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ceased. They have been extinguished, not by the fires of the Inquisition or the anathemas of Convocations or General Assemblies, but by the steady growth of the same reverential, rational appreciation of the divine processes for the revelation of great truths, as has shut the mouths of the defamers of Milton and covered with shame the despisers of Shakespeare.

doctrine of the Double Procession, which was sufficient to tear asunder the Eastern and Western Churches; to give the chief practical occasion for the terrible anathemas of the Athanasian Creed; to precipitate the fall of the Empire of Constantinople; and therefore to sow the original seed of the present formidable Eastern Question. This controversy has in later days, with very few III. Leaving the grounds of hope exceptions, fallen into entire obscurity. furnished to us by the original docu- But in those cases where it has occupied ments of our faith, let us turn to those the attention of modern theologians, its which are supplied from the study of sting has been taken out by the process, its doctrines and institutions. And here simple as it would seem, but to which I will name two bridges, as it were, by resort had never been had before, of inwhich the passage to a brighter prospect ducing the combatants to express their may be effected. One is the increasing conflicting opinions by other phrases consciousness of the importance of defi- than those which had been the basis of nition. It was said by a famous theolo- the original antagonism. This, and this gian of Oxford thirty years ago that only, is the permanent interest which atwithout definition controversy is either tached to a recent Conference at Bonn, hopeless or useless." He has not, in his between certain theologians of the Greek, subsequent career, applied this maxim, Latin, and English Churches. What as we might fairly have expected from was then done with much satisfaction, his subtle intellect, to the clearing away at least to those more immediately conof obstructions and frivolities. But the cerned, might be applied with still more maxim is true, not only in the negative advantage to many other like phrases sense in which he pronounced it, but in which have acted as mischievous a part the more important sense of the pacify- in the disintegration and disunion of ing and enlightening tendency neces- Christendom. Another instance shall sarily implied in all attempts to arrive be given from a Church nearer home. at the clear meaning of the words em- In the Gorham controversy, which in ployed. It was a sagacious remark 1850 threatened to rend the Church of which I heard not long ago from a England from its summit to its base, Scottish minister on the shores of Ar- and which produced the widest theologyleshire, that the vehemence of theological panic of any within our time, the gical controversy has been chiefly in proportion to the emptiness of the phrases used. So long as an expression is employed merely as a party watchword, without inquiring what it means, it acts like a magical spell; it excites enthusiasm; it spreads like an infectious malady; it terrifies the weak; it acts as a stimulant to the vacant brain. But the moment that we attempt to trace its origin, to discover in what other words it can be expressed, the enthusiasm cools, the panic subsides, the contagion ceases to be catching, the dram ceases to intoxicate, the cloud disperses, and the clear sky appears. This pregnant reflection might be aptly illustrated by examples in the history of the Scottish Churches. But I will confine myself to two instances drawn from other countries. One is that of which I have before spoken, the NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXVI., No. 1

whole question hinged on the word "regeneration;" and yet, as Bishop Thirlwall showed in one of those charges, which I would recommend to all theological students, of whatever Church, who wish to see the value of severe discrimination and judicial serenity on the successive controversies of our time, it never occurred to the disputants that there was an ambiguity in the word itself-it never occurred to either of them to define or explain what either of them intended to express by it.* What is there said with withering irony of "regeneration" is true of the larger number of theological phrases by which truth has been veiled and charity stifled. Differences and difficulties will remain. But the bitterness of the fight is chiefly concerning words;

* Bishop Thirlwall's Charges, i. 156.

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the fight itself is what the apostle denounced as "a" battle of words.* Explain these define these-the party collapses, the bitterness exhales, the fear is

cast out.

