ious question. They must ever be contrasted as habits of
mind, as sources whence faith arises. But it needs no exceptional
discernment to see that the religion of the strenuous and progressive,
the peoples who move the world and make its history, cannot by any
possibility known to us be a religion of undiluted authority. As a man
is, so are the gods he worships, for the gods are the ideal. Therefore
the progressive nations who find it impossible to stand still, not to
speak of looking back, will more and more recede from even the remnant
of the Helbeck ideal which remains to us to-day, and find their
inspiration in a religion which is advancing like themselves. What!
science grow, knowledge increase, freedom advance, and religion only
stagnate! Perish the thought! Our religion, like our knowledge, grows
from day to day, because it is only through the deepening knowledge of
the universe and of himself that man is enabled to rise to a
proportionate knowledge of That of which all things are but transitory
symbols. Creeds and systems, prisons of the infinite spirit of man,
never can they befit the age in which the ideal of progress has
entered, like an intoxication, into the soul. "The snare is broken and
we are delivered." Woe to the man, woe to the people, who are content
to sit or stand! Woe to them whose hope is in the dead past, and not
in their living selves! Woe to the faith that has no better message
for the eager, palpitating generations of to-day, than a bundle of
parchments from the third or fourth century, or the impossible
practices of an age when the life of the world stood still! They shall
never inherit the earth. The new heaven, the better land, is reserved
for the strenuous and the progressive alone, for "the kingdom of heaven
suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away".

[1] The Rev. Father Clarke, of the Jesuit Society, in the _Nineteenth
Century_ of September, 1898, refuses to recognise Helbeck as true to
the Catholic type. Certainly, he is not a modern Roman Catholic, and
probably Mrs. Ward knows this as well as her critic. The question is,
which conforms to type, the old or the modern English Catholic? Mr.
Mivart's "liberal catholic" criticisms of Father Clarke in the October
number of the same review are good, very good, reading.

XIV.

THE RELIGION OF TENNYSON.

Prophecy and poetry are the embodiment in artistic form of the abstract
conceptions of the philosopher