HE, my brethren, who having been ordained to the ministry of the word, stands up to preach the gospel which his Master taught, ought to do so on all occasions with as little fear or misgiving as an ambassador in delivering the message of a king. If he be telling of that which by Faith he has heard and seen, and his hands have handled, of the Word of Life—if he not only believe in his utmost soul the truths he utters, but would be ready, if need were, to die for them—then his heart should not beat one throb the faster, though, like the Apostles of old, he were standing before Philosophers at Athens or Emperors at Rome. But the case of one who stands here and in this office, of one who has rather to argue than to apply, rather to defend than to enforce, is not the same. The transcendent majesty and unutterable value of the truths which he maintains—the oppressive sense of his own insufficiency—the knowledge that many far better and wiser and more learned than himself have been his predecessors, and that many far better and wiser and more learned than himself will listen to his words—all these considerations may well paralyse his energy and chill his heart. And yet if he have no other aim than to give a manly reason for the truth that is in him; if, with single-hearted simplicity, he strive to set forth some one fragment at least¹ of those arguments which have wrought in his own soul the strength of its convictions and the security of its hopes, then he may at once take courage. Happy he who, in an age which has been described as "destitute of faith yet terrified at scepticism," can still say Manet immota Fides; happier still is he, to whom, "having the witness in himself²," may be given the high grace of labouring to strengthen the faith of others. And if, after well-nigh two thousand years of apologetic literature, but little room for originality be left, on the other hand the arguments of those two millenniums have established the truth upon a more impregnable foundation³; if the lapse of centuries have dimmed for us the historic brightness of the facts of our religion, they have at least attested the permanence and the beneficence of the system which rests upon them as its base. And since, undeniably, the rock on which Christ built His Church has risen unshaken out of the stormiest waves of past assault, we may well feel an undaunted confidence, that even amid the decuman billows of modern scepticism it shall remain immovable as the granite bases of the world. It may be deluged again and again by the fiercely recurrent surge,—it may be hidden again and again from the eyes of the multitude by the blinding spray,—but it is there; and so long as the feet of the Church militant on earth be planted firm upon that living rock, she may indeed be desolate, she may be wounded, she may be oppressed, but so long we believe and are sure that "the gates of Hell shall not prevail against her (Matt. xvi. 18)."

        It was the direction of the pious founder of these lectures⁴ that they should deal with recent attacks upon the faith of Christians. In his day such attacks were sufficiently rare to be easily distinguishable, sufficiently definite to be separately resisted. It is not so now. We are, as it were, in the very focus of the storm. It is not that every now and then there is a burst of thunder and a glare of lightning; but the whole air is electric with quivering flames. And what is the point around which all the dangers of the storm converge? Not around minor questions, the mere adiáphora of Theology, the things unessential respecting which there need be only charity: but the storm now rages about the very Ark of God. It is the Divinity of Christ himself which is called in question, and we are challenged to prove that the most sacred archives of our religion are not a delusion or a lie. Nor is it any longer against this or that treatise that we must defend the most vital principles of Christian doctrine. It is against whole literatures; it is against whole philosophies; it is against the vague doubts of eminent thinkers; it is against the innumerable sneers, the repeated assumptions, the ever-varying criticisms of a powerful and intellectual press. It is impossible to deny the fact, it is useless to deplore it. "Our duty," said Spinosa, "is neither to ridicule the affairs of men, nor to deplore, but simply to understand them." And meanwhile it may fortify us to bear in mind that of these attacks we were from the first forewarned. "This child is set for a sign which shall be spoken against (Luke ii. 34)," said the aged Simeon as he pressed the yet infant Saviour to his heart. His cross from the first was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness; His earliest Apostles were denounced as "pestilent fellows and ringleaders of sedition⁵;" His Gospel was stigmatised by haughty historians as an "exitiabilis superstitio⁶," and His self-denying children in their purest and sweetest days were distinguished by this fact only, that "everywhere they were spoken against⁷."

        Eighteen hundred years have passed away, and, side by side with a happy awakenment to life and energy, we cannot deny that there is a wide-spread defection from the faith which our fathers held; nor does it require much insight to recognise that the causes of this falling away are both moral and intellectual. To enter briefly into those causes—to show that neithet Philosophy nor Criticism has shaken one truth of Christianity—to show the extent and the glory of its individual, social and political victories, and thus to demonstrate the mighty Witness borne by History to the faith of Christ—will be the object of these Lectures; and I pray that with all their feebleness and imperfections they may be blessed by His Holy Spirit to the brightening of our hopes, and the deepening of our charity, by the establishment and the increase of our faith in the Son of God.