Another ground of hope is the growing sense of the doctrine of proportion. It is a doctrine which has dawned slowly and painfully on the theological mind of Christendom. "In God's matters," said Samuel Rutherford, "there is not, as in grammar, the positive and comparative degrees; there is not a true, a more true, and a most true." "Every pin of the tabernacle," said Ebenezer Erskine, in his amazement at the indifference which Whitfield displayed towards the Solemn League and Covenant, "is precious." What Rutherford and Erskine thus tersely and quaintly expressed is but the assumption on which has rested the vast basis of the Rabbinical theology of Judadaism, and the Scholastic Theology, whether of Catholic or Protestant Churches. But to the better spirits of Christendom there has penetrated the conviction that these maxims are not only not sound, but are unsound to the very core. "There is a true, a more true, and a most true." "Every pin of the tabernacle is not equally precious." Richard Hooker and Richard Baxter had already begun to perceive that religion was no exception to the truth, expressed by a yet greater genius than either, in the magnificent lines of "Troilus and Cressida," which tells us how essential it is in all things to

"Observe degree, priority, and place,

Insistence, course, proportion, season, form, Office, and custom, in all line of order." This, if not the ultimate, at any rate is the proximate, solution of some of the difficulties which have threatened, or which still threaten, the peace of Churches and the growth of religion.

Take the vexed question of Church government. The main source of the gall which once poisoned, and still in some measure poisons, the relations between Episcopal and Presbyterian Churches, was not the position that one or other form was to be found in the Bible, or in antiquity, or was more con

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formable to common-sense and order. These are comparatively innocent and unexciting propositions. The distracting thought lay in the conviction that one or other was absolutely perfect, and was alone essential to the Christian religion. It is for the rectification of this misplaced exclusiveness that we owe a deep debt of gratitude to such men as Hooker in England and Leighton in Scotland. There is much to be said for Presbyterianism; there is much to be said for Episcopacy. But there is much more to be said for the secondary, temporary, accidental character of both, when compared with the general principles to which they each minister; and in the light of these principles we shall view more justly and calmly the real merits and demerits both of bishops and of presbyters, than is possible for those who, like your Scottish or my English ancestors, upheld the constitution of either Church as in all times and under all circumstances irrevocably indispensable. What is true with regard to those two leading distinctions is still more applicable to all debates on Patronage, Ecclesiastical Courts, Vestments, Postures. There is a difference, there is, if we choose so to express it, a right and a wrong, in each case. The appointment by a multitude may be preferable to the appointment by a single individual; the appointment by a responsible layman may be preferable to the appointment by a synod; a black gown may, in certain circumstances, be superior to a white one, or a white one to a red one. But far more important that any of these positions is the persuasion that, at most, all of these things, the nomination, the jurisdiction, the dress, the attitude of ministers, are but means towards an end-very distant means towards a very distant end. And in measure as we appreciate this due proportion, scandals will diminish, and the Church of the future will leap forward on its course, bounding like a ship that has thrown over its super-charge of cargo, or quelled an intestine mutiny.

Or take a yet graver question-the mode of regarding those physical wonders which are called miracles. There is no doubt an increasing difficulty on this subject-a difficulty enhanced by the incredulity which now besets edu

cated sections of mankind, and by the credulity which has taken hold with a fresh tenacity on the half-educated. It is a question on which neither science nor religion, I venture to think, has yet spoken the last word. It is a complex problem, imperatively demanding that careful definition of which I spoke before, and the calm survey of the extraordinary incidents not only of biblical but of ecclesiastical history, whether Catholic or Protestant. On the true aspects of such physical portents as have been connected with the history of religion, there is much to be argued. But on these arguments I do not enter. The point on which I would desire to fix your attention is this: that whatever view we take of these "signs and wonders," their relative proportion as grounds of argument has altogether changed. There is a well-known saying, like other famous axioms of Christian life, erroneously ascribed to St. Augustine-"We believe the miracles for the sake of the Gospels, not the Gospels for the sake of the miracles." Fill your minds with this principle, view it in all its consequences, observe how many maxims both of the Bible and of philosophy conform to it, and you will find yourselves in a position which will enable you to treat with equanimity half the perplexities of this subject. However valuable the record of extraordinary incidents may be in other respects, however impressively they may be used to convey the truths of which they are confessedly the symbols, they have, in the eyes of the very men whom we most desire to convince, become stumbling blocks and not supports. External evidence has with most thinking men receded to the background, internal evidence has come to the front. Let us learn by experience to use with moderation arguments which, at least for the present, have lost their force. Let us acknowledge that there are greater miracles, more convinccing miracles, than those which appeal only to our sense of astonishment. "The greatest of miracles," as a venerable statesman has observed, is the character of Christ. The world was converted, in the first instance, not by appeals to physical, but to moral prodigies. Let us recognise that the preternatural is not the supernatural, and that, whether

the preternatural is present or absent, the true supernatural may and will remain unshaken.

