CULTURE AND FAITH.

THERE is nothing which sometimes puzzles us so much as the apparent incompatibility of culture and faith. Must not the mind be narrow in order to be pure of stain ? Must not life be one long abstaining in order to be true to itself ? The ordinary religious man, who is sometimes, very mistakenly, spoken of as Evangelical, says Yes! We find men everywhere preaching that, if we thoroughly believed in immortality, we should not crave for this enjoyment, or shed bitter tears over that grief. We should say, ' All this is transitory, live for what is not transitory.' And so in all ages men have tried to make life one long shrinking away from what is unworthy of us, instead of one long seeking after what is worthy. Yet after all, narrowness is not life. And when we come to examine the higher forms of the religious life, we find that it is realising the greatness of man, not the small- ness, which leads us to the true deliverance. We know no finer recent type of the fall breadth and richness of the religious life than the late Dean Church, to whose in- sight into the darker side of the religious spirit we called attention last week. Let us use the same remark- able volume of sermons which has just appeared from his hand to illustrate the converse of the same truth,— namely, that if it is human to feel the poverty, the dryness, the pettiness, the darkness of every individual nature, if it is human to know that we live in our own shadow, it is also human to find in humanity something very great, very wide, very far-reaching, something prophetic of that which is indeed our highest destiny, a life which stretches out on all sides towards what is not only illimitable, but what is illimitable in its glory of colour and form and complexity, and its manifold richness of life. There is a sermon in this new volume of the late Dean of St. Paul's on "Adam, the Type of Christ," which is a most impressive protest against the narrowness so often associated with Christian faith. In it he dwells on the waste of life which is everywhere visible in human history, as well as in human consciousness, on the long centuries of savage life, life spent in the various dreary ingenuities, let us say, of the stone ages, spent in pointing arrowheads for the destruction of wild beasts, or, worse still, for the destruction of human foes; life spent in ware and jealousies and in snatching away the hopes and joys of others; life spent in sordid industry, in multiplying email frugalities, or launching out into small extravagances, life spent by men in tyranising over women, or by women in dragging men down. He dwells on the ex- ceeding poorness of the average man and woman in all ages and in all classes of society ; and then he goes on :—" But there are failures which are final, and there are failures which, in the very moment of their ill-success,—by what they might do, by what they do,—carry with them the promise of being at last repaired. The fall of Sodom was not like the fall of Israel, or the going astray of Greece and Rome. And here, in Adam and the race he stands for,—amid ruin, amid in- credible debasement, amid the very mysteries of iniquity and apostasy around him, amid horrors not to be exaggerated, not to be told, of his history,—still are to be discerned the out- lines of the image of God. Can that image stay with men, and not be to them the pledge of remedy P Can that image strike its print so deep,—can the dream of nature, contra- dicted everywhere, yet be always and obstinately of goodness, of what is noblest, and purest, and most divine, and not lift mankind to the looking-for of deliverance, of that day when the old shall pass and all things be made new ? " And again :—" Human nature,—in what it is and in what it is not; in what it would be and cannot be; in its aims and its

incompleteness; in its stateliness and its deformity; in its charm and its repulsiveness ; in its power and its failure,— sends up the cry for restoration?' Yes; and it sends it up, not from its narrowness, but from its richness ; for its prophecy is of the many and infinitely numerous directions in which it will ultimately burst this " bondage of corruption." Faith is not faith which limits itself to a patient endurance of the many agonies and still more hopeless miseries of human life,

in the belief of some ultimate emancipation. True faith feels its way towards that "far more (acceding, even eternal weight of glory," the germs of which were planted in our nature from the first. True faith gives the life within us fall

credit for all its attractions towards the life of the Creator himself, though many, perhaps most, of these attractions must be repressed here in order that the best of all may not be repressed. Of course it is true that the most potent springs of life often need the most purging. It is not the most lavish life which is the purest. It is not the Homers or even the

Shakespeares, still less the Byrons, who give us the most living image of that richer life, the seeds of which we carry

within us, for the most potent springs in us are very far from the highest and purest. Still, it is true that there is no narrowness in that image of which we carry the stamp deeply impressed upon our nature. Even the chaos of human nature, as we know it., is a chaos of profusion and not of poverty. What is wanted is the harmony of the finely ordered will, not the wasting and ravaging of the wildest impulses within us. What our nature points to is development on every side, but development under an authority which knows the significance and the immense comprehensiveness of the idea

of sacrifice, the incalculable depth of that saying, "Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die it bringeth forth much fruit," a saying which really implies that death in the right fashion, not by the dwindling of life, bat by the yielding of it to nurture the life of others, results not only in much fruit to others, but in

much renewal of its own being.

