reformed Liturgy 
 into Irish been fulfilled, Ireland would have become 
 a Protestant nation, and not the product of the 
 Catholicism that we know her to be to-day. Why did 
 Belgium, France, and Spain respond to the appeals 
 that were made to their Reasons, and then again surrender 
 their thinking powers to the ecclesiastical castes that had 
 for so many centuries, kept them under control 1 Conmion 
 sense answers that they followed the varying fortunes of 
 their environment and submitted to the influences that 
 succeeded in the end. The religious beliefs of the three 
 countries followed the swing of the national pendulum and 
 found their resting places where and when it ceased to 
 move. The inquisition, and the massacre of St. Bartholomew, 
 failed to shake the Reformed Faith, so long as it was sup- 
 ported by surrounding public opinion, but when the latter 
 was changed as the result of overpowering political acts and 
 the old environment re-established, France, Belgium, and 
 Spain became Roman Catholic countries once more. Few 
 living Spaniards are aware that thirty-two thousand of their 
 ancestors were burned to death in Spain, because they tried 
 to change the religious beliefs of the State that had given 
 them birth. Few contemporary Frenchmen are aware that 
 France was once equally divided in creed, and that the 
 zealots of the surviving belief had to resort to subterfuge 
 and political acts to establish their Faith upon the ruins of 
 that of the foe. When Alciat filled the chair of Law at 
 Bruges, Calvin found the popularity of the Reformed Doc-
 
 30 
 
 trines oppressiA^e to his own wave of repose. ' By nature 
 somewhat clannish,' says he, 'I always sought the shade and 
 ease, and would haA'e preferred some hiding place : but this 
 was not permitted, for all my retreats became like public 
 schools.' What a flood of memories does the Revocation of the 
 edict of Nantes bring to the thoughtful mind, and how well 
 does it remind it of the fact that political acts can change 
 a nation's religious belief and character. We smile as we 
 admit that this may be abstractedly true but cannot be 
 allowed to apply to the prejudices that we ourselves have 
 conceived, and that we mean to establish and to defend. 
 Our vanity must be fed even when it falsely avows that oppor- 
 tunism cannot endanger the results that nature has trans- 
 fixed to certain current causes. The orator who appeals to 
 our passions will continue to be rewarded with the most 
 flattering unctions of our applause. Let the dicta of history 
 be to the wiseacres who are dull enough to peer into the 
 future, they miist not be allowed to interfere with our con- 
 tempt of singularity and the pleasantry that follows in its 
 wake. But we must proceed to demonstrate that not only 
 have nations grasped the truth and lost it again, but that the 
 processes of mental operation have victimized the majority 
 of individuals who have come under a difterentiating environ- 
 inent. We all know the story of the convict who resolved 
 to maintain his reason by the simple act of throwing pins 
 about his cell and finding them again. Contemptible as 
 such a reference may be judged to be by the political 
 jugglers of the day, it nevertheless proves that environment 
 is almost absolute in its effects upon character. And is not 
 the inference well substantiated by the case of the Prussian 
 Newfeld, who was rescued from a living death in the Dervish 
 Prison at Khartoum after the battle of Omdurman. Were 
 not Newfeld's reason and memory aff^ected by his long 
 ca])tivity, and had he not become the materialized product 
 of his surroundings? Was he not a Christian when he 
 entered the prison, and a Mahomwedan when he came out
 
 81 
 
 of it again 1 Could the stream of tendency be expected to 
 let him alone, when its mission was to try the strengtli of 
 the world's Reason and will 1 Has it ever left the majority 
 of Englishmen and Americans alone, when travelling in 
 foreign countries, and when it needs the exercise of a super- 
 human effort to rise above the envirotnnent that affects 
 them through the eye 1 Every travelled man knows that 
 temperament everywhere succumbs — with the exception of 
 the miraculous maintenance of the character of the Jews — 
 to the material influences of its surroundings. Englishmen 
 attend Sunday Bullfights in Spain, Sunday races in France, 
 and Sunday plays at the theatres of Vienna, and Bucharest, 
 and San Francisco. The ecclesiastical sesthetic forgets his 
 reckoning at sea and joins his fellow travellers to the 
 ordinary dinner on Friday. Interesting as the world is to 
 the spirit of contemplation, it is more interesting to the 
 student who watches its eftects upon prejudice and 
 character. Truth and falsehood are promoted by the opera- 
 tions of the same laws, and establish themselves by the 
 agencies of the same kinds of enterprise. The lives and 
 beliefs of men and nations are what their surrounding have 
 made them. God's will is both remembered and forgotten 
 by the strength or weakness of the forces that flaxuit it in 
 the faces of men. No generation laboui's so much for itself 
 as for posterity, because its sensible corporate action does 
 not begin until half its life has gone. What therefore is to 
 be the measure of our contribution to the future ages of the 
 woi'ld 1 Are we going to hand on the issues of great ques- 
 tions that we have not the strength of will to decide for 
 ourselves and for our children 1 Or are we going to allow 
 the grand emanations of Time to be obscured and thwarted 
 by the influences of prejudice and the accidents of environ- 
 ment 1 Are we prepared to authorize brazen faced Demago- 
 gues to dilate upon subjects that their mental powers are 
 too feeble to understand, to inflame passions that even men 
 of capacity cannot control, to declaim against historic systems
 
 32 
 
 that are beyond the ken of their little grasps, and that can 
 only be assailed at the cost of arresting the real evolutions of 
 the world's history ? Is the age to be given up to charlatans 
 and political mountebanks, and to the puny pretenders who 
 are prepared to float to power upon the stream of human 
 tendency 1 How long are these quacks to be permitted 
 to insult the aureoles of human Reason with their em- 
 piricisms and opportunisms, their puerilities and surfeits 
 of monkeyisms, their dawdling mimicries of sentiment and 
 conviction, and the brutalized satires and coarse ironies 
 with which they assail the perceptions and tastes of intel- 
 lectual men 1 Have our visions become so darkened that 
 we cannot see the trend of contemporary events, the issues 
 of current policies in the larger life of the world 1 We stand 
 on the brink of Time to play our part in the evolution of 
 human history ! Shall we be cursed or applauded for our 
 mental and material transmissions to posterity? The 
 memories of our age will either be enshrined in garlands of 
 grateful recollection, or maledicted and anathematized for 
 our obscuration of the trend and purport of the higher 
 counsels of the world. 
 
 3tae-4-
 
 Chapter V. 
 
 THE CAUSE OF ENGLAND'S GREATNESS. 
 
 The obligation to discuss the problems of individual and 
 national life is acknowledged by all schools of thought with 
 the reservation that every deduction must be hypothetical 
 and inapplicable to the burning questions of the da}'. 
 Enviromnent has so stamped our prejudices into the tissues 
 of our beings that no power on earth is strong enough to 
 eradicate its imports from our minds. The brows of some 
 of the best reasonei's of the day become darkened when 
 compelled to confess that their predilections are palpably 
 wrong. Bias controls the sequence of thought both in 
 respect of the lives of individuals and of nations. We see 
 it in the vox populi of the age, and in the special pleading 
 of the social and political partizans of the world to-day. 
 What coidd more systematically demonstrate the powers of 
 environment than the mob law of America, or the madness 
 that chai^acterizes the conduct of public political meetings 
 in the Emerald Isle. We know that our lives ought to be 
 devoted to the discovery and application of Truth, but we 
 forget the fact as soon as we leave our studies to mingle with 
 our fellow-men. We are aware that our social and political 
 enquires should be deep and conscientious, but we are too 
 weak to act up to the spirit of the dictum. We are 
 conscions that our predilections may be the very antithesis 
 of Truth, l)ut we apologize for the conviction when con- 
 fronted by the materializations of sincerity. We cannot 
 contend against the gibes of fools, because they are the 
 elements of the environing powers that expose the weak-
 
 nesses of our wills. Civilization has done muc to Improve 
 the world, but it has failed to touch the iniluence of 
 environment upon our lives. Is it therefore of any avail 
 to plead for the supremacy of human Reason in the consid- 
 eration of the policies of the day 1 Is it of any utility to 
 remind our fellow-men that prejudice should not be trans- 
 mitted to our children, and that Faith should not be 
 requisitioned to conceive problems that do not lie beyond 
 the ken and grasp of Reason ? The affirmations of 
 material results should not be permitted unless these 
 results are ready to put themselves into the crucible of 
 rational examination, and subject themselves to the ordinary 
 laws of evidence. Life is a great mystery, but it can never 
 be made more mysterious by the word of its own species. 
 The world is impregnated both with the causes of its own 
 condition, and with remedies that are capable of changing 
 its character. Revelation and imposture have both been 
 adopted as standards of Life, and have only been prevented 
 from becoming omnipotent by the Providence that rules the 
 world. Tne martyrdoms of good men have not been more 
 ph^'sically courageous than the fanatical self-abnegations of 
 bad men, and have not more influenced the laws under 
 which our characters are formed. What then are the 
 positions of living nations in the scale of the world ? What 
 are the relative powers and influences of Buddist, Confuscian, 
 Mohammedan, and Christian Kingdoms and States at the 
 present time. Why do disparities subsist, if they subsist at 
 all 1 Why are not all nations equal, since thej' belong to a 
 common type of Life 1 The cpiestion is both answered by 
 Revelation and by the experience of Inunan history. The 
 quarter-master may steer the ship, but the course most be 
 marked oiit for him by the master of the vessel. Empires 
 rise and fall according to their perception of the influences 
 that form character, and of the arbitrament of character 
 upon the destinies of the world. As Christendom has 
 brought into subject in the other parts and nations of the
 
