as it goes, what it does is this: in the face
of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy,
it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a
historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable,
to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ,
as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was
meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church
to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from
us the reality of the wonders in which it began.

The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron
systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it
shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is,
in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in
the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of
Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but
depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have
misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not
understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the
writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest
among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a
writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest
and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save
and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of
it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of
hearts in the object for which He created it.

X

THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]

[12]
_Guardian_, 6th March 1889.

Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force
the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so,
using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect,
in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing
the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of
mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa
Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a
Calvin's _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an
_Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than
usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human
questioning, Plato