11:t1, RELIGION OF THE BEATITUDES.*
TILER& is a Cathedral—it shall be nameless—of which it could have been said a few years ago that all the four Residentiary Canons were men of intellectual distinction. But it must also be said that their ministrations were inadequately appreciated by their bearers, whose point of view was expressed by a de- tached observer : " The old ladies who attend the Cathedral services say this= We don't want to hear what Canon A thinks Rdisisa ths Bistimam By the Rev. Minos Devine, M.A. Lanka Unroll= nal Co. Eta Oda of God, or Canon B of the Bible, or Canon C of Church History ; what we want is to go home feeling comfortable.' " That this should be the mind of English churchgoers has brought the English pulpit into contempt, and is a source of real weakness to English religion. Supply and demand are oormlatives : our congregations get the preaching that they desire and deserve. But intelligent people refuse " to hear sermons" ; and there is .an increasing gaff between the lay and the clerical mind. In Scotland the pulpit is still a power. Tho reason is that it is living and actual ; a Scots village congregation would resent the preaching that satisfies a fashionable London church. The former asks for, and expects, instruction ; tho latter wants " to go home feeling comfortable." And each gets what it demands.
Mr. Devine's addresses are of the Scots rather than the English type. We do not know whether he filled All Hallows, Lombard Street ; but, had they been preached in Edinburgh or Glasgow, the church in which these addresses were delivered would have been crowded to the doors. They present us with "a devotional and literary treatment of the Beatitudes" ; the preacher's aim is " to enforce their teaching by illustrations from history, biography, and literature." The conception is a happy one. Christianity is part and parcel of Western civilization ; it has influenced and pervaded every department of thought and life. To overlook this is to see our world out of perspective. The distinction between the religious and the secular is surface and apparent only ; press it, and it escapee you ; the preacher who is not soaked in Wordsworth, in Matthew Arnold, in Browning, is ill-equipped for his task. For the New Testament, taken by itself, does not give us is code of Christian ethics ; it is on the fundamental misconception that it does so that much of the ethical criticism to which Christianity has been subjected rests. Mr. Devine rightly insists on this :— " Nowhere does our Lord claim to have originated a new code of morals. He always assumed an existing code. The moral teaching of the New Testament takes forgranted a good deal that is not explicitly stated as morally binding, such as the virtues implied in a good citizen, which existed wherever Roman law prevailed. . . . The virtues of the Beatitudes are corrective and supplemental rather than exhaustive ; for Jesus addressed Himself to the points in which previous' morality bad failed. . . . It is when we realize Christ's sanction to all that was good in Pagan morality, His rejection of all that was corrupt, His substitution of principles for hard and fast rules, His appeal to the spirit rather than to the letter of the law, that we can confidently affirm, after nineteen hundred yearn' experience, that we seek in vain for a better translation of the rule of virtue from theory to practice than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life."
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