THE SPIRITUAL FATIGUE OF THE WORLD. D R. LIDDON, in the

new volume which he has just published under the title of "Christmas-Tide Sermons," begins with two striking sermons on St. Thomas, in which he suggests that one of the modern maladies, which palliates though it does not justify a good deal of its unbelief, is "a morbidly active imagination which cannot acquiesce in the idea of fixed and unalterable truth." Such a malady of imagination there no doubt is, and it shows itself in morbid activity ; but this morbid activity is more often, we believe, the inability to rest which is due to over-fatigue, than the inability to rest which is due to abundance of life,— the restlessness of fever, not the restlessness of overflowing vitality. Look at such a book as Amiel's "Journal," of which Mrs. Humphry Ward has just issued a new edition, with a portrait in which Amiel looks out upon the world with tired eyes that seem to be discerning in every new glimpse they take of life, some fresh difficulty which his strenuous but wearied soul cannot surmount. " Que vivre est difficile, 0 mon cceur fatigue !" are the words with which his long scrutiny of himself concludes ; and perhaps the most characteristic thing in a journal full of characteristic things is this,—" Am I not more attached to the ennuis I know, than in love with pleasures unknown to me ?" "Attached to the ennuis I know" !—is it not the condition of half the souls which are yearning for faith and unable to attain it ? Shelley declared nearly seventy years ago :—

"The world is weary of the past, Oh, might it die or rest at last !"

But since Shelley made that declaration, the world has grown more weary of the present than it was then of the past, and now, too, seems to be so weary of the future that it yearns after some modern form of the Nirvana doctrine of the Buddhists. When Mrs. Humphry Ward makes her dying hero, Robert Elsmere, declare that he can neither ascribe nor deny personality or intelligence to God, is it not obvious that the predominant feeling in that tired mind which is dying of its spiritual struggles, is something like Amiel's " Que vivre est difficile, 0 mon cceur fatigue ! "—the difference being, however, that Amiel was really dying when he so wrote, and that physical exhaustion may have prompted the exclamation ; while there is no reason at all to suppose that Mrs. Humphry Ward intended her imaginary hero's deliberate judgment to be symptomatic of the physical exharstion of his condition. Robert Elsmere's fatigue is purely intellectual and moral, not physical. Yet he can neither affirm nor deny the eternal spring of life in God, for it is at least clear that if God may be denied personality and intelligence, he must also be denied what forms part of the very essence of life to all human experience. Dr. Liddon might even have suggested, what is not, we think, at all improbable, that when St. Thomas anticipated, as he remarks, "something of the positive spirit of the modern world," and was so anxious "to escape illusions and to arrive at truth by experiment," that he would trust only his own senses, it was just because he was more subject than the other Apostles to this dejection and weariness of the soul. Does not the suggestion, when Christ prepares to return to Jerusalem to restore Lazarus to life, "Let us also go that we may die with him," read like the cry of an affec- tionate but weary soul that could see no end to all the tragic elements which were gathering so thick about our Lord, except death, and had not a glimpse of the new life and refreshment

that was about to spring from that great collapse of their recent hopes ? Indeed, the question which forms the subject

of Dr. Liddon's second sermon on St. Thomas, "Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way?"

has all the air of a mind that had almost exhausted itself already in the effort to follow the vivid bnt mystic teaching of his master in tracks to him new and strange ; and if so, there is less reason to wonder that when he was told that Christ had appeared to the ten Apostles in Jerusalem, he found the statement a new demand upon his spiritual nature to which be was hardly equal, so that he devolved, as it were, upon his senses the responsibility of faith. "Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe."

There is the same tone of fatigued spiritual feeling about a great deal of the scepticism of to-day. As Dr. Liddon says, men are impressed by the apparent difficulties of Christianity, and ask to put their hands into the print of the nails if they are to receive it ; but in all probability they would not find it any the easier to believe if they could do so ; they would im- mediately explain it away as subjective illusion. Most likely they have not vivid life enough in themselves to enter into so great a manifestation of the divine life :— "For we, brought forth and reared in hour3 Of change, alarm, surprise, What shelter to grow ripe is ours, What leisure to grow wise ?"

