human thought in its efforts to understand and explain the mysteries of the universe has consisted of a series of efforts and a series of failures.

If a Christian had said all this, he would have been charged with ignorance and prejudice. But who shall doubt the truth of the description when philosophy itself has drawn it? Speculative thought in this its latest development has surely dug its own grave and written its own epitaph, and written it, moreover, in inspired words: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity." In its complacent admiration of the beauty of the monument, it forgets the corruption and death within, and how large a portion of the mental history of man, how many soaring ambitions, how many hopes and prospects, lie buried in that tomb. Often in the history of the world has the heart of man borne unconscious witness to its own disappointment and the utter inadequacy of the creature to fill the affections of an immortal nature; but never since men first began to think and feel have such a misery and such a pride, such a ruin and such a complacency, found utterance in a confession so complete or so strange as this.

Thus on every side distinctions between speculative philosophy and the dogmatic faith present themselves to the notice. They differ in their objects. Philosophy looks only to the intellect, and does not even attempt to supply the practical wants of the conscience, the will, and the affections. The faith, on the other hand, fixes itself at the central springs of the whole compleie man, and throned in the will and the conscience, throws its blessed beams over every part, reason, affection, feeling, character, and conduct, diffusive and quickening as the sun in the natural heavens.

They differ in their methods. Philosophy relies upon deductions from ideas devoid of all external evidence and speculatively conceived in the mind itself. Its authority is self-the human, fallible self; and its conclusions are loose

and indefinite as the authority whence they are derived. The faith, in its formal shape, consists of inductions from Divine facts, generalized from the inspired records by the process to which we are indebted for all the marvellous triumphs of natural science and art in modern times. The Divine facts are themselves divinely given, and free therefore from the fallibility attached to human observations even at their best. The dogmatic doctrines as formulated by the Church are no more than the Scriptural truths in a technical statement. They therefore rest on the same authority—that is, on the authority of God. Hence they are clear, definite, positive, and unchangeable as their Author.

But philosophy and the dogmatic faith differ no less widely in the course of their history. The life of philosophy has ever been flickering and inconstant, blazing up into flame here and there, and then immediately dying away again. The life of Christian dogma was steadily progressive up to the Christian era. Then, under the special inspiration of our Lord and His apostles, it broke all at once into glory, rising to its zenith in a revelation containing all things necessary for salvation, and able to make the man of God "perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." From that zenith it has never declined.

No cloud has permanently interrupted that light; no progression of time or change has darkened its beams or enervated its quickening powers. It shines like the sun over a troubled sea. Schools of philosophy have been no more than the sea waves rising and falling again; but the everlasting sunbeams shine on and shine for ever, eternal and immutable as God.

Lastly, they differ in their results. Philosophy has done little for the world. It has not one practical triumph to show. It has discovered no new truth, it has inaugurated no new principle, it has produced no new element of good.

It cannot point to one of life's many evils either removed by its strength or alleviated by its influence. It has achieved no triumph of civilization, no trophy of human happiness. Were the whole swept away we should not lose any abiding or substantial benefit. Were all else swept away and it left alone, we should sink into absolute ignorance, and should not possess one fixed truth to elevate human nature by its dignity, or bless it by its beneficent influence.

The dogmatic faith has given us Christian civilization, with its national liberty, its pure morality, its lofty benevolence, its energetic activity and enterprise. This is its lowest effect. It reveals all we need to know; answers every question relative to ourselves and to the Unseen we need to ask; plants a new life within the soul itself; comforts every distress, brightens every joy, makes life worth living, and then transforms death into the threshold of another and a higher state. All this it does because it is dogmatic. Take away the dogma, and you take away the Divine foundations, and in their absence the grand superstructure totters, shakes, and crumbles into ruin.

LECTURE VI

CHRISTIANITY AND CIVILIZATION

I TIM. iv. 8

Godliness is profitable unto all things, having promise of the life that now is, and of that which is to come.

FROM the barren solitudes of intellectual speculation,

the course of my argument passes back into the busy working world and the conflicts of its principles and interests. Neither in the loose sentiment of religion, nor in the efforts of the human soul to meet its own moral wants, nor in the theories of philosophy, can be found either the originating cause, or the formative principle, or the influential rival of the dogmatic faith. But another process of contrast and comparison must be gone through. A fresh claimant starts up in what is called Civilization.

It is not easy to define what is meant by the word, for it represents rather an aggregate of things than any one single thing. We denote by it the habits of life, social, domestic, and intellectual, which have grown out of the aggregation of mankind into communities. The tribes of the human family, so far as they have maintained their nomad state, have been found in a condition of barbarism or savagism, rude in habits, ill-clothed, ill-sheltered, ill-fed; for the most part low in intellect, incapable of either governing themselves or of being governed by others; the crea

tures of their own wild impulses, and moved, like the beast, by natural passion and affection alone.

This account of the matter is not without exceptions. There are savage tribes who live in settled communities of a kind, and their savagism is attributable to their isolation from the rest of mankind. There are also communities isolated from contact with their fellow-men for centuries, as in China for instance, which can in no sense of the word be called savage, however rude and barbarous their state in some particulars may be. But it is sufficient to say, in general, that as men have been gathered into settled communities and brought into free contact with themselves and others, a definite and orderly change has taken place in their condition. They have occupied themselves in the pursuits of settled industry, have built permanent cities, have acquired property, have regulated the relation between themselves by fixed laws, have established regular government, have acquired a taste for luxury and enjoyment, and have cultivated the arts subservient to the wealth, comfort, and prosperity of man. The whole condition thus reached represents a very large aggregate of separate particulars and influences. But as all the world over it has exhibited a certain unity in its progress, and certain common features in its development, we generalize the effects into one idea, and call it civilization [1].

The exact relation existing between civilization and the Christian faith, and the precise questions arising out of it, need to be accurately distinguished. The broad controversy is represented by the question relative to the priority of the two. Should civilization precede Christianity, and does it in point of fact precede Christianity, or should Christianity precede civilization? But the argument must not be exaggerated on either side.

Thus when it is urged that civilization does and must precede Christianity, it is not necessarily intended to deny