IV. And what is the true supernatural? What are those essentials in religion which have been the purifying salt of Christianity hitherto, and will be the illuminating light hereafter; which, raising us above our natural state, point to a destiny above this material worldthis commonplace existence? The great advance which, on the whole, theology has made in these latter centuries, and which it may be expected still more to make in the centuries which are to come is this, that the essential, the supernatural elements of religion are recognised to be those which are moral and spiritual. These are its chief recommendations to the reason of mankind. Without them, it would have long ago perished. So far as it has lost sight of these, it has dwindled and faded. With these, it may overcome the world. Other opportunities will occur in which I shall hope to draw out at length both the means by which these spiritual elements of Christianity may be carried on from generation to generation, and also the characteristics which distinguish them from like elements in inferior religions.* It is enough to have indicated that in the supremacy of these, and in their supremacy alone, lies the hope of the future. To love whatever is truly lovable, to detest whatever is truly detestable, to believe that the glory and divinity of goodness is indestructible, and that there has been, is, and will be a constant enlargement and elevation of our conceptions of it-furnishes a basis of religion which, whilst preserving all the best parts of the sacred records and of Christian worship and practice, is a guarantee at once for its perpetuity and for its growth

Observe also that in proportion to our insistence on the moral greatness of Christianity as its chief evidence and chief essence, there accrues an external weight of authority denied to the lower and narrower, but granted to the higher and wider, views of religion. When we look over the long annals of ecclesiasti

lege Church and in the Parish Church of St. Andrews on the following Sunday, March 18th.

* In the two sermons preached in the Col

cal history, we shall often find that it is not within the close range of the socalled orthodox, but from the outlying camp of the so-called heretic or infidel, that the champions of the true faith have come. Not from the logic of Calvin, or the rhetoric of Bossuet, but from the great scholars and philosophers of the close of the last century and the beginning of this, have been drawn the best portraitures of Christianity and its Founder. A clearer glimpse into the nature of the Deity was granted to Spinoza, the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, than to the combined forces of Episcopacy and Presbytery in the Synod of Dordrecht. When we cast our eyes over the volumes which, perhaps, of all others, give us at once the clearest prospect of the progress of humanity, and the saddest retrospect of the mistakes of theology-Mr. Lecky's History of European Morals and of Rationalism -when we read there of the eradication of deeply-rooted beliefs which, under the guidance of ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical rulers, were supposed to be essential to the existence of religionwitchcraft, persecution, intolerance, prohibition of commercial intercourse-if for one moment our faith is staggered by seeing that these beneficent changes were brought about by States in defiance of Churches, by philosophers in defiance of divines, it is revived when we perceive that the end towards which those various agencies worked is the same as that desired by the best of the theologians; that what Mr. Lecky calls the secularisation of politics is in fact the Christianisation of theology. That view of man, of the universe, and of God which by a recent able writer is called "Natural Re

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ligion"* is in fact Christianity in its larger and wider aspect. The hope of immortality, which beyond any other belief of man carries us out of the world of sense, was eagerly defended by Voltaire and Rousseau, no less than by Butler and Paley. The serious view of duty, the admiration of the heroic and the generous and the just, the belief in the transcendent value of the spiritual and the unseen, are cherished possessions of the philosophers of our generation, no less than of the missionaries and saints of the generation that is past. The Goliath of the nineteenth century, as was once well observed by a Professor of your own, is not on the opposite side of the valley-he is in our midst; he is on our side: he is not to be slain by sling and stone, but he is-if we did but know'it -our friend, our ally, our champion. If there is a constantly increasing tendency, as Mr. Lecky says, to identify the Bible and conscience, this is in other words, as he himself well states the case, a tendency to place Christianity in a position "in which we have the strongest evidence of the triumph of the conceptions of its Founder," a position in which by the nature of the case the doubters will be constantly diminishing and the intelligent believers constantly increasing.

