THE SAVAGE CLUB. L' ITERARY and artistic society in England has, within the last thirty or forty years, undergone a notable change-a change which has been concurrent with a corresponding movement among other classes of the community. During this space of time those persons, especially, who are engaged in the professional and superior commercial pursuits, have shown an ever-advancing tendency in the direction of greater luxury and refinement—a constantly increasing desire to surround themselves with the elegancies of life, and, as the phrase goes, to "live up to them." Their houses are more handsomely and tastefully furnished and decorated than in the past; walls once disfigured with pictorial monstrosities are now hung with works pleasing to the aesthetic sense; the hand of art has touched and beautified every article of domestic use; antique fashions have been revived to give new grace to modern ornament. Simultaneously we have to note a growing disposition among the upper middle-classes to cultivate the fine arts. There is, in these days, more art-work-more painting, singing, and playing-executed in our homes than there was a generation ago; while persons well-to-do, and even of moderate means, in larger numbers than ever, buy pictures, engravings, books, periodical publications, and so forth; throng the art galleries and frequent the theatres and concert-rooms. At the same time our upper middle-classes have come more and more to affect the ways of the orders immediately above them in the social scale. They aspire to be "in the fashion"; and have migrated from the West Central and Northern districts to the West-end, in the endeavour to creep nearer to the outer ring of that magic circle known as the beau monde. That love of "appearances" which so provoked the scorn of Michael Angelo Titmarsh has shown no sign of diminution on the primitive idea. It yielded, in its turn, in many parts of the Christian world, to an idea which seems to mark a still further advance, that the Christian sacrifice is one not of material things but of the will, and that the essence even of Christ's offering was the same. It is by thus reading the record of the history of thought that we must expect the theological knowledge of the future to be distinguished from the knowledge of the present, as the physical knowledge of the present is distinguished from the knowledge of the past. The reading of that record must be the work of many men working through many generations. It must be the work of many men, both because it must be spelt out letter by letter, and because the writing is of many kinds and requires more than one type of mind to interpret it. It must be the work also of many generations, because the judgments of masses of men upon large questions settle down but slowly, and each succeeding generation revises unconsciously and in silence the judgment of that which has gone before. But when we remember that the science of geology, including all those large parts of its domain which belong to chemistry, to botany, and to zoology, is not yet a hundred years old; when we consider the exactitude and minuteness of it, even though it has not yet perfected its methods or achieved its final results; when we see large numbers of able men patiently toiling at small fragments of it, and thinking it almost a life-work to have found a new fossil; when we take into account the far keener enthusiasm with which, when once that enthusiasm is roused, men may be expected to work at the strata of religious history, we may look forward with the delight of a hope that is already halfrealized to what our son's sons will know. But what, after all, you will ask, will they know that we do not know? When theology has followed in the track of geology, when it has ascertained the conditions under which past strata of thought have existed, and the law of their sequence, how much nearer will men be to theological truth and to the sense of certainty? In the first place, the area of controversy will be diminished by the recognition of the fact that phases of opinion are relative to states of mind, and by the gradual elimination from the domain of present discussion of the opinions which, by the operation of artificial causes, have outlived their proper environment. In the second place, there will be a growing recognition of the limitations of our knowledge. When we have learned the conditions and the sequences of material things, we have learned the greater part of what it is possible for us to know about them. Metaphysics promised more than this: it framed complete cosmologies, it professed to define the essence of things. But the growth of scientific knowledge has revealed to us that, whatever may be the possibility of our ultimately knowing more about them, we must be at present content to know their conditions and their law, and to gather together one by one whatever indications may be afforded by such knowledge as to their inner nature. In the same way when we have come to know how little it is given to us to know of the spiritual world of which we are part, and what are the conditions of our knowing it, we shall have made the first step towards building up, stone by stone, the firm fabric of the positive knowledge of it. Such positive knowledge comes slowly, nor can it be anticipated. The chief of the results which can be affirmed with a sense of certainty now, if one of the simplest, is also one of the sublimest. It is the revelation of the nature both of God and of the human soul which is implied in the fact of sequence and growth. The sublimest result of all the physical sciences is the knowledge, which is as certain as any inferential knowledge can be, that the whole vast universe, and this earth as part