        Now in attributing the spread of disbelief in part to moral causes I would at the outset, and with deep sincerity and earnestness, guard myself against a misconception. It has been a common, and I may add a deplorable mistake among Christian controversialists, to assume that error in the judgment must necessarily be caused by depravity in the heart. Nothing has led to deeper irritation, or more directly tended to harden into an antichristian attitude the minds of men who might have been won by less ungenerous arguments, than this endeavour to suppress free inquiry under the crushing and insulting charge of moral obliquity. To silence a doubt, or slur a difference under the uncharitable haughtiness of "we know that this man is a sinner," (John ix. 24) is a mixture of religious Pharisaism with social impertinence⁸ and it is least of all excusable in an age which has seen a doubtful or even an adverse position towards the truth of our religion maintained by men who have deepened our love for all that is great in conduct and pure in thought, and who in their stainless lives and noble utterance give the unconscious testimony of "minds naturally Christian⁹." But while we utterly condemn in religious controversy the mixture of moral innuendo with intellectual proof, we are justified, as a warning to our own hearts no less than those of others, in asserting the undeniable truth that sometimes, though not necessarily, and in some instances, though not in all, the first rills of heresy have flowed from the bitter fountains of a perverse will or a corrupted heart. It remains as true now as in the days of the Apostles that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God¹⁰," and that "spiritual things must be spiritually discerned." The voice from heaven saying "This is my beloved Son" sounded to most of those who heard it but as the dull roll of the thunder; to some only as the unintelligible voice of an angel; to very few as the distinct and articulate utterance of God¹¹. If it was a Christian historian who took for his motto "Pectus est quod facit theologum¹²," it was a sceptical poet (Göthe) who wrote, "As are the inclinations so are the opinions," it was an idealising philosopher who said "that our system of thought was often only the history of our heart¹³." Oh my brethren, we may lose our faith in Christ from many causes, and from some which it is not for fallible man to denounce or to condemn; but it is well for us to know there is undoubtedly one path which leads with dangerous frequency from practical faithlessness to speculative infidelity; from the "Yea, hath God said?" to the "Ye shall not surely die¹⁴." Let us then at least beware that in us unholiness do not cloud the spiritual eye and dull the spiritual ear: for the rank mists which reek upward from the sinful heart do tend most fatally to obliterate the Image, the Memory, the Life of Christ—they end by hiding from the human soul even the vision of its Creator in fold on fold of a more and more impenetrable night¹⁵.

