Who shall look for the scholarly divine to utter the talismanic word in his heart, when he knows that at that moment the walls around him must crumble, and he be left to take his chance with the hunted foxes, but without even their certainty as to holes?

"Some foolish people, gentlemen, had fancied there was one wing of the clergy about to withdraw itself from the market. I say foolish, because such an exceptional course could be pursued by no aggregate interest; not because there are not eccentric religionists who are now and then unwilling to exchange their convictions for the whole world. The particular clerical body to which I allude is constituted of those called Ritualists. These men had been showing such a restless and reckless antipathy to our most valuable religious standards that, albeit they had not much sense, some seemed to think they could not be bought up by the Establishment. They stood between their altar and the court of law. On the altar was throned Almighty God, claiming, in their belief, certain definite obeisances; on the bench sat an Englishman authorized to continue to them the advantages and properties of the Establishment on condition that such obeisances should be withheld. As many genuflections as you please, gentlemen, as many altar-lights for God as you desire, only you must go out of our Church with them, as your Master went out of the Synagogue! A plain choice was here to be made between God and man. The result was never doubtful. The Ritualists would like to be on the side of God; they must be on that of the Property.

"Consider these things, I pray you, gentlemen, and confess that it is but a straining at gnats to object to the selling at auction of the five churches, which I now again offer to the highest bidder, saint or sinner, without

condition, save that no nonconformist shall preach in any one of them, be he the angel Gabriel. Set in them clergymen who shall teach men how to invest successfully in heavenly scrip. Let the children learn, as they did at the Big Tabernacle, that fleeing to Jesus means tea and cake. at a distinguished brother's house, and limitless measures of the same hereafter. Let young and old there study the law and the profits. How much was the popularity of Christ's name increased in medieval Europe after it was stamped on a gold coin, and his leadership (ducatus) meant a ducat! And is not the name of God on our own coins? Wherever our race goes, this sanctity of the profitable thing appears — as, across the ocean, in the Almighty Dollar. Other races may be proverbially 'gay,' 'romantic,' 'theoretical': we are shopkeeping; and in the sacred name of British Trade I offer you these Cures of Souls. Who bids?

"Going-going-gone!"

ST. ALBAN'S

THE reference to the Ritualists in the auctioneer's harangue made me determine to visit St. Alban's Church. I have always had a little niche in my heart for the protomartyr of Britain. As saints go, he was, perhaps, the most honest we have ever had in this region. He had none of that pious ingenuity which, at Rome, could convert a statue of Jupiter into Peter with his keys. He said plainly to the barbarians, "These deities to whom you offer sacrifices are not deities, but devils; and he that offers prayers or sacrifices to them, so far from securing the objects of his desire, will have everlasting tortures in hell for his reward." The deities thus blasphemed were not accus

tomed to postpone their retaliations to a future world, as poor Alban soon had reason to know. The clergyman and worshippers at the London church named after him were, about the time of my going there, giving some indications that they would prove equally uncompromising with Alban toward their opponents. That, at least, would be a sign of life, and therefore hopeful.

I went early enough to see them lighting their candles, and could not help thinking of the foolish virgins trimming their lamps. Give us, O buried Ages, of your oil, for our lamps of the Present have gone out! Yet there was a singular archæological interest about the scene. The legend of the Romans and Huns, above whose slain hosts two spectral armies arose to continue the battle in the air, seemed realized in the ritualistic controversy. These vestments and candles were the ghosts of ancient banners and war-fires, once the insignia of real religions. Would that one could add just enough to the forehead of yonder strongheaded priest to enable him to trace to their sources the candles on his altar!-gathered there, as he might be amazed to find, from the torches of Isis, Demeter, Ceres, from the Shechinah of Israel, from the altars of Sunworship, from the Baal-fires, or Bel-fires, and Bon-fires, which still light up certain dark corners of Europe where paganism managed to linger longer than elsewhere: for the pagans (pagani, rustics; or heathen, dwellers on the heath) hold on to old religions which have been trampled out in the cities.

A poet looked while the sun shone upon a sod, and a flower answered. A poem flowered in his mind at the same moment. It was the face of a goddess smiling from the earth in those tinted petals, who should be named Demeter. By Zeus, the Sky, she has conceived, and the

floral offspring he will name Persephone. But now Winter comes-Pluto, the god of Hades, he shall be called — and snatches the flower away. Demeter, mourning her lost child, searches through the earth, attended by sunbeams for torches, and finds Persephone at last (a seed) in the Underworld. The sunbeams assure the partial victory of Demeter: they lead the flower to upper light and air again; but on condition that she shall pass one third of the year (winter) with Pluto. This was the simple allegory dramatized in the Mysteries of Eleusis, revived in Rome in the myth of Ceres and Proserpine. It fell upon the stony ground of literalism in unimaginative Rome, and the common people worship Ceres as the supreme power over the fruitfulness of land and cattle, and even of mothers. The temple raised to conciliate her in time of famine at Rome becomes the temple of the farming and labouring classes; hence, presently, of political importance. In it the decrees of the Senate must be inspected by the tribunes of the people. Allied thus with the Democracy which is to sway Europe, Ceres gained a kind of immortality. Europa herself, after whom the continent was named, was probably a mortification of the same goddess; and we call our grains cereals after Ceres. It is not wonderful that the despised Christians were glad to ally themselves with this religion of the people, nor that the two should be jumbled in the brain of Constantine, who was wont to consult pagan oracles as to how he should propagate Christianity, and should through him pass together to mould Western Christianity.

Thus it happens that, as Constantine had "Soli Invicto" on his coins, while the cross was on his banners, the priest here in St. Alban's, bowing before a cross, says, "Light of lights." From Eleusis, not from the Bible, he recites,

"He descended into hell." Then he goes on with his brief discourse to declare his altar a real altar, with God actually and supernaturally present upon it. This is the immortality which Ceres has obtained. The story should have been told of her, rather than of Tithonos, that the granted petition for immortality was followed by such decrepitude that the recipient was glad to be transformed to a grasshopper. To this miserable form has the beautiful myth of Egypt, Greece, and Rome shrunk, as observable at St. Alban's.

Nevertheless, there was a certain fervour about the sermon that set me asking whether Ritualism itself may not be, in a way, a Proserpine lost in Hades, a seed for which sunbeams are searching. Hides there not a germ of life in this doctrine of the "real presence," little suspected by this devout somnambulist? At least he does not hold that God wrought in the earth eighteen centuries ago as he no longer does, or that his wonders were limited to Palestine. It is sad to see galaxies shrunken to St. Alban's candles, and Nature under a paten, and the long line of Seers and Prophets ending in this poupée in painted clothes. It is not delightful to witness a marionette performance of the sacred drama of the Universe. Yet at each moment, and with each phrase, the Ritualist was groping with bandaged eyes near the holiest truths. As one sees in caverns quaint repetitions of the forms of Nature, even to star-chambers or mimic firmaments, so does one find in the underground foliations of St. Alban's a mystical imitation of the upperworld growths of the human heart, and even of the vault of Reason. May we not hope that, as the law has come in to spoil these miserable vestments and dwarfed symbols, the Ritualists may be driven to some point where a gleam of the Day may reveal to them that it is a cellar they