but the record of God's complete and perfect disclosure of himself to man. The gulf between God thus conceived and man as seen in actual life is enormous. To account for this gulf the doctrine of the Fall was conceived to be necessary; to bridge this gulf, certain views of revelation, miracles, atonement, mediatorship, were thought to be equally

necessary.

Five converging lines of thought have brought about a radically different process of thought. Agnosticism has shaken, if it has not destroyed, the old a priori conceptions of God. Biblical criticism has changed the popular conception of the Bible. Anthropology has negatived the notion of a cataclysmic Fall. Evolution has traced man's gradual rise from a lower order of animal creation, and has measured humanity, not by an idealized picture of his early state of innocence, but by a scientific prevision of the goal toward which he is traveling. Depravity is no longer regarded as natural; it is religion and virtue that are natural; depravity is unnatural, contra-natural. Finally, for a search of the Bible for proof texts to sustain a priori theological assumptions has been substituted a study of the Bible as a collection of laws, history, and literature, especially a study of the earthly life of Jesus of Nazareth as it is recorded in the Gospels. The students, conducting their study from various points of view-the agnostic, the romantic, the Protestant, the Roman Catholic, the Jewish-have yet agreed in seeking to know exactly what that human, earthly life was, and in their conclusion that it was a life unique in the world's biographies. Dr. Gordon's description of Jesus may stand here as a statement, pictorially presented in exquisite miniature, of this conclusion on which substantially agree the world's students of every variety of faith and temperament:

Look at Jesus. Consider him simply as the perfect man. There is no higher name than that. The language of the creeds seems unreal in the presence of his spotless and sublime humanity. We gain one or two glimpses of his childhood, and how full of wonder and beauty it is! We have one clear glance into his boyhood, and we mark the thirst for knowledge, the reverence for authority, the flow of deep questions, and the high spirit that fill it with grace and

charm. When we see him again, he has become a man, he has risen into the consciousness of his Father in heaven, into the consciousness of his Sonhood to God. We see him at the Jordan, accepting baptism as the sign of the new world that has risen into clearness in his soul. We follow him into the wilderness, and watch him under his great temptation. In trial he is so patient, so strong; and out of trial he comes so pure and mighty. We hear his teaching, we listen to his parables, we go with him in his errands of mercy, and try to count his countless acts of compassion and healing. We retire with him for prayer, we come again with him to the solemn business of living. We keep close to him while the great misunderstanding concerning him grows blacker and blacker, we are with him in the heart of the awful tragedy. We watch the supremely good, apprehended, tried, condemned, and crucified as the supremely bad, and in it all absolute, strength so victorious. This is we behold comprehension so clear, pity so man at his highest; this is our humanity carried to its best. This is the glory of human history. Nothing is wanting here that the wise and noble mind can ask for ; everything is here that should be present in human character. And it is this perfect human reality that gives to Jesus Christ his unique influence over men, that lends to his character its endless interest for men. You may call him divine or semi-divine, God or the Son of God; these are names, significant for some, insignificant for others. What you must note is that the sovereign soul of Jesus is his humanity; that is the reality, that is the truth of his being. Human nature, the greatest thing that we know, becomes in him the highest and best.

These concurring currents of thought, co-operating throughout the past century, have not merely changed theological opinions on certain doctrines; they have not merely modified special articles in the ancient creeds; they have not merely modified the point of view of the student-they have changed the method of approach to God. We no longer ask ourselves what God must be supposed to be, and deduce our conclusions concerning his dealing with men from such presuppositions. We ask ourselves, What is man? we answer that question by asking another, What is the ideal of humanity toward which man is growing? and to that question we find our answer in the life and character of Jesus of Nazareth. Through this study, first of humanity as it is, next as it aspires to be, and last of all as it is exhibited in the realized ideal of humanity portrayed in the

life of Jesus of Nazareth, we find our way to God. And this method gives us a fundamentally different conception of God from that furnished by the a priori conceptions of the old theology.

The skeptic may say that this method is also based upon a presupposition; that the faith that we are to find the likeness of God in ideal humanity is founded on the assumption that ideal humanity is made in the likeness of God. If religion were merely curiosity looking for an explanation of the riddle of the universe, this would be a just criticism. But it is not. Religion is aspiration looking for a model of character, and reverence looking for an object of worship. Neither is to be found in nature. The wind, the earthquake, and the fire may awake our awe, but never our reverence nor our love. These look for ideals to follow and objects to worship in the statesman creating a nation, in the patriot giving his life to its preservation, in the martyr scattering the seeds of a new revealing of truth through the ashes of his martyrdom, in the mother laying down her life in unrecognized service to her child; and back of all such deeds of heroism, and the type of them all, reverence and love find an ideal to follow and an object to reverence in the life of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the after-life of Jesus the Christ, manifested in the Christly lives of thousands who call themselves by his name and of other thousands who follow him without knowing that they do so; and back even of him and of the humanity he has inspired, inspiring their common life and guiding them to a common end, reverence and

love dimly perceive the Spirit of purity and goodness and truth, and find in this figure, dimly as they perceive it, undefined and even undefinable though it be, the object of their quest, the One, interpreted to them by the life of idealized humanity but greater than all humanity, interpreted to them by Jesus Christ, the supreme object they have sought. Reverence and love have found God. the evidence that they have found him is a mystic experience of his fellowship which they are powerless to impart to the unrevering intellect and which the unrevering intellect is equally powerless

And

to take away from worshiping reverence and love.

