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It is a large inquiry. I can but touch on a few salient points.

I. First, there is the essentially progressive element in religion itself. Lord Macaulay, in his celebrated essay on Ranke's History of the Popes, maintains, with all the exuberance of logic and rhetoric, the difference between theology and all other sciences is in this respect, that what it was in the days of the patriarch Job, such it must be in the nineteenth century, and to the end of time. No doubt in religion, as in all great subjects of human thought, there is a permanent and unchanging element; but in everything which relates to its form, in much which relates to its substance, the paradox of our great historian is as contrary to fact as it would be crushing to our aspirations if it were true. In the practice of theological controversy, it has been too much the custom to make the most of differences and the least of agreements. But in the theological study of the past, it has been too much the custom to see only the agreements and not the differences. Look in the face the fact that the belief of each successive epoch of Christendom has varied enormously from the belief of its predecessors. The variations of the Catholic Church, both past and present, have been almost, if not quite, as deep and wide as the variations of Protestantism; and these variations, whilst they show that each form of theology is but an approximation to the truth, and not the whole truth itself, contain the surest indication of vitality in the whole body of religious faith. The conceptions of the relations of man to man, and, still more, of man to God, have been incontestably altered with the growth of centuries. Not to speak of the total extinction of ancient polytheism, and confining ourselves within the limits of the Christian Church, it is one of the most consolatory fruits of theological study to observe the disappearance of whole continents of useless controversies which once distracted the world. What has become of the

belief, once absolutely universal in Christendom, that no human being could be saved who had not passed through the waters of baptism; that even innocent children, if not immersed in the font, were doomed to endless perdition? Or where are the interminable questions respecting the doctrine of predestination or the mode of justification which occupied the middle of the sixteenth and the close of the eighteenth century in Protestant Churches? Into what limbo has passed the terrible conflict between the Burghers and the Anti-Burghers amongst the now United Presbyterians? What do we now hear of the doctrine of the Double Procession, or of the Light on Mount Tabor, which in the ninth century and in the fifteenth filled the mind of Eastern Christendom? These questions for the time occupied, in these several Churches, the whole horizon of theological thought. They are dead and buried; and for us, standing on their graves, it is idle to say that theology has not changed. It has changed. Religion has survived those changes; and this is the historical pledge that that it will, survive a thousand

it may, more.

Even the mere removal of what may be called dead matter out of the path of living progress is of itself a positive gain. But the signs of the capability of future improvement in Religion are more direct than this. No doubt theologians have themselves to thank for the rigid, immutable character which has been ascribed by philosophers to their beliefs. The Jesuit maxim, Sint ut sunt, aut non sint, has been too often accepted in all Churches for any of the Churches to complain if they have been taken at their word. But already, as far back as the Reformation, there were indications of a deeper insight-exceptional and quaint, but so expressive as to vindicate for Christianity, even then, the widest range which future discoveries may open before it. In the first Confession of John Knox, the Reformers had perceived what had

been so long concealed from the eyes of the Schoolmen and the Fathers-that the most positive expressions, even of their own convictions, were not guaranteed from imperfection or mutability; and the entreaty with which that Confession is prefaced, contains at once a fine example of true Christian humility and the stimulus to the noblest Christian ambition-"We conjure you, if any man will note in this our Confession any article or sentence repugnant to God's Holy Word, that it would please him of his gentleness, and for Christian charity's sake, to admonish us of the same in writing; and we, upon our honour and fidelity, do promise him satisfaction from the Holy Scriptures, or due reformation of that which he shall prove to be amiss." And perhaps even more striking is the like expression in the well-known address of the first pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, before embarking on the great enterprise which was to issue in the foundation of new churches and new commonwealths beyond the Atlantic-"I am verily persuaded that the Lord has more truth yet to come for us-yet to break forth out of His Holy Word. The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. The Calvinists stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. Though they were burning and shining lights, yet they penetrated not into the whole counsel of God, but were as willing to embrace further light as that which they first received. I beseech you to remember that it is an article of your Church's covenant, that you be ready to receive whatever truth shall be made known to you from the written Word of God." "Noble words," says the eloquent historian of the Dutch Republic; "words to bear fruit, after centuries shall go by." They are, indeed, the charter of the future glories of Protestant, and perhaps of Roman Christianity. Well did Archbishop Whately, on the eve of a change in the constitution of the Church of 1 Motley, Life of Barneveldt, ii. 295.

England, exclaim :-"I will not believe that the Reformers locked the door, and threw away the key for ever!" It is in the light of this progressive historical development that the confessions and liturgies, the doctrines and usages, of former times find their proper place. All of them, taken as the final expressions of absolute truth, are misleading. All of them, even the most imperfect, may be taken as the various phases and steps of a Church and a faith whose glory it is to be perpetually advancing towards perfection.

