alm a
proclamation goes forth, "Come ye! Come to the banquet which death is
preparing out of life!" All this the modern surgeon disappoints with a
smile and a wave of his hand. The invisible swarms of invading
animalculae are swept back. Not a single bacterium can any longer enter
the most inviting wound while the surgeon stands ready with drawn
sword to defend the portals of life.

Great Religious Movements.

DEFENCE ON NEW LINES.

In a period so intensely active and progressive as the nineteenth
century has been, in politics, science and literature, it would have
been surprising if the church had remained inert, wrapped like a mummy
in the cerements of the past. At the beginning of the century, there
were voices on all hands loudly proclaiming that it was dead; that it
was antiquated and obsolete; that it had lost touch with the life of
the time, that it was a relic of exploded superstition; and as a great
writer said, had fallen into a godless mechanical condition, standing
as the lifeless form of a church, a mere case of theories, like the
carcass of a once swift camel, left withering in the thirst of the
universal desert. That in certain circles there was ground for such
reproach is sufficiently proved. Materialism had crept into its
colleges, sapping away their spiritual life and driving young men
either into Atheism or into the Roman Catholic Communion. Such
activity as it had, was in the evangelical circles only The common
people still listened eagerly to Wesley's successors and were
intensely in earnest in the Christian life and work. It was at the top
that the tree was dying, where the currents of the philosophy of
Voltaire struck the branches, and where Hume's scorching radicalism
blighted its leaves. In the universities, and the clubs, not in the
workshops, was religion scorned and contemned.

There was soon, however, to be a quickening of the dry bones. The
spirit of the time--the zeit-geist--began to move in the Church. It
was the spirit of investigation, of scientific inquiry, of rigorous
test. The older preachers and religious authorities still droned about
the duty of defending the faith "once for all" delivered to the
saints. In spite of their protests, the younger men would go down into
the crypt of the Church, and examine the foundations of the building.
They could not be kept back by authoritative assurances that the
stones were sound, and were well and truly laid. The hysterical
prote