legend has grown up amongst every primitive people around any hero of commanding personality.

To such a one the pious legends woven about the Christ will appear just as natural, just as right in their place, and just as unnecessary of belief now, as any of those narrated of Moses, or Buddha, or Plato. In a primitive people the ascription of such legends was one way of expressing sincere adoration, a pious act quite irrespective of the historic facts. There is a frame of mind which regards the adoring legend, because it is adoring, as of vastly greater moment than the historic truth, because it is true. Those who have never inquired into this wonderfully interesting branch of human history, or who have never even attempted to comprehend that frame of mind, cannot understand how the reverent seeker after truth in these days can frankly admit that some of the things supposed by our forefathers to be a vital part of religion are myth, and yet not lose his reverence towards those earlier ones whose pious hearts wove, repeated, believed, and were even edified and spiritually strengthened by believing those legends. To each age its own conception of the divine stands to serve its own purpose. And the age which finds it better to hold simple unvarnished truth than to weave pious fancies, must not harshly condemn the age which thought it greater honour to God to weave these pious fancies than even to ask what the facts were. It will not do for the twentieth century to rise up in judgment against the second century, nor for the Western mind to rivet condemnation upon the Eastern, because the Eastern mind of the second century took different views of life and truth from these the Western of the twentieth century takes. To the uninstructed of all ages that which is abnormal has always presented itself as something sacred. To the oriental mind, untutored in science, the abnormal still always presents something calling forth an instinct of reverential worship. Of very recent growth, even in the better educated of westerns, is the idea of the reign of law. We forget too often that in this respect a whole chasin lies between the England of Edward VI. and the England of Edward VII. Only those who either fail to understand or else despise the reign of law and all that the phrase connotes, can continue to suppose that the truth of any doctrine can be established by the occurrence of some abnormal phenomenon. So convinced are all the clearest thinkers on this point, so scrupulous in their regard for ascertained truths, that they will rightly demand for any abnormal Occurrence a testimony of evidence much more strict and

precise than that which is required for an occurrence of normal kind.

Only those who misunderstand the reign of law or ignore it can hold an abnormal event to be more sacred than a normal one. On the other hand those who have attained to this scientific clearness of vision, and who can see as a simple and obvious truth that in abnormality there is nothing of itself that is sacred, that the normal is just as sacred as the abnormal, must not, because it is obvious to them, despise or condemn those who in the pre-scientific ages did attribute some sort of sacredness to abnormality.

There are still those, and possibly they are still a majority amongst professed Christians, who would think it derogatory to the person whom they worship as wholly God as well as wholly man, to be a man in the fashion of His birth as well as in the fashion of His death. Let us honour them for their sincerity of heart and for their reverential souls even when we deem their sincerity and their reverence to be founded in this respect on no adequate basis. If we find ourselves in the cause of what we consider truth unable to share all their beliefs, let it be ours to see that we neither plume ourselves on any superiority of discernment, nor fall behind them in the devotion with which inwardly and outwardly we follow the Master.

Our minds are not all constituted alike; it is impossible for us all to see truth in the same aspect. But we can all follow truth as it is discoverable by us, and we can all pray for a clearer revelation of it. To our own Master we stand or fall. There are idols of the temple as well as the idols of the cave, and of the tribe, and of the market-place. It has been largely the part of scientific investigation to show us how well-meaning piety has not always held a clear distinction between idol and emblem, between the symbol and the thing symbolized; and "Nehushtan" has had to be the verdict pronounced, and still will have to be pronounced, over some of the survivals before which men, thinking to worship God, have offered incense, and bowed themselves down.

It is for this cause that as our convictions deepen and strengthen we must be the more ready to preserve open minds. towards the convictions of others, to hold judgment in reverential suspense even toward some things which large bodies of devout men have regarded-perhaps for centuriesas closed questions. Revelation has not stood still, nor will it in our time. We stand not on the limited territory

where our forefathers stood: we have a larger heritage, we look out upon a larger landscape, there are before us greater heights to be climbed. Why should we feel anything but hope and courage in the larger vision? We are no longer children, and must look to outgrowing many of the thoughts and even of the beliefs which were accepted as final in the childhood of the

race.

It is well known that one of the first-fruits of the invention of the telescope was the discovery of the spots on the sun. History records that the discovery was denounced as impious; and the doctrine that there are sunspots was banned as heretical. It is narrated, and the narrative is of significance to-day, how an ecclesiastic being invited to examine for himself and to see whether there were not spots on the sun, refused even to put his eye to the telescope for fear that he should see the spots which the astronomers asserted to be there, and so discredit should be brought on the reputation of Saint Thomas Aquinas.