II. When we examine in detail the materials of Christian theology, they give abundant confirmation of this general truth. Theology has gained, and may gain immensely, by the process which has produced so vast a change in all other branches of knowledge-the process of diving below the surface and discovering the original foundations. How much has been effected for archæology by the excavations of Pompeii, of Nineveh, of Rome, of Troy, of Mycene! How much for history, by the exploration of the archives of Simancas, of the Register House of Edinburgh! How much for science, by the crucible of chemistry, by the spade and hatchet of the geologist, by the plummet of the Challenger! To this general law theology furnishes no exception. Every deep religious system has in it more than appeared at the time to its votaries, far more than has appeared in later times to its adversaries. Even in the ancient pagan religions of Greece and Rome, it is surprising to observe how vast a power of expansion and edification was latent in forms of which the influence might long ago seem to have died out. The glory of the Homeric poems, the solemnity of Sophocles and Eschylus, the beauty of the Apollo Belvidere, have, as it were, risen from their graves after the lapse of centuries, and occupy a larger space in the modern mind than they have done at any time since their first creation. Even in the case of Mohammedanism the Koran has,

within the last century, been awakened from a slumber of ages, and has been discovered to contain maxims which Christendom might cultivate with advantage, but which, in all the long centuries of ignorance, were hopelessly forgotten both by friends and foes. A great religion is not dead because it is not immediately comprehended, or because it is subsequently perverted, if only its primitive elements contain, along with the seeds of decay and transformation, the seeds of living truth. Especially is this the case in Christianity, which is not only (like Mohammedanism) the religion of a sacred book, but the religion of a sacred literature and a sacred life.

Putting aside for the moment all question of the divine authority of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and of the dogmatic systems built upon them, it is certain that their original force and grace is far more keenly appreciated now than it was when they were overlaid with fanciful allegories and scholastic perversions. The spirit of the time, the "Zeit-Geist,'

as

Matthew Arnold says, "has turned the rays of his lantern" full upon them, and in "the fierce light" that beats upon their structure through this process, if some parts have faded away, if the relation of all the parts to each other has been greatly altered, yet there can be no question that by its influence, which has penetrated more or less, all modern theology, the meaning, and with the meaning the grandeur and the beauty, of the Sacred Volume has been brought out with a fulness which was unknown to Hume and Voltaire, because it had been equally unknown to Aquinas and Augustine. Whole systems of false doctrine or false practice, whole fabrics of barbarous phraseology, have received their death-blow as the Ithuriel of modern criticism has transfixed with his spear here a spurious text, there an untenable interpretation, here a wrong translation, there a mistaken punctuation.

Or again, with regard to our in

creased knowledge of the dates and authorship of particular books, much, no doubt, remains obscure; but this partial ignorance is as the fulness of knowledge compared with the total blank which prevailed in the Church for a thousand years or more. All the instruction, inward and outward, which we have acquired from our discovery of the successive dates, and therewith of the successive phases, of St. Paul's Epistles, was lost almost until the beginning of this century, but has now become the starting-point of fresh inquiry and fresh delight in every historical or theological treatise. The disentanglement of the Psalter, the Pentateuch, and the Book of Isaiah from the artificial and fallacious monotony in which, regardless of times and circumstances, a blind tradition had involved them, gives a significance to the several portions of the respective books which no one who has once grasped it will ever willingly abandon. The Parables, as has been of late well described, have by their very nature an immortality of application which could never have been perceived had they been always, as they were in many instances at the time of their first delivery, shut up within the gross, carnal, matter-of-fact interpretation of those who said, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" or "It is because we have taken no bread." In short, when it was perceived, in the noble language of Burke,1 that the Bible was not a dead code, or collection of rigid dogmas, but, "an infinite variety of a most venerable and most multifarious literature," from that moment it became as impossible in the nature of things that the educated portion of mankind should ever cease to take an interest in the Old and New Testament, as it would be that they should cease to take an interest in Homer, or Shakespeare, or Dante, or Scott. The Sacred Books. which were once regarded as the stars were regarded by ancient astronomers,

1 Burke's Works, x. 21, Speech on Acts of Uniformity.

spangles set in the sky, or floating masses of nebulous light, or a galaxy of milky spots, have now been resolved by the telescope of scholarship into their component parts. Lord Macaulay would not deny that astronomy has undergone a total revolution through Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton-a revolution which has immensely extended its grandeur and its usefulness. Erasmus, Lowth, Herder, and Ewald have effected for Biblical knowledge a revolution no less complete and no less beneficent. There has been, as it were, a triple chain of singular, one may almost say providential, coincidences. The same critical process which has opened our eyes to the beauty and the wisdom of the sacred records has, by revealing to us the large infusion of the poetic element, enabled us to distinguish between the temporary and the essential, between the parabolical and the historical; and thus, at the moment when science and ethnology are pointing out difficulties, which on a literal and mechanical view of the Biblical records are insuperable, a door of escape has been opened by the disclosure of a higher aspect of the Scriptures, which would be equally true and valuable, were there no scientific difficulty in existence. Except in the lowest and most barbarous classes of society the invectives and the scoffs of the last century have ceased. They have been extinguished, not by the fires of the Inquisition or the anathemas of Convocations or General Assemblies, but by the steady growth of the same reverential, rational appreciation of the divine processes for the revelation of great truths, as has shut the mouths of the defamers of Milton and covered with shame the despisers of Shakespeare.

