“What religion are you, Mr. Rogers?” said a lady once.

“What religion, madam?  I am of the religion of all sensible men.”

“And what is that?” she asked.

“All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.”

If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said perhaps that when the opinions of those best able to judge are divided, the questions at issue are doubtful.  Reasonable men who are unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.  But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect therefore to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them.  The Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment.  The Archbishop of Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology.  The objections of the present generation of “infidels,” he says, are the same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child might answer.  The young man just entering upon the possession of his intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more anxious for truth than for success in life, finds when he looks into the matter that the Archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning.  The words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be exorcised.  They come and come again from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss and Renan.  The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming fresh to the subject, with no more than a year’s study, throws the Church of England into convulsions.

If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy.  The state in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not say would be a state of faith.  But if that dark time is ever literally to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it.  The creed of eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look with comfort to exchanging one for the other.  Christianity has abler advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives.  The God that answer by fire is the God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful persons will remain convinced that with them in some