That same spirit which first denounces the results of investigation, and then refuses even to look whether they exist, is by no means extinct, as the recent correspondence on Faith and Reason in the columns of the Standard has shown. To fear that which one does not understand may be natural; but to refuse to try to understand is a defect of character worse than cowardice. Those who pin their religious faith to an outward authority have had many shocks of late, and may need more for their soul's health. The spirit of inquiry cannot be stemmed by an appeal to the fourth century or to the sixth. If men ask us to accept as final the decisions of the Council of Nicea, we are bound to inquire whether that body had before it all materials needful for a final judgment, whether history has shown its composition to be representative and unbiased, its deliberations to be conducted in the scientific spirit of calm inquiry, its decisions to be taken without heat or partisanship. Nay, even if in all these respects it had been perfect-and alas! in some of them it was a miserable failure-the question would still remain why any thinking person in the twentieth century should be bound by the thoughts of the fourth. The fact is we are not bound by the decisions of the Council of Nicea. It has closed no question which we are not at liberty to reopen. Except to those who are in bondage to ecclesiastical systems, there are no closed questions that a reverent mind may not beneficially reconsider. We have as much right to reconsider the problems of religion in the light of our own age and of its

special revelations, as the men of any former age by the light of theirs. There is an open door before us, which no man, and no body of men, alive or dead, can shut. We cannot be denied the right to look through the telescope lest we should see spots on the sun. When, forty years ago, Bishop Colenso drew general attention to that which devout scholars had already several times observed, the "stratification" now so evident in the books of the l'entateuch, he was hounded out of the communion of the Orthodox. Even now there are pious souls who refuse to read his scholarly works-lest they should see spots on the sun! We are to a lesser extent witnessing a like attitude assumed toward those who in our day are pointing to the undeniable evidences of stratification in the composition of our Gospels. It is not a question of science but one of scholarship. Scholarship is now in possession of the records of ancient Babylon and ancient Egypt, which antedate our Bibles and which were not known until recently. Already these have been sufficiently deciphered to throw much light upon the stratification previously observed, and have vindicated the earlier perceptions of the scholars.

All the more reason have we, who can from a lower plane appreciate the labours and conscientious care of a scholarship that is itself far beyond us, to keep that open mind which the study of science continually reminds us to be essential in all true progress. Depth of faith for some of us is measured not by the quantity of pious beliefs which we can accept, but by the simplicity of those which we find needful for guidance and conduct. A man's religious life consisteth not in the abundance of the beliefs which he professes. Credulity is not faith. Even in spiritual things there is a sacred renunciation of the self, which enables one to lay aside many hindering things that are but old garments inherited from our forefathers. When we observe the greatest source of hindrance to all united work for the spiritual betterment of mankind, to have been those endless theological controversies which have embittered and estranged the earnest and the devout, and have been ever followed by persecution and spiritual cruelty, shall we not at least declare that in the name of the Master whose we are and whom we serve, we will have nothing to do with them or with the un-Christ-like spirit that characterises them. We need to have faith enough to believe that suspense of judgment is often a more sacred duty than acceptance of any particular dogma. For our age one of the greatest blessings that could befal us would be to possess that reverential open mind which

rises above all bigotries, scientific as well as religious. For while we need knowledge and insight, just as much do we need reverence reverence for the truth because it is true, wherever we find it. If in the sole pursuit of truth we find ourselves called upon as a sacred duty to renounce some things hallowed by usage and pious association, that renunciation must be itself no hasty act, no passing impulse, no wilful breaking away. It must be under the supreme conviction that it is required of our hands. Return to the simple faith long overlaid by tradition and sacramentalism may not be easy, but it may be none the less a duty laid upon us. The renunciation with which for most of us the restatement of religion necessarily begins, must be a renunciation not for renunciation's sake, not born of spiritual pride, no truckling to popular pressure, no weak compromise for the sake of intellectual peace. It must be a renunciation made in obedience solely to the dictates of truth, a renunciation ad majorem Dei gloriam.

DISCUSSION.

Dr. WALTER KIDD.-I have been asked to move a vote of thanks to Professor Silvanus Thompson, thanking him for his kindness in coming this afternoon and putting before us this valuable address; we recognise the value of the source from which it comes, from one who is well known for his Christian character. You will see how valuable it is for us to have this address presented to us from such a source. We have all been brought into a high plane of thought, into spiritual regions, and into regions of high science, and we have heard an address which is marked by extreme clearness of thought and loyalty to truth on both sides; and I could only wish that our President had been able to be present to the end of this address, that he might have expressed the value of evidence as it has been presented to us;—it is a question of evidence, all through, and the task remaining for us is simply to interpret the evidence. We shall all be set thinking on these lines and be prepared to learn much more. We may be startled to find we have to learn so much. Years ago we thought we knew a great deal more than we do now,