III. Leaving the grounds of hope furnished to us by the original documents of our faith, let us turn to those which are supplied from the study of its doctrines and institutions. And here I will name two bridges, as it were, by which the passage to a brighter prospect may be effected. One is the

increasing consciousness of the importance of definition. It was said by a famous theologian of Oxford thirty years ago that "without definition controversy is either hopeless or useless." He has not, in his subsequent career, applied this maxim, as we might fairly have expected from his subtle intellect, to the clearing away of obstructions and frivolities. But the maxim is true, not only in the negative sense in which he pronounced it, but in the more important sense of the pacifying and enlightening tendency necessarily implied in all attempts to arrive at the clear meaning of the words employed. It was a sagacious remark which I heard not long ago from a Scottish minister on the shores of Argyleshire, that the vehemence of theological controversy has been chiefly in proportion to the emptiness of the phrases used. So long as an expression is employed merely as a party watchword, without inquiring what it means, it acts like a magical spell; it excites enthusiasm; it spreads like an infectious malady; it terrifies the weak; it acts as a stimulant to the vacant brain. But the moment that we attempt to trace its origin, to discover in what other words it can be expressed, the enthusiasm cools, the panic subsides, the contagion ceases to be catching, the dram ceases to intoxicate, the cloud disperses, and the clear sky appears. This pregnant reflection might be aptly illustrated by examples in the history of the Scottish Churches. But I will confine myself to two instances drawn from other countries. One is that of which I have before spoken, the doctrine of the Double Procession, which was sufficient to tear asunder the Eastern and Western Churches; to give the chief practical occasion for the terrible anathemas of the Athanasian Creed; to precipitate the fall of the Empire of Constantinople; and therefore to SOW original seed of the present formidable Eastern Question. This controversy has in later days, with very few exceptions, fallen into entire obscurity.

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But in those cases where it has occupied the attention of modern theologians, its sting has been taken out by the process, simple as it would seem, but to which resort had never been had before, of inducing the combatants to express their conflicting opinions by other phrases than those which had been the basis of the original antagonism. This, and this only, is the permanent interest which attached to a recent Conference at Bonn, between certain theologians of the Greek, Latin, and English Churches. What was then done with much satisfaction, at least to those more immediately concerned, might be might be applied with still more advantage to many other like phrases which have acted as mischievous a part in the disintegration and disunion of Christendom. Another instance shall be given from a Church nearer home. In the Gorham Controversy, which in 1850 threatened to rend the Church of England from its summit to its base, and which produced the widest theological panic of any within our time, the whole question hinged on the word "regeneration ;" and yet, as Bishop Thirlwall showed in one of those charges, which I would recommend to all theological students, of whatever Church, who wish to see the value of severe discrimination and judicial serenity on the successive controversies of our time, it never occurred to the disputants that there was an ambiguity in the word itself-it never occurred to either of them to define or explain what either of them intended to express by it.1 What is there said with withering irony of "regeneration" is true of the larger number of theological phrases by which truth has been veiled and charity stifled. Differences and difficulties will remain. But the bitterness of the fight is chiefly concerning words; the fight itself is what the apostle denounced as "a" battle of words.2 Explain these-define these

1 Bishop Thirlwall's Charges, i. 156. 21 Tim. vi. 4.

-the party collapses, the bitterness exhales, the fear is cast out.

Another ground of hope is the growing sense of the doctrine of proportion. It is a doctrine which has dawned slowly and painfully on the theological mind of Christendom. "In God's matters," said Samuel Rutherford, "there is not, as in grammar, the positive and comparative degrees; there is not a true, a more true, and a most true." "Every pin of the tabernacle," said Ebenezer Erskine, in his amazement at the indifference which Whitfield displayed towards the Solemn League and Covenant, "is precious." 3 What Rutherford and Erskine thus tersely and quaintly expressed is but the assumption on which has rested the vast basis of the Rabbinical theology of Judaism, and the Scholastic Theology, whether of Catholicor Protestant Churches. But to the better spirits of Christendom there has penetrated the conviction that these maxims are not only not sound, but are unsound to the very core. "There is a true, a more true, and a most true." Every pin of the tabernacle is not equally precious." Richard Hooker and Richard Baxter had already begun to perceive that religion was no exception to the truth, expressed by a yet greater genius than either, in the magnificent lines of "Troilus and Cressida," which tells us how essential it is in all things to

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"Observe degree, priority, and place,

Insistence, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order."

This, if not the ultimate, at any rate is the proximate, solution of some of the difficulties which have threatened, or which still threaten, the peace of Churches and the growth of religion.

Take the vexed question of Church government. The main source of the gall which once poisoned, and still in some measure poisons, the relations between Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches, was not the position that one or other form was to be found in the 3 Lectures on the Church of Scotland.

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