oral value claimed for itself by orthodoxy. Some of its doctrines, the
great and picturable parts of them, that appeal to all, and that in some
degree can be taken in by all, it declares doubtless to be saving, in
their own nature. But for the mass of men the case is quite different
with the facts underlying these. That we eat Christ's body in the
Eucharist is a belief that, in a practical way, can be understood
perfectly by anyone; but the philosophy that is involved in this belief
would be to most men the merest gibberish. Yet it is no more unimportant
that those who do understand this philosophy, should do so truly and
transmit it faithfully, than it is unimportant that a physician should
understand the action of alcohol, because anyone independent of such
knowledge can tell that so many glasses of wine will have such and such
an effect on him. Theology is to the spiritual body what anatomy and
medicine are to the natural body. The parts they each play in our lives
are analogous, and in their respective worlds their _raison d'etre_ is
the same. What then can be shallower than the rhetoric of such thinkers
as Mr. Carlyle, in which natural religion and orthodoxy are held up to
us as contrasts and as opposites, the former being praised as simple and
going straight to the heart, and the latter described and declaimed
against as the very reverse of this? '_On the one hand_,' it is said,
'_see the soul going straight to its God, feeling His love, and content
that others should feel it. On the other hand, see this pure and free
communion, distracted and interrupted by a thousand tortuous reasonings
as to the exact nature of it. What can obscure intellectual
propositions,_' it is asked, '_have to do with a religion of the heart?
And do not they check the latter by being thus bound up with it?_' But
what really can be more misleading than this? Natural religion is
doubtless simpler in one sense than revealed religion; but it is only
simple because it has no authoritative science of itself. It is simple
for the same reason that a boy's account of having given himself a
headache is simpler than a physician's would be. The boy says merely,
'_I ate ten tarts, and drank three bottles of ginger-beer._' The
physician, were he to explain the catastrophe, would describe a number
of far more complex processes. The boy's account would be of course the
simplest, and would certainly go more home to the general heart of
boyhood; but it would