they may pare down and extenuate its meaning till only a scanty residuum is left, which few people would think worth the trouble, of being conveyed to men by a special

revelation.

The Pharisees and Sadducees in the time of our Lord are striking instances of these opposite evils. We have a warning against both, alike in the opening of Deuteronomy, iv. 2, and at the close of the Apocalypse, Rev. xxii. 18, 19. The same charge was given by Christ Himself to his disciples. We are thus taught that under the Law and the Gospel these are two lasting sources of danger to the Church of God. Such is the natural relation of these two errors, that every faithful Christian is likely to be charged in turn with each of them. Some will condemn him for believing too little, others for believing too much. He will seem a Rationalist or semiSadducee to superstitious devotees; or again, a superstitious bigot to the disciples of human reason. The best, wisest, and holiest Christians have only a partial and incomplete understanding of divine truth. The void left by an immature faith will either be filled up with opinions and misinterpretations which men mistake in their haste for parts of the divine message; or else they may accept a maimed and imperfect creed, instead of including within the circle of their faith the full scope and compass of the whole word of God. In one case they will add to its teaching, in the other they will take away from it. We ought never to suppose that we ourselves are free from all participation in one or other of these evils, against both of which it is our duty to contend. Renouncing rationalism we may fall easily into the arms of superstition; in condemning formalism and a mere traditional creed, we may contract a captious and sceptical habit of thought, which must betray us into partial unbelief. In dealing with slighter departures, on either side, from the line of

truth, we need to be very guarded in our censures, lest the fault after all should prove to be our own. We may think that we have detected rationalism in others, when the real fault is some mixture of superstition in our own faith; or, in other cases, we may charge men wrongfully with superstition, through a false and diseased estimate of our own powers of spiritual discernment. The arrows from both camps, that of the Sadducee and of the Pharisee, will be aimed, not less frequently against the truth which lies between them, than against each other. As Caiaphas and Pilate conspired together against the Lord of glory, a double reproach, both from the Pharisee and the Sadducee, is the natural consequence and usual price of a faithful adherence to the inspired word of God.

The stage of Rationalism farthest removed from Christianity, is that which denies even the possibility of a supernatural revelation, either in an oral or written form. In Atheists of the French school, such as Helvetius, Condillac and Volney, in the last century, and M. Comte and the Positivists of our own day, this doctrine is only the natural consequence of their dreary creed. The "fool" who says in his heart "There is no God," must naturally infer, there can be no Divine Revelation. With such men, nature is an immense lumber-room of effects without a cause, and of laws without any lawgiver. Their barren theory makes every star in the firmament re-echo the boast ascribed by Milton to the arch-fiend in the hour of his rebellion:

"We know no time when we were not as now,
Know none before us, self-begot, self-rais'd,
By our own quick'ning power, when fatal course
Had circled its full orb, the birth mature

Of this our native Heav'n, ethereal sons."

But the paradox that all revelation is impossible, is not confined to Atheists, whose one great falsehood incor

porates into itself a thousand lesser follies. It is held more or less fully by some who profess to be Theists, and even Christians of a high order, ardent lovers of "the absolute religion." It appears in F. Newman's works on "the Soul;" T. Parker's "Discourses on Religion;" and Strauss's "Mythical Theory of the Gospels." In the first, religion is a sentiment, not a conclusion of the intellect, and therefore can never be embodied in a creed, or conveyed by a "Book revelation." In the second, the perfections of God imply the certainty of a universal revelation of pure and absolute religion, and exclude any other of an historical, limited, and partial kind. In the last, the alleged proofs of Supernatural revelation are said to be proved impossible by the progress of sound metaphysics, and their inconsistency with the discoveries of modern science.

The doctrine that miracles are impossible in their own nature, is itself a moral miracle, a marvellous extreme of presumptuous folly, veiled under a thin mantle of metaphysical subtleties. From the fact that God has richly displayed His wisdom in the universe, as the great architect and mechanician, it draws the inference that He can never manifest any nobler attributes as the Father of mercies, the supreme Judge and moral Governor of all reasonable beings. Creation, and the silent quiet course of daily providence, as man now experiences it here on earth, can never exhaust all the conceivable or probable modes of His operation, who is "wonderful in counsel and excellent in working." Man is able easily to convince his fellow-man of his own presence. And shall the Almighty God, who upholds all things by His power, and fills Heaven and earth by His presence, be unable to manifest Himself by means more decisive and effectual than those which, at the present hour, leave Atheists at full liberty to deride the superstition of His worshippers,

and to boast of their own superior wisdom, in their strenuous efforts to banish the Creator from His own universe? How much wiser to say with the ancient patriarch, after all our fancied advances in metaphysics and real progress in natural science, "Lo! these are a part of His ways; but how faint a whisper is heard of Him; the thunder of His power who can understand?"

But Supernatural religion, though not impossible, may perhaps be superfluous. Natural reason may be sufficient without the feeble help of historical records like those of the Gospels. The traditional saying of Omar has been applied to this subject by some modern writers.

"If the doctrine of Scripture agree with the conclusions of sound reason, they are superfluous; if opposed to it they are untrue and ought to be thrown away. To ascertain what is absolute religion,” (Mr Parker affirms) "is not difficult. It is perfect obedience to the law of God; perfect love towards God and man exhibited in a life allowing the harmonious action of all the faculties. Christianity is either absolute religion and morality, or it is less; greater it cannot be. Jesus of Nazareth may either have taught absolute religion, or an imperfect form; he may have omitted what was essential, or have added what was national, temporal and personal. But if His religion has none of these faults, then it is the absolute religion, eternally true before revelation." Parker's 'Discourses,' pp. 180-182.

One would suppose that a single glance at the present state or past history of the world, would dispose at once of this strange wild fancy, that a supernatural revelation is entirely needless. A few jackdaws in Christian countries may strut about in borrowed feathers, and may boast of an "absolute religion" which they have stolen from the Bible, and then carved and mangled, till it is no better than a bleeding corpse. This residuum is a law without any sanction, a morality without life; the worship of a Being wholly unknown, without any remedy for conscious guilt, or any clear hope of life beyond the grave, or of any deliverance from the dark despotism of death. There is

in fact no myth so purely mythical, as this dream of some philosophers in their dotage, that the light of man's reason has made all supernatural revelation superfluous.

If the sun of Christianity were once blotted out of the firmament, the dim feeble moonlight which these pretentious deists call "the absolute religion," a mere reflection lighted by that sun, on the sterile plains and volcanic caverns of the human heart, in its ceaseless lunations, would also disappear and pass away for ever. Wherever

the true sunlight from heaven has not dawned, the words of the prophet have been verified, "Darkness has covered the earth, and gross darkness the people." Amidst all these declamations on the virtue and clearness of the absolute religion, the words of the Apostle remain still as true as ever, "after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness (тоû кηрúуμaтos) of the preached word to save them that believe."

Though a divine revelation be admitted to be both possible and desirable, it may still be maintained that it has never been actually given. When the evidences of the Gospel are pleaded in the court of reason, the verdict may be returned, 'It is either an imposture or a mere dream of excited imagination.' Rationalism, in its third form, admits that a divine message might be given to men, and be in some respects desirable, and affirms only, that the proof of the fact, in the case of the Gospel, and still more of other religions, is insufficient and defective. This view is common to the earlier rationalism of Germany, and to the mythical theory which has widely displaced it. In reality it is seldom found to be maintained on its own merits. In those who maintain it, there is commonly a secret conviction that the laws of Nature have, in some way or other, tied up the hands of the supreme lawgiver. Or else there is an evident desire to