SPIRITUALITY versus THEOLOGY.

1'I RS. RUSSELL BARRINGTON has just published a 171 thoughtful and eloquent paper on "The Reality of the

Spiritual Life,"* which may be described as embodying the view of those who think that there is something radically un- spiritual in the dogmatic side of Christian teaching. "To many," she says, "the framework in which the mind of the theologian has encased that spiritual emotion, has become obstructive rather than helpful to a spiritual vitality The forms and words of our services, often in themselves so very beautiful, have ceased, partly from reiteration perhaps, to carry with them any inspiring ring which can kindle a spiritual emotion. They associate themselves in the mind to Wearisome times in childhood, to restraint, formality, often unreality. Some not unworthy natures feel most strangely irreligious the moment family prayers begin, or they find them- selves at the orthodox 11 o'clock morning service in Church.

Everything in life seems to have a more suggestive moving quality, than those only too well-known religious exercises. It seems to us that positivism in religion is a phase very analogous to realism in art and literature. It is a resistance against the taking for granted that the mind ought to go in a certain groove. The form in which orthodox teaching generally comes to a youthful and earnest mind fails to inspire that sense of growth and vitality which he finds in intellectual pursuits. To the intellect is given food, and the spirit is given none. There is, on the one side, a formality which deadens the interest, and on the other side, a certain forcing a belief in the spiritual mysteries and dogmas of the Church (which eomes to a climax in the Athanasiast Creed) which excites a resistance in the mind, raises a critical spirit, and ends in opposition and incredulity. A want of harmony, a sense of unreality is felt in all this formal dictating of the noblest truths and the most spiritual emotions. A form, a pro- cess is expected to be gone through, before the heart is allowed to impart its wants and necessities in prayer, Or its gratitude and love in praise." And, again, she ma's :—" It is the dictating of dogmas instead of the etcouragement of direct communion with the spirit,—the centre of life and the power of life-giving. It is still life and more life 'for which we pant ;' but we seem to go further and further away from the source of it. We seek it on the wrong lines. No straining of the intellect can ever give us what in its essence the intellect does not contain. Has not orthodoxy ceased to hold its strongest ground Has it not attempted to use the intellect where the intellect is out of place Has it not ceased to rely on its finest weapon, and taken up those fit only for its adversaries ? " 4n.d Mrs. Russell Barrington's prescription for the remedy of these mischiefs of orthodoxy appears to be, that creeds should be abandoned, and that spiritual emotion should be cul- tivated wherever it is to be found. "Cannot we find a satisfying contentment," she says, in conclusion, "in those intimations" (intimations, that is, of our real communion with a great spirit of nature and righteousness) "which are

all that are vouchsafed to us ? " Perhaps we could, if they were all that is vouchsafed to us, though even of that we feel no assurance ; but is not that precisely the question at

lime? Wordsworth, from whose great "Ode on the Intima- tions of Immortality" Mrs. Barrington repeatedly quotes, has elsewhere summed up her protest against formalism in religion, more exactly, we think, than in any part of that famous ode. After describing the stately forms of a great cathedral service, where the formalism is artistic even more than theological, he goes on :— " Alas ! the sanctities combined

By Art to unsensualise the mind Decay and languish ; or as creeds And humours change, are spurned like weeds ;

The priests are from their altars thrust,

Their temples levelled, with the dust ;

And solemn rites and awful forms Founder amid fanatic storms.

* Edinburgh : Dsvid Douglas.

Yet evermore through years renewed In undisturbed vicissitude

Of seasons balancing their flight On the swift wings of day and night, Kind Nature keeps a heavenly door Wide open for the scattered Poor.

Where flower-breathed incense to the skies

Is wafted in mute harmonies ; And ground fresh-cloven by the plough

Is fragrant with a humbler vow;

Where birds and brooks from leafy dells Chime forth unwearied canticles, And, vapours magnify and spread The glories of the sun's bright head ;— Still constant in her Worship, still Conforming to the eternal Will, Whether men sow or reap the fields, Divine monition Nature yields That not by bread alone we live,

Nor what a hand of flesh can give,

That every day should have some part Free for a sabbath of the heart, So shall the seventh be truly blest From morn till eve with hallowed rest."

That is an exquisite exposition in verse of what Mrs. Barrington says of the superiority of natural scenery to any Church, in its power of exciting spiritual feeling, in one of the most eloquent pages of her paper. But could Words- worth have felt the confidence he expresses in this natural religion if he had not believed, as be undoubtedly did believe, that the inarticulate worship of Nature had received articulate expression in the divine life of Christ ?