However, the kind of incompatibility with which we are moat intimately acquainted in our own day, between breadth of mind and true faith, is not so much that between breadth of character and the Christian character,

as that between breadth of intellect or breadth of know- ledge, and the Christian faith. The late Dean of St. Paul's, however, was one of those whose intellectual insight and whose knowledge was of the widest, and yet that intellectual insight and knowledge seemed rather to stimulate than to paralyse his Christian faith. No one entered more eagerly and more intelligently into the speculations of the great

apostle of Evolution, Charles Darwin, than Dr. Church, and no one followed more closely the various criticisms and com-

ments upon that great principle ; yet the discovery of a principle which made many a Christian tremble for his Christianity, and not a few even resign it with a sigh, pro- duced no such effect upon Dr. Church. He knew, as few but professional students of science know, the difficulties which men of science feel in reconciling the teaching of Christ with the teaching of biologists. He knew the criticisms by which the meaning of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures had been modified,_ and all this knowledge seemed rather to root his faith more deeply instead of staggering or dismaying it. See how he describes the life of the natural man as completed and transfigured in the life of the spiritual man, namely, the life of man as God intended that it should be, if he had used his freedom rightly,--and we think no one who reads the

passage will think that Dean Church underrated either the dignity or the indignity of human life as we know it:- " We may measure the reality of the deliverance by the reality, whi•:h we know, of the wreck ; we may measure the vastness of what was wreck.•d by the greatness of the remedy. And so the world is changed, and what might but be guessed at before is made certain now. We are of a race that had lost its way ; and now we know it. We are of a race whose prospects and destiny it is vain to circumscribe by what we sea; it belongs to a world to which this world cannot reach, and where we are linked with God. So even the First man dared to imagine before the Second came; but he knew not, and all the practical energy of his nature was directed here. He went forth and did great things. As it is said in those great Choruses which are the Psalms of Heat henisin,—he subdued the earth, he founded states, he sought out arts, he mastered powers living and powers elemental, he found the secret of beauty, and the spell of words, and the power of numbers, and the fine threads that waken and order thought ; he made the world his workshop, his arsenal, his palace; genera-

tion after generation he learned to know more of its inexhaustible magnificence, to use more of its inexhaustible gifts ; his eye was more opened, his sense more delicate, his hand more crafty ; he created, he measured, he gathered together, he enjoyed. He is before us now, in his greatness, his hopes, his pride, with even nobler aims and vaster tasks, alleviating misery, curing injustice, bridling or extinguishing disease. But still he is the First Man : of the riddle of his nature he has not the key, and despairs of reaching it; he passes in his greatness, and never continueth in one stay ; sorrow and decay baffle him, sin entangles him, and

at the end is death. Of the earth, earthy;' of the earth, bounded by its barriers, invisible, impassable. And now, side by side with him, is the Second Man, from the Manger, the Cross, the Grave,—dead, yet alive, and alive for ever: attended by His train of sanctities, by unthought-of revelations of heart, by the 'things of the Spirit,' by hopes and peace which for this world were an idle dream, by the new Beatitudes. He comes in the greatness of His strength, He comes in weakness : but strength and weakness to Him are both alike ; for love, which is cf God, in strong and weak, is the life of the new creation, its 'one thing needful,' the essential mark of its presence." (pp. 140-2.)

The real dismay which wide knowledge and high culture bring upon so many Christians is due to the dissipation of the energy of their faith upon the infinity and complexity, the manifold riddles and enigmas, of the world, and their con- sequent inability to keep it concentrated on the great spiritual certainties which sooner or later must solve these riddles and enigmas in a manner which it is at present far beyond our power to discern. Cardinal Newman was not mistaken when he said that a thousand difficulties did not necessarily con- stitute a single doubt. The real question is whether God has been at work in the Christian revelation, and has identified himself with the very substance of its teaching ; whether he has shown us how humanity can be trans- formed and transfigured, by himself taking a human mind, a human character, and a human lot. If that can be im- pressed upon us as it was upon the late Dean Church, then the difficulties which are urged against the form of revelation are in some sense strictly irrelevant. It may be shown that there is plenty of human weakness and error in the lives of those who have been the chief apostles of revelation ; bat when a divine being himself entered on a human career and underwent the limitations of human thought and passion, the insignificance of these difficulties was assured,—indeed, the occurrence of them was as it were foreseen as the inevitable human dress of divine revelation. What Dean Church believed was that the divine power had so manfestly developed the Bourse of the Jewish Revelation, and had so concentrated itself in the life of Christ, that, whatever we might doubt, we could not doubt that the light which was shining in darkness would dissipate year by year and century by century, more and more of that darkness, and would glorify human life in the end.