carried becomes visible. The wind is ever driving the particles away, the wind ever forming there the cloud. Now so it is with all the heights of human life. They are always shrouded in mystery. The winds do not dissipate it, they create it. Courage, love, devotion are lifted up to the heights. Behold there the ever-present mystery of godliness! All life is touched at last by something which we cannot understand. The whole life of man, all his civilization, all his knowledge, all his achievements, are borne along by eternal forces, and reach at length to that great mystery wherein the thought of that which is highest in man blends insensibly with religion and with worship.

THE RELIGIOUS CRISIS OF OUR AGE.

BY PROFESSOR OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D., BERLIN.

T is an acknowledged fact, that the Christian religion is at present involved in a crisis which appears to be of graver nature, both in scope and in character, than any previous conflict. In scope, because it is no longer confined to the upper classes, but has seized hold of the great masses; and in character, because doubt and contradiction have passed beyond the outworks of hierarchical abuses and patristic or scholastic dogmas, and have attacked the very foundations of religious belief. But, as history teaches that Christianity has already issued from many a struggle not only victorious, but also purified and invigorated, we are justified in the hope that the present crisis will finally enable the religious spirit, set free from ancient bonds, to realize with greater freedom, energy, and purity, its indestructible life. The more impartially we contemplate the present difficulty, the more clearly we endeavour to recognize its causes, the more convinced shall we be that the very circumstances and tendencies of thought which are responsible for the evil, implicitly

contain the forces of resistance and of cure, which will bring to light, with the aid of the Christian spirit, a new development alike of religion and of the moral life in human society.

The religious crisis of to-day rests on a combination of new scientific modes of thought with new social ideals, such as has never presented itself before. The former are summed up in the idea of Evolution, which became dominant after Darwin in the field of natural science, and was then applied by Marx to history also, with the intention of eliminating from it all ideal aims and motives, and reducing everything to the struggle of material interests. By this means the idea of Evolution, which still in Herder and Hegel served to support an idealistic teleological interpretation of history, was now employed as the foundation of that practical materialism which, in social democratic circles, has taken the place of the religious view of the world. This view is now opposed by a combination of the practically socialist tendency with the scientific modes of thought belonging to our time. In this conflict lies the difficulty of the present situation. How can we meet it? What can we do to preserve religion for our children and grandchildren, and to heal the breach which seems to have been formed with such incurable mischief between the ineradicable religious needs of the human heart and man's modern thought?

Thus much, at any rate, is certain,-that nothing could be more perverse, nothing more futile, than the renewed attempt of short-sighted and narrow