ey have done so under the compulsion of secular progress.

Mr. Brooke's conception of the Fatherhood of God is creditable to his
feelings. The deity he worships is one who will "effectually call
to himself and effectually keep, at last, all his children to whose
free-will only one thing is impossible--final division from the
sovereignty of his love." But how far is this creditable to Mr. Brooke's
intelligence? It is certainly inconsistent with the teaching of Christ,
and Mr. Brooke calls himself a Christian. It is no less inconsistent
with all we know of Nature, who is supremely indifferent to the fate
of individuals. To talk so consumedly of God's love in this age of
Darwinism, with its law of natural selection based on a universal
struggle for existence, is to fly in the face of common sense. But here,
alas, as in so many other cases, the voice of reason is drowned in the
chorus of sentimentalism.

With respect to democracy, which is a kind of John the Baptist to Mr.
Brooke's form of Christianity, there can be little doubt, we think, that
it has been chiefly indebted to science, which has in three centuries,
since the days of Copernicus and Galileo, done more to advance the
brotherhood of man than has been done by religion from the "first
syllable of recorded time." Mr. Brooke does not concern himself
with science, however; but he nearly agrees with us in the matter of
chronology. A vast alteration in thought, due to whatever causes, had
been going on for centuries. It was a change "from exclusiveness to
universality," and it "took a literary and philosophical form in the
eighteenth century writers in France, and finally emerged a giant in the
French Revolution." In that mighty upheaval "the whole of the ideas of
the old society perished for ever and ever," and what seems to be left
of them is "but their ghosts, a host of pale-eyed, weary phantoms."

This is true and well expressed, but it should be added that most of
the eighteenth century writers in France, particularly those who may be
called philosophical, were vehemently opposed to Christianity, as were
most of the eminent actors in the Revolution. Several of them were
downright Atheists, who would have regarded the "liberal theology" of
Mr. Brooke as a sign of mental feebleness.

Out of the Revolution sprang the vivid conception of the Brotherhood
of Man, and it was this, Mr. Brooke says, that made possible "the
conception of God's universal Fatherhood." In o