he nation and of social redemptive effort exists
outside the churches altogether. I am well aware that there is a great
deal of snarling criticism of the churches which springs from selfish
materialism, and I gladly recognise that in almost any ordinary church
to-day brave and self-denying work is being done for the common good,
but this does not invalidate my general statement. The plain, bald
fact remains that the churches as such are counting for less and less
in civilisation in general and our own nation in particular. One of
the ablest of our rising young members of Parliament, a man of strong
religious convictions and social sympathies, recently declared that we
were witnessing the melancholy spectacle of a whole civilisation
breaking away from the faith out of which it grew. To be sure, the
same thing has been said before and has proved to be wrong. It was
said in the eighteenth century when men with something of the prophet's
fire in them preached the gospel of the Rights of Man, declaring at the
same time that institutional religion was at an end, utterly
discredited, and impossible of acceptance by any intelligent being. In
France during the Revolution the populace turned frantically upon the
established faith, tore it to shreds, burlesqued it, and set up the
worship of the Goddess of Reason, as they called it, typified by a
Parisian harlot. In England a devitalised Deism laid its chilly hand
not only upon the world of scholars and men of letters, but even upon
the church. An English king is reported to have said that half his
bishops were atheists. And yet, somehow, religion reasserted itself
all over the civilised world. Napoleon with shrewd insight realised
that the people could not do without it, and so effected the Concordat
with Rome which has now been dissolved; Wesley began the movement in
England which has since created the largest Protestant denomination in
the world; Germany produced a succession of great preachers and
scholars the like of whom had hardly ever been known in Europe before.

+Will religious faith regain its power?+--Will this happen again? For
assuredly Christianity has for the moment lost its hold. Can it
recover it? I am sure it can, if only because the moral movements of
the age, such as the great labour movement, are in reality the
expression of the Christian spirit, and only need to recognise
themselves as such in order to become irresistible. The waggon of
socialis