 ;55 
 
 globe, so hiis England become the most influential power of 
 C'liristendom. Is this the result of accident as our atheistic 
 fellow-citizens ure so fond of telling us ? If so, is it not 
 strange that the accident should not have produced contrary 
 results and have established the nations that have made pre- 
 sent licentious happiness their chief object in life ? Is it not 
 incomprehensible that the accident should have produced 
 the same results as what Revelation has taught us to 
 expect 1 If our Empires supremacy is but the consequence 
 of accident what hope can we have of its continuance for 
 another single day ? If accident be the cause of our 
 national greatness and the producer of the eighty-four per 
 cent of battles that we have won in the course of our 
 history, can we rely upon its stability for success in the 
 future 1 Were Marlborough, Wolfe, Clive, Nelson, and 
 Wellington believers in the theory of accident would not 
 its luicertainties have made them afraid to meet more power- 
 ful foes than themselves 1 Can the belief in accident be 
 substantiated as a canon of Logic and impi'essed upon the 
 mind of anyone who attempts to trace the connection 
 between cause and effect? England's Religion may be 
 laughed to scorn because it is out-of-date, but we ask again 
 why has England's material power been allowed to be re- 
 tained by a country that is fossilized and bigoted and ecclesias- 
 tically wrong ? It is a fact — whether based upon accident or 
 not — that the powers of living nations correspond to their 
 perceptions of Truth, Reason, Justice, and of what they 
 have deduced to be the revealed will of God. The ratio of 
 material power to geographical areas and to population has 
 been reversed, and England has become the mistress of three 
 of the five Continents of the world. Our object, however, is 
 not to argue with the Atheist so much as with a school of 
 thinkers, whose Logic is lopsided and whose false conclu- 
 sions are making themselves the most dangerous enemies 
 whom England has had to confront. If national greatness 
 be the outcome of character, we are compelled to look for
 
 36 
 
 the differentiating propensities between our own country 
 and other nations. If no such diff'erences exist, the doc- 
 trines of the Atheist may, for all that we can demonstrate 
 to the contrary, be true ; but if such disagreements obtain 
 we naturally ask whether they appertain to what we believe 
 to be Revelation or not. England is a Christian country, 
 but so is France as far as a nominal profession of faith is 
 concerned. Wherein then lies the difference between Britain 
 and the Gallic State 1 The difference is to be found in the 
 taunt that we take our pleasures sadly. England is said 
 by her enemies to have surpassed the nominal religious 
 professions which are sufficient for them and to have in- 
 corporated her Faith into her character. She adheres to 
 academic Christian disquisitions when she perceives that 
 they have no practical bearing upon life, but she enforces 
 their decrees when she assumes that they were intended to 
 produce character. She does not claim to make men 
 religious by national establishments because the results to 
 be obtained are known to be immaterial ones, but she does 
 aspire to influence them by making the environment of the 
 country the Imagery of the embodied Faith. This is both 
 the secret of her success and the glory of the sensibility 
 with which she acknowledges Christianity to be not of this 
 world, and yet compels it to give unto Caesar the things 
 that are his. This is her fierce insight into the obligations 
 attaching to the Commandments ; her apprehension of the 
 fact that they can only be entirely corporeally obeyed by 
 the Union of Church and State. The foresight and insight 
 of the English and Scottish Reformers three hundred and 
 fifty years ago was the corner stone of a mighty Empire's 
 greatness. The transmission of their prescience into the 
 defence of the unity of created social powers and into the 
 spirit of the country's Legislation was to be rewarded by 
 the dissemination of British influences throughout the 
 countries of the globe. As England is the only country 
 that has perceived the import of the Commandments, and
 
 37 
 
 the fact that they cannot be fully obeyed without the Union 
 of Church and State, so is she the only country that has 
 been permitted to civilize and to Christianize the major 
 portion of the globe. Let those who assail our national 
 position tell us whether the State was created for any 
 purpose at all, and whether its preponderating influences 
 were given it to be used as an attack upon the Revealed 
 Faith or not. Was the Creator of the Church not also the 
 Creator of the State, and did he form the latter for no 
 purpose whatsoever 1 Or, if the State was destined to be 
 degraded to ignoble purposes, was it not forseen that it 
 would cause weak human wills to become the servei's of its 
 omnipotent decrees 1 Could the early Church withstand its 
 degrading influences without the miraculous intervention of 
 Heaven 1 Is there a nation living that holds a diff"erent 
 religions belief to that of the Statute Book by which it is 
 governed 1 Will like causes cease to produce like eff"ects so 
 long as time itself shall last '? Had the Reformers answered 
 these questions differently to what we know them to have 
 done, would the British nation have attained to the proud 
 position that it holds to-day ? A negative answer is sup- 
 plied to the question by the position of the countries that 
 have refused to follow England's example, and that have 
 been given as a consequence inferior places amongst the 
 created forces of the world. 'Although the Law given from 
 God by Moses as touching Ceremonies and Rites do not 
 bind Christian men, nor the civil precepts thereof ought of 
 necessity to be received in any Conmionwealth, yet, not- 
 withstanding, no Christian man whatsoever is free from the 
 Commandments, which are called moral.' The quotation 
 will be found in the Articles of the National Church of our 
 country. How beautifully do they bear out the results 
 that we have been taught to seek in the archives of ex- 
 perience and in the Book of Revelation. The germs of 
 Imperialism that are the inheritances of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race ignominiously failed to establish an Empire until the 
 
 384671
 
 38 
 
 Reformers' creeds subverted the social econouiies and made 
 them subservient to the formation of Chi-istian character. 
 So long as our national Ideal was no higher than that of the 
 Continent of Europe, so long were the military victories of 
 England barren of material resvilt. What are Cresy, Poic- 
 tiers, and Agincourt but preceptors of Blenheim, Plassy, and 
 Waterloo without their moral values 1 It was reserved for 
 the Reformers to establish a deep insight into the purposes 
 of Revelation and existencies of Power, to unite them for the 
 attainment of the highest objects of life, and to produce a 
 national character that, with many failings and faults, 
 should still be obedient to the reaveled will of God. The 
 effects of their prescience are perceived long after their 
 causes have been consigned to forgetfulness and oblivion. 
 The Reformers' fidelity has been acknowledged in the crea- 
 tion of the infliienees that England has cast around the 
 shadows of the world, and in the creation of the most 
 resplendent captivations of Imagery that ever blazed their 
 jewels from Aureole or Kingl}- crown. Human history is 
 not a mockery that it should be guaged by the monkey 
 intellects of the tubrattlers of the day. Half the world 
 says Montalembest, has received the Faith from the stream 
 that had its rise in Britain. If the powers of the hiiman 
 mind be requisitioned to tell the Truth, they will declare 
 that the British Empire could not have been erected with- 
 out the union of the English Church and State. Tlie 
 product of the alliance is written in legible lines upon the 
 Englishman's character. He respects Christianity as no 
 other nation has ever respected it, he keeps the Sabbath as 
 only the Jews ever kept it, whilst the marriage laws under 
 which he lives are the re-duplications of the Commandment. 
 His sense of justice and love of chivalry and fair play are 
 the embodiment of the principles into which he was born. 
 His bravei-y is not allied to Fate, but is the demonstration 
 of a propensity that has bequeathed to Life its tributes of 
 respect and offerings of admiration. Other nations fight
 
 39 
 
 for glory and are doinoralized by defeat, but the Britishers' 
 determination develops in strength as he discovers that 
 little is to be gained by his death. The last to engage in 
 war and the last to proclaim peace, the Englishman only 
 fights for principles that are immortal. He appeals to 
 Reason as the only human arbitrament of Truth, and 
 rejects every claim that aspires to rise above its merits. 
 His characteristics are precisely what the union of Church 
 and State might be expected to make them. Environment 
 b- s not only created his character, but has compelled it to 
 proveiiu the English Church or State from falling below its 
 own Ideal. On the one hand, his principles compelled him 
 to inaugurate the Revolutions of 1645 and 1688, and 
 on the other, to establish a religions Revolution vuider 
 the Leaderships of Wesley and Whitfield. Not only is 
 our Parliamentary Government the crystallizations of the 
 union of Church and State, not only has it been purified 
 and developed by the degree of perception with which 
 Englishmen have read the Articles of the National 
 Church, but other nations have been led to copy its 
 forms into the regulations under which they themselves 
 are governed. But if the establishment of the English 
 national Faith has been materialized and embodied into the 
 actions of Englishmen, if it has demonstrated to mankind 
 that the Conmiandments are binding upon all Time, and 
 that they cannot be corporeally observed without the union 
 of Church and State, it is worthy of the respect and 
 reverence that downtrodden nations have conceived for our 
 country's character. If the Laws of Europe are Imsed upon 
 the Reformed Juriyprudence of Tribouian and his allies it is 
 equally certain that the Laws of England are destined to 
 become the foundations of the future Laws of the World. 
 We see the prospective resiilt in the nearer approximation 
 of national Liberty to the English Ideal. We see it in the 
 dread and jealousy of British influence as at present ex- 
 emplified in the world, and of the desire of autocracies to
 
 40 
 
 break it down, The English State has been raised to 
 higher conceptions of its duty and vahie as the result of 
 its union with the Chui'ch, whilst the Church has been 
 exalted to the highest pinnacle of responsibility and power 
 as the consequence of its connection with the State. The 
 majority of great Englishmen have been proud to belong to 
 our national communion, whilst the charms of her com- 
 prehensive genius have succeeded in winning the major 
 portion of English Legislative and executive genius to her 
 side. Genius itself may be erratic, but its highest forms will 
 be found to have a natural love for association with ex- 
 pressed embodiments of power. The authoritative defini- 
 tion of the visible Church of Christ that is incorporcited in 
 Thirty-nine Articles of Religion has been accepted by the 
 major portion of the Churches of the world. Is the history 
 of Nonconformity anything more than a succession of pro- 
 tests against the attempts that have have made to obliterate 
 and to change that Article as the characteristic expression 
 of England's Faith 1 Is it not true that out of the two 
 hundred and fifty Nonconformist Denominations in the 
 country, only a single one owes its origin to the belief that 
 National Churches are unscriptural and therefore unlawful 1 
 Has Dissent contributed as much to the Temple of Thought 
 as the Church of England has done ■? Have the shelves of 
 Christian Libraries been filled equally by Dissenters as by 
 National Churchmen during the past two hundred years ? 
 Even if Dissent were based upon the new conception of its 
 principles, it would still be true that it can only claim to 
 have produced a minority of great British theologians and 
 thinkers. Nonconformity has done its full share of prac- 
 tical Christian work, and is valuable as a protest against the 
 various attempts that have been made to change the organ- 
 ized expression of our National creed, but its recent at- 
 tempted degradation of the powers of the State has alienated 
 the bulk of modern English intellect from sympathy with 
 its communion. And vet it must not be forgotten that
 
