Stephen, ’with the best intentions, to take such a discussion seriously.  Boswell tells us how a lady interrogated Dr. Johnson as to the nature of the spiritual body.  She seemed desirous, he adds, of “knowing more; but he left the subject in obscurity.”  We smile at Boswell’s evident impression that Johnson could, if he had chosen, have dispelled the darkness.  When we find a number of educated gentlemen seriously enquiring as to the conditions of existence in the next world, we feel that they are sharing Boswell’s naivete without his excuse.  What can any human being outside a pulpit say upon such a subject which does not amount to a confession of his own ignorance, coupled, it may be, with more or less suggestion of shadowy hopes and fears?  Have the secrets of the prison-house really been revealed to Canon Farrar or Mr. Beresford Hope?...  When men search into the unknowable, they naturally arrive at very different results.’ And Mr. Stephen argues with perfect justice that if we are to judge Christianity from such discussions as these, its doctrines of a future life are all visibly receding into a vague ‘dreamland;’ and we shall be quite ready to admit, as he says, in words I have already quoted, ’that the impertinent young curate who tells [him he] will be burnt everlastingly for not sharing such superstitions, is just as ignorant as [Mr. Stephen himself], and that [Mr. Stephen] knows as much as [his] dog.’

The critic, in the foregoing passages, draws his conclusion from the condition of but one Protestant doctrine.  But he might draw the same conclusion from all; for the condition of all of them is the same.  The divinity of Christ, the nature of his atonement, the constitution of the Trinity, the efficacy of the sacraments, the inspiration of the Bible—­there is not one of these points on which the doctrines, once so fiercely fought for, are not now, among the Protestants, getting as vague and varying, as weak and as compliant to the caprice of each individual thinker, as the doctrine of eternal punishment.  And Mr. Stephen and his school exaggerate nothing in the way in which they represent the spectacle.  Protestantism, in fact, is at last becoming explicitly what it always was implicitly, not a supernatural religion which fulfils the natural, but a natural religion which denies the supernatural.

And what, as a natural religion, is its working power in the world?  Much of its earlier influence doubtless still survives; but that is a survival only of what is passing, and we must not judge it by that.  We must judge it by what it is growing into, not by what it is growing out of.  And judged in this way, its practical power—­its moral, its teaching, its guiding power—­is fast growing as weak and as uncertain as its theology.  As long as its traditional moral system is in accordance with what men, on other grounds, approve of, it may serve to express the general tendency impressively, and to invest it with the sanction of many reverend