Religious thought in these pages is bound by the slenderest threads to religious symbolism. At bottom, if one looks close, liberal Christians suppress religion, properly so called, and substitute a religious morality in its stead. The believer of other times affirmed the existence of God first, and then made His will the rule of conduct; the liberal believer of our day affirms the existence, first of all, of the moral law, and cloaks it in divinity afterward. He, like Matthew Arnold, treats with Javeh on equal terms, and speaks to Him almost as follows: “Art Thou a person? I do not know. Hast Thou had prophets, a Messiah? I no longer believe so. Hast Thou created me? I doubt it. Dost Thou watch over me—me in especial—dost Thou perform miracles? I deny it. But there is one thing, and one alone, in which I do believe, and that is in my own conception of morality; and if Thou art willing to become a surety for that and to bend the reality into harmony with my ideal, we will make a treaty of alliance; and by the affirmation of my existence as a moral being, I will affirm Thine into the bargain.” We are far away from the antique Javeh, the Power, with whom no bargain could be made; the jealous God, who wished man’s every thought to point toward Him alone, and who would make no treaty with His people unless He could precisely dictate the terms. [Sidenote: Practical attenuation of Christian faith.] The more distinguished German, English, and American clergymen thrust theology so far into the background for the purpose of forwarding practical morality that one may apply to all of them the words of an American periodical, the _North American Review_: that a pagan, desirous of making himself acquainted with the doctrines of Christianity, might frequent our most fashionable churches for an entire year and not hear one word about the torments of hell or the wrath of an incensed God. As to the fall of man and the expiatory agony of Christ, just so much would be said as to fall short of giving umbrage to the most fanatical believer of the theory of evolution. Listening and observing for himself, he would reach the conclusion that the way to salvation lies in confessing one’s belief in certain abstract doctrines, beaten out as thin as possible by the clergyman and by the believer, in frequenting assiduously the church and extra-religious meetings, in dropping an obolus every Sunday into the contribution box, and in imitating the attitudes of his neighbours. All the terms of theology are so loosely employed that all those are considered Christians whose character has been formed by Christian civilization, all those who have not remained total strangers to the current of ideas set up in the Occident by Jesus and Paul. It was an American clergyman who had abandoned the narrow dogmas of Calvin[58] that, after having employed a long life in becoming more and more liberal, discovered, in his seventieth year, this large formula for his