of it, have progressed from lower to higher forms, from a less to a more complex state of existence. The metaphysical conception of it tended to be that of a world made all at once by a single fiat. It was argued that creation must have been instantaneous, because a thought of God could not rest, even for an infinitesimal moment, inoperative and unachieved. The interval which in human action must elapse between conception and execution vanished in the action of God. It was a sublime thought. And yet, for all its sublimity, it was but a reflection of our finiteness and our impatience. We learn not from metaphysics, but from the record of the world's history which is written in its structure, that the result of the action of God has been gradual and progressive. This knowledge is independent of any particular theory as to the mode of that action. It is equally true whether the progression was by "natural selection" or by successive creations. The world, however created, was not created all at once in the perfection which it was destined to attain. But that which, from the point of view of the scientist, is a progress of creation, is, from the point of view of the theologian, a revelation of God. He unfolds himself in creation step by step. The innumerable years roll on, and the generations of men succeed each other like the uncounted seconds that pass in the busy hours of time. There is no fast nor slow. There is but the awful rhythm of an everlasting life. Patiens quia acternus. This sublimest truth of physical science is also the sublimest truth of historical theology. The world of spiritual, no less than the world of material, phenomena is the result of progressive movement. We learn not from metaphysics but from history that the action of God in the human soul, no less than His action in the material world, has been gradual and progressive. But that which, from the point of view of the historian, is the slow evolution of thought, is, from the He point of view of the theologian, the gradual revelation of God. has manifested Himself in the human soul "in many portions and in many ways." Every new thought has been a new revelation. Like a vast roll that slowly unfolds itself, the knowledge of God manifests itself from more to more. The fact of the gradualness of the manifestation is the sublimest as it is also the most certain of truths; for it suggests that in these surging tides of human thought, in the ideals which men frame, in their large abstractions, in the slow elaboration of their settled convictions, God may be not only revealing Himself to His creatures, but also realizing Himself to Himself. This is the contribution which our age promises to make to theology. It alters its character. It transfers its basis from metaphysics to history. It abandons the search for essences, and looks only to the operation of forces. It recognizes in the operation of spiritual forces a revelation of the nature of spirit, in the same way as the operation of physical forces reveals all that we know of the nature of the physical world. In doing this it gives to theology a basis of certainty. It builds it upon the fact of the manifestation of God in Jesus Christ rather than upon speculations as to His nature. It puts that fact before us as one which was meant to be understood not all at once but progressively, as in the physical world succeeding generations have better understood the phenomena of light and heat. It thereby raises theology again to its lost place in the world of human thought, making it sit once more where the Angelic Doctor sits in the great fresco of the Spanish Chapel; but in place of that incarnation of the metaphysics of the Middle Ages is a divine figure robed in a modern dress, all other forms of knowledge sitting, as they sat of old, at her feet, and all the energies of the noblest of mankind again busy in her service. EDWIN HATCH. THE SAVAGE CLUB. L ITERARY and artistic society in England has, within the last thirty or forty years, undergone a notable change—a change which has been concurrent with a corresponding movement among other classes of the community. During this space of time those persons, especially, who are engaged in the professional and superior commercial pursuits, have shown an ever-advancing tendency in the direction of greater luxury and refinement—a constantly increasing desire to surround themselves with the elegancies of life, and, as the phrase goes, to "live up to them." Their houses are more handsomely and tastefully furnished and decorated than in the past; walls once disfigured with pictorial monstrosities are now hung with works pleasing to the aesthetic sense; the hand of art has touched and beautified every article of domestic use; antique fashions have been revived to give new grace to modern ornament. Simultaneously we have to note a growing disposition among the upper middle-classes to cultivate the fine arts. There is, in these days, more art-work-more painting, singing, and playing-executed in our homes than there was a generation ago; while persons well-to-do, and even of moderate means, in larger numbers than ever, buy pictures, engravings, books, periodical publications, and so forth; throng the art galleries and frequent the theatres and concert-rooms. At the same time our upper middle-classes have come more and more to affect the ways of the orders immediately above them in the social scale. They aspire to be "in the fashion"; and have migrated from the West Central and Northern districts to the West-end, in the endeavour to creep nearer to the outer ring of that magic circle known as the beau monde. That love of "appearances " which so provoked the scorn of Michael Angelo Titmarsh has shown no sign of diminution |