ents. '_It is barely possible_,' says Mr. Stephen, '_with
the best intentions, to take such a discussion seriously. Boswell tells
us how a lady interrogated Dr. Johnson as to the nature of the spiritual
body. She seemed desirous, he adds, of "knowing more; but he left the
subject in obscurity." We smile at Boswell's evident impression that
Johnson could, if he had chosen, have dispelled the darkness. When we
find a number of educated gentlemen seriously enquiring as to the
conditions of existence in the next world, we feel that they are sharing
Boswell's_ naivete _without his excuse. What can any human being outside
a pulpit say upon such a subject which does not amount to a confession
of his own ignorance, coupled, it may be, with more or less suggestion
of shadowy hopes and fears? Have the secrets of the prison-house really
been revealed to Canon Farrar or Mr. Beresford Hope?... When men search
into the unknowable, they naturally arrive at very different results._'
And Mr. Stephen argues with perfect justice that if we are to judge
Christianity from such discussions as these, its doctrines of a future
life are all visibly receding into a vague '_dreamland_;' and we shall
be quite ready to admit, as he says, in words I have already quoted,
'_that the impertinent young curate who tells [him he] will be burnt
everlastingly for not sharing such superstitions, is just as ignorant as
[Mr. Stephen himself], and that [Mr. Stephen] knows as much as [his]
dog_.'

The critic, in the foregoing passages, draws his conclusion from the
condition of but one Protestant doctrine. But he might draw the same
conclusion from all; for the condition of all of them is the same. The
divinity of Christ, the nature of his atonement, the constitution of the
Trinity, the efficacy of the sacraments, the inspiration of the
Bible--there is not one of these points on which the doctrines, once so
fiercely fought for, are not now, among the Protestants, getting as
vague and varying, as weak and as compliant to the caprice of each
individual thinker, as the doctrine of eternal punishment. And Mr.
Stephen and his school exaggerate nothing in the way in which they
represent the spectacle. Protestantism, in fact, is at last becoming
explicitly what it always was implicitly, not a supernatural religion
which fulfils the natural, but a natural religion which denies the
supernatural.

And what, as a natural religion, is its working power in the world? Much