disparage the Word of God, I, on the contrary, have to complain that in assigning inordinate sanctity to Scripture, men are instituting an empty idolatry of forms and images, of ink and paper." But in this view Scripture in its actual form ceased to be the all-sufficient rule, and became itself amenable to the awards and measurements of the human mind. It was no longer identical with revelation; still, by the theologians, it was upheld as "containing" revelation; to ascertain and extricate the latter it had to undergo a process of weeding and pruning, in the course of which the "pure word" was recognised either by its inherent moral power to edify as Semler said, or, according to the pious Bengel, was traced as a delicate aroma of godliness amid the mazes of contradictory readings and manuscripts by religious instinct. In the course of this process more and more was thrown into the category of the superfluous; until in course of time Semler proclaimed the inferences of Spinoza from the professor's chair at Halle, and it was at last admitted that Scripture contains nothing whatever of importance which reason might not have attained independently.

The Evidences.

But before these inferences were generally received, there was an intermediate state of opinion, a temporary suspension of the crisis which must here be adverted to. When the idea of the absolute internal evidence of inspiration, or the so-called "inner witness," was given up, and the Bible reduced more or less to the level of a human production, two parties appeared on the field virtually left open to enquiry, the argumentative partizan, or writer of "evidences," and the historical critic. The former class, i.e., the theologians inheriting from the Socinians and Locke the postulate of "rational religion," tried to make reason do the work which faith seemed dis

inclined or unable any longer to perform; they undertook to base the "fides divina" on the "fides humana;" to give an adventitious right of settlement to what seemed to have no intrinsic rights or natural home in the country of the soul; to furnish proof of the reliability of Scripture considered as the human testimony of competent eyewitnesses, who were both able and willing to speak truth. Hence the elaborate arguments as to genuineness and authenticity collected by Lardner and others in answer to the Deists in proof of the general divinity of Scripture. For if, it was said, what apostles and evangelists report of Christ be true, namely, that he wrought miracles and even rose from the dead, he must have been divinely commissioned; the facts being true, Christianity must be true; and thus, having humbled religion before the bar of reason, we indirectly get it back again in the form of an inference or syllogism. But there were many fallacies and false assumptions in the premises. What would now be thought of Warburton's monstrous begging of the question in the Divine Legation? Who is thoroughly satisfied by the "tu quoque" argument of Butler's Analogy; or by his defence of Scripture immoralities and murders on the ground that He who gave life was able to revoke it, and that a few detached commands to do immoral things have no immoral tendency, as constituting no immoral habit? Who does not see the fallacy of pretending that no greater demand is made on faith by the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Trinity,-than by those constantly recurring cases in which we fearlessly act in implicit reliance on nature's order? The reference to miracle as evidence becomes a snare instead of a support, compelling the bewildered advocate to beg the credentials of the miracle out of the general antecedent credibility of the system or doctrine it was cited to support. Miracles, instead of affording satisfactory proof of anything, are now usually found in the dock instead of the witness-box of the court of

criticism; and it is pertinently asked why, except among the mountains of Grenoble or the revivalists of Belfast, are there no well accredited modern miracles? since Scripture stands opposed to the notion of their having absolutely ceased;1 and it is impossible to assert in the face of the multiplying assaults of modern scepticism that they are less necessary now than they were eighteen centuries ago. The usual staple of what is called Scripture "evidence" consists in registering every detached fragment of ostensible testimony, however in itself weak and unreliable, and carefully omitting the test of cross-examination. The Jews believed the Old Testament to be genuine; Christ and the Apostles accepted it; the inference is therefore unquestionable; authorship is to be legitimately inferred from the names given on the title-page, and "there is no more reason to doubt that the Gospels were written by those whose names they bear, than that Livy or Tacitus wrote the books ascribed to them;" "that these writings have come down to us in the state in which they were originally written there is every reason to believe," etc., etc. But the advocate omits to state that a prior question might fairly be raised as to the competency of his Jewish witnesses; that these witnesses entertained other beliefs of a very monstrous and irrational kind; that "Peter" and "Jude" supply apostolic attestations of the book of Enoch and the "Ascensio Mosis" as genuine Scripture; that the Evangelists cite the Old Testament arbitrarily and incorrectly; that the Fathers relied on to prove the genuineness of the New rejected several parts of it, admitting writings not now received as canonical, and were swayed either by fanciful reasons in their choice, or by no reason at all save arbitrary usage and custom. But not to dwell