Is it not this want of vivid life in themselves which makes men like Amiel at once unable to believe and to disbelieve, unable to reject so great and natural a consolation for the soul as faith,

and yet unable to accept it ? Dr. Liddon finds fault with the Poet-Laureate for saying :— "There lives more faith in honest doubt, Believe me, than in half the creeds."

But there we think that he does not quite give the significance which Tennyson meant to be given to the epithet " honest " doubt. There is a healthy doubt which may properly be called "honest," and which is in many men and women

the beginning of true faith ; but it is not the doubt of mere hesitation and ennui. It is not even the rather sickly

faith which the Poet-Laureate describes in some lines which perhaps better deserved Dr. Liddon's stricture than the line praising "honest doubt:"—

" I falter where I firmly trod,

And falling with my weight of cares Upon the world's great altar-stairs That lead through darkness up to Goff, I lift lame hands of faith, an'l grope And gather dust and chaff ; and call To what I deem is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope."

This " faint " trusting of the larger hope, this double mind of which the one self shrinks and suffers in the shadow, while the other only totters feebly towards the light, betrays, we

think, a good deal more of the morbid tendency of the day, than doubt which faces calmly and boldly the testing of its true significance. We feel quite sure that a vast deal of the spiritual lassitude of the day is due much less to the magnitude of the obstacles to hearty faith, than to the fatigue of spirit with which those obstacles are regarded. The modern world is far too full of small cares and interests, and the modern conception of life and its duties is far too favourable to the frittering away of life on a multitude of petty distrac- tions. As Dr. Liddon says in the sermon we have referred to,

a great deal of the scepticism of the day is due to the in- sufficiency of people's knowledge of Christianity, to their

very superficial acquaintance with it, the complete absence of any preparation for sounding its depths, and surveying its wide horizon, and apprehending the inner harmonies of its spiritual teaching. And, in fact, this is often impossible with the meagre amount of life which remains to be thrown into the search for spiritual truth, after all the other excitements of life have been provided for. There is now no adequate economy of human strength for the higher objects of life, too much a great deal being lavished on its petty interests.

People are attached to their religion much as Amid l said that he was attached to his ennuis. They have not the strength requisite either to give it up or to give themselves up to its demands, and so they hover in a miserable state of nervous

tension on the boundary that divides faith from doubt, their worldly energy being diminished by the anxious glances they cast over their shoulder at the faith which they half- believe, and their spiritual energy being " sicklied o'er by the pale cast" of sceptical hesitations. Christianity cannot be understood in any degree without being approached with a certain passion both of hope and fear. The whole history which led up to it, the whole history which has flowed forth from it, has been a history of spiritual passion, and there is no meaning in Christianity at all if it be not true that divine passion is as deep-rooted in the eternal spirit as infinite reason itself. If men come to Christ with exhausted natures, they will never know what there is in him. And they do come too often to the study of his teaching with the mere fag-end of their powers, with heart and mind both battered and fevered by the con- tending interests and pleasures of a life that is much too full of small excitements. No doubt Christianity offers a new life of its own, and an inexhaustible spring of that life ; but it offers it only to those who can give a life for a life, who can give up the whole mind and heart that a new mind and a new heart may be substituted in their place. There must be the power to exult even in suffering for a great end, in those who would really understand the passion of Christian teaching ; and the power to exult in suffering for a great end takes an in- tensity of nature which is very easily extinguished by a life of minute distractions and of widely distributed affections. A generation of which the most impressive characteristic is its spiritual fatigue, will never be truly Christian till it can husband its energy better, and consent to forego many petty interests that it may not forego the religion of the Cross.