        In speaking, however, of the moral causes for prevalent disbelief, I am not alluding at all to single cases, but to that subtler, more indefinable, more general something which we may call the Spirit of the Age. If pride and fashion have often been fatal conspirators against individual faith, so have wider but more specious evils wrought a certain atrophy in the spiritual life of nations and centuries. Ages of the most advanced refinement have not unfrequently been ages of the most open unbelief¹⁶. At the zenith of their civilization nations have often been at the nadir of their faith¹⁷. There has been on absorbing luxury, and luxury makes the heart soft, and effeminate, and vulnerable: there has been an eager race for wealth, and the love of wealth deadens all the soul's finer sensibilities; there have been unbounded means of gratification, and selfish pleasure makes men earthly, and cruel, and coarse. Entangled in complex interests, amused by incessant frivolities, stimulated by restless excitements, beguiled by the dazzling treacheries of a refined immorality, for such ages the horizon of life has dwindled into an ever-narrowing circle, and amid the dust and glare of material interests, all heavenly hopes, all Godward aspirations have faded utterly away. The spectacle is full of warning for ourselves. It shows us that material advance may be moral retrogression, and that widely-extended comfort, rapidly-increasing knowledge, vast literary activity may co-exist in Philosophy with a dreary materialism, in morals with a corrupted selfishness, in religion with a blank negation. It proves to us—and at this moment the white cliffs of England seem to reverberate to us in echoing thunder the solemn lesson—it proves to us that not on refinement, but on spirituality; not on selfishness, but on sacrifice; not on knowledge, but on wisdom; not on intelligence, but on faith, rests the entire superstructure of national greatness and individual peace. Is it a true philosophy which prides itself on a perfect impartiality between the faith which in the fifteenth century produced a Picus of Mirandola, and in the eighteenth a Vincent de Paul, and that immoral deism which culminated in the one century in an Aretino and a Poggio, and in the other in a Marât and a Robespierre¹⁸? My brethren, let us beware lest, while the censer is in our hands, the spot of leprosy be on our foreheads. There is but one direction in which the disease can be developed; there is but one remedy whereby it can be cleansed. To these moral causes for the growth of unbelief it will be needless to return; our task summons us to deal with those which are more purely intellectual, and have their seat in the understanding rather than in the heart. There are assaults upon Christianity which have their ground in philosophy, in science, and in historical criticism. It is not easy to encounter them because once, like the tents of the nomads, they were shifted from day to day, but now the very frequency of their intrusion has won for them, among too many, the position of scattered indeed yet tolerated settlers. So that now it seems as though against the doctrines, and above all against the miracles of Christianity, there were, so to speak, "a conspiracy of silence," an agreement of contemptuous indifference; as though forsooth it were too late in the day to argue or to refute, and it were at once more effectual and more courteous to ignore. For instance, the central doctrine of Christianity is based upon a miracle, and in no small realm of literature the impossibility of miracles is calmly insisted upon as a discovery which needs no demonstration. Their invention is attributed to an imaginative reverence; their reception to an ignorant credulity; the present belief in them to the cant of an interested hypocrisy, or the deficiencies of intellectual gifts¹⁹. And are we timidly to admit these haughty assertions? are we meekly to bow before the intolerant dogmatism of an ignorant science? are we, the successors of those who overcame the world, to accept the patronising condescension which is willing to spare our venerable prejudices? Nay, unshaken amid the storm of contemptuous assertion, we reply that it requires a loftier height of intelligence to believe in miracles than to reject them²⁰, because it involves the realisation of loftier than mere material verities, and the recognition of wider than purely physical laws. And can it, we ask, be so decisive a sign of contemptible inferiority, to hold a faith which was dear to the heart and acceptable to the intellect, I will not say of a Milton only, or a Bossuet, but of philosophers and mathematicians, of biologists and astronomers, of a Leibnitz and a Descartes, of a Haller and a Pascal, of a Copernicus and a Kepler, of a Bacon and a Ray²¹? Have we in the last century discovered laws so far more general than the law of gravitation, that the belief in Prophecy and Miracle which was natural to a Newton should be so drivelling in us? And with so many supreme intellects still among us, so many over whom the grave has but recently closed, who have humbly held our faith in all its breadth and in all its simplicity, are we to regard the days as past in which

                             "Piety has found
Friends in the friends of science, and true prayer
Has flown from lips wet with Castalian dews?"

Nay, but beside the graves of a Whewell and a Faraday let all at least that is shallow and noisy in modern Atheism, learn the humility of science, and the calm dignity of unshaken Christian faith!

        If we seek, my brethren, for the causes of this rejection of the supernatural, we shall find them partly in the recent tendency of metaphysical speculation, partly in certain logical inferences, partly in the increasing strength of various scientific conceptions: and each of these, as briefly as possible, we will consider in order.

        I. However noble may have been the lives of Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their lives were very noble; however sincerely they may have claimed—and most of them did claim—the position of humble Christians²² and religious philosophers; however magnificently they may have asserted—and some of them did assert with unequalled force—the majesty of the moral law within; above all, however little it may be fitting for us to pass judgment upon men so good and wise, with intolerant bigotry or austere condemnation,—yet certainly the total effect of their speculations was to idealise, say rather, to evaporate the facts of Christianity²³,—to substitute the supposed intuitions of a natural²⁴ for the firm truths of a revealed religion²⁵. In their hands the simple faith in Christ was sublimated into a mere religious Theosophy, and the doctrine of His divinity furtively relegated from the light of history into a misty region of intellectual subtleties.

        And though understood only by the few, yet the effect of these systems extended to the many; and some who would have been unable to comprehend a single step of the arguments on which such views are founded, have yet grown to regard God as a "mere form of thought," and the belief in His objective existence as an imbecility of the understanding. Now we must not only admit,