the labours of Christ we may lament that he is not in our very midst now, to solve the problems that weigh us down; and yet one of his most fervent disciples reports him as saying that it was profitable that he should go away. To escape from the barrenness of abstract questions it may indeed be wise to ask what Jesus would do if he were living here and now, but on this condition, that we do not let our question snare us into the wiles of spiritualism, remembering that if Jesus did come amongst us now, his first act would surely be to divest himself of the merely local and natural form under which he lived in the past, appearing no longer as a Jew or a Galilean but as a modern man, and we can have no better means of knowing what he would do today than by seeking through reflection and observation to discover what would be a faithful application of the principles he represented nineteen centuries ago. We ought to guard against supposing that the Christ of History would speak with the consciousness of a man of modern times, seeing that two thousand years of added experience and study have inevitably modified the modern man's point of view.

Instead, however, of exhausting our energies in barren endeavours to guess what the prophet of Nazareth would say, or what solutions he would advocate for our social needs, would it not be far more practical to bring to bear upon the industrial, political, and social conflicts and problems of the times the sentiments experienced by Jesus, and to draw the conclusions contained in germ in his

114 Contribution of France to Religious Progress

teachings as to the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man? If we would attach to the Gospel the people who have sworn a Hannibalic oath against Catholicism, we must insist on the humanity of Jesus, and by so doing we shall but be following the example of the first Christians, who in order to resist those gnostic tendencies that were reducing Christ to the condition of a phantom, insisted in their earliest declarations on the reality of the humanity of Jesus. We shall only be able to establish a successful propaganda among our contemporaries whom the assertions of dogmatism have revolted, on condition that we maintain that Jesus is not the object of Religion, but the subject of that Religion that was dimly emerging out of antiquity, and which eventually came to full bloom in this son of Israel. This Religion consists in basing man's trust in a principle of Supreme Love, trust that is in the Heavenly Father. To give us courage and comfort in our labours of spreading this gospel, I can recall nothing more suitable and efficacious than that noble exclamation of one of your own martyrs, 'Play the man, Master Ridley! we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England as I trust shall never be put out.'

THE MISSION OF LIBERAL PROTESTANTS

AMONG CATHOLIC PEOPLES.

BY PROFESSOR JEAN REVILLE, D.D., PARIS.

A

CCORDING to the request of the Council of these meetings, I wish to offer here a few general considerations on the mission of liberal Protestantism amidst the Roman Catholic peoples. I say general considerations, because it is quite impossible to fix exactly such a mission. The conditions in which Protestants may exercise their influence are very different according to the different countries or social classes. It is indeed a serious mistake to suppose that one may use the same method for the religious education of men of different races, of different instruction and of a different hereditary intellectual constitution. The relative failure of the Christian missions-I mean the immense disproportion we observe between the duties undertaken and the results obtained-proves how defective is this method.

Amidst people still tightly bound to the Roman Catholic faith, and whose spiritual thought is not yet developed, it is impossible to conduct any serious

liberal Protestant propaganda. They do not and cannot understand the questions involved, any more than you could teach algebra to some one who could not do a simple multiplication or division sum. You cannot imagine what strange ideas are prevalent about Protestants in certain countries where they are not known, and where priests, sincere but ignorant, teach the most stupendous legends about them. Protestant and atheist are there the same thing, and, according to the strict Catholic faith, all Protestants are considered as excommunicated-that is, condemned to damnation and to the eternal sufferings of hell.

In such a community a liberal Protestant may not hope to gain any souls to his free and enlightened religious faith. Those he speaks to can appreciate neither light nor liberty. He must concentrate his thought and zeal upon social emancipation or instructive enterprises, apart from religious organizations, diffusing historical and scientific knowledge that may prove the absurdity of the traditional Catholic teaching. He must try to change the intellectual condition of these men, and so prepare an appropriate ground where a free and conscious religious faith may later on grow and ripen. testantism can exert some influence only on Catholics already emancipated from the authority and faith of their own church, and we are taught by experience that in the countries where there is no powerful Protestant organization, the two most active agents of this emancipation are secular schools and

Pro

democracy. But it is not enough for a Catholic to emancipate himself from his own church to become a Protestant. In Catholic countries of advanced instruction and high civilization, there are a great number of these emancipated souls, especially amongst men. An important majority of them become Freethinkers as a natural consequence of their Catholic breeding. They were taught in their childhood that there is no other religion but Christianity, that Christianity and Catholicism are identical, that besides the Catholic Church no church has any right to call itself Christian. So when they arrive at the conviction that the Catholic doctrine and the authority of the Catholic Church are irreconcilable with the modern spirit and modern science, they naturally conclude that they are no longer Christians, and cannot profess any positive religion. Consequently they are ill-affected towards Protestantism, and do not even take pains to study it. Nevertheless, most of these Freethinkers are not irreligious men ; most of them believe in God, and many of them in a future life. The best amongst them, for whom liberty has not degenerated into licence, cherish a moral ideal. Why, then, do such a small number

become Protestants?

It is not only because the Protestant service, especially the Calvinist, seems to them too rigid, too unæsthetic, one might say too tedious; for they could adhere to a Protestant church without being constrained to a regular attendance at all its services.