tion. It was carried on by those systems of German. illuminism which during the first quarter of the nineteenth century made the field of speculation itself a region of romance. It was borne into our own country by the very increase of those mechanical appliances which are supposed to minister only to the outer man. The increased facilities for travel opened up lands which were before unknown, and in proportion as they became known, the points of difference between them and us were minimised. The spirit of liberalism in England has been exactly contemporaneous with her power of locomotion. It is popularly said that travel liberalises. The saying is true, but it is not true for the popularly given It is not because the man of travel is brought into contact with many diversities that he becomes enlarged in his sympathies. It is rather because beneath these diversities he recognises for the first time a common bond of unity. It is because he wakens to the conviction that human nature is very much the same under all circumstances, and that, underlying the differences of customs and modes of life, there beats within the heart the same impulse and the same instinct. In short, it is because the man of travel arrives at a sense of the world's essential smallness, amid its wideness, that he ceases to believe in the exclusiveness of his own privilege or in the monopoly of his own creed.

reason.

Such has been the position of our country during the last half-century. It has obtained ever-increasingly a door of entrance into other lands, and the result has been to minimise its sense of their religious differences. It has found beneath these differences an underlying unity. Its search has been stimulated into a new direction. It has ceased to seek for the points of divergence between other faiths and its own; it has begun to study the points in which other faiths do not diverge from its own. It is trying to find in the sphere of religion what it has already found in every other sphere an element of contact between separate forms. Just as it has discovered a principle of unity between the anatomy of the higher and the anatomy of the lower organisms, so it essays to find a principle of unity between the religion of the developed and the religion of the undeveloped races. If the effect of this tendency has been to abate the ardour of missionary enterprise, it has also been greatly to increase its facilities. The pioneers of a religion, the men who seek to carry their own form of faith into other lands, no longer need to depend on the influx of a force purely supernatural. They can henceforth be stimulated by the thought that in the minds of those whom they wish to proselytise there is already existing an element of concord with their own. They can be fortified by the knowledge that beneath all its diverse forms there is even now

in operation one common religion, and that the diversities in the form are themselves only able to endure by reason of that principle of unity which abides ever the same.

What, then, is this principle of unity which underlies the different forms of religion? When we look on the surface of the surrounding faiths it almost seems as if there were no such bond. It cannot be said that there is any single doctrine of religion on which the worshippers of every creed are agreed. Even those beliefs which to modern development seem elementary have at no time commanded the simultaneous assent of the united world. The belief in a personal God has occupied little place in the religious philosophies of India. The doctrine of individual immortality has had no share in the development of Buddhism. The recognition of a moral government in the universe has been a comparatively late fact in the history of religion. If even in its most elementary aspects the study of human worship reveals little trace of unity, the diversities which it displays must be still more broadly marked when we pass from first principles to secondary details. On the whole, it may be fairly concluded, that wherever religious unity is to be found, it cannot be found in the acceptance of a common object of worship. It may be doubted if, even within the pale of any one religion, there is really recognised a common object of worship. We

do not make an object common by giving it a single name. Millions of human beings are united in the recognition of Jesus Christ as the highest ideal in the universe; but it may be questioned if to any two individuals amongst them the ideal is exactly the same. The Christ of the middle ages is no more like the Christ of modern times than the Jupiter of ancient paganism is like the God of scientific evolution. A universally-sided character can never be universally seen in precisely the same light. The Christian claims for Christ such a character, and as the result of that claim he must be prepared to give up the hope of any unity which shall be based upon the sight of one outward form.

Is there any other direction in which we can look for religious unity? If we cannot find it in a common object of worship, is there any other region in which we may hope to discover it? There is; let us turn from the object of worship to the attitude of the worshipper. And to facilitate our search in this direction, let us take an analogous case, the case that of all others presents to my mind the nearest analogy-the sphere of the poet. No man will deny that there is in the world a thing called poetry. No man would ever dream of believing that the various specimens of rhythmic thought which meet the eye from all quarters constitute, each of them, a separate subject of study. We all feel that the points of separation between them

are nothing in comparison to the point in which they are agreed. We feel, in short, that they are pervaded by one and the same spirit-a spirit of poetry. But if we ask what is this spirit of poetry, if we ask where lies the point of union which makes these separate verses the parts of a single science, the answer is not at first very easy. If we look on the surface here, we shall have very much the same experience which we had when looking on the surface of religion—a sense of diversity everywhere. Here also it may be said that the unity cannot lie in the subject-matter. It cannot be held that there is any one subject on which the attention of poets has been simultaneously concentrated. Every sphere of nature has been ransacked in search of materials for the poetic mind. The mountain and the valley, the grand and the commonplace, the strong and the gentle, the grave and the gay, have at one and the same moment been the theme of the sons of song. can it be said that song itself has been the medium of union. Poetry needs not be rhyme, needs not be verse, needs not even be rhythm. Thomas Carlyle is the most unrhythmical of writers, communicates his thoughts in sentences that defy the possibility of scansion; yet Thomas Carlyle is worthy of a place amongst the greatest of the poets, worthy of a place amongst that band of poets whose form of diction has been specially rhythmical- the prophets of

Nor