1 See Mark xvi. 17; John xiv. 12.

2 See Porteus' Evidences, p. 36, etc.

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longer on these pretended evidences, which being ex-parte, unverified, and otherwise inconclusive, were continually more and more clearly seen to be useless for the proposed object, it eventually appeared that the whole proceeding was a mistake; that the common assumption of Apologists and Deists as to "rational" or argumentative religion was fallacious; and that, after all, in making faith the first and paramount requirement, the original instincts of Christianity had been perfectly right. The competence and also the integrity of the attesting witnesses had already been impugned; it now turned out that their evidence was not only inadequate but irrelevant. One of the earliest advocates of evidential belief had admitted its basis to be unsound; and Episcopius 2 declared from the first that historical faith could never reach more than probability. The merely external status assigned by Socinianism to revelation was only the prelude to a renunciation of it. And when inspiration was reduced from its first lofty pretensions to a vague moral essence or

The writers of "Evidences" expatiate on "the pure light of the gospel," "the beauty of the Christian scheme," "this beneficent code of religion," etc., etc., but rarely, if ever, condescend to define clearly and exactly the thing so recommended. Is it for instance to be considered, as the late Archbishop of Canterbury says (Evidences, pp. 59, 74), an original and entirely new thing, or, as the Archbishop of Dublin has it (Evidences, p. 61), a continuation and fulfilment of the old? Dr. Sumner treats the Atonement as characteristically and exclusively Christian; and he adduces the novelty and peculiarity of this doctrine as a main proof of the supernatural origin of the religion. "There was nothing," he says, "in the preceding expectations of Jews or heathens tending to make the doctrine of atonement credible; it was in open contradiction to the opinions and belief of all who heard it" (Evidences, pp. 59, 66). Omitting for the present any consideration of the accuracy of this statement, be it observed that Dr. Whately elicits the same proof of supernatural origin from the contrary assumption, or from the assumed fact of the absence of sacrifices in Christianity in contrast with universal cotemporary practice (Evidences, p. 64). Surely when Canterbury's Archbishop, in quoting Volney and Tom Paine as the "most rational" authors known to him on the freethinking side, dismisses them with a contemptuous-"such is infidelity," the commiseration may with at least equal cause be reiterated on the freethinking side with the exclamation-"such are self-contradictions of official orthodoxy.'

2 "Impossibile est id quod dictum, factum, scriptumve ab aliquo est, postquam auctor in vivis esse desiit, ita probare ab eo scriptum, dictum, factumve esse, ut cavilli aut tergiversationis locus nullus reliquus maneat."

tendency to edify, of which reason and conscience were the judges, it became useless to adduce arguments in proof of that which, if susceptible of proof, was already selfproved;-supremacy reverted to the "inner witness" which had so long been held in abeyance by the outward letter; the doctrine had once more to sustain the miracle, instead of being supported by it; and thus rational or argumentative supernaturalism gave place either to rationalism, or to what in the technical theological phraseology of Germany was termed "supernatural rationalism,"-i.e., the theory reducing revelation to a mere anticipation of the results of reason, the means of an easier or earlier attainment of what might have been acquired without it. Argumentative theology was an ingenious way of making reason refute itself; it meant the art of being logically absurd, the discovery of rational grounds for believing irrational things. It rested on the assumption of the competency of reason to determine the criteria of revelation, but not to sit in judgment on its contents; whereas the contents were in reality the best, perhaps the only available criteria for estimating the matter at all. Authority thus reverting to internal evidence, it only remained to be seen what shape the internal arbiter would take; whether it would appear as reason and conscience, or as fanatical caprice; as indolent conventionalism, or as sceptical denial. The Quakers had long before seen that a book confessedly derived from internal revelation could not claim primary authority; Spinoza was led to a diffierent form of the same inference from the same discovery; Jacobi plunged recklessly into feeling in order to escape the God of reason and Spinoza; Hume acquiesced in the sceptical inference, referring even the foundations of religion to custom and belief; theologians availed themselves of the threatening crisis in order to insist the more vehemently on "fides implicita" of churches; and Kant reared a new system of rational