took their part in supporting and extending it, they protested against its claims to be regarded as supreme in the Universe. Christians would not sacrifice to the Emperor; they refused to pay such honour to an arbitrary will. They regarded the State as a mundane organisation, while the individual has an eternal life within his reach. Earthly institutions for earthly objects shall pass away, but he that doeth the will of God abideth. The intrinsic value of the human life, which God has created and Christ redeemed, cannot be weighed against the institutions which have developed from regard for human convenience.

And since Christianity thus attaches a unique importance to human life, it does not recognise a direct opposition between the claims of the individual and those of the State: they are in different planes. The effort to make the most of the individual life takes us beyond the mundane sphere altogether, while the State is merely concerned with the life that now is. But it is just on this account, because it lays such stress on a future existence for the individual, that the claim of religion to intervene is dismissed by many people as irrelevant. They are not content to look to a future life and another world as redressing the wrongs of our present existence. They are eager for a reconciliation between the good of the individual and the good of the State, here and now. They ask that

they should have a prospect of getting their part in it, in present experience-not in some distant sphere; and they maintain that those who relegate the beneficent influence of Christianity to a life to come, do not satisfy the hopes that are raised in the New Testament by the vision of a new earth.

There have been many who hold it is our wisdom to make the best of this world as we find it, and to bring common sense and reason to bear on the problems of human life and society. They are impressed with the mischief that has been wrought by reckless over-population, and see that so long as this continues it is impossible that there shall be a real improvement in all grades of society; there will always be a tendency to populate down to the lowest standard of comfort. J. S. Mill, who looked forward with enthusiasm to the progress of the working classes, held that there might be a diffusion of rational self-restraint which would bring about a stationary state, in which the feverish race for wealth should have ceased, and opportunities would be more generally diffused for the enjoyment of the wealth which mechanical powers had rendered available. But in so far as Malthusian doctrine has been popularised, it has done little to accomplish the result that was hoped for. Misery continues, for the lowest elements in the social scale continue to populate down to a very low standard of life, while

anxiety has been roused in many quarters by the fall of the birth-rate and the danger of race suicide.

There has been a similar disappointment in diffusing a knowledge of the analysis of the laws according to which wealth tends to be divided. There were many who looked to the teaching of the principles of political economy as a panacea which would reconcile the masses of the people to conditions which seemed to be inevitable. But there has been a wide diffusion of the principles of Ricardo, as interpreted by Marx, and the result has been most unexpected. It is shown that there are many persons in modern society who do little in the production of material goods themselves, although they are able to take a toll from wealth that passes through their hands. The justice of their claim to share personally in wealth which they do not personally create is called in question; the services which they render to society by their skill or organising power are not easily comparable with those of the manual labourers, and the manual labourer has come not merely to urge that the reward of these services should be reconsidered, but to deny that they are worthy of reward at all. It is thus that economic analysis, coupled with the comparison of the opportunities of enjoyment open to different men in their individual lives, has led to a widely spread attack on organising power and scientific

ability at a time when the service they render to society is being recognised in England as it never was before. The irreconcilableness of the rival claims of the individual and of society could not be more clearly brought to light.

The attempt to frame a doctrine of individual and social life, apart from religion altogether, proves to be as great a failure as the one-sided application of religion, as if it were merely a matter of the personal life, and we could weigh the consolations and possibilities which religion holds out against the miseries of this naughty world. But this is a misunderstanding; we cannot hope for a reconciliation unless we look at both sides from the same point of view as Christianity endeavours to do; we may try to look both at personal and at social life as God sees them, and, in attempting to realise the purpose of God, to find guidance for making the most both of individual and of social life. It is by keeping an absolute aim before us that we can see earthly things in a right proportion, and learn better and better how to mould personal life, and social life as well, so that they shall not fall apart, but may work together with the best results for each. All religion is inclined to protest against the materialism of the present day; but a self-centred religion can hardly make an effective protest against materialism; it can be waived aside as the opinion which is natural to a particular temperament. And

self-centred religion has no effective remedy to propound for social life.

Religion is apt to become self-centred when a hard-and-fast line is drawn between the spiritual life within and the external material surroundings of that life, and the latter are regarded as the seat of evil of every kind. The man who is in earnest about making the most of the possibilities of the soul within will feel that he ought to free himself as completely as possible from the attractions of things of sense, and thus escape the evil which is rooted in them. The life of the religious man who thus devotes himself to self-discipline as the means of eradicating evil is continually on the defensive, guarding against the evil around him, and seeking to keep himself pure. To a large extent Christians have been inclined to give their religion this self-centred character in all ages, and to concentrate attention on defences against evil in the personal life. This frame of mind was in part an inheritance from Judaism. Israel was to be separated from the people around, and ceremonial observance served as a guard to keep them from being corrupted by evil communication. When the physical separation of the realm at Jerusalem was broken down and the chosen people were widely dispersed throughout the world, they clung especially to the institutions which separated them from other peoples, as did circumcision, and Sabbath