disease to the surface. The feverish plunge into study and discussion with his conscience and himself is thoroughly characteristic of Elsmere, and is powerfully and admirably described. He was sick in body and mind, overburdened, overwrought. His friend, Mr. Newcome, advised asceticism, which Mr. Gladstone thinks absurd. Mrs. Ward compares Elsmere's case to Bunyan's, when he was on the verge, if not over the verge, of religious madness. The cases are much akin. Bunyan was advised to "drink beer and dance with the girls." In a less Early English form, Elsmere needed the same advice. He needed a year's holiday (without his wife), trout-fishing (he did try pike), and golf. He was not in a condition to tackle theological problems. He was in a fever of unrest, and of anxiety as to whether he was not trifling with his conscience, to a man of honour an intolerable thing. He was not alone in his quandary. Mrs. Ward has introduced into her novel a type resembling one in real life, Mr. Grey, a lay tutor who preaches lay sermons, and who is understood by Mrs. Ward to have entertained the opinions which finally commend themselves to her hero.* Perhaps she may also be acquainted with the case of other students of Biblical evidences whose paths, after going far in Elsmere's course, turned back on the old belief. Nobody knows what happier haven Elsmere might have won if he had only given himself a chance "The old need not be therefore true; However (and it is a considerable compliment), one is arguing about Robert Elsmere as if he had been a live Robert, and not a character in a tale, bound to point the author's moral, and support her own conclusions." Robert Elsmere " will be read by hundreds of young people, who, while the ideas about the Book of Daniel remained in M. Renan's and in similar works, would have heard nothing about them. Probably their beliefs will be shaken; if so, it is not certain that they will be lucky enough to find another rest for the sole of the foot as promptly as did Mrs. Ward's hero. But they may, at least, avoid his feverish haste, and give time a chance to heal them. Elsmere was, indeed, extremely fortunate. He put out suddenly on the darkling waters of discussion, sub luce maligna, he sailed at random there, he ruined his barque, but of Faith he kept a wreck as richly stored as the famous wreck of Robinson Crusoe. It contained all that he really needed for the living of the Christian life. As a matter of temperament, he would always have lived that *The reviewer happened to be at Oxford when a tutor, one of the best men who ever lived, occasionally preached lay sermons to his pupils. As a hearer of his ordinary lectures, and a reader of his writings, I thought his influence was all on the side of a liberal orthodoxy, that his endeavour was to find a way in which old beliefs might still be credible. His metaphysics were certainly full of Biblical terminology; but this is not the place to discuss the man nor his work. kind of life, whatever his opinions. What pure religion and undefiled is, according to the mind of the Apostle James, we know, and, without even his remaining stock of Theism, of that religion Elsmere would have been a follower. But, if we are to speak only of beliefs, for what logical reason should he have stopped in the glissade just where he did stop? For no logical reason; man is a reasoning but not a logical animal. Granting Elsmere's character, he was at the mercy of the next new book, the next sceptical squire with a work on the Evolution of Religion. This is a topic to which I have given some attention. One has to allow for personal prejudices and prepossessions, but I confess that, in my opinion, the study does not inevitably lead to disbelief in the necessity and ultimate truth and triumph of Faith. But it is plain that the comparative study of religion may be so handled as to show that all creeds are gradually modified survivals of primitive illusions, dreams, impressions of a creature "moving about in worlds not realized." Suppose Mr. Elsmere had taken up the study, and taken it up by that handle, what would have become of his Theism and his new sect? He would have been at the mercy of the first anthropological squire who came along with a work on "The Savage Origins of Theism." Then, what an attitude would have been his, when he had to tell his New Brotherhood, and his most unfortunate wife, that he had been reading a new book, and had altered his opinions! The most poignant parts of "Robert Elsmere," the scenes almost too painful to be dwelt upon, most carefully and sympathetically drawn, display the relations between the hero, after his change of mind, and his wife. As a rule, in actual experience, husband and wife find theological differences very trifling and unconsidered affairs. They do not want to argue, and go their own ways. But Mrs. Elsmere was an uncompromising saint of the Puritan persuasion, and her silent misery is a thing not to be read about without pain. The position is not like that of the clergyman who renounces his orders, in Mrs. Gaskell's "North and South," and of his wife. She merely sighed after the flesh-pots, the respectability, the pleasant parsonage in the New Forest. But Catherine Elsmere was a born Puritan, and the foes of her belief were her own foes. "Your historical Christ, Robert, will never win souls," she says. "If He was God, every word you speak will insult Him. If He was man, He was not a good man." That is put "plump and squarely." Indeed, Mrs. Elsmere might have applied to the New Testament Grote's exposure of the absurdity of seeking to find history in the Greek heroic age by simply dropping the myths and miracles. Every one will discover a different historical deposit in the New Testament, as in Homer. But such arguments were not in her way. Robert's answer was a solvitur ambulando. "Come and see," was all he said. Alas, where are we to walk, where can we go forth into the wilderness and see this moral miracle? The war of opinion is only ended by