l harmonies of the
wide earth and of the stars had touched his listening soul, that
already he who stayed to hear Casella sing heard far off a diviner
music, the tones of the everlasting symphony played by the great
Musician of the World, the chords whereof are the deeds of empires, the
achievements of the heroes of humanity, and its most mysterious
cadences are the thoughts, the faiths, the loftiest utterances of the
mind of man?

And to the present age, what an exhortation is implicit in this thought
of Dante's! No unity, no bond amongst men is so strong as that which
is based on religion. Patriotism, class prejudices, ties of affection,
all break before its presence. What a light is cast upon the deeper
places of the human heart by the history of Jesuitism in the
seventeenth century! Genius for religion is rare as other forms of
genius are rare, yet both in the life of the individual and of the
State its rank is primary. In the soul, religion marks the meridian of
the divine. By its remoteness from or nearness to this the value of
all else in life is tested. And there is nothing which a race will not
more willingly surrender than its religion. The race which changes its
religion is either very young, quick to reverence a greater race, and
ardent for all experiment, or very old, made indifferent by experience
or neglectful by despair.

In the conception at which she has at last arrived, and in her present
attitude towards this force, Britain may justly claim to represent
humanity. She combines the utmost reverence for her own faith with
sympathetic intelligence for the faiths of others. And confronting her
at this hour of the world's history is a task higher than the task of
Akbar, and more auspicious. Akbar's design was indeed lofty, and
worthy of that great spirit; but it was a hopeless design. The forms,
the creeds which have been imposed from without upon a religion are no
integral part of that religion's life. Even when by the progress of
the years they have become transfused by the formative influences which
time and the sufferings or the hopes of men supply, they change or are
cast aside without organic convulsion or menace to the life itself.
But the forms and embodiments which a divine thought in the process of
its own irresistible and mighty growth assumes--these are beyond the
touch of outer things, and evade the shaping hand of man. Inseparable
from the thought which they, as it were, reinc