Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/531

Rh recognized as Professor Seeley, promised a supplementary volume of applications of his theory. This has never appeared, and we may look upon the present work as the fulfillment of his promise. The wide difference between them must be ascribed to the progress since made by liberal thought. Still, "Ecce Homo" was regarded with fear and disgust in its day by the orthodox, among all sections of Christianity, and at once provoked an eloquent and, from Professor Seeley's point of view, unanswerable rejoinder in Dr. Liddon's Bampton Lectures "On the Divinity of Christ," delivered at Oxford in the following year.

We now come to the two celebrated years 1873 and 1874—years of open utterance on all sides, and which we may look upon as the crisis of the revolution of thought. In these years appeared the first two volumes of "Supernatural Religion," an elaborate investigation from two points of view into the foundations of Christianity, and Matthew Arnold's "Literature and Dogma," an attempt to rehabilitate Christianity, while openly recognizing the futility of all attempts to base it upon miracles or the supernatural. Christianity was to remain in force, but without a personal God. At such a moment, Leslie Stephen's direct question, "Are we Christians?" came home to us with full force. It was anticipated, by one year, by the amusing brochure entitled "Modern Christianity, a Civilized Heathenism." In the same year Max Müller carried the critical spirit of science into religion itself in his "Introduction to the Science of Religion." Meanwhile, there appeared a beautiful volume, carefully printed upon exquisite paper, containing "Studies in the History of the Renaissance," which their author, Mr. Pater, concluded with the following words: "We are all condamnes, as Victor Hugo says, Les hommes sont tous condamnés à morte avec des sursis indéfines; we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more. Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest in art and song. For our one chance is in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. High passions give one this quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, political or religious enthusiasms, or the 'enthusiasm of humanity.' Only, be sure it is passion, that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

In 1874 appeared Green's "Short History of the English People," of the importance of which I shall speak presently; Mill's "Autobiography," revealing the blameless life of a true humanitarian who had lived without a God, in the ordinary acceptation of the term; and George Eliot's "Jubal, and other Poems." In this volume the religious aspirations of the new faith were thus given poetical expression: