position, for the soul's sake, is wanted for this now. The Christian miracles, if believed, show the Father's enduring interest in us. They are the seal of Christ's authority. They are the print of the Divine signet upon the casket which inclosed truth. They are not indeed the sole evidence, the spiritual demonstration, of the truth. Spirit ual truth addresses itself to our spiritual discernment. But they attest the origin of what Christ said, and invite us to apply our minds to discern its truth. They give the authority of God's messenger to that which the soul may discern with too faint and feeble intuition. And when I consider the conflicts of human opinion, how the mind wavers and varies in its moods, how spiritual discernment is dimmed by sin, and also how much the belief of Divine interposition lies at the basis of the best spiritual education of the race, and of that of each of us, I dare not lift a hand to remove this foundation. I bless the Providence which has wrapped such a wealth of influence in the Christian miracles. And if any one says that it adds no strength to his faith in a future life to believe that Jesus was a miraculous being, that he was one who from his birth to his ascension was a miraculous manifestation of God, that spoke of death as but a rising out of the fleshly vestment into a higher form, I confess I feel a need which he does not. I wish not to try the experiment of knocking from under my faith this pillar of support, because I know not exactly how much may rest upon it. And never more than now, amidst the triumph of modern science and the intensity of modern enterprise, was there danger of men's being immersed in material existence, or need that they should believe in the stupendous facts of Christ's appearing, and study their import, that they may be kept from relapsing into the disbelief of any God other than the physical powers of Nature. But not only the Divine seal upon our faith may be thought to be endangered by mental freedom. Fear may be felt for the reality of the Gospel portrait of Christ. The evangelic records themselves, we are told, are not safe, except under the guardianship of authority. We must shut our eyes, and take the canon without question. If we begin to inquire, we know not where we shall stop. German learning is perilous, and, with men 1853.] Bugbears of Criticism. 261 tal freedom, leaves the genuineness of no historical book of the New Testament unquestioned, and only a phantom in place of the historical Christ. Behold the last result of free thought, and trust in reason. In other quar ters besides the Roman or the Anglo-Catholic Church, even among Protestants of a liberal school, are heard murmurs of apprehension. Now, in the first place, I think the portrait of Christ, in spite of the criticism of the Straussian school, authenticates itself,-pictures itself to the spiritual discernment as veritably the face of the Son of God; and that his colossal figure stands high above the waves of disputation, which rage around its base, concerning the origin of the Gospels. I should be among the last, however, to represent the subject of dispute as unimportant. Next, therefore, if the fact in relation to the subject be ascertainable, as I believe it to be, we must ascertain and accept it, whatever it be, on rational grounds. But it is no gentle blow that will shake the old position of the genuineness and virtually independent authority of the Gospels. The evidence, external and internal, is of too much mass and coherence to be easily weakened. The voice of the Church is of great weight. And while negative proof may strengthen positive, it is weak against it. For instance, the internal evidence that the fourth Gospel was written by a companion of Christ, added to the fact that the Church has always ascribed it to John, is so much positive proof, against which some omissions have little weight. Its omissions, and some discrepancies with the others, are more conceivable, if it be genuine, than its internal character is, if it be not. Conjecture is light against the demonstrable consequences of fact. Mr. Norton's argument from the internal structure of the synoptical Gospels for their genuineness, and against the supposition of their being copies one from the other, or from common documents, is a demonstration, against which the opposite inference from their correspondences - it not being a necessary inference - has only the momentum of gossamer against granite. From time to time, we are threatened with an inundation of German criticism that shall bear off the old bridge of history by which we cross the stream of time to converse with Apostles or their companions. The flood from Strauss was expected to knock away the piers and abut ments, so that the structure, originally made of decaying materials, must be crushed to fragments in its fall. Now the freshet from Tübingen threatens to lift it bodily from its supports, waft it down stream, and land us luckless passengers at quite a different point from the one for which we set out. But we shall see. Meanwhile, let us not distrust or undervalue our freedom. Christianity is not to be defended by deprecating assault or depreciating German learning. Fact must be sifted from conjecture, and error patiently corrected. Warn the ardent against hasty conclusions, but never shrink from the most thorough research. Christianity is surrendered when its friends deprecate assault, but every victory over doubt is a permanent conquest. Next to those who drive us from an untenable position, and deliver us from error, they do us, in the end, the greatest service, who bring us the strongest presumption, the most plausible objection, against tenable truth, and oblige us to fortify it anew with impregnable defences; while the school of the prophets which relies on subscriptions of articles and foregone conclusions, strikes the faith with a more fatal weapon than English