Their fall before

historical faiths.

sources of man's good or ill fortune, the elements, the fertility of the ground, the earth itself, the atmosphere, and so on. It was a good example of the merely materialistic positivism to which the Philosophie Positive would confine human knowledge; and a fair example, because one isolated from the light of revealed truth and morality which now might disturb the Philosophie, of how powerless such positivism is to help man to the knowledge of the spiritual, or to better his moral condition; and of how powerful it is to release the superstitious propensities which revelation enables him to subordinate to intelligent faith. The ancient and genuine philosophical religion, getting no farther than to imagine a possible God, the concentration of human excellences, but active or inactive towards earthly things, as the philosophers might consider most dignified in a great man's conduct towards the world, and without any link to real observed existence, was a shifting theory which sat upon those that thought of it in the lightest possible manner, and had no moral influence to guide or restrain or support them. The highest Greek speculators in the field of theology are known by their writings to have been as low morally as the gross believers in the sensual myths of the popular faith. The Athenians of Paul's days were the most eminent triflers with life; their acute and widely-inquiring intellect seeing nothing better to do under their empty thoughts of the immaterial world than to make the most of the material (1 Cor. xv. 32) in careless, easy, self-indulgent existence from day to day while the only certain lasted. The serious thoughts unavoidable by man's nature they could only do their best to get over the uneasiness of by industrious husbanding of passing trifles of enjoyment (Acts xvii. 21), and resisting the feeling of care about subjects of which they had no certainty (ver. 32); but they were hopeless in the presence of the evils of life, and effortless, to a degree hardly appreciable by us, towards alleviating the most intense social miseries of their time.

11. Such religions of imagination fell before the theology of actual manifestation and known transactions; the reasoning continually upon historical facts with which Paul went single

handed into the very focus of subtle metaphysical scepticism, cultivated frivolity and seemingly invulnerable self-satisfaction. But the same had been the effect from the beginning whereever the religions of human subjective hypothesis came into contact with the revealed religion of historical facts. The reality of Judaism seized hold upon the spirits of observant heathens brought into prolonged intercourse with the Hebrew people. Nothing in history is so striking as the awe, thoroughly rational and self-possessed, with which Nebuchadnezzar, imagining himself, as his Assyrian remains show, an entire believer in the gods of his mythology, looked upon the reality of the God whom Daniel proclaimed to him as the giver of the vision he was "troubled" by. The same feeling, recognising reality in the revealed God, is evident over all the earlier history of the Hebrews. The nations which Israel passed through or by during their forty years' pilgrimage, the Philistines near whom they settled, the Egyptians from whose oppression they went forth with a high hand, trembled and stood in sharply-reasoning dread of the invisible being, manifestly the ruler of all things, who protected that isolated people. Their professed fear of their own gods, and fancied belief in them, vanished before the unmistakable realities of Israel's history. The Jehovah of the Israelites was evidently the I AM that He called Himself, the one reality, the one existence. He was an invisible being, the facts surrounding whom made Him felt by the spirit of man as a living, true, undoubted power, its master and its judge. Pharaoh trembled before the patriarchal knowledge of God, the faith which Moses came before him to demand his submission to, as much as Felix did before the more perfect light of Paul's preaching. The case of Paul in the cities of Greece is more in point than has been noticed above, as showing the force of the historical truth to make itself recognised. To meet the subtlety, the rhetoric and practice in disputation, of the flower of heathen apologists, Paul, though capable of learned display, was permitted to speak only the simple story of God's so great love of the world completed in Christ and Him crucified. This story of the cross of Christ was at first sight foolishness to

The human mind's recognition

the learned Greeks ingenious in philosophising; but it was the power of God and the wisdom of God to seize upon their own minds and turn them away from all their beautiful interesting imaginations of possible truth to itself; as a reality which the soul of man recognised, as the eye practised in the human countenance will recognise a portrait among pictures, and set apart its real life as quite a different thing from all imaginary individuality inserted into an ideal painting.

12. Success is said to have attended some attempts to construct an intricate fiction, so as to pass with good judges for a of reality. narrative of actual occurrences. The rule approaching at least

to universality is, that a narrative of actual life commends itself as a real portrait does to the numerous testing points which human experience educates ready feeling to apply to any narrative of human life.