The Church to-day needs theologians who, frankly accepting this Biblica method of approach to God-for the method of the Hebrew people was always "through man to God"—and frankly discarding as theological material, without attacking, those creeds which were arrived at by a very different method. will interpret what may be known of God and his ways in a humanized theology. And it needs even more an apostolic ministry who, in the same spirit of frankness, will help humanity in this philanthropic age to find ideals for its life and an object for its worship through a humanized religiona religion which will treat the spirit of humanity, not as a rival of religion, but as a teacher of religion and the guide of the soul" through man to God."

The Spectator

A third-class carriage in Switzerland is apt to be an international ́ affair. When it is a carriage that is going on a pilgrimage to Einsiedeln, the "Swiss Mecca," it becomes a still more interestThe Spectator ing epitome of mankind. sat beside a white-haired peasant woman, brown and wrinkled and wholesome, and opposite him a voluble workingman, with a dog in his arms and a cage of birds in the rack above his head, was explaining to a stolid German, in a mixture of Italian and Swiss, how his pets disliked traveling. A pretty Frenchwoman and her husband were in another

seat with a couple of priests, and two peasant girls with quaint head-dresses were in a third. At the last moment, with a rush and clang, in trooped half a dozen soldiers, with guns and knapsacks, apparently off duty and somewhat exhiltwittered with fear; the dog barked; The birds in the cage arated with beer. and altogether it was an animated scene, and reminded the Spectator of "Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were going to St. Ives?"

Certainly there was no more austerity about this part of the pilgrimage than the

Canterbury Pilgrims showed in Chaucer's day. One soldier produced a mouth organ, and two others executed a jig in the aisle, while the old peasant woman smiled and nodded at them. The Spectator regretted his ignorance of patois, for a broad-shouldered, fair-haired young soldier entered into conversation loudly with the whole carriage, eliciting shouts of laughter. The Swiss soldier is forever associated with heroics and the Lion of Lucerne in the tourist's mind, but he appears to be a very simple, easy-going, and popular person in everyday life; and the two peasant girls obviously set their queer, wide-winged caps at him, and giggled tremendously at his evidently ardent compliments.

If the train was crowded, Einsiedeln

was more so. It was dark when the little mountain town, among its forested hills, was reached, but lights were moving everywhere, and a band was playing in the great square in front of the abbey that dominates the place from its central height. Mine host of the Peacock had no rooms empty, though he boasts a hundred of them; but he had arranged

with various outside lodgings to take the overflow, and the Spectator found himself in a tiny whitewashed chamber, with a bare floor, monumental feather bed, and a pitcher and basin the size of á teacup and saucer. The schedule of services for next day-the great pilgrimage day of the year-hung on the door, Mass at half-past four A.M. began the list; but the Spectator mentally decided that he would not commence his devo

church, answering the call of the insistent and persistent bells. The Spectator felt himself a renegade, but the morning was cold and the feather bed warm; and, besides, there were five more stated services that day. So he went to the half-past nine sermon instead, and was properly rewarded for his laziness, since the sermon was an hour long, and in German-Swiss, entirely beyond his comprehension. The great church was so packed with men, women, and children that one could have walked on their heads. Some were French, some Italian ; there were men with earrings in their ears, and girls in folded yellow kerchiefs on their braided hair, or bareheaded, with silver pins artistically stuck through the coils of their tresses. There were old and young, rich and poor—an extraordinary throng, but all serious and reverent, and nearly all armed with prayerbooks and rosaries, which those who did not understand the sermon, like the Spectator, were diligently using in order to improve the moments.

independent devotion, so he slipped in

The Spectator had no such aids to

and out through the crowd as he could, the sermon, to get from one end of the and barely managed, in the one hour of nave to the other, so dense was the crush. Einsiedeln has been a pilgrim center for over a thousand years, and consequently knows its business. The monks have handled these vast throngs of various nationalities so long that their system could hardly be improved upon. The great abbey church, to begin with, is full of gilding, frescoes, statuary, chapels, and shrines. It is one of the worst and most gaudy of eighteenth-century interiors, but its spaces are impressive and its great organ fine, and it lends itself to a continuous performance, so to speak, where all comers can find something to suit them. While the preacher was haranguing an hour on end from a solid gilt pulpit with a flaring clock dial just over his head (a very good idea, indeed), a continuous mass was going on in the "Engelweihe" chapel, the original cell of St. Meinrad the hermit, which is built into one end of the nave very much