Deism or German Rationalism ever wielded. The religious movement in which our Theological School had its origin has been powerful to modify what is taught under the name of religion beyond the limits of our own body. It has prompted some theologians to attempt to bring the doctrines called Orthodox into more apparent harmony with rational thought. But the world is yet full of notions, rites, and customs, inculcated or defended as a part of Christianity, for which the teaching of Jesus is no more responsible than it is for Buddhism, or for the insanities and domestic institutions of the saints of Utah. While the doctrine of righteous retribution is converted into one of everlasting reprobation for the transgressions of the briefest life,a fate from which infants are rescued only by a miraculous change, washing away inborn sin, while this doctrine leads to its antagonist opinion of no future retribution, which in its turn steals from faith its vital power, there is yet need to make religion pass through the purifying fire of rational thought. Again, no doctrine is more fruitful of confusion than that of the 1853.] The Rights of the Mind. 263 infallibility of the Bible, as it is commonly understood. If it were meant only, that one obeying its highest truth would find in it all that is essential to his life as a child of God, none could reasonably demur to it. With little help, and in spite of difficulties, a soul hungering for righteousness will be filled out of it with spirit and truth. But the doctrine, that the whole Scripture, after allowing for errors of transcription, is an exact transcript of Divine thought, revealed as absolute truth for all time, is fraught with mischief, prompting to attempts to reconcile what is irreconcilable by forced constructions; sanctifying ancient errors; sanctioning customs prevalent in barbarous ages as beneficent and legitimate relations, on which a pure God will pour his blessing now. Its natural reac tion is seen in a violent hostility towards Scripture itself. And he who protests against this doctrine is not assailing the Divine word, but may be filled with the truest love of man, coming to the rescue of faith perilled by a theory which the influence of the Bible itself prepares men at length to question. The world's mind needs to be relieved, by the leaders of theological thought, of such burdens upon its faith in Christianity. Alas! how often does their responsibility in this respect appear to have been mistaken! How extensively has it been supposed expedient for religion itself to withhold from the popular mind the very light which it has most needed for the intelligent and hearty reception of Divine truth! Nothing more moves one properly sensitive to the mind's right, than withholding from it the vision of pure truth which God meant it to have. Caspar Hauser, in the German fiction, kept through all the fresh years of being by a false guardian, and supplanted in his paternal inheritance, below ground, where daylight never pierced, on being brought up to the precincts of life and day, felt the keenest indignation at one who had defrauded his sight for years of that beautiful exhibition of God's majesty nightly given to the healthy and free. And so indignant may many minds, now unconscious of loss, be conceived to feel, when the hour of their being shall come for beholding the visions from which their mental guardians shut them out, imprisoning them in their spiritual nonage in the locked vaults of blindness and bigotry. For how slight the other loss, compared with the injury done * by leaving men to sit in darkness when the wrappages of delusion should be torn off, and they should be led forth and bidden to see things as they are, to carry the mental and moral eye to the verge of the mind's horizon, and lift it upward to the highest objects in the firmament of thought! The work of vindicating the claims of Christianity to rational belief is necessary to make it blend with man's inward, and to mould his outward life. The abnegation of reason loosens the hold of the Christian religion upon the life of the mass of mankind, and makes it but a form of superstition, or a sort of spiritual jugglery, instead of the life of God flowing through the human spirit in the beautiful human relations. Putting a grand perversion at the fountain of religious life, it pours perversion through its whole stream. It is not such a Christianity that can meet the want of the present age, or stem its torrent of sin. The Christianity which shall do this must show its correspondence with all truth, must import into to-day the wisdom of history, must root its doctrine deep in real consciousness, that is, must seek its foundation where Christ sought it, summoning men to judge, of themselves, what is right, and harmonizing Christ's transcendant authority with the voice of God in the soul. There appears a disposition, in many parts of the world, in the stress of danger, to resume cast-off notions, in order to restore belief and rebind man to his Divine allegiance. Sometimes it is seen in the wish for Roman Catholic authority and usages, sometimes in the reanimation of forms of belief from which the intelligence of the age has withdrawn sympathy and let out the vitality. It is all futile in church or state. It will avail no more than a scratch upon the beach when the tide has ebbed, which the next flood will wash away. To put on the faded dogmas of the past will no better serve us, in the strug gles of this hour of the world, than it would assist us in the toils of our daily life to array ourselves in the tattered uniforms which our fathers wore in the Revolutionary war. The old accoutrements did well for those whom they were made for and fitted; but now, to say nothing of their being rather tight, they would not stand a month's wear. It would be but a masquerade in old clothes, ludicrous, yet with a tinge of pathos and venerable mem |