is nothing left but to appeal to the Church--not, indeed, to the Church
of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms,
but to that venerable fiction, "the undivided Church" of the first few
centuries of our era, and thus brand religion with the stigma of
retrogression by proclaiming it the only thing which is incapable of
progress.

Not infrequently is a progressive movement attended at first by a
partial reaction, and it is not at all unlikely that Ritualistic
clergymen have been terrified into an increased reliance upon forms and
rites by the disastrous effects produced upon many of their followers
or fellow-churchmen by the new controversial methods of Mrs. Humphry
Ward.

Now, what is this new controversy? It consists in the adoption of the
handiest implement available to literary genius, namely, the novel, or
fictional history, and by consummate critical and constructive skill,
showing the disintegration of the old faiths and the building up of the
new in the life of some representative man or woman. There is much
more in such a novel than appears. First, there is the work of the
scholar, of the man of research. He is like the miner who works
underground and digs out of the hard earth that "gem of purest ray
serene," the truth. Then comes the artist, just as cultured as the
scholar, and only less learned, who polishes the gem and gives it its
setting in pages of brilliant writing, and what is more important
still, weaves it subtly into the daily life of some human being to whom
it has been slowly and always painfully introduced. Or, to vary the
metaphor, this new controversy is an inoculation performed by one who
possesses a masterly acquaintance with the circulatory system of the
spiritual anatomy, and is enabled thereby to describe with unerring
accuracy the precise effects of the new ideal at every stage of its
progress through the soul. You see before you the experiment of a new
ideal, at first only suggested, then partially welcomed and even loved.
Then the awful struggle in which no quarter can be given on either
side, and the final victory of the truth. Such is the new controversy,
the world of truth brought down to the world of life, the fertilising
streams of knowledge turned by some strong, wise hand, into the narrow
channel of an individual existence for the purification and recreation
of life.

Naturally, the distinguished authoress turned her attention first to
the Angl