from the Scriptures exist in the familiar text-books of the University. Whatever may be concluded as to the character of the Scriptures, it is certain that they and the faith sprang into being together; and their birthday is in the period to which step by step I have traced the genealogy back. We stand, as it were, looking at the depths mysterious, yawning beneath and before the eye, inscrutable and unfathomable, whence the waters spring into the daylight. Look and watch and wonder. What spring is capacious enough to have given them birth? The channel itself we can see to be human as ourselves, though of finer and purer soil, as if the ever-gushing fountains of truth close by had clothed it with perennial beauty and verdure. Whence it issues the outward eye cannot see. The spring is there where no human hand can reach, no human foot can tread. It lies in the unseen, not the seen. Stand and watch the waters. All the dear familiar truths are there, known to us from our childhood, almost the very words in which the Church is accustomed to express them. How sweetly, purely, freshly, vigorously they well forth from the fountain infinite, for that fount is-God.

Here then we find both the witness to the fact and the fact itself coincident. The Church from the very beginning to the very end has consistently declared herself to be in possession of a sacred gift of truth, a solemn charge from God. Had the faith entrusted to her been lost, we might have regarded the assertion as the instinct of an ignorant fanaticism or the extravagance of a self-exalting pride. But here the faith is, traceable from our own days to the days of the Apostles, unchanged and unchangeable. The facts are plain historical facts; they lie within the reach of any man's examination. In the face of them to speak of dogmas as the modern creation of the Church, to refer them to the sixteenth century, or to the Schoolmen, or to the ancient Fathers, is either ignorance or carelessness.

To put out of view the plain fact that the dogmatic faith and the Scriptures synchronize, and must either be accepted together or rejected together, is a gross injustice.

The theory of the Scriptures and the actual facts of human history are consistent with each other throughout. It is useless to battle against the theory, unless the hand of the objector can also sweep away the facts. The marvellous coincidence between the two is itself a fact, pervading all the other facts; and it penetrates through the distant haze of time and the shifting lights and shadows of human events, as if it were a smile from the face of Christ Himself, the shining of His cloudless light and truth who is "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever."

LECTURE III

THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT

EPH. ii. 12

Without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world.

THE existence of the dogmatic faith as an historical fact

is wholly independent of any opinion that may be formed regarding its origin or character. The fact rests on precisely the same evidence as the ordinary facts of history. A series of writings, genuine and authentic beyond controversy, reach from the present time back to the first century of the Christian era, and attest, at each successive stage of the descent, alike the existence of the faith and its identity. Two further questions immediately arise: whence this faith has been derived, and what is the amount of its authority. The latter question is involved in the former. The range of inquiry is limited to the first three centuries of the Christian era. Evidence of the strongest character may be adduced for referring the origin of the faith to a date earlier than the Council of Nice, for the ante-Nicene Fathers reach back to the close of the first century. At this date they themselves refer the origin of their faith to the sacred Scriptures, which must therefore necessarily have been anterior to their own time. But without pressing this fact to the utmost, it must in any case be admitted that the

origin of the Christian faith must be traced to a period earlier than the third century after Christ. The Nicene Creed fixes this date. For here we find the doctrines of the faith not diffused through various books, or latent in reference and allusion, but already formulated and methodized, expressed in a strict theological language, and classified in a logical synthetic order. A considerable period of time must have elapsed before the faith could have created its own language, literature, and organization.

But is the account given by the Church of the beginning of her own faith credible and true? She has ever consistently affirmed that she received it by revelation from God, through men specially inspired for that purpose. Inasmuch as the revelation so given includes all things necessary for faith and practice, it can admit neither of enlargement nor diminution. It is therefore dogmatic ex hypothesi, because it was delivered by authority of God, not gained by discovery of man; and what man in no way created, man can in no way change. This is the account given by the Church. That the saints themselves devoutly believed it to be true is proved by the sacrifices they made for it, the devotedness of their lives, and the heroic constancy of their deaths. But perhaps they were themselves deceived. Such is the suggestion of modern rationalism, and several natural influences have been specified, to which it is believed that the origin of Christianity can be much more rationally referred, than to a supernatural revelation. My object is to test these supposed causes one by one, and examine their adequacy to produce a result so memorable as the faith, and effects so wide in their reach and so ennobling in their character, as the results of Christian civilization.

It is not enough in answering this question to trace the faith back to the Scriptural books, or to show that every article is either clearly contained in the Holy Scriptures, or gathered from it. The character of the Scriptures them

selves is called into discussion. According to the modern idea, they are not the creators of the faith, but the product of it, the embodiment of the religious consciousness of a particular period of the world. The faith therefore and the books containing it are involved in the same suspicion, and must be considered together. The question is thus rendered more specific. The faith and the Scriptures must stand on one side, and the cause producing them, whatever it may be, on the other. The cause must precede the effect, and be distinguishable from it, however much they may act and react on each other.

Foremost among the causes alleged to have been operative, is the religious instinct. That a religious sense or sentiment, or emotion, whichever it may be called, exists in the human heart independently of the dogmatic faith contained in the sacred books, is undeniable. It has been found to exist where the books are unknown and the specific religious doctrines of Christianity have never been preached. A belief of some kind in a deity of some kind, if not absolutely universal to all known tribes of heathendom, is, at all events, almost universal. Sometimes it is a dim superstition, vague and terrible, such as holds in chains the benighted heart of suffering Africa; a formless, shapeless dread of evil spirits, the more oppressive because it cannot be reduced into definite form or brought within the reach of the understanding. Sometimes it is a dark monotheism, because it is the worship of a great spirit, terrible not beautiful in his attributes, dreadful not glorious in his doings. Sometimes it is a gross polytheism, not only shaping the powers of nature into a host of divinities, but tracing the spark of deity in dead things and objects revolting and offensive. Sometimes it is a worship of the Evil One, conceived in fear, and finding expression in the fires of the Phoenician Moloch or the dreadful sacrifices of the Mexican divinities. But whatever may be its special shape,