such a revolution have surely a right to be heard upon the power by which they effected it.

One page suffices to carry us from the age of the prophets to the dawn of Christianity, and Philo is the sole personage in the story. He again, it seems, laid the foundation of another new Theology by the union of agnostic speculations, which anticipated those of Herbert Spencer and Mansel, with a Logos-doctrine (borrowed from Plato and the Stoics), which helps to make the unknowable known. Upon this portion of Professor Huxley's treatise we would remark, first, that on the supposition of Philo's importance in founding a new Theology, being all that is supposed, it is quite unscientific to assume without proof that Philo's thinking, yes, or that of Plato or of Zeno, does not represent essential truth in the relations of man to God; the necessary way in which man must think God. We feel no difficulty whatever in supposing that God should have used these great pre-Christian thinkers in the evolution which prepared the way of the new Theology of the Gospel.' But secondly we must pronounce it quite absurd that a scientific account of the evolution of religious thought should offer Philo as the germ of Christian Theology. Put his influence at the very highest that any sane author has ever claimed and there remains still by far the largest part of Christian Theology unaccounted for. It came from a holier source: the Life of Jesus Christ.

But the question of the real bearing upon Theology of the influence exerted by the teaching of Philo's contemporary, Jesus of Nazareth, is one upon which it is not germane to Professor Huxley's 'present purpose to enter.' We cannot, indeed, greatly regret it; we do not desire to see that theme treated as this author would have treated it. But still, in refusing to enter on it, he refuses to enter on the most essential part of his subject. Theology, as we all know Theology, is Christian, and the professor has undertaken to prove its natural evolution. Does he then think that the Teaching of Jesus of Nazareth has had no part in the evolution of Christian

1

Nothing forbids us to believe that the speculations of Philo may have been known to S. John. We have, in fact, a connecting link in the Alexandrian Jew Apollos, who taught in Ephesus. It would be quite in the spirit in which Paul dealt with the Grecian philosophers at Athens if John, when not professing to record the words of Jesus, but speaking in his own person, presented Christianity to those whose training had been Alexandrian by acknowledging and accepting all that was true in the Philonian speculations about the Divine Logos, but went on to tell what Philo had not dreamt of-that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.'-Salmon's Introduction to the New Testament, p. 88.

theology, that he should pronounce it not germane to his purpose to show that Teaching to be naturally evolved, and the effect which it produced upon the Church's thought to be equally natural.

After this, it is hardly worth while to follow the course of the writer. It carries him in two or three bounds through the patristic and mediæval periods to the present. If Professor Huxley had given to the cray-fish the careless treatment which he has given to Christianity, his monograph upon that interesting creature would have been pronounced scarcely to touch the surface of its shell.

And what is the conclusion? It is Mr. Huxley's 'firm conviction that with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium-historical, philological, philosophical, or physical-through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant elevation of the standard of veracity, the end of the evolution of theology will be like its beginning-it will cease to have any relation to ethics.'1 The conviction of the existence of One who will make it best in the end to have been good, has been believed by many as true experts in ethics as Professor Huxley is in physiology, to be necessary to the advance of virtue in the world.2 No one acquainted with the state of ethical controversy would say that the reverse has ever been proved. But Professor Huxley not only renounces such a belief with a light heart, but is apparently quite sure that morals are better without it. The moral ideal which Christianity offers, the exquisite and spiritual forms of virtue which many an unbeliever has recognized as the fruit of religion, are not thought by this writer worthy of mention: scientific culture will supply them, or, if not them, something better. The separation of ethics from Theology which existed in the minds of the Tonga islanders before the missionaries corrupted them, is the goal of Evolution which we all are to wish for without doubt or repining! It is but a sad conviction for any human being to hold that the entire course of human thought, and the feelings which have moved men most, have been futile and baseless. But for an evolutionist it would seem an almost impossible conclusion that the proper end of a long course of progress of the 1 Precisely similar is the aspiration of Dr. Maudsley.-Natural Causes, &c., p. 144.

26 'Je ne pense pas, si du moins on s'entend bien sur les mots, que la morale puisse, sans en beaucoup souffrir, se passer de tout principe religieux mais en tout cas si la morale peut se passer de la religion, on peut bien affirmer que la religion ne peut plus se passer de la morale.'-Réville, Prolég. p. 120.

highest faculties of the highest creature on earth is that he should return to the point from whence he set out!

But this, it seems, is science. This is the way of thinking and of searching and of arguing which assumes the airs of a truthfulness and a moral earnestness unknown to theologians. To us it seems more full of assumptions, more inconsequential in argument, and more careless in its induction, than anything which the most benighted of religionists ever wrote on a scientific question. And few treatises of Christian evidence have ever brought home to us such a certainty that our Faith is indeed a Revelation from God, and not the product of nature or the work of man, as this essay, which the great name of the author would seem to warrant as the best proof that can be given of its Natural Evolution.

ART. II.-HOME MISSION-WORK IN LARGE TOWNS.

