made; but it is God's revelation and is divinely inspired. The Church, with its various denominations, may be man-made; but these denominations, confederated by a common creed and the one fundamental dogma of justification by faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as symbolized in the celebration of the holy sacraments, constitute the visible body of Christ and become the reincarnation of his spirit.

When we speak of Church membership as a voluntary matter we are apt to lose sight of the fact that it is not voluntary, as many other privileges are voluntary. A man may join a secret order or club or not, as he may please, and he may have neglected no duty. But the Church, being a divine, though in matters of polity in some respects a man-made, institution, having been founded on the Christologic fact stated by Peter, that Jesus is the Christ, and having been declared to be the "pillar and ground of truth," and Christ having made it his special charge and organ, union with it becomes a duty-an essential duty and need in order to a sincere and sufficient allegiance to the dominion of Christ. Through it the Spirit, Christ's successor on earth, operates for the salvation of the world.

There is no other institution like the Church. Though it may often have been weakened and corrupted by mercenary and unholy men, yet it has ever been the organ of the divine Spirit, the authorized representative of the Lord Jesus Christ.

If we expect to succeed in anything we must employ every means and help in our reach; and in the Church, and the Church alone, are found the very helps we need for efficient and acceptable service in the Lord's vineyard and for successful prosecution of the warfare of faith to a triumphant conclusion. In it we have both visible and spiritual union with the great Head of the Church. Its ordinances, its means of grace, its fellowship, its unity of faith and action, its channels of service in evangelical, charitable, and educational enterprises, its Gospel ministry and systematic dissemination of the word, its cooperative efforts under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, for the evangelization of the world, all make the Church necessary to whoever would be a true soldier of the cross and a sincere follower of the Lamb. In Christ we are saved. Out of Christ we are lost. But to be in Christ and out of his visible body-the Church—is an absurdity. As the Church is the reincarnation of Christ by the

Holy Ghost given unto it on the day of Pentecost, whoso has the experience of the new birth by the operation of the Holy Ghost is as forcibly drawn toward and into the Church, the visible body of Christ, as is the food of the polypode, touched by its arms, drawn into its body. The new birth turns a man toward the Church as naturally as the living plant turns to the sun or the magnetized needle to the pole. If we have no drawing toward the Church we have a most conclusive evidence that, though we may claim the Spirit, the Spirit does not own or acknowledge us, and that there still remains within us a darkened mind, if not also an "evil heart of unbelief." "By one Spirit are we all baptized into one body." "Those that be planted in the house of the Lord shall flourish in the courts of our God." "As true civil liberty is freedom in the law, but not from the law," so true religious liberty is freedom in the Church, but not from the Church. And as freedom in the law is the highest civil liberty, so freedom in the Church is the liberty in which we are free indeed.

Why Lawe

ART. VI.-STUDIES IN RECENT FICTION.

THE golden age of English fiction began with the publication of Scott's Waverley, in 1814, and ended with the death of George Eliot, in 1880. There had been much good work before, and there has been much since, but those were the days of giants. In addition to the great names which open and close it the period comprises all the works of Thackeray and Dickens; the remarkable Bronté novels; the powerful historical and sociological romances of Charles Kingsley; the clever and exciting stories of Captain Marryatt, Charles Reade, and Wilkie Collins; the clever but not exciting stories of Anthony Trollope; the voluminous works of Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Beaconsfield, G. P. R. James, and many lesser lights. The novels of the American Cooper and Hawthorne may also be fairly included.

The inferiority of the present age of fiction is not, however, in quantity. More novels are written now than ever before. In 1857 Professor Masson, in his lectures on the "British Novelists," estimated the number of novels published in Great Britain at two a week, or one hundred a year, and put in a pathetic plea that he should not be considered to have read them all. But now the London Athenæum reviews from six to ten novels a week, or about four hundred a year. These are mostly British novels, leaving untouched the most of Continental and American fiction. When we also remember that the reader of English is supplied with a large number of translations from French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Russian, and Scandinavian novels it is a very mild and moderate statement to say that the hungry novel reader can have his choice of ten new novels every week, or five hundred a year. Indeed, an alleged compilation from trade reports asserts that in 1895 there were fourteen hundred new novels published in the United States, five hundred and seventy-three of which were by American and eight hundred and twenty-seven by foreign authors.

