Is the religious world willing to accept this view of religion? It would seem so by the remarkable popularity of these books. This view may be correct or incorrect, wise or foolish; at any rate, it is strangely at variance with the view commonly ascribed to “Muscular Christians,” and strangely identical with that which Dr. Newman explicitly avows in the most eloquent pages of his “Apologia.” People generally consider “Muscular Christianity” as a clever and cheerful improvement on the old solemn ascetic Christianity, as a doctrine which fully recognises the goodness of the common world and common worldly life, as a liberal cultus which does not sacrifice body to soul any more than soul to body, but is at once gymnastic and spiritualistic in its “exercises”; a vague notion is abroad that, whereas the early religion of Christ and his apostles was of sorrow and suffering, this, its latest development, is a religion of happiness and health; in short, it is believed that “Muscular Christianity” has added the Gospel(1) of the body and this life to the primitive Gospel of the soul and the next life: and yet the most popular and vigorous writer of this new school, after exhausting a very fertile imagination in the suggestion of methods and modes by which godless sinners may be converted to godliness, has absolutely found no other process effectual than this of showering upon them misfortunes, humiliations, afflictions, calamities (such as do not in real life fall upon one human being in a thousand, and working results such as they would not work in one real human being out of ten thousand); until health and hope, self-respect and the capacity for sane joy are altogether destroyed in them, the manhood and womanhood overwhelmed and crushed out of them; after which he brings in these miserable wrecks and relics of what were once men and women as all that he can contribute to the extension of the Church, which ought to be the cheerful congregation of wholesome men and women throughout the world, the richest flower and ripest fruit of humanity. If the Church of the future is to be composed of creatures like Mr. Kingsley’s Convertites, Westminster Abbey must be turned into a Grand Chartreuse, and St. Paul’s into an Hospital for Incurables, and the metropolitan Cathedral of England must be Bedlam.