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wider view than they did.

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searches into history, a more thorough knowledge of the world they inhabit, have enlarged our philosophy beyond the limits which bounded that of the Church of the Fathers; and all these have an influence, whether we will or no, on our determinations of religious truth. There are found to be more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in the patristic theology. God's creation is a new book, to be read by the side of his revelation, and to be interpreted as coming from him. We can acknowledge the great value of the forms in which the first ages of the Church defined the truth, and yet refuse to be bound by them; we can use them, and yet endeavor to go beyond them, just as they also went beyond the legacy which was left us by the apostles.

In learning this new lesson, Christendom needed a firm spot on which she might stand; and has found it in the Bible. Had the Bible been drawn up in precise statements of faith or detailed precepts of conduct, we should have had no alternative but either permanent subjection to an outer law, or loss of the highest instrument of self-education. But the Bible, from its very form, is exactly adapted to our present want. It is a history: even the doctrinal parts of it are cast in a historical form, and are best studied by considering them as records of the time at which. they were written, and as conveying to us the highest and greatest religious life of that time. Hence we use the Bible, some consciously, some unconsciously, not to override, but to evoke, the voice of conscience. When conscience and the Bible appear to differ, the pious Christian immediately concludes. that he has not really understood the Bible. Hence,

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too, while the interpretation of the Bible varies slightly from age to age, it varies always in one direction. The schoolmen found purgatory in it. Later students found enough to condemn Galileo. Not long ago, it would have been held to condemn geology; and there are still many who so interpret it. The current is all one way: it evidently points to the identification of the Bible with the voice of conscience. The Bible, in fact, is hindered by its form from exercising a despotism over the human spirit: if it could do that, it would become an outer law at once; but its form is so admirably adapted to our need, that it wins from us all the reverence of a supreme authority, and yet imposes on us no yoke of subjection. This it does by virtue of the principle of private judgment, which puts conscience between us and the Bible; making conscience the supreme interpreter, whom it may be a duty to enlighten, but whom it can never be a duty to disobey.

This recurrence to the Bible as the great authority has been accompanied by a strong inclination, common to all Protestant countries, to go back in every detail of life to the practices of early times; chiefly, no doubt, because such a revival of primitive prac tices, wherever possible, is the greatest help to entering into the very essence, and imbibing the spirit, of the days when the Bible was written. So, too, the observance of the Sunday has a stronger hold on the minds of all religious men because it penetrates the whole texture of the Old Testament. The institution is so admirable, indeed so necessary in itself, that, without this hold, it would deserve its present position; but nothing but its prominent position in the Bible would have made it, what it now is, the one

ordinance which all Christendom alike agrees in keeping. In such an observance, men feel that they are, so far, living a scriptural life; and have come, as it were, a step nearer to the inner power of the book from which they expect to learn their highest lessons. Some, indeed, treat it as enjoined by an absolutely binding decree, and thus at once put themselves under a law. But, short of that, those who defend it only by arguments of Christian expediency are yet compelled to acknowledge, that those arguments are so strong, that it would be difficult to imagine a higher authority for any ceremonial institution ; and among those arguments, one of the foremost is the sympathy which the institution fosters between the student of the Bible and the book which he studies.

This tendency to go back to the childhood and youth of the world has, of course, retarded the acquisition of that toleration which is the chief philosophical and religious lesson of modern days. Unquestionably, as bigoted a spirit has often been shown in defence of some practice for which the sanction of the Bible had been claimed, as, before the Reformation, in defence of the decrees of the Church. But no lesson is well learned all at once. To learn toleration well and really; to let it become, not a philosophical tenet, but a practical principle; to join it with real religiousness of life and character, -it is absolutely necessary that it should break in upon the mind by slow and steady degrees, and that at every point its right to go further should be disputed, and so forced to logical proof: for it is only by virtue of the opposition which it has surmounted that any truth can stand in the human mind. The strongest

argument in favor of tolerating all opinions is, that our conviction of the truth of an opinion is worthless unless it has established itself in spite of the most strenuous resistance, and is still prepared to overcome the same resistance if necessary. Toleration itself is no exception to the universal law; and those who must regret the slow progress by which it wins its way, may remember that this slowness makes the final victory the more certain and complete. Nor is that all. The toleration thus obtained is different in kind from what it would otherwise have been. It is not only stronger; it is richer and fuller: for the slowness of its progress gives time to disentangle from dogmatism the really valuable principles and sentiments that have been mixed up and intwined in it, and to unite toleration, not with indifference and worldliness, but with spiritual truth, and religiousness of life.

Even the perverted use of the Bible has, therefore, not been without certain great advantages. And, meanwhile, how utterly impossible it would be in the manhood of the world to imagine any other instructor of mankind! And, for that reason, every day makes it more and more evident that the thorough study of the Bible, the investigation of what it teaches and what it does not teach, the determination of the limits of what we mean by its inspiration, the determination of the degree of authority to be ascribed to the different books (if any degrees are to be admitted), must take the lead of all other studies. He is guilty of high treason against the faith who fears the result of any investigation, whether philosophical or scientific or historical. And, therefore, nothing should be more welcome than the extension of knowledge of any and

every kind; for every increase in our accumulations of knowledge throws fresh light upon these, the real problems of our day. If geology proves to us that we must not interpret the first chapters of Genesis literally; if historical investigation shall show us, that inspiration, however it may protect the doctrine, yet was not empowered to protect the narrative of the inspired writers from occasional inaccuracy; if careful criticism shall prove that there have been occasionally interpolations and forgeries in that book, as in many others, the results should still be welcome. Even the mistakes of careful and reverent students are more valuable now than truth held in unthinking acquiescence. The substance of the teaching which we derive from the Bible will not really be affected by anything of this sort; while its hold upon the minds of believers, and its power to stir the depths of the spirit of man, however much weakened at first, must be immeasurably strengthened in the end by clearing away any blunders which may have been fastened on it by human interpretation.

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The immediate work of our day is the study of the Bible. Other studies will act upon the progress of mankind by acting through and upon this; for while a few highly educated men here and there, who have given their minds to special pursuits, may think the study of the Bible a thing of the past, yet assuredly, if their science is to have its effect upon men in the mass, it must be by affecting their moral and religious convictions: in no other way have men been, or can men be, deeply and permanently changed. But though this study must be for the present and for some time, the centre of all studies, there is meanwhile no study of whatever kind which will not have

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