The author of "Natural Religion," it will be remembered, assumes for the purposes of his argument, that the supernatural portion of Christianity is discredited, is put aside by physical science; that, as M. Renan has somewhere tersely expressed it, "there is no such thing as the supernatural, but from the beginning of being everything in the world of phenomena was preceded by regular laws." Let us consider what this involves. It involves the elimination from our creed, not only of the miraculous incidents in the history of the Founder of Christianity, including, of course, His Resurrection--the fundamental fact, upon which, from St. Paul's time to our own, His religion has been supposed to rest--but all the beliefs, aspirations, hopes, attaching to that religion as a system of grace. It destroys theology, because it destroys that idea of God from which theology starts, and which it professes to unfold. This being so, it might appear that religion is necessarily extinguished too. Certainly, in the ordinary sense which the word bears among us, it is. "Religio," writes St. Thomas Aquinas, "est virtus reddens debitum honorem Deo."[33] And so Cardinal Newman, somewhat more fully, "By religion I mean the knowledge of God, of His will, and of our duties towards Him;" and he goes on to say that "there are three main channels which Nature furnishes us for our acquiring this knowledge--viz., our own minds, the voice of mankind, and the course of the world, that is, of human life and human affairs."[34] But that, of course, is very far from being what the author of "Ecce Homo" means by religion, and by natural religion, in his new book. Its key-note is struck in the words of Wordsworth cited on its title-page:--" We live by admiration."[35] Religion he understands to be an "ardent condition of the feelings," "habitual and regulated admiration" (p. 129), "worship of whatever in the known Universe appears worthy of worship" (p. 161). "To have an individuality," he teaches, "is to have an ideal, and to have an ideal is to have an object of worship: it is to have a religion" (p. 136). "Irreligion," on the other hand, is defined as "life without worship," and is said to consist in "the absence of habitual admiration, and in a state of the feelings, not ardent but cold and torpid" (p. 129). It would appear then that religion, in its new sense, is enthusiasm of well-nigh any kind, but particularly the enthusiasm of morality, which is "the religion of right," the enthusiasm of art, which is "the religion of beauty," and the enthusiasm of physical science, which is "the religion of law and of truth" (p. 125).[36] "Art and science," we read, "are not secular, and it is a fundamental error to call them so; they have the nature of religion" (p. 127). "The popular Christianity of the day, in short, is for the artist too melancholy and sedate, and for the man of science too sentimental and superficial; in