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have been vehemently discussed for centuries. We have to take sides;
and we at least have agreed to take the side of the downright thinker,
who will say nothing that he does not believe, and hide nothing that he
does believe, and speak out his mind without reservation or economy and
accommodation. Indeed, as things are, any other course seems to me to
be impossible. I have spoken, for example, of General Booth. Many
people heartily admire his schemes of social reform, and have been
willing to subscribe for its support, without troubling themselves
about his theology. I will make no objection; but I confess that I
could not therefore treat that theology as either morally or
intellectually respectable. It has happened to me once or twice to
listen to expositions from orators of the Salvation Army. Some of them
struck me as sincere though limited, and others as the victims of an
overweening vanity. The oratory, so far as I could hear, consisted in
stringing together an endless set of phrases about the blood of Christ,
which, if they really meant anything, meant a doctrine as low in the
intellectual scale as that of any of the objects of missionary
enterprise. The conception of the transactions between God and man was
apparently modelled upon the dealings of a petty tradesman. The "blood
of Christ" was regarded like the panacea of a quack doctor, which will
cure the sins of anybody who accepts the prescription. For anything I
can say, such a creed may be elevating--relatively: elevating as
slavery is said to have been elevating when it was a substitute for
extermination. The hymns of the Army may be better than public-house
melodies, and the excitement produced less mischievous than that due to
gin. But the best that I can wish for its adherents is, that they
should speedily reach a point at which they could perceive their
doctrines to be debasing. I hope, indeed, that they do not realise
their own meaning: but I could almost as soon join in some old pagan
ceremonies, gash my body with knives, or swing myself from a hook, as
indulge in this variety of spiritual intoxication.

There are, it is true, plenty of more refined and intellectual
preachers, whose sentiments deserve at least the respect due to tender
and humane feeling. They have found a solution, satisfactory to
themselves, of the great dilemma which presses on so many minds. A
religion really to affect the vulgar must be a superstition; to satisfy
the thoughtf