Is it really true that the free, unconventional, unorganised spiritual emotions which Mrs. Russell Barrington treats as having found so internecine a foe in formal creeds and dogmatic definitions, would live and grow at all, if it could be shown that all those formal creeds and dogmatic definitions were the phantoms summoned up by a super-subtle intellect? As a matter of fact, almost all the most exquisite out- pourings of spiritual feeling, from St. Augustine to Thomas Kempis and Tauler. from Tauler to Henry Vaughan, George Herbert, and Bunyan, from Bunyan to Words- worth, Charles Wesley, James Montgomery, Keble, and Newman, have been the productions of minds which had the utmost, confidence in the solidity of the dogmatic basis of their faith, and which, because they rested calmly and firmly on that solid dogmatic basis, were sufficiently at ease to find an adequate imaginative form for their spiritual emotions. We should ourselves have said that if in the present day this freshness and fullness of religious emotion are deserting us, it is for almost the opposite reason to that which Mrs. Barrington assigns, that is, because there is no sufficient rest in the dogmatic foundations of creed, and because the heart, therefore, exhausts itself in vain and fruitless soundings of its own depths. In other words, the want of freshness and fullness is due not certainly to excess of dogmatism, but to the quaking of the dogmatic ground under the feet of those who would otherwise be open to these fresh natural feelings, but who are now, in fact, perpetually asking themselves, as Matthew Arnold used to do in such melodious language, whether any such feelings can be justified at all. We do not say that in a time when the floodgates of doubt have been thrown wide open on all subjects, this could have been avoided ; but we do say that the remedy is not to be found in giving up dogma altogether, and going in search of spiritual feelings which must be taken for every different individual just at the subjective value at which he chooses to appraise them, and which cannot be assigned any definite objects, or restricted to any well-marked channels, without the intrusion of that dogmatic definition of which the mis- sionaries who preach religion without dogma are so jealous. We are, of course, not suggesting, what no rational person would suggest, that there are not large regions of human life whence proceed very powerful religious influences of the exact character and scope of which none of us can give any clear account. The question at issue is a very different one,— namely, whether these are the only religious influences which at the present day deserve to be welcomed; whether the mere fact that we can define the character and scope of an influence with something like theological definiteness, should dis- credit it as a religious influence, and dismiss it into the category of intellectual petrifactions. Let us make the issue clearer by an illustration. We understand Mrs. Bar- rington to approve, as one of the " realities " of the

spiritual life, the recognition of a power outside ourselves to whom we can appeal in our misery-, and to whom we can pour out our thanks in joy. "When the answer is given," she says, "to that cry of the soul, When my heart is over- whelmed, lead me to the Rock that is higher than I,' it is as much a fact as is the feeling of misery which has overwhelmed the heart. Who that has passed through the agony which death, or separation, or such changes which can be worse than either, who that has further experienced that such agony can only be alleviated by an influence which overwhelms, has not also felt how cruelly unreasonable is any creed which could discourage human nature from seeking the only help that can be effectual ? " We quite agree that it is cruelly un- reasonable, as is any creed which discourages belief in God, though, of course, the agnostic would urge that he discourages the search for it not because it will be effectual, but because he believes that it will be ineffectual, and will issue in a disappoint- ment far more cruel than his own discouragement of the search for a mere dream. But as we heartily agree that the discourage- ment of faith in God is cruelly unreasonable, that the lifting power which will set one up on "a Rock that is higher than I" may really be found, we are bound to say on what we base that conviction, whether on an isolated experience here and there, or on a long course of con- tinuous evidence which has altered the history of nations, constituted the life of Churches, exalted poetry, glorified Art, and breathed into politics itself a new enthusiasm of humanity. If we take this wider ground,—which is the only ground we can take consistently with an affirmative answer that is more than hesitating and conjectural,—then surely we must be able to take a step further, and connect together some story of the achievements of that spiritual power to which we ascribe all these mighty influences ; then surely we must be able to compose some Te Deum laudamut which brings out the character of the divine share in human history and justifies the passion of our gratitude. But what can this be if it does not involve a creed,—and involve a creed in which the religious faith of generation after generation of men has been adequately embodied P Is it conceivable for a moment that we could recite even the merest outline of this long chronicle of grace and mercy, and of the swelling hearts and conquering wills which have been flooded by that grace and mercy, with- out noting the luminous points which stand out in the divine story of the past ? Would there be, could there be, a deep foundation for our gratitude to the divine providence of human life and history, if that gratitude rested only on vague and doubtful emotions surging up here and there in private experience, and could boast of no transfiguring memories by the infinite significance of which whole generations of sufferers have been transformed into joyful and exultant victors ? The distrust of creed, the weariness with theology, which is so often and so vividly expressed in our own day, is at bottom a doubt whether God has really been to past generations what we faintly hope that he is to us, though it is often expressed as if, by making light of the story of the past, we could somehow magnify the reality of the present. That surely is not so. Spirituality implies a full recognition of what God is to each human heart that fears and hopes and suffers now ; but that recognition is hardly separable from the glad belief that he has done for countless generations of men all and more than all that he is doing for us,—we say more than all, just because the very fact that we are beginning to observe this "sense of unreality" in our faith, this aversion to every form of prayer in which our fathers have poured forth their souls, this pre- ference of vague natural beauty to the great story of Christ's passion, this nausea of religious history, this intolerance of revelation, this preference for exalting emotions which spring up in odd times and places, and which ignore all the forms and phraseology of our ancestors, proves that we are less capable than our forefathers of realising that God is the same yester- day, to-day, and for ever,—and that he at least does not dwindle when faith declines, any more than he grows when faith increases.