tions of this need lie open to our sight on every side. Here is a company of refined and educated people going down to make a college settlement among the poor and ignorant, to help them and lift them up. They declare that it is not a religious movement, that there is to be no preaching connected with it, that the only faith which it is to embody is faith in humanity. They choose a leader who has only that faith. But they find, under his guidance, that the movement will not move, that the work cannot be done, that it faints and fails because it lacks the spring of moral inspiration which can come only from a divine and spiritual faith. And they are forced to seek a new leader who, although he is not a preacher, yet carries within his heart that power of religious conviction, that force of devotion to the will of God, that faith in the living and supreme Christ, which is in fact the centre of Christianity. All around the circle of human doubt and despair, where men and women are going out to enlighten and uplift and comfort and strengthen their fellowmen under the perplexities and burdens of life, we hear the cry for a gospel. All through the noblest aspirations and efforts and hopes of our age of doubt, we feel the longing, and we hear the demand, for a new inspiration of Christian faith.

These are the signs of the times. We must take note of them, we must labour and pray to understand their true significance, if we are to say anything to our fellow-men which shall be worth our saying and their hearing.

Renan made a strange remark not long before his death: "I fear that the work of the Twentieth Century will consist in taking out of the waste-basket a multitude of excellent ideas which the Nineteenth Century has heedlessly thrown into it." The sceptic's fear is the believer's hope. Once more the fields are white unto the harvest. The time is ripe; ripe in the sorrow of scepticism, ripe in the return of aspiration, ripe in the enthusiasm of humanity, for a renaissance of the spiritual life.

Already the horizon brightens with the tokens of this renaissance. There is a new interest in religion as the most living of all topics. There is a new sense of its vital meaning for the whole life of man. There is a new determination to apply it all around the circle of human responsibilities and test its value everywhere. There is a new cry for a Christ who shall fulfil the hopes of all the ages. There is a new love waiting for him, a new devotion ready to follow his call. Doubt, in its nobler aspect,-honest, unwilling, morally earnest doubt, has been a

John the Baptist to prepare the way for his coming. The men of to-day are saying, as certain Greeks said to apostles of old, "Sirs, we would see Jesus." The disciple who can lead the questioning spirits to him, is the man who has the Gospel for an Age of Doubt.

THE

II

THE GOSPEL OF A PERSON

'HE prevalence and the quality of modern doubt, with its discontent and sadness, its misgivings and reactions, its moral inconsistencies and fine enthusiasms, bring the preacher who is alive and in earnest, face to face with the most important question of his life. What can I do, what ought I to do, to meet the strange, urgent, complicated needs of such a time as this?

First of all, as a man, and every preacher ought to be a man, though not every man is bound to be a preacher as a man, it is necessary to lead a clean, upright, steadfast, useful life, lifted above all selfishness, and especially above that form of religious selfishness which is the besetting peril of those who feel themselves rich in faith in the midst of a generation that has been made poor by unbelief. Never has there been a time when character and conduct counted for more than they do to-day. A life on a high level, yet full of helpful, heal

ing sympathy for all life on its lowest levels, is the first debt which we owe to our fellowmen in this age.

But beyond this, is there not something personal and specific which the conditions of the present demand from us, as men who have not only the common duty of living, but also the peculiar vocation of speaking directly and constantly to the inner life of our brothers?

The moment we look at the problem in this light, we see that there are various lines of activity open to us, and along all of these lines men are making promises and prophecies of usefulness and success. The cures which are suggested for the malady of the age are many and diverse. Of some of them we need speak only in passing, to recognize that for us, at least, they are unsuitable.

Herr Max Nordau, for example, in his curious and chaotic book, Degeneration, diagnoses the sickness of modern times as the result, not of a loss of faith, but of a fatal increase of nervous irritability produced by the strain of an intricate civilization. He declares that the malady must run its course, but that in time it will be healed by the restorative force of "misoneism, that instinctive, invincible aversion to progress and its difficulties that Lom