 41 
 
 British Nonconformity has benefitted immensely from the 
 continiumcc of the union of Church and State. Without 
 that alHance, Dissent would long since have become but the 
 incongruous assimilation of ideas that are the bequests of 
 units and obscure social sections. Such a result would be 
 demanded of the fact that Christianity inculcates a change 
 of life from its professors, and that its demands will continue 
 to be only comparatiA'cly obeyed by the majority of men 
 until the millenium. What would become of the social 
 and political power of Nonconformity if arrested by the 
 opposition of larger bodies of men acting under a different 
 form of environment 1 What would then be its advocacy 
 of a more rigid enforcement of the obligations of the Fourth 
 Commandment, of its impugnation of the legalisation of 
 vice in the British Empire, of its desire to penalize the use 
 of oaths in public thorougfares, of its defence and applica- 
 tion of the laws of Bigamy and Divorce, of its ci'aving for 
 making the Nonconformist conscience a factor of the National 
 Life of England ? One turns away with disgust at the 
 liightiiicss of irresponsible men who draw conclusions from 
 a cursory examination of great questions which they have 
 not probed and to which they have contributed no thought. 
 The earlier Dissenters applied their reason to the elucidation 
 of these weighty matters, and did not scruple to defend the 
 principle of the union of Church and State. The new 
 cnviromnent of Liberationism has blinded the eyes of living 
 men to the fact that Cromwell and Pym were both believers 
 in the necessity for maintaining the National Church of 
 their country. ' Cromwell saw the need of administrative 
 Reform in Church and State,' says Green in his History of 
 the English people, 'but he had no sympathy whatever with 
 the revolutionary theories which were filling the air around 
 him. He was still for an established Chiirch, for or. parochial 
 system, and a ministry maintained by tithes.' Howe, Flavel, 
 Bagster, Doddridge, Gill, Matthew Henr}', and the other 
 Nonconformist Divines of the reigns of Charles the Second
 
 42 
 
 and his brother James were all likewise believers in the 
 principle of the connection between Church and State. 
 Wesley and Rowland Hill defended the maxim in later times. 
 ' But has it not always been the opinion of the most spirit- 
 ually minded persons that National religious establishments 
 are unlawful ? To far frovi it, answers Dr. Chalmers, the 
 objection is only of modern groivth. The first Dissenters never 
 thought so.' Why, therefore, have living Nonconformists 
 turned their backs upon the principles of the founders of 
 Nonconformity ? The answer is allied to the causes that 
 have produced the history of the world. The environment 
 of Liberationism has succeeded in crystallizing its forces 
 aroiuid the Nonconformist conscience and has destroyed its 
 apprehension of pure Reason. The stream of tendency is 
 carrying the modern Dissenter to an ocean that he knows 
 not of, and that he would see and avoid if he could only 
 release himself from the grip of Fate. Civilized States 
 must either rise to an appi'eciation of the objects for which 
 they were created or sink to become the detractors of the 
 struggle between good and evil that is perennially evolving 
 in the lives of men. They must either lend the weight 
 of their subjugating Imageries to the development of 
 opinion into corporate act of religious Life, or scatter 
 their sporules over minds that will reproduce, expand, 
 and diffuse their degraded apprehensions. The freedom 
 of the human will has predestined one of these two results, 
 and will continue to do so until it shall cease to belong 
 to a type of Life that has fallen from its Ideal. History 
 lifts the veil from the Imageries that have subdued the 
 rectitude of the world to shew us the sleeping places of 
 the nations and Empires of the dead. It is a solemn scene 
 and resplcndant with glimpses of the chasm that divides 
 Time from Eternity. A flood of purple light shoots across 
 the glol)e of Death to decipher the tributes of warning that 
 fire their majestic meanings into the souls of living men. 
 The porticos of memory invite us to partake of their shelter
 
 43 
 
 as they dazzle our minds with their bewildering enehant- 
 meuts of sapphire and gold. And we sink to a sleep from 
 which we shall only be awakened by the dreams of a lost 
 heritage and the echoes of our own despair. If England 
 should be numbered with the nations that have received 
 the Truth and lost it again, then indeed will her star have 
 set in the ruin of the mightiest Empix-e that the world 
 has ever seen. 
 
 ■^^r^ 
 -^^w
 
 Chapter VI. 
 
 OPINION VERSUS RULE OF LIFE. 
 
 'The most important fact to every man,' says Froude in 
 his hfe of Beaeonsfield, ' is his religion. If we would 
 know what man is we ask what notions he has formed 
 about his duty to man and God.' The historian's apoph- 
 thegm is true both of men and of nations. Religion is the 
 parent of conduct everywhere. A Turk, a Hindoo, a 
 Chinese, an Englishman is precisely what his religion has 
 made him. But as Christianity is a spiritual religion 
 and is allied both to the Church militant and the Church 
 trivunphant there must be a line of demarcation between 
 its real and its nominal attachees. Can that line be drawn 
 bv any living man 1 We trow not. The majority of the 
 three hundred and fifty millions of the people of Europe 
 would be deeply ofiended if told that they were not Clirist- 
 ians. They conform to their creeds everywhere, and they 
 rise and fall in the religious scale in accordance with the 
 demands that are made upon them. As we belong to no 
 higher type of life than themselves we have no right to say 
 whether or not they are wortliy of the name that they bear. 
 Environment has everywhere made them what they are and 
 will make them what they are to become so long as the 
 hmiian will shall continue to bo free. Christendom is 
 ubiijuitous ])ut its surface docs not pi-esent a conunon form 
 and character. England and Sweden dillcr (mm Spain and 
 Italy as nnich as Ireland ditfers from Wales. Tiiese contra- 
 distinctions and differences of feature are positive proofs 
 that they have been produced by the idiosyncrasies of 
 environment and differentiating strengths of human wills.
 
 45 
 
 Character in religion as in everything else is the material- 
 ized semblance of its surroundings. A word is suthcient to 
 dispel the belief that the Kingdom of Grace operates to 
 compel mankind to turn to God. The Kingdom of (irace 
 cannot operate outside the borderland of Revelation without 
 destroying the character of Revelation itself, and as three 
 fourths of the world are not yet even nominal adherents of 
 Christianity so they cannot be influenced by the Kingdom 
 of Grace even to the slightest degree. Catholic environment 
 produces Catholic character as Protestant environment pro- 
 duces at least an outwai-d conformity to Protestant char- 
 acter. The dicta of Catholicity are obeyed because they 
 are the Imageries of power even when they refuse to 
 submit themselves to an examination by the faculty of 
 Reason. Catholic opinion is the Rule of Catholic life every- 
 where. And what is true of Catholicism is also true 
 of Greek Christianity. The Russian is outwardly the most 
 religious man in the world. His devotion is persistent and 
 goes as far as his environment induces it to go. He is 
 reminded by the glitter of his Church domes, by the 
 ecclesiastical paintings that adorn the street corners and 
 open spaces of his towns, by the respect that has for centur- 
 ies been paid to his Priests, by the gesticulations of his 
 ornate subjugating Church services, and bj' the silver glitter 
 of the sacred Volume w'hose covers he is commanded to 
 kiss, that his Church demands the measure of obedience 
 that is represented by these symbols from his life. He is 
 content to deserve merit from his acquiescence and to let 
 his intellectualities lie dormant at the request of material- 
 ized subversive powers. He is pliant as a babe because his 
 will power is still tliat of a child. The ninety five per cent 
 of Muscovites who can neither read nor write are blocks of 
 flesh and bone upon whose visages have been carved the 
 Imageries of environment. What is true of Greek and 
 Western Chi'istianity is likewise true of Protestant states. 
 Sweden is polished beyond compare because its National
 
 46 
 
 Liturgy has made no compromise with error in its appeals 
 to the highest development of the powers of human Reason. 
 The canaille of the United States of America are boisteroiis 
 in their protestations of Liberty and License because their 
 secular surroundings have not been tamed by the union of 
 Church and State. The fourth of July celebrations both 
 proclaim the birth of American Independence and the 
 advent of an environment that was to secularize the major 
 portion of the chax'acter of America. The War of Inde- 
 pendence resolved American society into its component parts 
 and gave it new conceptions of Life and of the object for 
 which it was bequeathed to the world. New hopes destroyed 
 the traditions of the past and bequeathed new avenues 
 of secularized thought to the American people. The goal 
 of the new ambition was not perceived because of the 
 temporary aberration of Religious Thought and of the 
 desire to obliterate the memories of the country's past. 
 The State was shorn of its higliest functions and reduced to 
 temporal dominion and power. Liberty and License were 
 raised aloft as the only objects of adoration — the Ideals that 
 should subvert the nobler Imageries of social units and 
 religious sections. American statesmen made ample pro- 
 vision for the fructification of the pleasures of Life but 
 forgot that all materialized forms of social power were 
 created to direct human thought towards the majestic 
 certainties of the Life to come. The American nation was 
 drilled to intertwine one formula into the fibres and tissues 
 of its being and never to forget that England wliipped the 
 world and America whipped England. The child absorbs 
 ideas but to devclo]) and to reproduce them again in after life. 
 What Admiral Sampson learned in his youthful days he 
 developed in a despatch that was to become the possession 
 of history : ' / present to the nation as a fourth of July 
 offerinfi the destruction of Admiral Cerveras fleet.' Nelson 
 would probably have offered the victory of the Nile to the 
 English nation as a birthday present if his character had
 
