anger at their miserable dalliance with evil. I rather
believe that we are rising and struggling to the light, and that his
heart is with us, not against us in the battle. It may of course be
said that all that kind of Calvinism has disappeared; that no rational
Christians believe it, but hold a larger and a wider faith. I think
that this is true of a few intelligent Christians, as far as the
dropping of Calvinism goes, though it seems to me that they find it
somewhat difficult to define their faith; but as to Calvinism having
died out in England, I do not think that there is any reason to suppose
that it has done so; I believe that a large majority of English
Christians would believe the above-quoted hymn to be absolutely
justified in its statements both by Scripture and reason, and that a
considerable minority would hardly consider it definite enough.

But then came a larger and a wider thought. We talk and think so
carelessly of the divine revelation; we, who have had a religious
bringing up, who have been nurtured upon Israelite chronicles and
prophecies, are inclined, or at least predisposed, to think that the
knowledge of God is written larger and more directly in these records,
the words of anxious and troubled persons, than in the world which we
see about us. Yet surely in field and wood, in sea and sky, we have a
far nearer and more instant revelation of God. In these ancient
records we have the thoughts of men, intent upon their own schemes and
struggles, and looking for the message of God, with a fixed belief that
the history of one family of the human race was his special and
particular prepossession. Yet all the while his immediate Will was
round them, written in a thousand forms, in bird and beast, in flower
and tree. He permits and tolerates life. He deals out joy and sorrow,
life and death. Science has at least revealed a far more vast and
inscrutable force at work in the world, than the men of ancient days
ever dreamed of.

Do we do well to confine our religious life to these ancient
conceptions? They have no doubt a certain shadow of truth in them; but
while I know for certain that the huge Will of God is indeed at work
around me, in every field and wood, in every stream and pool, do I
_really_ know, do I honestly believe that any such process as the hymn
indicates, is going on in some distant region of heaven? The hymn
practically presupposes that our little planet is the only one in whic