Page:The Dial- a monthly magazine for literature, philosophy and religion 1.djvu/13



Vol. I.

that which is alive can impart life. And the magazine which we now introduce to our countrymen can not live but by the life it can supply. Such reciprocal vitality, we believe, must depend on the degree in which it shall he representative of the Spirit of the Age—a phrase which we fear is too common-place to carry with it always its deep purport. What can the Spirit of an Age mean hut that leading tendency, coordinating all interests, which gives to that age an individual character and a special strength? Why should not this individuality and specialty he as sacred in an age as in a man? Every faithful man has found God at the core of the special task assigned to his life; with no other friend than his work, he is upheld, inspired, empowered: there he is at home, there are the heacon-lights; there it matters not whether wind and tide he ahead or astern. So does God draw nigh to an age in the spirit of that age. Christ declared that out of his Word and Work should come a Spirit which should the world. The conviction of an age is its only possible Christianity: the deepest thing of its own time, Christianity must he the deepest thing of every time. To he alive and powerful, it must represent the conviction of the time that is, not of the time that was: it must not take a man whose every other sense and faculty is satisfied in the fulness of the Nineteenth Century, and set him, for the satisfaction of his religious sense, back in the Third; it must not place a man's holiest day of the week fifteen hundred years behind his other days. Heine, the German poet, was asked, by his friend Alphonso, as they stood before the great