 been formed under a similar national environment. The 
 grandeur of American life and Institutions will never be 
 complete until she moderates the preponderating influences 
 of the State by uniting it to one or more branches of 
 the Church. A slavish servility is no more degrading to 
 true manhood than untamed wills running amuck with the 
 authority of License. The former is the characteristic of 
 the canaille of Spain, Austria, and Russia, the latter the 
 designation of the rabble of America. What can our con- 
 ceptions of Truth be but the standards of moral principles 
 by which we are surrounded 1 What is the yellow journal- 
 ism of the United States but the creation of an environment 
 that for a hundred years has recognized no moral obliga- 
 tion 1 ' Redshid,' says Disi'aeli in one of bis letters to his 
 sister, ' was an approved warrior, a consummate politician, 
 uni'ivalled as a dissembler in a country where dissimulation 
 is 2^ctrt of the moral ctdtu7-e ? ' When the Emperor Nicholas 
 wished to convey his impression of the highest degree of 
 personal loyalty and honour he ahmys spoke of the word 
 of an English gentlevian. Environment either bhmts our 
 inliibition of the Truth or impresses its sacredness upon 
 our minds. The new life that was born of American 
 independence was destined to make it impossible for the 
 commandments to be corporeally incorporated in the life of 
 the nation. The thunders of Sinai wei-e but to be re-echoed 
 by the inaudible whisperings of American conscience. 
 The American Sunday therefore fell, and the American 
 laws of marriage, bigamy, and Divorce sank to become the 
 amenabilities of private acconmiodation. A century has 
 passed away and American politics have become a byword 
 and a reproach to the thinking portion of the American 
 people. Marriage Licences are taken out to make flirtations 
 respectable and when the ceremony has been performed 
 sometimes in plumbers' stores and sometimes in Lions' dens, 
 the first passing Judge is called upon to untie the Knot and 
 to say adieu to the fun of the Romance. When life is thus
 
 4S 
 
 played with we cannot wonder that the American revolver 
 arrests its progress or that the murderer is acquitted and 
 but cautioned not again to run foul of his country's licence. 
 The bulk of human acts are but the materializations of our 
 environments, the reduplication of principles that lie at the 
 root of our social ceremonies. American life is what it was 
 made by the men who framed the constitution of America 
 just over a hundred years ago. It may, however, be re- 
 torted that the British colonies do not possess National 
 Churches and that their characters should therefore approx- 
 imate to those of the citizens of America. We reply that 
 the colonies are allied to a Power whose character has been 
 formed by the union of Church and State, and that the 
 colonies have reflected and will continue to reflect the dis- 
 position of the present State. Were the colonies to sever 
 themselves from Britain tomorrow their characters would 
 immediately change. The British colonies are parts of an 
 Empire of which England is the corner stone. The whole 
 is greater than its part. They are affected by the public 
 opinion and Rule of Life that obtain in Britain. London is 
 more the capital of New South Wales than Sydney, of 
 Victoria than Melbourne, of South Australia than Adelaide, 
 and of Van Diemens Land than Hobart Town. The Public 
 Opinion of England is the Public Opinion of Nova Scotia, 
 New Brunswick, Manitol)a, British Columbia, Vancouver, 
 and Prince Edward's Islands Pictcrmanitzberg and Cape 
 Town. Can it be denied that the pubHc opinion of England 
 was also the opinion of America before the War of Inde- 
 pendence 1 When England changes her environment the 
 other parts of the Empire will change theirs too. When 
 England ceases to merge opinion into Rule of Life the 
 colonies will cease to do so too. The differences between 
 liritain and her colonies with regard to environment are not 
 of principle but of Degree. As tlie parts of Kngland herself 
 are affected in various ways by the inequalities of eccles- 
 iastical endowment so arc the provinces of the colonics
 
 49 
 
 affected similarly too. As the old parts of England are 
 better endowed than the new are the older parts of the 
 colonies are fre(]uontly provided with religious establish- 
 ments when the newer places haA'e no Churches at all. This 
 fact was pointed out in the House of Commons by Sir 
 Michael H. Beach in a discussion upon the Welsh Suspensory 
 Bill some four or five years ago. The Backwoodsman of 
 Australia is the creation of his enviroimient and is known 
 to frequently fall to the level of Paganism for want of 
 Images or Institutions to keep his conscience alive. It 
 matters not what nation he may belong to, he becomes the 
 embodiment of the principles by which he is surrounded. 
 The wills of individuals and nations are poised on the same 
 Throne of Light and are either strengthened or weakened 
 by the operation of the same persistent laws. The per- 
 manent characteristics of men are only those than can be 
 brought out by opposition, and that appertain more to 
 brutes than to the domains of moral virtue. Englishmen 
 can he effectually corrupted though less easily than other 
 nations because of the hereditary propensities of their 
 country's environment. The belief that Englishmen can 
 never fall away from a nominal profession of Christianity, 
 that its practical principles have been incorporated into 
 their natures, and that no laws can be sufficiently powerful 
 to turn their country to the profession of another P^aith, is 
 one of the delvisions of the age in which we live. It is 
 indeed a doubly distilled delusion becaiise it is held by 
 schools of thought that are as divergent as the Poles. One 
 class of thinkers declare that Legislation cannot injure or 
 destroy the Keligion of Britain because it is miraculously 
 maintained by the Kingdoms of Providence and Grace, 
 whilst another type of exegetical opinion avows that our 
 Christianity cannot be hurt because it is in the safe keeping 
 of men who are in the line of the apostolic succession. If it 
 be true that like causes produce like effects it must ! e true 
 that both conceptions are opposed to the laws of nature, the 
 [e]
 
 50 
 
 causes of the will's freedom, and the teaching of human 
 history. Again and again have Englishmen surrendered every 
 national characteristic to become brutes and autocrats of 
 injustice and cruelty. Hume's story of the Irish Rebellion 
 of 1641 may be quoted in substantiation of this great 
 historic fact. ' The English,' says he, ' as heretics abhorred 
 of God, were marked out for slaughter. The English 
 colonies were almost annihilated in the open country of 
 Ulster whence the flames of rebellion diffused themselves 
 over the three other provinces of Ireland. Not content 
 with repelling the English from their houses, and despoiling 
 them of their manors and cultivated fields, the Irish stripped 
 them of their clothes, and turned them out, naked and 
 defenceless, to all the inclemency of the Season. The 
 number of those who perished is estimated at the lowest at 
 from .30,000 to 40,000. The English of the Pale or ancient 
 English planters, who were all catholics, were probably not 
 at first in the secret and pretended to blame the insurrection 
 and detest the barbarity with which it was accompanied. 
 By their protestations and declarations they engaged the 
 Justices to supply them with arms which they promised to 
 employ in defence of the government, but in a little time 
 the interests of Religion were found more powerful than 
 regard and duty to their mother country. They chose Lord 
 Gormanston their leader, and joining the old Irish, rivalled 
 them in every act of violenee toivards the English Protestants^ 
 Another proof of the fact of which the foregoing quotation 
 is an evidence is afforded by the story of the Indian mutiny. 
 ' If ever the crisis found the man,' says M'Carthy, ' Lord 
 Canning was the man called for by that crisis in India. 
 Because he would not listen to the bloodthirsty clamours of 
 mere frenzy, he was nicknamed " Clemency Canning." In- 
 deed for some time people wrote and spoke, not merely in 
 India but in England, as if clemency were a thing to be 
 reprobated, like treason or crime. For a while it seemed a 
 question of patriotism which would propose the most savage
 
 51 
 
 and sanguinary measures of revenge. If such a temper 
 were encouraged said Disraeli we ought to take down from 
 our altars the image of Christ and raise tJie statue of Moloch 
 there. If people were so carried away in England, whence 
 tlie danger was far remote, we can easily imagine what were 
 the fears and passions roused in India itself. The taking 
 of Delhi was followed by an act of unpardonable bloodshed. 
 Hudson went boldly to the tomb whence the King and his 
 family had taken refuge, tried them as rebels taken red- 
 haiided, and borrowing a carbine from one of his troopers, he 
 shot them flead with his own hand. Nicholson was one of 
 the honest and most capable officers whom the war produced. 
 It is worthy of record as an evidence of the temper aroused 
 even in men from whom better things might have been 
 expected, that Nicholson strongly urged the passing of a 
 law to authorize fla^'ing alive, impalement, or burning of 
 the murderers of the women and children in Delhi. He 
 urged this view again and again, and deliberately argued it 
 on grounds alike of policy and principle.' History and 
 experience are both replete with evidence of the fact that 
 Englishmen's characters have been changed by the opera- 
 tions of environment. And lest it should be thought that 
 the examples quoted do not and cannot apply to our own 
 age we will prove our point by citing some of the biograph- 
 ical episodes of living men. One of the most brilliant of 
 contemporary journalists recently went abroad to study the 
 Land of the Crysanthemum and to marry a lady of Japan. 
 She was an adherent of the Shinto faith which is a mere 
 bagatelle in the world's economies, but she speedily secured 
 the conversion of her husband to Shintoism. A living 
 son and heir to an English Earldom is now known to 
 have adoptcrl the religion of Buddha. An existing British 
 Nobleman marfied a Spanish lady at Seville and is now a 
 believer in the doctrines of Mohammed. A grand daughter 
 of the most brilliant English poet of the nineteenth century 
 is also now a follower of the prophet of Mecca. The late
 
 52 
 
 Lady Hesther Stanhope and the Countess of Ellenborough 
 both died in the faith of Islam. The widowed Countess of 
 Stamford has since the death of her husband followed the 
 Pagan belief of her tribe, and worshipped all kinds of 
 horrible heathen deities, while the present Loi'd Gardner, 
 his wife, and children are all Brahmins. The foregoing- 
 particulars were published in Mr. O'Connor's society paper 
 for the month of October, 1898, and they demonstrate to 
 the hilt that Englishmen like the members of other nations 
 are but the creations of their environment. There was as 
 much truth as sarcasm in Lord Beaconsfield's remarks when 
 informed that the Zulus had killed the Prince Imperial in 
 South Africa. ' A very remarkable people the Zulus : ' said 
 he, ' they defeat our generals, they convert our Bishops, they 
 have settled the fate of a great European dynasty.' But 
 we need not go to history or to biography for proofs of the 
 fact that the beliefs and actions of our countrymen are 
 affected by their enviroimients. Every traveller has noticed 
 the coincidences and appurtenances of this fact in his own 
 life and in the lives of his countrymen whom he has met 
 abroad. If British mercantile sailors convey a false estimate 
 of English character to the nations of the world it is solely 
 because they are the embodiments of their indilferent sur- 
 roundings. Twenty thousand of them are believed to live 
 on ships that are never darkened by religious services. Five 
 hundred Englishmen and Scotchmen approximately were 
 engaged by the Spanish Government to build Admiral 
 Cervera's ill-tarred fleet at Bilbao about seven years ago, 
 but during their residence in Spain they could not be pre- 
 vailed upon by the Englisli chaplain of the Port to attend 
 the services of the local Church or to remember the Christ- 
 ian ethics that they had left at home. We also speak from 
 experience when we refer to the case of the few Britishers 
 who still reside at Archangel in Northern Russia. Their 
 religious conduct and belief are apparently the reduplication 
 of their surroundings and the English summer chaplain of
 
 53 
 
 the Port has to chronicle the fact that he cannot induce 
 them to attend his religious services. ' Irishmen,' says 
 Froude, ' obey authority and prosper under it : But they 
 run ivild ichen left to their own wills.' What the historian 
 says of Irishmen in their natural capacities is true of all 
 men in their religious inclinations. Free wills will only 
 respond to the Images of Authority by which they are 
 surrounded. The State was created to make these Images 
 the highest object of its care and to give them the noblest 
 position for materializing their influences in the creeds and 
 lives of men. Neither human nor Divine Laws will be 
 heeded by the majority of men unless they are symbolized 
 by the majesty of created visible power. England has 
 advanced our globe's courees by her correct perceptions of 
 Revelation, experience, and history : she has demonstrated 
 that the commandments cannot be corporeally obeyed 
 without the Union of Church and State : she will undo her 
 work and retard the progress of Christianity by reducing 
 the State to a degraded position in the natural economies. 
 The Liberationist will not learn the abhorrencies of his 
 principles so long as he remains luider the environment of 
 Libei'ationism but he will siicceed in running foiil to the 
 teachings of human history. The men who play before the 
 footlights of England's destiny have problems to solve that 
 arc red with ruin and bright as the Light of eternity, and it 
 is for them to decide whether the world's career shall be 
 changed or the British Empire be commissioned to accelerate 
 the advent of the Kingdom of God.
 
 Chapter VII. 
 
 WHAT WILL BE THE EFFECTS OF DISESTABLISH- 
 MENT UPON ENGLAND AND THE WORLD 1 
 
 Half a century ago the people of the British Empire were 
 startled to hear that a society had just been formed in 
 London for the purpose of securing the secularization of the 
 State by the Disestablishment of the Churches of England, 
 Scotland, and Wales. We cannot fully comprehend the 
 indignant feelings with which the announcement was re- 
 ceived because the danger has long since crystallized itself 
 into the environment of our lives. Men are now trained to 
 propagate the belief that Disestablishment is essentially a 
 desirable Reform. Reason, however, tells us that the germs 
 of peril miist be inherent in an}' proposal that threatens to 
 destroy the fundamental maxims of a nation's character and 
 greatness. The maintenance of the Established Cliurch 
 was as sacred to the Nonconformists and Churchmen who 
 lived before the advent of the Liberation Society as the 
 defence of the Monarchy is to the men of to-day and as 
 the Act of Union was to the voters of all schools of thought 
 who exercised the Franchise before the Radical Party sold 
 itself to the enemies of its coinitry. The success that has 
 attended the assailment of the cardinal principles of a 
 nation's character in the past has, however, taught us that 
 vital principles may be safely attacked wlienever the organ- 
 izers of the Revolution are prepared to explain away tlie 
 first presentiments of fear and sur})ris(). As familiarity 
 with physical danger causes us to forget its perils so does 
 intimacy with Revolutionary political principles induce \xs 
 to obliviate their mighty issues upon tlic fortunes of the
 
 00 
 
 world. But tlie clangor will remain long after the memories 
 of it have passed away. A Revolution has assumed the 
 garb of Refoi'm and under its new habiliment has captured 
 the Reasons of living men. As we have ceased to disregard 
 the perils to Christianity that are involved in the secular- 
 ization of the English state so will our children complete 
 the issue by assaulting principles that we ourselves still 
 know to be essential to the preservation of our national life. 
 We laugh at Socialism and Anarchy to-day but who will 
 dare affirm that their tenets will not be adopted by the next 
 generation of Englishmen 1 A shortsighted policy Dis- 
 established the Irish Church thirty years ago and thought 
 that the event would make Ireland happy. Vain delusion ! 
 Nemesis has followed in the wake of the blunder and has 
 made Irishmen more determined than ever to secede from a 
 Protestant Union and to ally themselves to some Roman 
 Catholic State. By the determination not to perceive the 
 natural consequences of individual and national acts do 
 nations fall and empires decline and die. We live in a 
 conventional age and allow our perceptions to be dazzled, 
 blinded, and destroyed by the maxims of Revolution that 
 come to us in the garb of Reforms. We occupy the tryst- 
 ing places between the propagation of false beliefs and the 
 ubiquity of ruin into which they are about to plunge. The 
 provinces of history are to warn us of danger but not to 
 interfere with the free workings of the hvmian will. We 
 have the same power to inaugurate Revohitions, to destroy 
 empii'es, and to divert the causes of human history as 
 was possessed by the nations of a mighty past. As they 
 had prescience which they did not utilize so have we futuri- 
 ties that we can change, vary, alternate, or destroy. Let 
 us not forget that the freedom of the human will is to last 
 until the millenium. As Liberationism has destroyed our 
 Reasons in the past so have we little or no hope that it will 
 fail to do so in the future. We may therefore rest assured 
 that Disestablishment will not cease to be advocated by the
 
 56 
 
 persistent proclamation that it is a Desideratum and a 
 Potential Reform. What then will be the effects of Dis- 
 establishment upon Great Britain and the world 1 Can they 
 be enumerated by any man wlio is alive to-day ? Freeman 
 has summarized the direct effects that will accrue from the 
 severance of the Union between the English Church and 
 State, but neither an individual nor a generation of men 
 can total the indirect issues of the adoption of such a retro- 
 grade policy. ' We should,' says Freeman, ' have to repeal 
 all laws by which the Established Church is recognized in a 
 way in which other Religious bodies are not recognized. 
 The Ruler of the whole nation must no longer even seem to 
 be admitted to the royal office by the ministers of a relig- 
 ious body which forms only part of the nation. The 
 obligation on the part of the Sovereign to be in communion 
 with what is now the Established Church must be taken 
 away. A Popish King must become lawful as well as an 
 Independent or Baptist King. The King may doubtless 
 have his chapel and his chaplains of any persuasion that he 
 pleases, but they must no longer keep about them anything 
 of the character of a public Institution. The Bishops must 
 of course lose their seats in the House of Lords. Eccles- 
 iastical courts must come to an end and with them must 
 come to an end the appeal from the ecclesiastical courts to 
 the privy council. The convocaticnis of the two Provinces 
 must be left as free as the Wesleyan Conference. Tlie 
 Crown nuist no longer have the appointment to the many 
 ecclesiastical offices which are now in its gift. . . . All laws 
 must be repealed which treat the Church or its fabrics as 
 national Institutions. Their could be no more questions 
 about burial bills, about Dissenting Churchwardens and the 
 like. Disestablishment must cut both ways. If it abolislies 
 privilage it nuist abolish bondage. There ni\ist be no pay- 
 ments out of public funds, out of taxes or rates, for any 
 religious purpose. There nuist be no such thing as a chap- 
 lain of a ship, or of a regiment, of a gaol, an asylum, or a
 
 57 
 
 workhouse, or of the House of Coiuukjus itself.' Such is 
 the long list of prospective ecclesiastical changes that the 
 historian has enumerated for the especial edification of the 
 Liberationists of Great Britain. But will any man with an 
 insight into human nature avow that it is possible for these 
 changes to be adopted without bringing in a longer list of 
 unperceived accretions and desuetudes in their train '? A 
 device that aspires to destroy the allegiance which a nation 
 has placed at the disposal of the Almighty for so many 
 hundreds of years and to replace it by no design save the 
 accidental incohei'encies of units and obscure social sections 
 must develop into an iconoclasm that will break down the 
 Images of Christian tendency that have bequeathed the 
 causes of a mighty Empire's Faith to the world. Great 
 principles cannot be tampered with without destroying the 
 confidence that they have begotten, the stately representa- 
 tions that have envirioned and produced a nations character. 
 Disestablishment cannot be freed front the natural tendencies 
 of movement, or prevented from eclipsing its perceived 
 material issiies. The sins of the fathers are only visited 
 upon the children because the fathers' lives are too short to 
 restrict the penalty to themselves. The conscientious Dis- 
 establisher jiidges human events by the standard of his own 
 life and fails to comprehend the expansion of principles that 
 are co-extensive with the life of the world. The results of 
 the secularization of the State will not be seen by a single 
 generation because they cannot be robbed of their propensity 
 to expand. Disestablishment will be a Revolution in itself 
 because England can produce no precedent for such an act. 
 The Englishmen of the future will be born under a secular 
 Colossus and will become by nature the duplications of its 
 materializing inclinations. Men who will live under the all 
 powerful laws of a civil environment will naturally ask 
 whether Christianity is more of a Revelation than the other 
 religious systems of the world. Scepticism will advance in 
 England as it has never been permitted to advance before.
 