death, and neither yields. In Mr. Froude's gloomy theological romance, the sceptical clergyman makes love to a married lady, deserts her in agony of mind when her child is drowned, intends to commit suicide, is checked by a Catholic priest, is reconverted to Catholicism, retires into a monastery, and becomes a sceptic again! The last end of Robert Elsmere is less unhopeful than that, though he has to resist his wife's attempts to win him back to his old creed on his death-bed. He "did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was like a scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more than its father has allowed it to know." Some time earlier he would have believed that we are allowed to know a good deal. No religion that did not say as much has been a lasting cement of human society. It is reunion after this life that we really want, the rest is nothing. If the new thin Theism is dubious about this, then one might rather desire a cataclysm of creeds, and society, the disappearance of civilization, the return to barbarism, to the open air, to miracles, and to Hope, than predict success for the Truth as it is in "Robert Elsmere." But about the future of mankind, who dares play the seer? And about our "( Own soon shall we know better than prophets." ANDREW LANG. STREET CHILDREN. IT T seems likely that if count were made to-day there would be found in the Industrial Schools and Reformatories of the State, in the Homes and Refuges of charitable societies, and at large in towns and cities, two hundred thousand of the class of children who make a living in the streets. Did average mortality prevail amongst such children, there would be almost twenty thousand more, but these are prematurely dead. This is not a small figure, and the lot of those who are still within the control of their parents-for the most part ill-living parents-is as much a scandal to the land as it is pitiable in itself. The majority of street children maintain their parents, partly or wholly, as well as themselves. Many only indirectly maintain the father, relieving him of rent and wife-keep. His wages he spends on himself. These scarcely ever suffer more than the hardship of unnatural and protracted toil. Where both parents have to be kept, there is almost invariably a wearying repetition of threatenings to keep the tired child at work, and blows when the all-day effort in the streets has failed to bring the required money. To his parents such a child is a valuable slave. Before he is fully grown, even while still suffering from child ailments, when the stones under his bare feet are frozen, before his young bones are set-all because many people, to their credit be it said, pity an exposed child that is so frail and young-he is sent out to wander, to plead, to pester, to get thrust out of the way and cursed by some, to get for his light-box the penny for which all the joy and health of his childhood are being sold. He is a slave of slaves. Over and over again has this state of things been denounced by newspapers of all schools of politics; by Society papers; by all the papers of the Churches ;-an assumption running through them all that the law on the matter is what it ought to be, and that the fault lies with some administrative body. Yet it has never been dealt with, nor even attempted to be dealt with, as a State question. Sixty years ago the English Parliament legislated for the protection of the lower animals from cruelty, without either political or money reason, but solely out of compassion for animals and regard for their capacity of suffering; but to this day Parliament has not done as much for the little human animal, which is as dependent, as weak, and more capable of suffering, though both political and financial reasons can be urged in favour of it. Without resorting to the short, ready, and eternally true maxim of faith, that what is justice to the least is also, all round and in the long run, wise always and to everybody, legislation against cruelty to children is justified by great economic facts which are obvious and glaring, even to the science which acts only upon sight. The London Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has now, after three years of close study of these slave children in their actual daily life, prepared a Bill for their relief. Its most important provision is to make it a penal offence to send a child into the streets to beg, either openly, or under pretence of singing or playing, or sweeping a crossing, or hawking; and, in order to make this provision effective, it also proposes to punish any one who sends a child under fourteen to sing or play, or sweep, or hawk, in the streets at night, or a child under ten by day or night. Parents and guardians are to be made responsible for allowing children to do any of these things. The principle of these provisions is the right of dependent children to endurable lives. Fifty years ago it received its application to small workers in brickfields, mines, factories, and chimneys. Advanced at first by wholesome human instinct, it has at length received confirmation of experience, and has passed into the creed of political science. The economic prophecies of the advocates of this once called "grandmotherly legislation " have been all fulfilled, and are to be seen abroad in our streets, while the fears of its "anti-sentimental" enemies have all died a natural death, and now lie in peaceful graves in forgotten "Hansards." The political soundness of the principle is settled. It only remains to make its application extend to the school, the theatre, the street, the home. Wherever a weak and helpless child may be submitted to tyranny and made to do what is torture, there law must stand up for it and forbid. If the parents will not do justice from natural feeling, they must be made to do it in less desirable but not less efficient ways. Possibly even among politicians who hold with us that the State should forbid a big-limbed, arbitrary man to have his way with a |