held and retained by hundreds of millions of intelligent men through successive generations. The more the sceptic exaggerates the accessory difficulties of the Creed, and depreciates the direct evidence in its favour, the more does he confirm, in spite of himself, the preciousness and immense importance of these central truths, which have led millions on millions, even of those who have neglected a minute analysis, to lay it up among

their choicest treasures.

There are from thirty to fifty millions of Christians however, who, instead of accepting the principle of implicit faith as a duty, and rejecting inquiry as a sin, hold the very reverse. This is the nominal creed of all Protestants, but probably of these there are not more than one in ten whose practice corresponds with their theory, and who really submit every part of the faith to a serious personal inquiry. In the others, either worldliness or religious indifference, or intellectual torpor, or the passive acceptance of some ecclesiastical creed, or current of religious thought, in the midst of which they have been trained, transfers them really to the large class whose faith is an implicit faith in Christian doctrine as a whole, in one or other of its many corporate forms, and not the result in detail, of personal investigation and inquiry. The other nine-tenths, in common with all the Christians of the Greek and Roman churches, contribute a general evidence of the preciousness and importance of those great central truths of the Bible, for the sake of which they are willing, at least in outward profession, to believe all the rest. But there are left some millions at least in every age, from Constantine until now, who hold it a duty, in questions of such supreme importance, to search and inquire for themselves, and to receive. nothing into the citadel of their understanding, which

they do not believe in their inmost hearts to be sustained by sufficient and reasonable evidence, whether that of natural reason or of supernatural revelation. Against these, we have to place the negative presumption from some hundreds of thousands of sceptics, who profess after inquiry to have discovered the emptiness of the claims of Christianity to be a supernatural message from God, and convince themselves that there is no evidence of reason, even in favour of what are called the doctrines of natural religion. The author, in his Introduction, after dismissing as worthless the moral presumption from the faith of hundreds of millions of Christians through successive generations as simply "due to preconceived ideas, and preferences derived from habit and education," and complaining of the “general eclipse of faith," and blaming the uneasy position of so many Christians in these days, who profess to retain their faith in the Gospel as a supernatural message, and "still clip and prune its doctrines down to the standard of human reason," adds,

"The mass of intelligent men in England are halting between two opinions, standing in what seems to us the most unsatisfactory position conceivable: they abandon, in deference to the current of popular opinion, some of the most central doctrines of Christianity, and try to spiritualize or dilute the rest into a form which does not shock their reason."

He claims for his own work, that it is the result of

"Many years of inquiry, undertaken for the regulation of personal belief, and as a contribution towards the establishment of truth in the minds of others who are seeking for it... Seeking only the truth and holding it, whatever it may be, as the only object worthy of desire."

The same is the frequent profession of " Free-thinkers," who are accustomed to claim a thousandfold weight for their own conclusions, as conducted without bias and

with an honest search for truth alone. Now what are the signs of this freedom from bias in the present case? The author begins his task as a Sadducee, who believes neither resurrection to be possible, nor angel or spirit to exist, that a Supernatural Revelation from God is either impossible or incredible, and that the works of Nature furnish no presumption whatever for the existence of God as a personal and conscious Intelligence. To these he adds the further doctrine that the course of Nature, as known by the experience of the last thousand years is fixed, necessary and invariable; can never have suffered a change or interruption in past time, nor suffer such an interruption in the eternity to come. With these doctrines he starts, and only adds to them at the close, the high probability that the Apostles were credulous and superstitious simpletons, wholly unworthy of credit, if we were quite sure that we had the actual words of their testimony; and that the Gospels are most probably forgeries of four unknown writers, about the close of the second century, and therefore almost wholly worthless as historical testimony to the sayings and works of the Lord Jesus. Here then, there is not the slightest trace of that unbiassed inquiry, "dismissing preconceived ideas," the want of which the writer imputes to hundreds of millions of Christian men, as depriving their faith of all moral weight. The only spark of truth recognized, that man is a moral being, who has a duty to fulfil, remains wholly undeveloped through a thousand pages, and when once forced upon his notice by a quotation from Dr Mozley, he coolly passes over it, as involving "questions too intricate for treatment, and alien from the argument." The falsehoods with which he sets out, remain undisturbed and unquestioned from first to last: as if they were self-evident and unquestionable truths.

The duty of searching after unknown truth can only be satisfied under two conditions; first, to have some small amount of known and certain truth from which to start, and next, to proceed from this centre to develope and unfold what is already known, so as to reclaim some part from the outer darkness beyond. The author wholly fails to satisfy both these conditions; his starting-point is a triad of untested falsehoods which remain in undisturbed supremacy to the end of the work. He plunges at once into the region of darkness, the wide range of talmudical and patristical superstitions, and the varied forgeries as well as genuine writings of the three first centuries, and a chaos of the critical speculations of the modern Sadducees of Germany. Thus, professing to "seek only the truth, and hold it, as the only object worthy of desire," he proceeds to answer the question of Pilate, "What is truth?" very much as Pilate himself answered it, when he gave up the Lord of glory, who is Himself the Truth, to be exposed to the scorn and hate of the Jewish rabble on the cross, between two malefactors. He comes practically to the conclusion that the "great Teacher" Himself, and the Apostles who were His ambassadors to the world, were either most culpable impostors, or amongst the most blind, superstitious, credulous and unreasoning of men, who never once caught a glimpse of the three doctrines which are the alpha and omega of his own inquiry. By calling this an unbiassed search for truth only, he brings himself under that solemn sentence of the prophet, "Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil, that put darkness for light and light for darkness."

CHAPTER III.

PROTESTANT FAITH IN CONTRAST WITH FREE-THINKING.

THE name Protestant has been rejected by many in our days on the ground that it expresses a mere negation. This is a great and grievous error. Protestantism is simply submission to that Divine command, "Prove all things-hold fast that which is good." It is opposed alike to two extremes, an implicit and traditional faith which rests only on Church authority, which swallows blindly whatever ecclesiastical teachers put into its mouth, neglecting the spirit of Christ's command, "Call no man your father upon the earth, neither be ye called master, for one is your master, even Christ." The other extreme is that free handling of religious and moral truth, of which the "Essays and Reviews" were a specimen, which does not “hold fast that which is good," or recognize any clear definite principles of truth to be first believed, and work out from these to the region beyond, but counts it the condition of free inquiry to have the mind like a sheet of blank paper, ready to receive any inscription whatever that may be traced upon it. Honest inquiry implies a capacity in those by whom it is made to apprehend the force of evidence, and to discriminate between truth and falsehood. It does not imply a state of entire equilibrium and strict indifference. Even among philosophers and metaphysicians, since their speculations began, there has