New things,
astonishingly new things, in every imaginable department of life have
been witnessed by men who saw the opening years of the century, and
_fin-de-siecle_ as we are, the capacities of man are apparently as
inexhaustible as ever.

It would indeed be passing strange were religion an exception to the
uniform progress everywhere in operation. Doubtless the aspect of that
supreme concern of life does change less rapidly, but change it does
and must: _eppur si muove_. And it is significant, as one of the most
striking results of the beneficent movements of our time, that, in the
English-speaking countries at least, one of the most powerful, because
the most far-reaching, stimuli to religious progress has been supplied
by the hand of a woman.

It has always seemed to me that Mrs. Humphry Ward's _Robert Elsmere_
was the making of an epoch, and when so shrewd an observer of the
times, so enthusiastic an admirer of "the old ways" as Mr. Gladstone,
thought the book worth criticising and censuring, he bore eloquent
testimony to the effect it was evidently destined to produce. Its
influence has unquestionably been great. There are many people who owe
to it their first acquaintance with modern religious thought. Numbers
of the younger clergymen of the Establishment must have been profoundly
moved by it, because the faith of an Anglican is a comparatively
elastic thing compared with the rigidity of supernatural conceptions
which distinguishes the Roman Catholic communion. It may even be true
that these sporadic outbreaks of Ritualism, which are so seriously
threatening to "trouble Israel's peace," owe no little of their force
to the far-reaching effects of the new religious controversy. The
Newcomes of to-day, like their prototype in the novel, may very well
have come to the belief that there is no salvation from that besetting
demon of reason and "intellectual pride," but in a religion of
sensuousness and externalism which Sydney Smith, himself, of course, a
clergyman, once contemptuously designated as "painted jackets and
sanctified watering-pots". _Panem et Circenses_! Bread and games!
Give them fumes of incense, blare and blaze of sounds and lights, and
they may learn to forget that there ever was such a thing as a school
of biblical criticism which has turned orthodoxy into a heresy against
reason by telling the truth about the Bible.

Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanishing point, there