all amenable to one great influence. The
vast shuttle of modern life is weaving together all races and creeds
and classes. We are no longer shut up in separate compartments, where
the mental horizon is limited by the area visible from the parish
steeple; each little section can no longer fancy, in the old childish
fashion, that its own arbitrary prejudices and dogmas are parts of the
eternal order of things; or infer that in the indefinite region beyond,
there live nothing but monsters and anthropophagi, and men whose heads
grow beneath their shoulders. The annihilation of space has made us
fellows as by a kind of mechanical compulsion; and every advance of
knowledge has increased the impossibility of taking our little
church--little in comparison with mankind, be it even as great as the
Catholic Church--for the one pattern of right belief. The first effect
of bringing remote nations and classes into closer contact is often an
explosion of antipathy; but in the long run it means a development of
human sympathy. Wide, therefore, as is the opposition of opinions as to
what is the true theory of the world--as to which is the divine and
which the diabolical element--I fully believe that beneath the war of
words and dogmas there is a growth of genuine toleration, and, we must
hope, of ultimate conciliation.

This is manifest in another direction. The churches are rapidly making
at least one discovery. They are beginning to find out that their
vitality depends not upon success in theological controversy, but upon
their success in meeting certain social needs and aspirations common to
all classes. It is simply impossible for any thinking man at the
present day to take any living interest, for example, in the ancient
controversies. The "drum ecclesiastic" of the seventeenth century would
sound a mere lullaby to us. Here and there a priest or a belated
dissenting minister may amuse himself by threshing out once more the
old chaff of dead and buried dogmas. There are people who can argue
gravely about baptismal regeneration or apostolical succession. Such
doctrines were once alive, no doubt, because they represented the form
in which certain still living problems had then to present themselves.
They now require to be stated in a totally different shape, before we
can even guess why they were once so exciting, or how men could have
supposed their modes of attacking the question to be adequate. The Pope
and General Booth still cond