only, it were unreasonable to
expect from it regard to aught above this. Our current and popular
literature--Fiction, Poetry, Essays on social relations--is emphatically
a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of
pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain. And last, and in some respects most
serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit
of the age. Representative of a debased and emasculated Christianity, it
attacks our humanity at its very core. It rings out to us, with
wearisome iteration, as our one great concern, the saving of our own
souls: degrades the religion of the Cross into a slightly-refined and
long-sighted selfishness: and makes our following Him who "pleased not
Himself" to consist in doing just enough to escape what it calls the
pains of hell--to win what it calls the joys of heaven.

This is the dark side of the picture; but it has its bright side too.
These advances of science, these extensions of commerce, these
philosophies, even where they are falsely so called, this Political
Economy, which from its very nature must first "labour for the meat that
perisheth,"--these are all God's servants and man's ministers still--the
ministers of man's higher and nobler life. Consciously or unconsciously,
they are working to raise from myriads burdens of poverty, care,
ceaseless and fruitless toil, under the pressure of which all higher
aspiration is wellnigh impossible. Sanitary reform in itself may mean
nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more
abundant water: to the "Governor among the nations" it means lessened
impossibility that men should live to Him.

If in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature
has more prostituted itself to purposes of sensational or at most
aesthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age
our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted
itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the Cross. Sometimes
directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate
theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time.
Our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and
only here: Maurice and Arnold, Trench and Vaughan, Robertson and Stanley,
James Martineau and Seeley, Thirlwall and Wilberforce, Kingsley and
Brooke, Caird and Tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in
what is called opini