ew of what is possible and
desirable men may live and organize themselves for the future. In
short, the modern Church is to do what Hebrew prophecy did in its
fashion for the Jews, and what bishops and Popes did according to
their lights for the Roman world when it laboured in the tempest,
and for barbaric tribes first submitting themselves to be taught.
Another grand object of the modern Church would be to teach and
organize the outlying world, which for the first time in history
now lies prostrate at the feet of Christian civilization. Here are
the ends to be gained. These once recognized, the means are to be
determined by their fitness alone" (p. 221).

IV.

So much must suffice to indicate the essential features of the religion
which would be left us after the elimination of the supernatural. And
now we are to consider whether this religion will suffice for the wants
of the world; whether it is a religion "which shall appeal to the sense
of duty as forcibly, preach righteousness and truth, justice and mercy,
as solemnly and as exclusively as Christianity itself does" (p. 157).
Surely to state the question is enough. In fact the author of "Natural
Religion" quite recognizes that "to many, if not most, of those who feel
the need of religion, all that has been offered in this book will
perhaps at first seem offered in derision" (p. 260), and frankly owns
that "whether it deserves to be called a faith at all, whether it
justifies men in living, and in calling others into life, may be
doubted" (p. 66). He tells us that "the thought of a God revealed in
Nature," which he has suggested, does not seem to him "by any means
satisfactory, or worthy to replace the Christian view, or even as a
commencement from which we must rise by logical necessity to the
Christian view" (p. 25) and it must be hard not to agree with him. It is
difficult to suppose that any one who considers the facts oL life, who
contemplates not the _individua vaga_ of theories, but the men and women
of this working-day world can think otherwise. Surely no one who really
surveys mankind as they are, as they have been in the past, and, so far
as we are able to judge, will be in the future, can suppose that this
Natural Religion, even if embodied in a Natural Church, and equipped
with "a free clergy," will meet their wants, or win their affections, or
satisfy those "strange yearnings" of which we read in Plat