that the conscious aim of Jesus's life was the formation of a Society of Humanity. He could find no text for his refrain 'L'Église, c'est moi.' Yet his insistence on the social side of Jesus's work has done more for Christian union than any theological utterance of the past third of a century. Here, at any rate, is common ground.
He attempted a similar eirenicon in his Natural Religion, with reference to the conflict between religion and science. Religion is the pursuit of the ideal in any sphere, was his teaching. Thus science and art are both religious in tendency, if not in aim. How far the book served its purpose it is difficult to say. Science and religion are no longer at loggerheads, but that result, I fancy, has been produced rather by a process of exhaustion than by any direct influence of Seeley's. Yet Natural Religion was fully as original as Ecce Homo, and was much more attractive in style.
Not much need be said about Seeley's incursions into literary criticism. His contributions to English Lessons, so far as we can trace them, are lucid, but wanting in imaginative insight. Milton he treated rather as an historian than a critic. His little book on Goethe is somewhat commonplace, and fails to do justice to the Titanic side of the poet.