This has been the case with the Bible narratives, and especially with the unique religious narrative of human life, the history of Jesus. No ingenious hypothesis explaining away the actual occurrence of the things related in the Gospels has ever been more than a forced haze cast about one or other particular of the history. The whole picture soon forced itself upon fresh readers as a picture of real life. The scepticism never could be made general if the story was allowed to be read. It was such a labour to keep in mind the suggested doubts, which would not suggest themselves, that they were always soon let go. A sceptic fencing himself in his study from all corrective contact with the testing realities of the visible world, and the ways of human thinking and feeling and acting, confining himself alone with his own resolutely retained fancies, can compile ingenious theories of doubt concerning human things in the Bible, or out of it. If he go out of his guarded chamber into the world of men for a while, the world he has created for himself slips from his grasp. He finds himself, as Hume confessed in his own case, thinking very much as other men think. However it is to be explained, the language of fact forces itself upon men's recognition. Metaphysicians who are obliged to share a great deal in the business of the world, plunged daily into the bracing bath of human realities, do not

fall into the follies of philosophising which so often encloud recluse thinkers. This is perhaps great part of the reason of difference between what is looked upon as English commonsense and German dreaminess; as the same difference in kind is to be found between metaphysical writings coming out of busy life, and others coming out of studious cloister-life in England itself. There seems to be little possibility of holding anything like the mythical theory, or of doing anything but feel the historical reality of the Bible narratives when the reader travels in the locality which they claim. Commodore Lynch, in his narrative of his expedition to the Dead Sea, gives a case of entire disbelief of Moses' narrative, among several instances of scepticism, being converted into entire belief, in the case of some of his party of explorers during their few weeks' survey. The language of the Scriptural writers, casual as well as careful, especially the figurative language pervading the large proportion of the sacred books that is poetical, so perpetually reflects the unique scenery, terrestrial and atmospheric, of the region they speak of, as to assign itself to authorship certainly within the influence which that scenery would have upon men's customary thoughts. Even in the case of the parables of our Lord, some of them so reflect the topographical features of the spots where they were spoken, that to doubt their authenticity would be like doubting the details of a battle while standing amid peculiarities of the battle-field, which make these details almost a topographical necessity. To untravelled readers of such books of travel in Palestine as Dean Stanley's, even the attentive reading of his notes is enough to make unavoidable the acceptance as genuine of the narratives and the devotional language of the Bible which he illustrates.

historical

13. A strong negative proof of the importance, if not neces- Scepticism avoiding sity, that religious truth should be presented to man in the historical form, is that successful sceptical writers have always truth. withdrawn the attention of their readers from the actual picture presented by the sacred books as a whole-the Metaphysical school wrenching aside the notice to the bold preliminary question, whether we could by possibility believe a man telling us that he had seen a miracle—the Mythists absorbing the

B

Congruity

truth to

sciousness.

thoughts in ingenious statements of alleged circumstances of all kinds, which might have made the writers frame parts of their stories to be figurative representations of non-religious truth, or fables clothing popular sentiments to suit the habits of thought of imaginative ages-the German critical school confusing the mind by a perpetually shifting onslaught on frequently misquoted details, which in the tumult of fault-finding ignores and would conceal the absence of consistency in their own criticism, as well as the presence of a grand whole in the narrative round which they are skirmishing.

14. The revealed subject of faith which is to lay hold on of revealed man's spirit as the truth, has another essential feature besides man's con- its form of a promptly recognised history of a reality. It is a reality which suits his religious condition. A human religion must be one fitting itself to human nature. Its faith must be of facts which are recognisable by the bearers of that nature as of value to them. It is of no consequence to me what precise number of asteroids have been discovered in the vacant planetary orbit space, but it is of consequence to me to have a parent, or brother, or friend, whose love will make the vicissitudes of all other fortune easily borne. The facts of revelation are of this kind-human facts-which in all stages of revelation man has felt to be in rapport with his conscious condition, and which, therefore, have made themselves his proper faith. The history of God's love to man is a system into which he feels that his condition as to weakness, sinfulness, wish for sympathy, and need of help, strangely fits. It is evidently his subjective religion if it be objectively proved. And the practice of faith belonging to this revealed religion, as seen in the lives recorded in it, awakes his fellow-feeling. It is the feeling of the truth as he experiences it. This is the kind of evidence which must discharge the essential function of religious evidence-persuasion. Its force is different in kind from the chiefly forensic effect of external evidences which compel the intellect to see a divine Being standing near with a message in His hand. Within God's revealed Word the whole conscious human nature, not of logical reasoning powers only, but inarticulate cravings, sympathies, propensities of imagination and desire, meets