I. The Masses: how shall we reach them? Some Hindrances in the Way set forth from the Standpoint of the People, with Comments and Suggestions. By AN OLD LAYHELPER. (London, 1886.)

2. Stories and Episodes of Home Mission Work. With a Preface by His Grace the ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. (London.)

3. The London Diocesan Magazine. Vol. I. No. I. May. (London, 1886.)

THE greatest problem before our Church to-day is how to evangelize the crowded centres of population. Large towns have arisen within a few years, as fresh industries have grown up or old ones increased. The picturesque country village, with its ivy-clad church, its peaceful meadows and sheepfolds, its scanty population of farmers and their men, who found a personal friend, as well as a guide, in many a generation of their rectors, has often become, in a single lifetime, the scene of busy trade or of some flourishing manufacture. Instead of the sheep-bell is heard the whirr of machinery, the erewhile trout-stream runs black with offensive refuse, the scattered cottages have given place to close-built streets, and immigrant

thousands of persons dwell where corn waved, or cattle grazed. In many cases the change came unforeseen. In still more cases it was unprovided for by the Church. The parochial system, so valuable for diffusing her energies through the length and breadth of the land, proved inadequate where sudden concentration was required. Men of leisure were sighing for work in one parish, ample funds were practically unused, while at no great distance an overweighted clergyman was perhaps toiling in the evening of his days, single-handed, with a growing population which all his earlier experience had even unfitted him to deal with. The remedy for this failure of the parochial system, if failure it may be called, not to effect what it was never intended to effect, has been found in some degree, and must be found in a still greater degree, in the recognition of the Diocese as the unit of Church work. There is among us too great a tendency to congregationalism in our towns; and too often, both in town and country, the parish, especially if vigorously worked and in the midst of others less ably administered, has a tendency to a somewhat narrow isolation. Its own needs are not only foremost, but almost exclusive. We are glad to think that this tendency has been counteracted by diocesan societies, by the division of large dioceses, by the increased efforts of the bishops, by the appointment of suffragans, and, we hope that at no distant day we may be able to add, by a considerable increase in the numbers of our mission clergy. But our bishops are in the House of Lords, and a generation ago most of them may have been up in the balloon we have been told of as pertaining to that chamber. At any rate the want of fresh methods was felt, and a vast change had taken place in the circumstances of half the population of England before steps were taken to meet the new conditions of Church work.

Meanwhile a dense pack of human beings was being formed for whom no spiritual provision was made. The country migrated to the towns. Too often, new settlers were unsought by the Church. Too often, they did not seek her ministrations. Then, as now, old and good habits were broken by the wrench of a new and strange life. 'Well, sir,' said a respectable mechanic to a clergyman, in reply to an invitation to church, well, sir, I was always church, and used to go regular when I was in the country, but since we came to London sixteen years ago, I don't think either me or the missis has been to church once. Howsomever, I'll come.' And the man never failed to come for years, though his wife could never be induced to attend, except for the

baptism of seven out of their eight children. She seemed to think she had acquired a prescriptive right to dispense with Church ministrations by the lapse of so many years. Now, such a case belongs (we regret to say it), not to the exceptions, but to the rule. The feeble spiritual life that required for its maintenance the traditional influences and the force of early habits, as well as easily accessible Church privileges, becomes almost stifled by the fresh excitements of town life, by the irreligious tone of the new companionship, by the hurry and turmoil and whirl in which the greater activity of thought and energy of the city, as compared with the country, seems to place the new comer. So he drifts off into a godless, if not a wicked, life, and, if ever he is recalled from it, is perhaps only so far recovered as to become the votary of some one of the many forms of imperfect Christianity which find recruits most readily where the Church is failing to do her proper work. Such men ought never to have been lost. The problem is how to regain them.

But in the obscurity of a large and crowded town, there is a population still more difficult to deal with. Here abound poverty, filth, and the degradation that follows on the loss of self-respect. The common decencies of life have disappeared. The moral atmosphere is charged with vice. Force and fraud are considered respectable, and the hideous misery of the picture is only relieved by touches of kindliness that still tell of original righteousness." In such a region will be found petty thieves and professional beggars, the tradesman broken down by vice, the brutally ignorant whose language consists but of a few hundred words, of which a large percentage are unutterably vile. Here will be met the man of education of prostituted talent and infamous character, whose poem on Innocence,' frequently produced from tattered pocket, is a grim though unintended satire on the writer and his life. Here, in some garret of a dirty court, have been found children of twelve or thirteen years of age, who have set up (may we venture to say?) housekeeping for themselves. Here in the afternoon are lounging about the doors of low lodginghouses 'cadgers' who hang about the theatres to pick up, honestly or otherwise, a few pence, or who shut the doors of

1 The writer once came upon one of the greatest blackguards of his acquaintance, shivering without his coat on a bitterly cold day, and found he had put it over his sister's illegitimate children, who were sleeping on a dirty sack of shavings in a corner of the den. All honour to thee, Cornelius Daly, in whichever of Her Majesty's prisons thou dost sojourn

now.