 58 
 
 Even the Faith of the Churchesi will shrink from the per- 
 ception of eternal consequences when they transcend, the 
 lowest standard of degraded life in this world. The 
 Preacher's message will be shorn of its semblances of 
 anthority and will be less judged by its fidelity and Truth 
 than by its intellectual skill. The falsehood that is pro- 
 claimed by Rhetoricians and Rhapsodists will be believed 
 before the Truth that is spoken by ordinary men. Libera- 
 tionism will snap asunder the chains that for two centuries 
 have galled the intellects of Unitarians in England and 
 have made them the iconoclasts of national representative 
 power. The Incumbent and the Free Minister will become 
 the products of an equality that will reduce them both to a 
 lower common level. The social prestige that has driven 
 home the message of the Established Minister when the 
 Dissenter has failed to get an audience of the Conscience 
 will have been taken over by the materialized semblances 
 of secularism and Infidelity. Nonconformity itself will be 
 spurned as the representation of a bigoted little social class. 
 Disestablishment will hand over the keys of power to the 
 seething masses who will profess no Religion and whose first 
 object will be to complete the secularization of the State. 
 For as the British Reformers were the first to perceive that 
 the Commandments were meant for all time and that they 
 could only be corporeally obeyed by the Union of Church 
 and State, so will the Liberation Society succeed in demoral- 
 izing the observance of the moral law and in relegating it 
 to the domains of the individual conscience. Thus will it 
 be legal to do anything on the Sabbath which it is not 
 illegal to do on the other days of the week. Thus will men 
 be allowed to have the same privileges of Divorce in 
 England as arc at present enjoyed by the Libertines of 
 America. If the State was created for secular })urposes 
 only as the Liberationist avows who, may we ask, is justified 
 in asking it to bolster up a Religious law ? If the Image of 
 power was never constructed to assist in the pronnilgation
 
 59 
 
 of tlie Christian Faith what right have we to attempt to 
 change its institnted character ? Will worldly men allow 
 the smaller number of professing Christians to attach a 
 religions Jncuhus to a State which has just been freed from 
 its bondage and raised to its Ideal '(■ The certainty of a 
 negative reply will be brought home to the citizens of the 
 i^mpire more forcibly than they have ever thought to be 
 })Ossible. A Secular State can no more rise above its seculai'- 
 ity than a stream can rise above its source. Disestablish- 
 ment must be followed by the repeal of all laws that have a 
 religious base and that compel the nation to carry out the 
 Commandments in its corporate character. Thus will the 
 success of Liberationism be followed by the downfall of the 
 English Sunday and by the repeal of the present laws of 
 marriage, Divorce, and Bigamy. The laws of nature are 
 uniform in their character and what they do not condemn 
 in America and Turkey they will not condemn in England. 
 Our Sunday Societies, Halls of Science, and Freethinking 
 Asseml)lies will redouble their efforts to secure Disestablish- 
 ment as the potentiality of the event unfolds itself to their 
 view. Their inconsistency wo\dd be as apparent bj'^ the 
 adoption of any opposite course of action as is the inconsis- 
 tency of professing Christians in advocating the seculariza- 
 tion of the State today. The Libei-ation Society has laboured 
 for fifty years to degrade the English State, but it may wish 
 to labo\ir for ever to restore it to its Divinel}'^ appointed 
 position again. But if Disestablishment be fraught with 
 danger to England it is still more replete with peril to the 
 other countries of the world. Evei'y age must be kept up 
 to a sense of its moral responsibilities by an Ideal to whose 
 heights it cannot attain, (ireat Britain lias been the world's 
 Ideal for three centuries and a half and will remain so until 
 Disestablishment shall have changed its national character 
 and overthrown its noblest Institutions. A moral shock to 
 the faith of England nuist of necessity be felt by the other 
 countries of the "'lobe. Tiie future will then draw a new
 
 60 
 
 Inspiration from the Hand that rules the world. The 
 lodestan of history can only cease to shine when it has been 
 eclipsed by a more replendent efFulgenc}'. A Statesman," a 
 Martyr, a Kingxlom or an Empire will be requisitioned to 
 hold aloft the memorials of the world's destiny when Eng- 
 land may have been numbered with the forces of the dead. 
 The destinies will fight for the attainment of the eternal 
 purposes whether they be corporealized into representative 
 Aureoles or burning Diadems. The consciousness of thought 
 cannot be destroyed by apostate Kingdoms because it is 
 refurnished by the Providence of God. Egypt, Assyria, 
 Persia, Greece, Macedonia, Arabia, Spain, England, wear the 
 mantle of Empire in turn and pass it on as if it were but 
 the semblances of a dream. England is both the last and 
 the greatest of the Immortals and the tramp of her destiny 
 is the echo of the trumpet blast that sounds the ruin of a 
 fallen world. 

 
 Chapter VI 11. 
 THE KINGDOMS OF PROVIDENCE AND GRACE. 
 
 There is a tinge of loveliness about spiritual Christianity 
 that meets the highest aspirations of the soul. Men who live 
 more in eternity than in Time wear a habiliment of charaeter 
 that is unequalled in the world. Every act that they per- 
 ferm is a memorial of the Judgment Day. Every thought 
 that they conceive is developed or suppressed according to 
 its affinity to the will of God. Such men are to be found 
 in every age and country and will continue to rise above the 
 ruins of human nature until Time shall be no more. They 
 are the personifications of Lives that have really been born 
 again. The policies of Kingdoms and States have only an 
 academic and hypothetical interest for them excepting as 
 they tend to speed the coming of the Kingdom of God. 
 Faith is the compass of such men's lives, the decree at 
 whose bidding they are prepared to live or to die. Spirit- 
 uality has taken such a hold upon them that they cannot 
 discuss mundane matters like other men. Their presence 
 in the churches is both a lever for the development of 
 spiritual life and for degrading Reason and mentality as aids 
 to the perception of the decrees of Truth in the world. 
 The Knowledge that the Wesleyan Church is blessed with 
 more than its proportion of iuch men caused the Ruling 
 President of the Wesleyan Conference in his inaugural 
 address to plead for the outpouring of a little more sanctified 
 common sense amongst the members of his communion. It 
 is in no spirit of captious criticism that we re-echo the 
 President's prayer and apply its covenants to a deeper con- 
 sideration of the question relating to Disestablishment in
 
 62 
 
 England, Scotland, and Wales. For the spirtually minded 
 members of the Liberation Society who have abjured the 
 functions of human Reason are known to avow that no 
 human act can injure the Christian Church because it is 
 under the especial care of God. They ward oft' all warnings 
 with a phrase and escape the dangers of every conclusion 
 with a period and a term. They tell us that Disestablish- 
 ment is desirable because it will remove the trannnels 
 that appear to have shorn a spiritual Church of its 
 spiritual character. They forget that the Church 
 upon earth is composed of living men, and that living 
 men are the interpreters of the laws of nature. They 
 fail to remember that spirituality in its essence is beyoiid 
 the reach of fallen human nature and that its degrees of 
 attainment are not restricted by the materialization of pur- 
 pose and effect. Their attitude precludes all appeals to 
 Reason as aids to Truth and makes the history of Christian- 
 ity a miraculous interference with the operations of the 
 natural law. Their assertion has undoubtedly given an 
 Impetus to Disestablishment that would have appalled the 
 Fathers of Nonconformity. But with the hope that the 
 prayer of the Wesleyan President has been answered and 
 that his friends have been blessed with a large measure of 
 sanctified common sense ere now, we will proceed to de- 
 monstrate that the assertion runs foul to the objects of 
 Revelation and to the records of human history. The laws 
 of nature are uniform in their operations throughout the 
 world and they do not bend the human will in one part of 
 the globe unless they bend it wherever it may be foinid. 
 If the functions of the Kingdom of Grace are legislative in 
 CJhristendom they are likewise legislative in all parts of the 
 world. If their object is to turn men to God by force or to 
 interfere with the operations of tlic natural law they nuist 
 seek the same results in Christian and heatlien countries 
 alike. Hence the absurdity of supposing that the Christian 
 Church cannot be influenced by the actions of the natural
 
 G3 
 
 luw. The very fact that only a Hinall proportion of the 
 inhabitants of Christendom endeavour to make their lives 
 the reflex of Divine decrees, or even rise above the pro- 
 pensity of acknowledging the existence of the Kingdom of 
 Grace, clearly demonstrates that the militant Church is 
 influenced by the same accidents and to the same degree as 
 the remaining social forces of the world. The laws of nature 
 are the expression of the Almighty power and are uninfluenced 
 by the rise and fall of the religious beliefs of men. They 
 operate as regularly and powerfully amongst barbarisms as 
 amongst civilizations and pay the same court to heathen 
 as to Christian countries. We know nevertheless that 
 Christianity is a Revelation and must therefore have some 
 affinity to the object for which . the world was created. 
 Wherein therefore is it \inder the especial care of the Creator 
 and imder what conditions can His miraculous intervention 
 be conceived 1 The powers of the human mind were given 
 us to unravel this problem of human life. The Records of 
 the world declare that the guardianship which God exercises 
 over the Church is constant in its care but intermittent in 
 its operation, and is determined by the extent of the danger 
 that threatens the Church's welfare. We may .be certain 
 that it will be exercised to prevent the annihilation of the 
 Revealed will in the world, and to thwart any human effort 
 that may be put forth to obscui'e the majesty of its glory. 
 In respect 'to these two events the promise has beeen verified 
 in the annals of human history. ' Lo I am with you even 
 to the end of the world.' If the degradation of the English 
 State by the Disestablishment of the Church does not 
 imply the progeneration of either of these evils we may rest 
 assured that its consequences will not be arrested or 
 destroyed by the Hand of God. Miracles can be compre- 
 prehended by Faith but not by Reason but they will l)e 
 rendered all the more difficult to believe by the attempt 
 that has been made to import them into the issues of the 
 Disestablishment question. No extraordinary prescience is
 