as the Portiuncula of St. Francis has been preserved at Assisi. St. Meinrad flourished in 861 A.D., when the abbey hill was part of the "Dark Forest" of Einsiedeln. The son of a prince, he became a holy man of renown, and was murdered in his cell by two criminals whom he had befriended. They were followed, as they fled, by two ravens whom Meinrad had rescued from a hawk, and were pursued by the birds through the forest, and to a town where they were captured and executed for their crime. The shield of the abbey bears the two ravens, and the cell of the saint, now sheathed in stone, has become the nucleus of the abbey and town. It was dedicated, so the legend goes, by a company of angels-hence its name of Engelweihe; and it contains a wonder-working image of the Madonna and Child, as black as a coal, but clad in the stiffest cloth of gold, richly jeweled. A row of five silver lamps given by emperors and princes used to burn before this image, and sixteen silver candlesticks, one for each Swiss Catholic canton, stood on the altar. But Einsiedeln has been despoiled and restored over and over again in its long history, and these ancient things have vanished during the storms of war and politics, and are replaced by a great deal of copper-gilt bravery, red and white roses with gilt leaves, and electric lamps.

Here, all morning long, the mass. went on, one gorgeously robed priest succeeding another without a moment's cessation. A kneeling, praying crowd was twenty deep in front of it all the while. One pilgrim out of twenty carried a camp-stool, but the rest asked for no such luxury. At the smaller chapels lining the whole long nave, companies knelt and recited prayers together in French, Italian, and German, passing from one chapel to another. Then, as soon as the sermon was over, high mass began with the full choir and organ for which Einsiedeln is justly celebrated. The Spectator went off to lunch, and came back to find processions with robed choirs entering the chapel of St. Meinrad and singing the Salve Regina, kneeling, before the sacred image. After

that another sermon began. It had been raining in the morning; but now the sun shone, and the monks, some of them, were leading a procession of French pilgrims up the wooded hills to a cross half-way above the valley, singing as they went. It was all extraordinarily serious, reverent, devotional, emotional, and picturesque.

But the great climax was in the evening-a dark, starless, chilly one, in which all the warmth and life seemed to radiate from the great church above, brilliantly lit, with wide-open doors, and with a double file of soldiery outlining a path down to the market-place. There a great platform, like a gigantic altar, hung with hundreds of tiny blazing lamps, faced the church, and down the stones to it came the last long procession of the pilgrims, each bearing a candle. There were young girls, all in white, with crowns of white roses; there were ranks of nuns, black-robed and whitecoifed; there were priests and choir, dignitaries and bishop, and the Host borne under a canopy. Out in the night, under the flaring lights, a service was sung and chanted; and as the bishop lifted the Host, the whole throng fell on their knees on the stones, and there was a moment of awed and reverent stillness. Then the responses broke out afresh from the choir, the band joined in, the bishop and the rest marched up under the canopy, the pilgrim thousands crowded into the church doors again, almost sweeping away the lines of soldiers in their enthusiasm, and service, chant, and choral began again around the chapel of Meinrad, till at ten o'clock the Spectator left them still singing and came away. Down on the square a few pilgrims were drinking from the Virgin's fountain, going round from one to the other of its fourteen bronze spouts, as their custom is. The big bells were ringing yet, as they had rung practically all day long. They were the last sound the Spectator heard as he went to sleep, and they remain in his memory as the emblem of Einsiedeln's continual call to the pilgrim, which has not failed for a thousand years.

W

E had sincerely hoped-we Frenchmen of pacific tendencies who desire for every human being a place of his own under the sun of liberty-that the conflict between Church and State would terminate amicably. But the die is cast. War is declared. Not only is it declared, but hostilities have commenced. "We were not willing," said our Premier, M. Clemenceau, addressing an adversary, "we were not willing that you should fire the first shot." This first shot was the expulsion from French territory of Monsignor Montagnini di Mirabello, official delegate of the Pope.

Let us review here the first week of a fierce struggle whose consequences will long be felt. Before doing so, however, we shall find it of use, in gaining a clear comprehension of the circumstances, to supplement this review by a few reflections.

For several years the sectarian politicians of the Extreme Left had demanded the rupture of the Concordat. But wise Republicans felt that the hour for this had not yet come. We could, indeed, have ved for a long time still under the old régime had not Pope Pius X. raised such a protest as he did against the visit of President Loubet to the King of Italy that famous protest with which the public is familiar. This tactless proceeding excited to indignation the entire

democracy of France. Adroitly profiting by the situation, the Extreme Left demanded immediate separation. Rough drafts of laws were drawn up, but they were so drastic that public opinion remained unfavorable to them. An impulse toward Liberalism made itself felt in Parliament and through the entire country. Then the labor and travail of just minds bore fruit at last in the law of M. Briand. Through his policy, from which proceeded the main influence of the laical element, the law was made conformable to the spirit of the primitive Church, as well as to that of modern democracy. But it struck at the hierarchical philosophy of the Roman Church. The Vatican received it unfavorably. Our Catholic politicians, fiercely inimical to the democracy, encouraged resistance by spreading the report that the mass of French people were not in sympathy with the law. But the memorable elections of May 6, 1906, gave a formidable blow to the clerical and monarchical reaction. The Governmental majority was increased, and the separation law received an impetus. After the national conference a noticeable change of attitude took place among fair-minded Catholics-those who are attached to their religion from motives of piety rather than because of political considerations. After examining the law more closely they concluded that its observance would