nant amidst the other voices, a voice which says "Go back," where the others say "Go forward." It is remarkable by its very contrast; it arrests us by its discordance. Nor is it a voice which can be drowned by the others. In point of fact it has not been drowned. It has been powerful enough to arrest for centuries the development of one of the most extensive empires in the world. What is the secret of this power? That it has a secret is beyond question. It is not to be accounted for by anything on the surface. Climate will not explain it, for it looks behind the existing climate. Soil will not explain it, for it ignores the present soil. Priestcraft will not explain it, for the sceptre which it wields is precisely that sceptre which priestcraft would avoid the empire of primitive culture over existing forms of civilisation. Where are we to look for the source of that strength which has been able to attract and to retain the minds of millions under allegiance to an ideal of the past?

In answering this question, let us first consider whether, in the history of religions, there be anything analogous to this tendency of the Chinese empire. I have said that it is something unique amidst surrounding nations. Is there anything like it amongst nations which are not surrounding? Is it a purely isolated phenomenon in the sphere of religious thought? I think it is not. I believe that we shall find the true analogue to the tendency

of the Chinese mind if we extend our gaze into a wider circle. It does not, as we have said, present in this respect any point of contact with India or Persia or Egypt; but it does present a point of contact with something which is at once more modern and more universal-the religion of Christ. What is the secret of Christianity's moral power? Strange as it may seem, it is regressiveness. We commonly boast of it as a religion of progress; and so, doubtless, it is. But it is a progress which has been professedly reached by a process of retrogression. The initial command of Christianity is the command to go back. The Christian soldier receives at the outset the order to retreat. The distinctive motto of this faith is the preliminary necessity of regress, "Except ye be turned back and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." In these words there is a thoroughly Chinese ring-a more distinctly Chinese ring than that which is supposed to reverberate in Christ's golden rule. Here, as in the faith of China, we have set before the mind the ideal of a great State or empire which is to represent in its nature the rule of the Highest-a kingdom of heaven. Here we have set before the mind the same possibility which besets the eye of the Chinaman-the possibility that this kingdom may be actually attained by the earth. But here too, in more striking resemblance still, the road to the attainment of

the goal is declared to be a regressive road. It is declared that no amount of progress, no advance of civilisation, no addition of extraneous materials can of themselves hasten the coming of the kingdom. The first step must be not a learning but an unlearning, not a clothing but an unclothing, not an onward development but a backward march. What is wanted above all things and before all things is a new beginning,—an entrance for the second time into the stage of birth, the resuming of life in the form of a little child.

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The key-note of Christianity is redemption buying back. It expresses the thought that what man wants for his amelioration is, first and foremost, a regressive movement, the power to become a new creature. And a moment's reflection must convince every one that Christianity has here struck a note of nature. The deepest want of human nature will be found to lie, not in the absence of some future good, but in the presence of some old experience, in the fact that we are still in contact with some element of the past. Wherein, for example, consists the powerlessness of mere morality to effect a reform of the life? Is it not precisely in the knowledge that, in order to be reformed, the life must first be renewed? You tell a drunkard of the miseries awaiting him in this and other worlds if he persists in his downward course; you point out the necessity for imposing a restraint on him

self, and for cultivating above all things the virtue of abstinence. Why is it that the man to whom you speak, while perfectly conceding the truth of your every sentiment, is perfectly uninfluenced by any motive of reform? It is because he knows in his inmost heart that no reform of present action would really make him a new man. It is no use to tell him that the practice of sobriety would free him from future torments; he knows that it would only do so by bringing actual torments into the day and hour. Abstinence in itself is simply thirst, and thirst ungratified is torture. The root of the evil lies in the past, probably in the ancestral past. If the man could reverence his ancestors, he would have hope; but this is precisely what he cannot do. He has received from these ancestors an heirloom of misery. What he wants above all things is a new beginning, a rolling back of the shadow. Until he can cast back his eye upon a past without blemish, upon a heredity without taint, upon an ancestry without spot or flaw, he feels that every attempt at present reform is simply an effort to exchange one misery for another, to substitute for the inroads of passion on the body the ravages of passion on the soul.

Now this cry for a new beginning is precisely what Christianity professes to meet and satisfy. Its power over the moral life lies mainly in the fact that it claims to lead back that life to a fresh

starting-point, or, to use its own words, "to pure fountains of living water." The strength of Christianity lies in its claim to reach the "fountains." It does not propose to purify any special part of the stream. It proposes to go back to the beginning, to the stream's source. It offers to alter the whole course of life's flow by making a new commencement, by pouring into human nature a fresh flood of heredity. Its watchword is, not inappropriately, "Salvation by blood." It proclaims to the world that it needs to be revivified, born again. It tells the race of men that their blood has become impure, tainted, corrupted; it tells them that no midway cure will have any effect in arresting the malady, that moral abstinence will at best only remedy the symptoms, not check the disease. It tells them that what they want is new blood, a fresh stream of vitality flowing from a new fountain and interrupting altogether the course of the old heredity. It proclaims this necessity, and it offers to supply it. And herein to the mind of the first Christian age lay the secret of its power. Its earliest crown was not its aspiration towards the future but its regress towards the past, its promise to roll back the shadows and let the soul begin anew. It was this which fascinated the mind of a Paul; it was this which made to him the difference between law and grace. Other systems might offer him incentives to moral reformation; other creeds might inspire him with