 64 
 
 required to perceive that there is an analogy between the 
 faults of Liberationist belief in regard to niiracles and 
 the blunder that was made by Hume in relationship to the 
 same question. We may here pause to ask whether the 
 Dissenting degeneracy of Hume's Century would have sur- 
 vived its own alternation had it not been encrusted with the 
 environment of a Church that could not hereticate because 
 of its alliance with the State. ' The laws of nature were 
 uniform,' said Hume, and in any given instance it was more 
 likely as a mere matter of evidence that men should deceive 
 or be deceived than that those laws should have been 
 deviated from. Newman was so satisfied with Hume's 
 proposition that he told a body of Undergraduates at 
 Oxford that it could not be assailed. But as a matter of 
 fact it is no more difficult of assault than is the Liberationist 
 position today. For what object were the laws of nature 
 made uniform 1 If for no object at all how can the belief 
 in their uniformity be established 1 Did Hume perceive an 
 efl^ect without gauging a cause, if so, is he not condemned 
 by the postulates and axioms of pure Reason and of Spinoza 1 
 To understand an eftect,' says the great Pantheist in his 
 ethica, ' implies that we understand the cause of it. And if 
 there be no given cajise no effect canfoUow.' If the Disciples 
 perceived both cause and effect with regard to the uniformity 
 of nature's laws it was less likely that they should have been 
 deceived than that those laws should have been deviated 
 from. As those laws were created to be the expression of 
 the Creator's power so was their suspension demanded for 
 the establishment of the belief in that Power and in its 
 development in the institution of Christianity. It was 
 necessary that the uniformity of nature's laws should be 
 deviated from for the pin-pose of attesting the character of 
 Revelation, of diverting the streams of human tendency 
 when tottering before the upheaval of the MuliUiunedan 
 conquests, and of resuscitating the spiritual character of the 
 Church when obscured bv the encroachments, assumptions,
 
 65 
 
 and l)l;i,s[)lieiuies of lueii at the time of the llefoniiation. 
 Thus hais the promise been splendidly fulfilled, ' Lo 1 am 
 with you even to the end of the world.' The (iospel miracles 
 served a purpose that difiered only in degree from the 
 results of the battle of Tours and from the establishment of 
 the Protestant Reformation. We therefore sec that Hume 
 conceived wrong impressions of the miracles and their 
 import on the one hand and that the spiritually minded 
 Liberationist has apprehended false ideas concerning them 
 on the other. Faith and Reason must be allied for the 
 comprehension of Disestablishment and its issues in the 
 future of the Empire and of the wcn-ld. Human history 
 bears witness to the fact that (Christianity has been ejected 
 from Kingdoms and States that were once so many bright 
 jewels in its crown. What has become of the Provinces 
 that bore witness to the lifework of such men as Cyprian, 
 Tertullian, Augustine, Basil, and Chrysostom ? What has 
 become of the (Christianity that was planted by Polycarp and 
 Ignatius, by Papias, (^uadratus, Aristides, Ariosto, Claudius 
 Apollinaris, and Miltiades? Who now reveres the memories 
 of Mclito, Tatian of Assyria, Theophilus and Plermias 1 
 What do living men think of the venues of Nicea, Con- 
 stantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon 1 Is it not strange 
 that the countries in which were held the only general 
 councils whose authority is acknowledged both by the Greek 
 and Latin Churches should long since have ceased to be 
 Christian 1 And is not the establishment of Mohammedan- 
 ism upon the partial ruins of Christianity a complete answer 
 to the men who declare that the Revealed Faith cannot be 
 injured because it is under the especial care of God? Are 
 not the records of its intermittent failures and successes so 
 pronounced that some great minds have leaped to the 
 opposite extreme and have declared its fortunes to be 
 absolutely under the dominion of the human will 1 Was 
 the sceptical historian of the last century more to be blamed 
 for the injuries that he inflicted upon the Faith than men
 
 66 
 
 who are now prepared to destroy the fortifications of the 
 Church and to rely upon a miracle te subvert the natural 
 consequences of their acts ? We may rest assured that a 
 miracle will not save England from the sequences of her 
 folly unless Disestablishment predetermines the annihilation 
 of Chi'istianity in the world. England must either wear the 
 mantle of greatness herself or transfer it to the guardianship 
 of some more faithful country. It is axiomatically true 
 that as States that were once Christian have ceased to be 
 so, so may countries that are Christian today surrender 
 their Faith tomorrow. There was more truth than cynicism 
 in Bernard's address to the Knights Templars when handing 
 them the Rules of the order : ' Under Divine Providence we 
 do believe this new kind of religion was introduced by you 
 in the holy places, that is to say, the Union of warfare with 
 religion, so that religion, being armed, maketh her way by 
 the sword, and smiteth the enemy without sin.' There is 
 more faithfulness than expediency in declaring that Dis- 
 establishment will give a b^ow to Anglo Saxon Christianity 
 such as it has never received before, and that the laws of 
 nature will not be suspended to intercept its partial ruin. 
 As Faith without works is dead so Faith without Reason is 
 but the subversion of the highest faculties of the human 
 mind. If these had not been created for a purpose they 
 would not have been bequeathed to us at all. The germs 
 of manhood must be fertilized by the currents of history or 
 the evolution of humanity will be but the evolution of the 
 world's ruin. Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also 
 reap even though the Kingdoms of Providence and Grace are 
 powerful enough to determine a different type of award. 
 The people of this generation shall not pass away until they 
 have indited the beliefs of ages that are still to come.
 
 Chapter IX. 
 
 THE POTE^^TIALITIES OF THE UNION BETWEEN 
 THE ENGLISH CHURCH AND STATE. 
 
 The evolution of humanity is not an unbroken progress 
 towards perfection. Philosophy degrades its perceptions 
 when it declai-es that human history is the evolution of 
 events which lie already in their causes as the properties 
 of geometrical figures lie in the scientific definition of those 
 figures. Nor is it true that the life of the individual man, 
 the long sequel of his acts and fortunes, and all that he has 
 done and is to do, till the type is exhausted and gives place 
 to other combinations, is governed by laws as inherent and 
 as necessary' as those through which the mathematician 
 develops his inferences from the equation of an ellipse. 
 The lives of men and nations are what men and nations 
 have made them by the substitution of opportunity for the 
 faculties of pure Reason and the human will. The draft of 
 the world might have been deleted of its protuberances 
 of tyranny and shame. The Records of human history 
 might have been more glorious than they are. Hegel, 
 Schegel, and Comte have but touched the fringe of a con- 
 ception that is capable of rehabilitating the annals of the 
 world and furbishing them with the nolilcst Imageries of the 
 soul. Man is both a moral agent and an animal and 
 the life picture which he has bequeathed to his race is but 
 the besmearment of mentality by the enterprises of his 
 lower life. The highest monument of Time is but the abuse 
 of the powers of volition ; the resolute forgetfulness of the 
 great object for which Time itself was born. Had the
 
 68 
 
 human capacity been bequeathed to another type of Life it 
 is possible that its evolution would have been an unl)roken 
 progress towards perfection. Who can enumerate the ad- 
 vancements and retrocessions of human history, its remini- 
 scences and reviews, failures and successes, hopes and fears, 
 emulations and despairs, kindnesses and cruelties, civiliza- 
 tions and barbarism, reflexes of heaven, and rectoactives of 
 hell 1 Who can deny that human happiness has been taught 
 and bought for in the Infliction of human pain, and that 
 Dominion and Power have been utilized to extract Revenge 
 from the victimisation of the life that has dared to soar 
 above the materialization of the world's Ideal 1 Opportun- 
 ism has been the guiding star of the ages and has shewn no 
 semblance of feeling save that of regret at the shadows of 
 Death that would continue to obtrude and to darken its 
 vicious ways. The centuries are dyed with the blood of 
 martyrs shed by types of Life that were no higher than 
 their own, and the tyrannies succumb only to progenerate 
 new forms of despotism and oppression. The hand of 
 cruelty is still raised to strike its kindred down. When will 
 the human race begin to learn that man was never destined 
 to circumvent the happiness of man ? When will man 
 acknowledge that Empires as the highest form of created 
 power will be requistioned to wage terrific wars of justice in 
 the world so long as man continues to deny the equality of 
 man. Who can read the human stoi'y without wishing that 
 the human faculties had either been circumscribed or abso- 
 lutely controlled by the Kingdoms of Providence and Crace. 
 Then would there have been no empires raised to enforce 
 the evolution of Eternity's Decrees, no vile governments to 
 be shattered for defending the cruel fanaticisies of human 
 faiths, no prejudicies to be stamped upon the wings of ages 
 to subdue, to wreck, and to destroy the use of the resplend- 
 ent faculties of men. We reel beneath the memories of the 
 wrongs that still remain to be righted, the infernal conclus- 
 ions that must not be questioned, the twelve hundred
 
 G9 
 
 inillioua of niuii m'Ikj liave brains but must not use them. 
 We fall back before the sixty centuries of devilry that have 
 turned the world's heritage to monstrosity and degradation. 
 What a record for a mental endowment that was originally 
 superior to that of the angels. Can it be true that evolu- 
 tion has not begun for throe quarters of the peoples of the 
 earth. Are there men breathing who are not allowed to 
 think, question, to ask for authority, to answer their dis- 
 beliefs in material results that refuse to appeal either to 
 their Faith or to their reason 1 Is their freedom ever to 
 be secured and is it to be acquired by coherencies of 
 brother men or by the thiuiderbolts of an insulted God ? 
 Are the heavens to be blackened with wrath as when the 
 rebel angels were consigned to their doom or are the custod- 
 ians of the present apportionment of Time to be inspired for 
 the mighty fray ? Are the men of the present genei'ation 
 to burn the encasements of the captured intellect of brother 
 men in a fire of awful retribution? If so, is England destined 
 to lead the van and to teach the world once and forever 
 that there is no visible body on the face of this material 
 globe to whose Decrees men must submit in the matter of 
 private judgment? Never was her opportunity so great and 
 glorious as it is to-day. Never was she offered such gigantic 
 opportunities for bridging the chasms of the centuries and 
 refurbishing the escutcheon of human thought that should 
 have aided the Kingdoms of Providence and Grace to fire 
 their Imperious decrees. Every age has to play its part in 
 the evolution of humanity. Neither men nor nations can 
 dissociate themselves from the Alpha and Omega of the 
 human drama, from the genesis that works systematically 
 to apportion the rewards of human right and wrong. We 
 cannot forego our responsibilities, we nuist leave the world 
 either better or v.orse than we found it. Great and little 
 principles are alike troublesome to our love of repose, but 
 they will continue to sting us into the consciousness that we 
 are the iniits who have to produce the contempoi'aiy records
 
