Our current and popular literature—­Fiction, Poetry, Essays on social relations—­is emphatically a literature of enjoyment, ministering to the various excitements of pleasure, wonder, suspense, or pain.  And last, and in some respects most serious of all, our popular theology has largely conformed to the spirit of the age.  Representative of a debased and emasculated Christianity, it attacks our humanity at its very core.  It rings out to us, with wearisome iteration, as our one great concern, the saving of our own souls:  degrades the religion of the Cross into a slightly-refined and long-sighted selfishness:  and makes our following Him who “pleased not Himself” to consist in doing just enough to escape what it calls the pains of hell—­to win what it calls the joys of heaven.

This is the dark side of the picture; but it has its bright side too.  These advances of science, these extensions of commerce, these philosophies, even where they are falsely so called, this Political Economy, which from its very nature must first “labour for the meat that perisheth,”—­these are all God’s servants and man’s ministers still—­the ministers of man’s higher and nobler life.  Consciously or unconsciously, they are working to raise from myriads burdens of poverty, care, ceaseless and fruitless toil, under the pressure of which all higher aspiration is wellnigh impossible.  Sanitary reform in itself may mean nothing more than better drainage, fresher air, freer light, more abundant water:  to the “Governor among the nations” it means lessened impossibility that men should live to Him.

If in few ages the great bulk and the most popular portion of literature has more prostituted itself to purposes of sensational or at most aesthetic enjoyment, it is at least as doubtful if in any previous age our highest literature has more emphatically and persistently devoted itself to proclaiming this great doctrine of the Cross.  Sometimes directly and explicitly, oftener by implication, this is the ultimate theme of those who are most deeply influencing the spirit of the time.  Our finest and most widely recognised pulpit oratory is at home here, and only here:  Maurice and Arnold, Trench and Vaughan, Robertson and Stanley, James Martineau and Seeley, Thirlwall and Wilberforce, Kingsley and Brooke, Caird and Tulloch, different in form, in much antagonistic in what is called opinion, are of one mind and heart on this.  The thought underlying all their thoughts of man is that “higher than love of happiness” in humanity which expresses the true link between man and God.  The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, “Love not pleasure—­love God.  Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm, but through the blackness and the storm.  Though He hide Himself in the thick darkness, yet” give thanks at remembrance of His holiness.  “Though He slay thee, yet trust still in Him.”  The hope to which they call us is not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless future.  It is the hope of a true life now, struggling on and up through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns.