of waves. You know, on every side questions have arisen in regard to documents; most disheartening and discouraging if religion were a matter of books and words, and not a matter of the living and divine spirit in man, which no criticism is able to destroy. For, out of it all, thought arises and all criticism itself has birth. But, for the moment, in that tearing to pieces of the documents, one great inroad is made on the religion of the time. Then, if you turn to another destructive force that has been undermining popular religion, you find it in archæological research; you find it in what is called comparative mythology, built up out of the results of that research; unburied cities, unburied libraries, unburied tombs—they have all given up their longhidden secrets, and those secrets have been used as weapons against the religion of the West. Dates have been thrown overboard, hundreds of years have been lengthened into millions; archæology, geology, antiquarianism of every kind, researches into long-dead races have all given the same result, shaking the very foundations on which it was thought, however wrongly, that religion must be built. Out of all this undermining, this destruction, from the continuously critical spirit of man, have arisen doubt and question and half-scepticism, and only a hope instead of a knowledge, only an aspiration instead of a living faith. And beyond those minor questions of religion which can be touched by this kind of destructive criticism, beyond and above those, the central ideas of religion have been thrown into the Crucible of Reason. The idea of God Himself has been under discussion, argued about, reasoned about, and the conception of God has changed. Who now dreams of troubling himself much about Butler’s _Analogy_? Who now would spend his time poring over Paley’s _Evidence_? These are out of date, and they do not deal with the questions of the time; for the thought of Evolution has affected religion, and the central conception of Deity has not been able to escape the corrosion of that atmosphere of thought. Here, again, outward demonstrations are failing, outward reasonings fail to satisfy. Reason, though piled upon reason, can give no more than a reasonable probability, so long as you watch for God only in the outer world, and not in His highest manifestation, the Spirit which lives in yourself. The idea of an extra-cosmic God is gradually disappearing from the world of thought. The idea of a God who made the universe as a piece of machinery, and stood outside it while the wheels were turning and the bands were working—that idea has almost passed away; and instead of that a God immanent in everything, a God who is a life and not a mechanician, a God who is an informing Spirit and not an outside creator—that nobler, more exquisite idea is dawning on the religious world to-day. But still, to see Him only immanent in the universe, that is not the final answer of religion; there is something