before which he can only he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of Christianity.  He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further, that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another; the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman secession was going on fifty years ago.  But now, in Robert Elsmere, comes the upshot.  He is not landed, as some logical minds have been, which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or indifference.  He is too good for that.  Something of his old Christianity is too deeply engrained in him.  He cannot go back from the moral standard to which it accustomed him.  He will serve God in a Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what can claim to be called a Christian way.  He is the beginner of one more of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than any of the old ones could be—­of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper “A New Reformation.”

In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book. Robert Elsmere rests on the achievements of historic criticism, chiefly German criticism.  From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German historical criticism.  And the difference between the old and the modern way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between bad translation and good; the old way of reading, quoting, and estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless, narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts true life and character and human feeling and motives into the personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak.  These books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and meaning.  And where such a change of method and point of view, as regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them.  Revised ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity—­“A New Reformation.”