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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



rael for his own possession, to him not to speak 

 of religion would have been simply to keep silence, 

 for his daily life, his politics, hi3 commerce with 

 foreign nations, his wars, his treaties, his most 

 private domestic relations, were all part of his 

 religion. The Hebrew worship was the social 

 life of the nation: the Hebrew Scriptures were 

 its literature. When Judaism passed into Chris- 

 tianity, the idea of the holy nation was superseded 

 by that of the Church, and thus political and 

 national relations unhappily lost their religious 

 character, and for a time, partly under the in- 

 fluence of the expectation of the approaching end 

 of all things, men's interests and thoughts were 

 centred upon the unseen world. At such a 

 time, the danger would be not of reticence on 

 religious subjects, but of neglect and contempt of 

 secular life. Still, the spirit of Christianity pro- 

 claims unmistakably the sacredness of common 

 life ; the monastic or ascetic principle, which cuts 

 human life into two parts, one religious, the oth- 

 er secular, is not a true reading of the Christian 

 law; where that law has been understood in its 

 true import, there men have learned that the 

 domestic, the social, the political, and not the 

 monastic, is the truly religious life. And hence, 

 wherever religion has been understood, not as a 

 mere scheme for saving individual souls from fu- 

 ture punishment, but as a kingdom of heaven on 

 earth, wherever the religious life has been not the 

 mere refined selfishness by which each several 

 man tries to make the best terms he can for him- 

 self against a future life, but the struggle of man- 

 kind after clearer light and purer life, there men 

 have not been ashamed to speak openly of it, 

 because it is in fact nothing else than politics, 

 art, science, and every other human interest 

 looked at in their nobler and divine aspect. 



If, then, this view of the matter is a true one, 

 it would appear that the excessive reticence on 

 religious subjects of which we have spoken arises 

 not so much from reverence or from skepticism, 

 as from the individualism which is so marked 

 a characteristic of modern religion, and which 

 is the direct outcome of the evangelical move- 

 ment. For this movement, as we have seen else- 

 where, 1 ignored the idea of the Church as a 

 spiritual society, and — perhaps from the neces- 

 sity of its position — addressed itself simply and 

 solely to the work of quickening into life indi- 

 vidual souls. How admirably it did this work, 

 how it stirred with new life a whole generation 

 of men, how Bristol colliers and Welsh quarry- 

 men and Suffolk laborers and London merchants 



1 See Frasefs Magazine, January, 1878, p. 23. 



were alike melted by the eloquence, often rude 

 enough, of men who spoke strongly, because 

 they spoke from the heart, is known to all who 

 have read anything of the religious history of 

 the last and the present century. 1 But probably 

 great part of the success of the movement de- 

 pended on its strongly individual element, on its 

 addressing men not as members one of another, 

 but as separate souls who must answer each one 

 for himself as he stands alone before his Judge. 

 By such a course, it forced upon men a sense of 

 personal responsibility, but it also impressed up- 

 on the popular religion a character of isolation, 

 of independence, which has for a time at least 

 destroyed much that was lovely in earlier types 

 of Christianity. From this has arisen that " dis- 

 sidence of dissent," that " spirit of disruption," 

 which regards continually multiplying religious 

 divisions not as a perhaps inevitable source of 

 weakness, not as an evil to be endured so long 

 as it cannot be cured, but as the ideal of relig- 

 ious liberty, a grand achievement reserved for 

 the nineteenth century. And from this it has re- 

 sulted that religion, instead of being regarded 

 simply as the heavenward aspect of all things 

 human, has come to be looked upon as the rela- 

 tion between the individual soul and its Divine 

 Master. Such a relation cannot but be most 

 sacred, most delicate ; to reveal it to the general 

 eye, to make it a subject of discussion whether 

 with a friend or with a spiritual director, unless 

 under the urgent need of spiritual sympathy or 

 counsel, must blunt the sensitiveness of the soul, 

 and injure that spiritual modesty and reserve 

 without which religion loses all its loveliness. 

 To talk of religion, if by religion we mean the 

 inner secrets of the soul, must have upon most 

 persons a somewhat hardening effect, and may 

 very easily end in substituting words and profes- 

 sions for the deeper realities of the spiritual life. 

 But it may be objected that the evangelical 

 school of theology, far from discouraging re- 

 ligious conversation, has been the one school 

 which has most markedly encouraged it ; and 

 that it is among professors of this form of reli- 

 gion almost exclusively that such conversation 

 prevails. Most true. But, while this fact testi- 

 fies to the reality of conviction with which such 

 persons hold their view of religion, it cannot be 

 denied that, to those who have not been brought 

 up in the peculiarities of this school, the way 



1 A very convenient summary of the evangelical 

 movement in the last century, though of course writ- 

 ten from a strongly sympathetic point of view, is to 

 be found in Mr. Ryle's " Christian Leaders of the 

 Eighteenth Century." 



