t present be found."

Christendom does not yet realise how greatly, how grievously, it has
suffered in spiritual health by having sent to Coventry or to the stake
so many theological Simpsons, Listers, and Pasteurs simply because they
could not rest their minds in the hypotheses of very ill-educated men
who strove to grapple with the highest of all intellectual problems at a
time when knowledge was at its lowest level.

It will perhaps rouse the vitality of the Church when it finds twenty or
thirty years from now that the great protagonists of Christianity in its
future battles with science and philosophy are drawn from the ranks of
nonconformity.

Dr. Selbie is certainly preparing his students for these encounters, and
preparing them, too, with an emphasis on one particular aspect of the
old theology, and a central one, which the apologists of more orthodox
communions have either overlooked or find it convenient to ignore.

One of his first postulates is that man inhabits a moral universe, and
from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to
contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the
difficulty of punishment for sin. In a little book of his called _Belief
and Life_ he has the following passages:

In the long last men cannot be persuaded to deny their own moral
nature, and they will not be content with a theory of the universe
which does not satisfy their sense of right.

And because of this very sense of right they entertain no soft and
sentimental notions concerning the universe:

They believe in judgment, in retribution, and in the great
principle that "as a man sows, so shall he also reap." They
therefore require that room shall be found in the scheme of things
for the working out of this principle. They recognise that such
room is not to be found in this present life, and so they accept
the fact that God hath set eternity in our hearts, and that we are
built on a scale which requires a more abundant life to complete
it.

In corroboration of their faith, it may be said, as John Stuart
Mill used to argue, that wherever belief in the future has been
strong and vivid, it has made for human progress. There is no doubt
that the deterioration of religion and the more material views of
life so prevalent just now are due to the loss of faith in the
future.

Religion, he says, can never li