is such a God? the answer comes, and it is surely irresistible: If I groan over the sin and the sorrow of the world, and if I suffer in the catastrophes which crush my fellow-men, what right have I to think that this sympathy, this saving sympathy, is my creation? How dare I suppose that there is in me a virtue which I deny to the Soul of the World, the Creative Intelligence, God?

Is it said: That is reasoning in a circle; you agree that God is good because you are, and then that you are good because God is? Well, in matters of this kind the argument, to be complete, must be a circle. The circle is its own evidence. For who can deny that it is good? What better conclusion can faith or practice reach than this: I must be true and good and loving, because God is truth, goodness, and love? This is the vision of our desire, the self-evidencing reality which carries conviction.

"I saw Eternity the other night

Like a great ring of pure and endless light,

All calm as it was bright:

And round beneath it Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,

Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled."

That vision is the true theology.

We may, then, vindicate the name of theology as queen of the sciences, understanding by it, not that theology is one of the sciences, but that it is a knowledge or a discipline which must explain and

justify the sciences, and in its turn be justified and recognized by them.

This knowledge of the Cause and the Purpose, to which science as such cannot attain, is as necessary as anything to which science can attain. For if God is not, or if we cannot know Him, a doubt and a fear will inevitably steal over the human spirit, What use or joy or satisfaction can there be in any other knowledge?

CHAPTER IX

LITERATURE

Vita sine litteris est mors was a saying of Robertson, the Scottish historian - "Life without literature is death." But a sick doubt sometimes steals over the world, in the incredible multiplication of written and printed matter, whether life even with literature is much better. When books were few and rare, and (despite Bacon's pessimistic view that the weighty things sink in the stream of time and only the driftwood and the bubbles and the froth are carried down on its bosom) only those that were of weight survived, when a newspaper was an event, and even letters were written with care as if for posterity, the student in his library might easily feel that he breathed the air of the immortals and conversed with the good and great of all time. Such a commerce with what is noble in literature was a finer life; to be deprived of it would naturally seem to be death. But when the flood of written and printed matter assumes vast proportions, when the ephemeral writing of the day, in papers or books, leaves no time for reference to the solemn and silent monitors upon the shelves, when writing is a trade for wresting from the restless

and curious mind of man a living, and journalism becomes the record of facts which do not happen for the benefit of minds that do not think, then literature, if all that is written and printed is to assume the venerable name, appears as a muddy and defiling deluge, in which, though the precious products of time are still tossed and whirled, the mind is more likely to be debauched and defiled by the flood than to be saved by the treasures.

Life with letters is a death for the unhappy minds that feed upon vanity, for children who use the art of reading to debauch their spirits with sensational stories, for men who use it to exasperate the fever of gambling, and the like. None but a pessimist would say that a cheap press means more evil than good to the world, but he must be a blind optimist who does not recognize that the evil goes near to balancing the good.

Life without letters is death! But in contrast with the city population feeding on the garbage of the daily press, with no palate for any writing which is not spiced with lubricity, or malice, or sensationalism, consider the illiterate, still to be found in remote and quiet places, old men who live in dumb contact with the vital earth, or the still more vital heavens, tossed on the crisp waves of the sea, bronzed with the weather, hardy with the handling of the rope or of the spade. These illiterates are at least in presence of the living forces of Nature, and know the solemnity and uplift of the eternal

things. They read in the legends of the stones and the hedgerows more salutary messages than the paragraphs of the daily press; they hear in the twitter of the birds, and the timid rustle of earth's humbler progeny beneath the grass, the word of God which has been spoken since the Creation. The doings of the cottage, the birth, the marriage, and the burial, the uneloquent loves, and the unrecorded heroisms of endurance, are a better script than the fripperies of popular fiction, and the scraps which take the place of knowledge. It has become, therefore, more necessary than ever to discriminate between literature and literature, and, if possible, to retain the name "literature" only for writing which has a certain quality. If we could give to literature a specific and legitimate meaning, if we might stamp as "illiterate" all who have no taste for real literature, all who wallow by choice in the writing which is the negation of real literature, we should be in the way of amendment.

There is a kind of human swine, unclean feeders, that eat with equal relish food and garbage. Before them the pearls are cast in vain.1 Surely, and often quickly, the taste becomes morbid, and, like those Africans who acquire a craving to eat earth, which is

1 What the literature is that at present starves the souls of London children is told in the answer made by one of the boys to the question, what books they read in their country visit: Chips, Comic Cuts, the World's Comic, Funny Cuts, the Funny Wonder, Comic Home Journal. ("Towards Social Reform," by Canon Barnett.) They ought to grow up humourists, but they do not. The comic view of life ends in tragedy.

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