It is indeed one hope not only for the solution, but for the pacific solution of our theological problems, that in this, more than in any previous age, in our country more than in most countries, the critical and the conservative overlap, interweave, and shade off into each other-" Ionians and Dorians on both sides." The intelligent High Churchman, the moderate Free Churchman, melts almost imperceptibly into the inquiring scholar. The generous Puritan or Nonconformist is more than one third a Latitudinarian, perhaps even half a Churchman. Few philosophers have so entirely parted with the natural feelings of the human heart, or the natural aspirations of the human mind, as to be

indifferent to the sane or insane direc

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tion of so mighty an instrument for good or evil as the religious instinct of mankind. And thus the basis of a reasonable theology, even if shaken for the moment by the frenzy of partisans, has intrinsically become wider and more solid. The lines drawn by sects and parties do not correspond with the deeper lines of human nature and of history. A distinguished theological statesman some time since drew out what he called a chart of religious thought. But there was one school of thought which was noticed only to be dismissed. And yet this school or tendency is one which happily runs across all the others and contains within itself, not indeed all, but many of the finest elements of Christendom-the backbone of Christian life, the lamp of Christian thought. We often hear of the reconciliation of theology and science. The phrase is well intended, and has been used as the title of an excellent book. But it does not exactly describe the case. What we need is the recognition that so far as they meet, Theology and Science are one and indivisible. Whatever enlarges our ideas of nature enlarges our ideas of God. Whatever gives us a deeper insight into the nature of the Author of the universe gives us a deeper insight into the secrets of the universe itself. Whatever is bad theology is also bad science; whatever is good science is also good theology. In like manner, we hear of the reconciliation of religion and morality. The answer is the same; they are one and indivisible. Whatever tends to elevate the virtue, the purity, the generosity of mankind, is high religion; whatever debases the mind, or corrupts the heart, or hardens the conscience, under whatever pretext, however specious, is low religion, is infidelity of the worst sort. There are, according to the old Greek proverb, many who have borne the thyrsus, and yet not been inspired prophets. There are many also who have been inspired prophets without wearing the prophetic mantle, or bearing the mystic wand; and these, whether statesmen, philosophers, poets, have been amongst the friends, conscious or unconscious, of the religion of the future; they are citizens, whether registered or unregistered, in the Jerusalem which is above, and which is free.

And now, with all this cloud of witnesses, what is our duty in this interval of waiting, of transition? What is our duty? and what is yours, O students of St. Andrews, O future pastors of the famous Church of Scotland, O rising generation of that strong Scottish nation which in former times was the firmest bulwark of a national, Protestant, reasonable Christianity? You, no doubt, in this secluded corner of our island, feel the breath of the spirit of the age. How are you to avoid being carried about with every gust of its fitful doctrine? How are you to gather into your sails the bounding breeze of its invincible strength? There is nothing to make you despair of your Church. It may have to pass through many transformations; but a Church which has not only stood the rude shocks of so many secessions and disruptions, but continues to gather into its ranks the most liberal tendencies of the nation, is too great an institution to be sacrificed to the exigencies of party, if only it be true to that fine maxim of Archbishop Leighton's, of leaving to others "to preach up the times,' and claiming for itself "to preach up eternity." The principle of a national Establishment, which Chalmers vindicated in the interests of Christian philanthropy has in these latter days more and more commended itself in the interests of Christian liberty. The enlarging, elevating influence infused into a religious institution by its contact, however slight, with so magnificent an ordinance as the British commonwealth ; the value of resting a religious union not on some special doctrine or institution, but on the highest welfare of the whole community;-these principles are not less, but more appreciated now than they were in a less civilised age. It is the growing conviction of all reflecting minds that there is no ground in the nature of things or in the precepts of the Christian religion for the sharp division which divines used to draw between the spiritual and secular, for the curious fancy which represented all which belonged to ecclesiastical matters as holy, all which belonged to the state as worldly. In proportion as those larger and nobler hopes of religion, of which I have been speaking, penetrate into all the communions of this country, the provin

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