national and personal. This faith was partly an experience and partly
a demand; it turned on history and prophecy. History was interpreted
by a prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to govern
it; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration of the same
principles, at work in the catastrophes of the day or of the morrow.

There is no doubt a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal
apart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into
the life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they
were, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the
Platonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in
attributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and
imaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because
it is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the
world from the story of salvation, and God's government and the
sanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a _fundamental
apostasy_ from Christianity. Christianity, being a practical and
living faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the
punishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most
brilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a
faith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind,
within, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the
destiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that
failures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble
faith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our
point of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical,
physical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in
our day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but
were not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite
for Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and