If these last surprising figures be accepted as true it is probable that they include not merely such novels as form a part of the real literature of the age, but also that great mass of fiction found in the story papers, in the paper-covered trash sold on railroad trains, and in the voluminous juvenile literature some

of which is adapted to Sunday schools and some of which is very decidedly not. These Sunday school and juvenile books contain, however, some very good reading, and occasionally one of them gets over the line and becomes a part of our real literature, as Miss Alcott's Little Women and Mrs. Prentiss's Stepping Heavenward.

Many writers are very near the line which divides literature from nonliterature, and opinions will differ as to their precise place. Mrs. Barr and Mrs. Phelps Ward are just within the line. So was Mrs. Stowe, but Mrs. Southworth is without; E. P. Roe was barely within, and Edgar Fawcett and Julian Hawthorne are just outside. The latter is undoubtedly his father's true son, but his novels are illegitimate—of which his recent prize story is sadly convincing. Judging by sales the most popular author in the United States is one we do not care to name, whose books are always in paper covers and are sold mostly on railroads. Such authors frequently have more readers than many of talent or even genius.

Some writers are disposed to restrict the term novel to the analytic or realistic school, in which the greatest stress is laid on character, while the incidents are subordinate, must be probable or even commonplace, and are used merely to bring out character. In the romantic school the scene is usually remote in time or place or both, and the incidents are of an unusual, thrilling, or even supernatural character, having a vivid interest in themselves entirely apart from the persons connected with them. The "short story," now so popular, may be either a novel or romance, but inclines to the latter. In common speech we use the term novel as generic, and divide it into the realistic and romantic schools. There has always been a strife between these two, and it never raged more fiercely than at present. The realists have the more books, for four fifths of present ventures in fiction are society novels, but the romanticists have the more readers.

The realists claim that all the stories have been told, and that we now need only studies of character and such characters as are about us in everyday life. But the romantic party reply that this is just what we do not want. We see the commonplace ourselves, and when we read we want to get away from it. If we are still to be reminded of ourselves the remem

brance should be of the noblest and best of our emotions and experiences, not of "the trivial round, the common task." There are some things we never weary of, told by either school. Every youth who reads a love scene imagines himself in a similar one, and from the proposals in the novels forms plans for a similar performance on his own part, which plans, by the way, never exactly materialize. On the other hand, books like the Scarlet Letter and the Manxman appeal to us powerfully, because they discuss familiar temptations and hold up before us lurid lights to warn us, or beacons to show us the path of penitence and atonement. No author of either school can be of the first rank unless he deals with the highest and mightiest parts of our nature, and these cannot be expressed without notes of mighty passion, either good or evil.

The realists claim to depict life as it is, but it is doubtful if they are doing this any more than their rivals are. Heroes who fight savages and pirates are about as common as unfaithful wives. The exploits of Sherlock Holmes find as many parallels in real detective work as ordinary society supplies for the tales of Ibsen, Tolstoi, and the French school. These authors are true enough as far as they go. If one may judge from an exceedingly limited reading, the worst thing in them is their ghastly, terrible truthfulness. But we protest against having the deeds of brutal, vile, and impure men and women held up to us as pictures of universal social conditions. Dr. Richard Burton has rechristened this school as "Partialists," and the name deserves hearty indorsement.

We question the fitness of some real topics for the use of art. The processes of digestion and the problems of city sewage are undoubted realities, but we relegate the discussion of them to treatises on physiology and civics. Much which a certain literary school heralds as art, and even the highest art, is really no more fitted for artistic purposes than a diagram of the alimentary canal is fitted for framing as a parlor picture.

There is another branch of the realistic school, and its god is the commonplace. Instead of unbridled passion these writers give us a deadly tameness. Instead of frantic immoralities they give us maddening puerilities. We soon grow weary of these. We turn from parlor chairs and tea tables, from grocery wagons and clothing stores, vastly preferring to stir our blood and 60-FIFTH Series, vol. xII.