was decreed by the will of God, was a part of the order of nature.

And this view will be confirmed by the reflection that the ultimate desire prescribed for all Christian prayer is the desire of harmony with the ultimate law, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." "Teach us to pray," is the request made by the disciples to the Master on the very threshold of the Christian dispensation. The fact that the request is complied with is itself a strong corroboration of the view taken in the previous paragraph. It is assumed that the disciple is not able in his own strength to determine that which shall be consistent with the highest law of the universe, and therefore a form of prayer is put into his mouth expressive of those wants the gratification of which will be in unison with the plan of nature. In this form of prayer it is a highly significant circumstance that the suppliant is commanded to desire before all things the kingdom of God and its righteousness. Before offering up a petition even for his daily bread, he is enjoined to pray that the name of God may be hallowed, that the kingdom of God may come, and that the will of God may be done on earth as it is in heaven-an order which clearly shows that the limits of Christian prayer are ever circumscribed by the possibilities of existing law. The law of nature is here identical with the will of God, and to desire emancipation from the law of nature

is held equivalent to desiring a violation of the will of God. Accordingly, the suppliant is enjoined before all things to seek conformity with the Divine will, and to make the prayer for that conformity the basis of every subsequent petition. If he receives the promise of an answer to his prayer, that promise is ever conditioned on the previous attitude of his mind towards the law of the universe. Nowhere is this more strikingly seen than in the saying of the fourth Gospel, "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." It would seem at first sight as if it were a promise of unlimited freedom in the range of prayer; it is in truth a circumscription of that range. The disciple is really told that if he enters into sympathy with the Divine will, he will not be able thenceforth to desire anything which is not already included in that will, that his desires shall from that day become limited to the possession of those things which it is the will of the Father that he should possess.

We have dwelt on this point at some length, because we believe it to be the point in which the Christian idea of prayer becomes reconcilable with the modern doctrine of evolution. The reconciliation is effected without the slightest strain, or the least necessity to twist the meaning of the facts of Christianity. So easily, in truth, do the facts of the Christian consciousness adapt themselves to the

modern order, that one is tempted to ask if that order be really modern, if that form of scientific difficulty which presents itself to the religious mind in our day had not its analogue and its equivalent in some system of the early Church. We have seen. that, so far as the modern principle of continuity is concerned, it assuredly was so. That changelessness of nature which the scientist of the nineteenth century beholds in the doctrine of evolution, the Christian of the first century beheld in the Divine decrees. To the Christian of the first century the same philosophic obstacle presented itself as presents itself to the scientist of the nineteenth, and the same problem awaited the former as now falls to be solved by the latter. Therefore it is that the Christian idea of Divine communion lends itself so easily to the modern view of evolution; the apparent obstacle which it meets in evolution is identical with that apparent obstacle which it met in the Divine decrees.

It remains to ask whether the idea of Divine communion is less favoured by the modern, or evolutionary view of nature, than it was by the view of nature entertained by the older form of physical science. And here we must express our opinion that in this respect at least the modern doctrine of evolution has the advantage over its scientific predecessors. It seems to us that a man who has once accepted the principles of Christian

theism will find in the doctrine of evolution an illustration of the presence of God in the world, which he would have failed to find in the older conceptions of nature; and we shall endeavour, as briefly as possible, to set before the reader the grounds on which we have arrived at this opinion.

There have been two extreme views which the human mind has entertained of the nature of the outer world; they may be described repectively as the spiritualistic and the materialistic view. They have had their representatives in all ages. In India they were represented by the Vedanta and Sankhya systems, in Greece by the Platonic and Epicurean systems, in Medievalism by the Realist and Nominalist systems, in modern times by the systems of Idealism and Empiricism. Out of these we may select any pair of contrasts we choose, without respect to their historical order. Let us take, therefore, the system of the Platonist and the system of the eighteenth-century Empiricist. In these two poles, separated as they are by a vast interval of time, we shall see the contrast exhibited in its most marked and pronounced form, and shall thereby have the advantage of estimating the full strength of either tendency.

The Platonist sought communion with God by the attempt to destroy the influence of nature. He looked upon mind as the only reality, and on matter as a simple negation. To him the material

world was not so much evil as unreal; or rather, its evil to him consisted in the fact of its unreality. God was the most real Being in the universe, just because He was the most spiritual, which meant, to the Platonist, the most free from all material attributes. To commune with such a Being it was necessary that the soul should also be liberated from material conditions. If it would enter into union with God, it must consent to leave behind it all contemplation of the sights and sounds of nature, and must bury itself in a region of abstract thought, where the sights and sounds of nature cannot penetrate. Now the defect of this system consists in its violation of the very purpose which it is constructed to promote. Its aim is to secure an unqualified communion between the Divine life and the human soul; in reality, it ends by shutting out the Divine life from by far the larger part of human nature. It draws a line of demarcation between Divinity and temporal need. It regards man's secular wants—his hunger, thirst, physical privation, outward weariness, and the like

-as barriers to the reception of the higher spiritual life, and it looks upon the completion of that life as something which can only be reached when the soul has emancipated itself from all mundane conThis is certainly to diminish and not to widen the natural avenues of religious communion. At the extreme opposite remove from this view,

cerns.