degree. The original heat of these bodies tends to dissipate in space. The greater part of the heat of the sun is diffused recklessly. Only a little of it serves to nurture the planets that respond to parental attraction. Ultimately this heat will become exhausted, and the whole solar system must then shrivel into dead cinders, a funeral procession rolling through space, unless by chance contact with some live system they be awakened to renewed activity. One theory reports the final fate of the whole universe to be a reduction to dumb nothingness, a cemetery of dead worlds. Another suggests with more probability that the lost heat of one system is bound to be realised elsewhere, and that death and life are always progressing concurrently in different parts of the wide heavens.

The Original

Impulse.

There still remains the question : What is at the back of the beginnings? How came How came motion into being? Who gave the mighty football the first

kick-off? Or if there be no first or last, by what power is this variety of life evolved and maintained ? The knowable is that which our senses report, our consciousness remarks, and our reason assumes as the starting-ground for all deduction and conclusion. But we know

that our senses are limited, and that much lies beyond their cognisance. We cannot be sure that a thing exists in reality as it appears to us. We are necessarily restricted to phenomena, and are therefore justified in assuming something lying behind these phenomena, to which we must attach the name of the

The Unknowable.

Unknowable. First Cause can only be the entrance into the finite and comprehensible of that which previously belonged to the infinite and incomprehensible. Therefore, whether we begin with the Christian or with the scientific theory of life, we must admit that the infinite lies beyond both. The moment we attempt to define we limit. Christianity brings out of that infinite a Being to Whom it attributes quality, form, expression, or He could not be a personal God. It proposes to ascribe to Him eternity and infinity; but it finds that these are simply names which do not add to knowledge, and it is therefore compelled to fall back upon homelier illustrations in order to embody the idea of a supreme Being of purity, love and goodness. The more homely the illustration becomes the closer it draws us to Him, the deeper our love for Him. Christianity therefore presents for our worship a Being interpreted to us by the terms of human relationship, but it insists that this Being, allwise, all-good, all-powerful, is also infinite and eternal, the primal cause behind all things. In so doing, Christianity commits itself to an admission that from this First Cause both Good and Evil must have come. Yet it dare not assign to God the activities of Evil. It therefore retires upon a theory that God permits Evil for some good and temporary purpose unknown to us. This explanation, however, will fail under closer examination, as we shall show later on. We may here interpolate: Why are we called upon to worship a First Cause ? To whom should we address that worship? It is unknowable. It cannot consist of one single

personality. For where there is no circumference there cannot be a centre. Personality, as we understand the term, must always mean a separation of a part from the whole. If we offer worship to the unknowable First Cause we are bound to recognise both Good and Evil in Him, and our reverence therefore ceases to have moral value. So we may conclude that this personal Deity, gracious and lovable, must be a product of that First Cause, and not coincident with it. We therefore claim from Christianity the admission of the Unknowable lying behind its doctrine of God. We find in other faiths the same admission, either stated or implied; the "nameless That " underlying the Brahminic system of deities, the Moira at the back of the Greek theogony.

The Agnostic Philosophy. admits the

The Agnostic philosophy declines to accept this personal idea. The Spencerian section of it indeed possibility of direction, of sympathetic assistance in development along the lines of law, but, taking the phenomena of the world for what they are worth, that section refuses to affirm that such a Deity, whether uni-personal or multi-personal, can be regarded as a moral being. It would report Him as true to His purposes, but non-moral as to the conditions under which those purposes are effected. He is careful of mankind, so far as the type is concerned, possibly of an individual here and there, but He has nothing to do with the weak and down-trodden. As He is only known to Science through the phenomena of nature, it can merely recognise in Him such qualities as

belong to the world through which He manifests Himself. But this admission of the Spencerian school is only a guarded thought, and its definite conclusions resolve themselves into a theory of force behind phenomena of whose nature we are ignorant, and which can only be referred to the sphere of the Unknowable. The characteristic of this system is that it takes the phenomena of the world as it finds them, reduces their motions to intelligible order, and declines to advance a step beyond scientific demonstration.

The Pantheistic explanation.

all-pervading

A third interpretation of natural phenomena is the presence of an spirit in the universe, and coincident with it. It refuses to assume any personality of that spirit other than is expressed through a partial intelligence of which man is the one instance really known to us. All evolutionary movement, development and power are due to the manifestation in a higher degree of this spirit blindly seeking to express itself more fully in the universe. In this way the Pantheist anticipates the triumph of Good, the abolition of pain and wrong. Only by means of suffering can the universe attain to perfection. But as this system also implies the theory of infinite extension in space and time beyond the limits of our universe it falls by its very nature within the sphere of the Unknowable. It shares also with the Agnostic and Spencerian theory in the frank admission that such a spiritual Being or force must be non-moral, because it condones sin as a by-product in its evolutionary process. We have, therefore, one

denominator common to all three systems: Christian, Agnostic, and Pantheistic-the Unknowable, ever shrouded from human intelligence, but from which issue the beginnings of things.

Is a Concordat

possible?

Attempts have

No efforts to re-state Christianity in the terms of modern thought have proved to be satisfactory. been made to effect a compromise by modifying Christianity in deference to scientific conclusions, but the compromise has been confined to one side. Philosophy has conceded nothing. When the Christian demands to know whether we could imagine a supreme goodness if our ideal were not capable of realisation, the scientist points to the evil, pain and misery of the world, and enquires whether these are consistent with a conception of an all-powerful personal Goodness.

Christianity
as Ethics.

Finding a doctrinal concordat to be impossible, the reconcilers of Religion and Science are driven to propound an ethical system from which the supernatural and the miraculous are altogether eliminated. Men have lost their grip of theology. It has ceased to be real to them. The growth of Christian Socialism is largely due to the fact that it is a live problem. This is, however, a proposal to reduce Christianity from a cosmic mystery to an earthly betterment, and to leave the riddle of life unsolved. It proposes to introduce equality of distribution with grace before meat. before meat. But this is to exchange a Such is not the

theology for a sociology.

secret of that Faith before which the Paganism of Northern Europe prostrated itself, and to which