faith? Have you not been the constant panegyrist of such princes as have depopulated whole districts for heresy? Do you not daily teach, that they who appeal from your confessions to scripture ought to be punished by the secular power? It is impossible for you to deny this. Does not all the world. know that you are a set of demagogues, or (to speak more mildly) a sort of tribunes, and that the magistrates do nothing but exhibit in public what you teach in private? You try to justify the banishment of Ochin, and the execution of others, and you seem to wish Poland would follow your example. God forbid! When you talk of your Augsburg confession and your Helvetic creed, and your unanimity, and your fundamental truths, I keep thinking of the sixth commandment, Thou shalt not kill.' "

6

Blessings on the memory of this good foreigner! May God make his spirit less foreign to our churches !*

* In a letter to Wolff, he says, "Tell me, my learned friend, now that the Calvinists have burnt Servetus, and beheaded Gentilis, and murdered many others, and banished Bernard Ochin, with his wife and children, from your city in the depth of a sharp winter; now that the Lutherans have expelled Lasco, with the congregation of foreigners that came out of England with him, in an extremely rigorous season of the year; having done a great many such exploits, all contrary to the genius of Christianity, how, I ask, how shall we meet the Papists? With what face can we tax them with cruelty? How dare we say 'our weapons are not carnal?' How can we any longer urge, 'Let both grow together till the harvest?' Let us cease to boast that faith cannot be compelled, and that conscience ought to be free."-Socini Opera, tom I., quoted in Robinson's "Ecclesiastical Researches," pp. 592, 593.

LECTURE IV.

RATIONALISM.

1 CORINTHIANS, XIV. 20.

BRETHREN, BE NOT CHILDREN IN UNDERSTANDING; HOWBEIT IN MALICE BE YE CHILDREN, BUT IN UNDERSTANDING BE MEN.

If we were asked to describe the kind of revelation we should expect from the Infinite Creator to the human mind, we should have little difficulty in stating at least the faculties and sentiments of our nature, which it would be most likely to stimulate. It would restrain the merely animal tendencies, which subserve the purposes of physical existence, and from whose disordered ascendancy the saddest evils and most complete degradation of humanity arise. It would appeal sparingly to fear; for this is the coarse argument of mere power, which, if it produces submission, excites alienation, and is ill suited to the purposes of One who would win created minds to sympathy with himself, who holds in his hands unlimited means of touching the springs of better affection, and capturing all souls by the power of veneration. It would indulge that yearning after exhibitions of power more than human, which, in the absence of the reality, has given birth to fiction, and taken refuge, for want of better shelter, in the marvels of mythology and romance. It would pay respect to that melancholy feeling of moral imperfection which all noble minds

carry from the world to the converse of their own thoughts, and would prove how true has been their dark and instinctive feeling after a purer and greater virtue. It would show that the consciousness of mighty but undeveloped elements, of sublime though latent affections, in human nature was no delusion; that a mind lifted above the arts of selfishness, penetrated with a wise and generous love, possessing a profound unison of will with God, and while invested with the majesty of faith, not losing the meekness of mercy, is not merely a possibility, but a reality. It would not be silent to those human affections which, since the fathers fell asleep, have been plaintiffs against death, and stood on the brink of the invisible, crying in vain over its abyss for tidings of the treasures it conceals. Yet, in its answer to those eager inquiries, it would still leave scope for that imaginative faculty, whose office it is to people the unknown, and shadow forth the future, and urge on our progress by conceptions of better life. And it would invite the understanding of man to all topics which are great and inspiring; encouraging him to examine what it most befitted him to learn, and to reason on that of which it was needful that he should be convinced; aiding him to solve the mighty problems of life, and unfold the ideas of duty, and pierce the penetralia of his nature, and aspire for ever to worthier conceptions of the Infinite Mind. It would ask for the devotion of a free and fearless mind, whose faculties moved in the liberty of love, and whose only act of selfsacrifice consisted in turning out the whole intellect upon the field of nature and of history, to seek whatever God has made true and good. It would never aim at suspending speculation on any subject, except by superseding it-by exhausting discoveries upon it-by satiating curiosity-by presenting, as he who is Lord of the mind well may, such overpowering evidence, such clear illumination, as will set to rest the anxieties, and command the willing conviction, not of this or that small section of mankind, but of all whom it may concern.

Unsatisfied curiosity is itself a proof of defective information ; the mere desire for knowledge indicates the capacity to receive it; and the eagerness to inquire constitutes a perfect title to research.

If we are to trust to the popular description of the gospel, Christianity is almost the complete reverse of this picture of a revelation, and disappoints all these expectations. It invades every faculty of the human mind, and watches it with an inquisitor's eye. It suppresses the sentiment of duty, by representing us as incapable of putting it into action. It confounds the understanding and the will, and brandishes terrors, which address themselves to the latter, in the face of belief, which flows from the former. It forbids speculation upon everything, and gives the knowledge which supersedes it upon nothing. For, while no churches give the same report of its essential doctrines, they all agree that those doctrines must be kept safe from the approaches of reason. Its only acceptable worship is, not a free and progressive mind, open to new light and loving it, bending before what it knows not in holy listening for fresh revelations, but a mind with an old creed engraved upon it. We are therefore left in this condition: the subjects into which, before the rise of Christianity, the understandings of reflecting men used to inquire are still perfectly unsettled, and represented in as many different ways as there are churches in Christendom; and yet philosophy is put out, and may no longer concern itself with the character of God, the administration of Providence, the duty of man, and the hopes of immortality.

Let us attempt to rescue the Gospel from the imputation of this effect, and ascertain whether it does not accord with our first conceptions of what a revelation is likely to be; whether it is not a system of perfect rationalism, and does not encourage the unreserved application of our understandings to its records, and their various contents of history, miracle, and doctrine.

When the scriptures are placed in our hands we have two operations to perform on them; first, to draw forth their meaning, i. e., to reach the original ideas of the authors; secondly, having obtained those ideas, as nearly as we can, to yield to them the right treatment, and determine whether we are to look for additional evidence of their truth, or to receive them without further demur. I propose to explain what should be the proper conduct of the understanding in both these processes, with respect, first to the interpretation of the Bible, then to the admission of its statements.

1. There is a prevailing notion, that in the process of interpretation there is very little for the understanding to do. The scriptures we are everywhere told, are so plain, that he who runs may read, and the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot err therein. And yet, the wayfaring man, if a Catholic, has, we are incessantly assured, fatally erred therein. So has he, if an Arminian; so has he, if an Antinomian; so has he, if a Sabellian; so has he, if a Unitarian. Each of these has his separate theory of Christianity, which is so exceedingly obvious, that none but the blind can miss it; yet each does miss all but his own.- -Whence comes this diversity of interpretation, if the Bible be so easy to understand? Do you say, it is all from the diversity of men's understandings? It is not the difficulty of the book, but their mode of regarding it, that is in fault? That is to say, if they were in your state of mind, they would find your discoveries in the scriptures;—if they looked through your eyes, they would have no difficulty in seeing what you see. No doubt; and it is possibly to this that the declamation respecting the plainness of the sacred writings reduces itself; that they readily suggest to every one the notions which he is already persuaded are to be found there; and excite most forcibly in his mind the ideas of which his mind is already full. For what do we mean, when we say that any document is easily understood?—that it sug