 70 
 
 of history. Ineptitude has made the via media as a com- 
 promise between truth and lies the only principle that the 
 age thinks worth fighting for. The men or the society or 
 the nation who still thinks that Truth should be made the 
 life object of research is a butt for every fool's ridicule. No 
 objection could be taken to this deplorable apathy if the 
 world's destinies were to be evolved out of the idiosyncrasies of 
 the hiimau will alone. But every reflective mind knows that 
 a bequeathed responsibility cannot rise above the demands 
 that gave it birth and will not be allowed to lie dormant or 
 to transmit degeneracy to the world without involving itself 
 in its own ruin. Why are human Ideals so frequently 
 broken down just as they appear to have been reached and 
 to have been established 1 Why are Peace Societies so often 
 forced to blush for their principles or to re-echo the martial 
 strains of some just and necessary war? Has any Peace 
 Society yet understood the trend of the world's events or 
 perceived that wars will never be allowed by the Creator to 
 cease until the human intellect shall be free to comprehend 
 the importance of Revelation and of human destiny 1 As 
 all men will have to account for the use which they have 
 made of their talents so will nations and empires be raised 
 and tlirown down in Time according:; to their pei'ceptiou of 
 their moral responsibilities. As it is with material wars so 
 will it continue to be with the mental Revolutions that 
 stamp the centuries with their Decrees. We shall be roused 
 by their activities to a higher or a lower sense of accounta- 
 bility to the great object for which Time itself was born. 
 The human race has broken its iinity as a social order and 
 the cleavage must be righted ere hunuui fancies will be 
 allowed to be raised to the position of national Ideals. 
 The belief in human infallibilities, fanaticisms, and thauma- 
 turgies must be destroyed ere the created powers shall 
 be able to find the repose that they love so well. The 
 fact that Truth is not supported by miraculous environment 
 will never be allowed to excuse men from the responsi-
 
 bJlity of endeavouring to discover its Decretals. We smile 
 as we sit around tlie craters of a volcano and seek safety in 
 rest as its belching tires begin to redden the sky. England 
 now stands before the footlights of the centuries to play her 
 part in the evolution of humanity. What shall be the 
 stamp of her contribution, the impress of her accord 1 Our 
 countrymen can proclaim their creeds, avow their convictions, 
 and pronuilgate their accession of advantage today as they 
 never could before. And the freedom that they enjoy has 
 yet to be won for the nations of the globe. The Revealed 
 will of the Creator must yet overcome tlie obliquities and 
 prepossessions of men. Prescience must still be exercised to 
 discover the trend of thought and action, and to see that 
 the history of our genei-ation is glorified ere it be handed on 
 to posterity. Popular beliefs must be pruned, dissected, 
 examined upon their merits, and fiercely assailed if not con. 
 ducive to our improvement in the life of the world. We 
 must not aspire to defend a partizan cry because it is old, 
 or so entangle ourselves in the meshes of infatuation as to 
 be ashamed to abandon that which we have discovered to 
 be wrong. If the Liberation Society declines to discuss the 
 belief in its own Infallibility it iiuist be stormed with all 
 the concomitances* of human scorn. If it still refuses to 
 justify its effort to wreck the principle that has produced 
 a noble nation's character, it Uiust be arraigned as the 
 greatest enemy that England has yet had to meet in the 
 world. If Disestablishers have been cajoled into the 
 advocacy of an attack upon the safeguard of their country's 
 integrity they must nevertheless be treated as adversaries 
 to the highest interests of their land. For five hundred 
 years England has won nearly four-fifths of the battles in 
 which she has been engaged. What would have been the 
 proportion of her victories had she not inscribed the Com- 
 mandments upon her children's lives by the union of Church 
 and State 1 Were Cressy and Poictiers,. Agincort and Blen- 
 heim, Ouenarde and Malplaguet, Trafalgar and Waterloo,
 
 Quebec and Plassy, Alma and Inkerman, Atbara and (Jmdur- 
 man but the pawns in a game of chance, the tossed off sport 
 of fortune, the playtliings of a Destiny that was not con- 
 cerned with the future history of the world ! Have not 
 each of these battles paved the way for the enlargement of 
 the British Empire and for the expansion of the character 
 that was first produced by the Union of the English Church 
 and State 1 Are not each of these victories more attached 
 to our age than to the ages of the men who achieved them 
 for their country 1 Is not one fourth of the earth's surface 
 already secured to the British race, and has it been be- 
 queathed to \is for any other purpose than that of being 
 influenced by the Christianity of the parent State 1 Were 
 the eighty four per cent, of English victories given to our 
 forefathers for any other object than this? Were those 
 victories intended to be less barren of result than the 
 conquests of Titus and the dispersion of the Jews, or less 
 destined to act as Images for the submersion of the trend of 
 thought 1 If the acquisition of so much power is but a 
 move in a game of chance can we be certain of maintaining 
 our national greatness for a single day? These are questions 
 that must either be answered by ourselves or by our 
 children. We must either rise to a perception of the 
 potentialities of the connection between a English Church 
 and State or sink to witness the beginning of the end of our 
 country's greatness. The influence of environment is not 
 aftected by any accretions that may have been foisted upon 
 the Church for the purpose of circumscribing its compre- 
 hensive character. Brave men never shrink from mecLmg 
 dangers boldly and well. If modern accretions have 
 attempted to obscure the Doctrines of the English Church 
 they must be removed even though at the cost of a Revolu- 
 tion and a civil war. Reforms can only be seciired when 
 preceded by upheavals in the courses of human history. 
 Only a coward will think of Disestablishing the Church 
 becaiise it happens to have got into the temporary custody
 
 7. -5 
 
 of its enemies. If the Church is Scriptural in theory she 
 must be made Scriptural in practice too. The policies of 
 the State must be the amplification of the thirty nine 
 Articles of Religion so that the lives of Englishmen may be 
 made pliable to the higher standard of personal religious 
 appeal. The character of the subjects of England will 
 become the pattern of the character of the subjects of the 
 Empire and will assist or retard the rehabilitation of Divine 
 decree in the creation of the social powers of the world. 
 As the Christianity of England must of necessity have a 
 paramount intluence upon that of the British Empire, so 
 must that of the Empire have a supreme prepossession upon 
 the character of the peoples of the globe. For such a 
 purpose was the British Empire called into being, for the 
 development of Divine intention was it requisitioned to wear 
 the mantles of the mighty Empires of a noble past. The 
 Infantile days of the British Empire will be over when the 
 virgin soil of the earth shall have been occupied and 
 brought under civilized dominion. Each decade is a land- 
 mark in our national destiny, a beating of the pulse of our 
 Empire's life. The next half century will either seal its 
 doom or refiirbish its potentialities for the acconiplishnient 
 of the propagation of Christianity throughout the countries 
 of the Globe. No country save Britain has raised itself 
 to a true appreciation of the value of the Christian faith 
 and of the means that the Creator has provided for incor- 
 porating it into the lives of free men. And no Churches 
 save those of England and Scotland have so well perceived 
 that all images of material power were destined to assist in 
 the presentation of the Faith to the minds of created human 
 beings. The Reformers' perception has transcended its own 
 majesty and has produced the grandest moral agency in the 
 British Empire that the world has ever seen. The influence 
 of that Empire must — from the character of its foundation — 
 advance or recede according to the movement of religious 
 sensibility in the parent State and of its efforts to intertwine
 
 74 
 
 itself into the development of moral tone. Living English- 
 men have been led on by the trend of events either to make 
 or to mar an influence that will unostentatiously change the 
 history of the world. We can only forget that prescience is 
 the keynote of comprehension at the cost of ruining the 
 heritage of our children. We cannot shirk our responsi- 
 bilities or refuse to see that we live in a momentous age. 
 We must clear the chasm that divides the centuries into 
 four equal parts or be drawn into the vortex that swallowed 
 up the Empires of the ancient world. Time awaits the 
 impress of our decrees but will not allow its patience to be 
 tried for long. The images of material power were created 
 for a purpose and will not be allowed to be used by men 
 whose visions are circumscribed by the age in which they 
 live. A noble past must be the mentor of a nobler future 
 whose destiny must be discerned by glancing across the 
 domains of Time and perceiving why they were carved as 
 mathematical precisions of Eternity. The potentialities of 
 the Union between the English Church and State were 
 intended by the Creator to be too ubiquitous for the 
 pusillanimous comprehensions of fanaticism on the one hand 
 or of political flightiness and volatility on the other. The 
 question is both the kernel of the British Empire's destiny 
 and the trysting place of the world's career. The freedom 
 of the human will demands that prescience shall and must 
 be employed for the discovery of the causes that have pro- 
 duced the Revolutions of history. Disestablishment may 
 succeed in changing the character of Englishmen by the 
 substitution of a secular for a Christian environment but 
 it will not prevent the British Empire from being wi-estcd 
 from their care. Faithlessness may conceal the elements of 
 Eetributiuu but only mitil the time shall be ripe for their 
 distribution amongst the peoples who have run foul to the 
 everlasting purposes of God. Men and Empires have their 
 day and pass on but the thunders of their tread were intended 
 to resound as the warning voices of history for ever. Ob-
 
 scure are tlie inlluL'iices tluit overshadow tlio stroams of 
 human tendency, unperccived the trivial i+^ics that distribute 
 the doctrines of political power. As other Empires have 
 been weighed in the balances and have been found wanting 
 so is England a])out to be weighed in Eternity's scales. 
 Memorial shadows flit around her burning thoughts eacli 
 film of light being a precept that cannot die. Voices chant 
 Requiems in the caverns of the mighty dead to rehabilitate 
 the Imageries of living ])()wer with the reiterated promise 
 that Righteousness alone shall continue to exalt a nation.
 
 LA:MrETEK : 
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