and ere long to make, a hardness of its own; and then, self-seeking, and
therefore anti-Christian, it fell. Amid all its actual corruption the
Church stands forth a living witness, by its ritual and its sacraments,
to this fundamental truth of the Cross; and ever and anon from its
deepest degradation there emerges clear and sharp some figure bending
under this noblest burden of our doom--some Savonarola or St Francis
charged with the one thought of truth and right, of the highest truth and
right, to be followed, if need were, through the darkness of death and of
hell.

Perhaps few ages have needed more than our own to have this fundamental
principle of Christian ethics--this doctrine of the Cross--sharply and
strongly proclaimed to it. Our vast advances in physical science tend,
in the first instance at least, to withdraw regard from the higher
requirements of life. Even the progress of commerce and navigation, at
once multiplying the means and extending the sphere of physical and
aesthetic enjoyment, aids to intensify the appetite for these. Systems
of so-called philosophy start undoubtingly with the axiom that happiness
is the one aim of man: and with at least some of these happiness is
simply coincident with physical well-being. Political Economy aims as
undoubtingly to act on the principle, "the greatest possible happiness of
the greatest possible number:" and perhaps, as Political Economy claims
to deal with man in his physical life only, it were unreasonable to
expect from it regard to aught above this. Our current and popular
literature--Fiction, Poetry, Essays on social relations--is emphatically
a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of
pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain. And last, and in some respects most
serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit
of the age. Representative of a debased and emasculated Christianity, it
attacks our humanity at its very core. It rings out to us, with