enlargement, and perfect exhibition of the truths they hold in germ. This is the only divine rule of controversy, the only evangelical principle of conversion, the law of unity, truth, and love. Wheresoever, then, the germs of the perfect faith are sown, therein let us rejoice in hope.

What has here been said manifestly lies open to a multitude of apparent objections, and some of the highest and gravest kind. It may be said that this is equivalent to denying the visibleness and the divine institution of the Church, the necessity and grace of the holy sacraments; that it substitutes personal sincerity for the true faith, and goes all length with the latitudinarian theory, which either makes truth indifferent, or God all mercy.

I say, these are apparent objections; for not one of them, as we shall see, really has any force. All that has been said rests upon two undeniable truths.

1. First, that all truth has whose heart is right with God.

so absolute and clear that we

life in it to those

This is an axiom need not fear to

affirm it without limitation. Perhaps it may be said, What, then, is this but the latitudinarian fiction, so long ago familiar in rhyme, which says that bigots only care for points of faith; that God looks to our life alone; and that,

where this is right, we cannot, for the world to come, be wrong?" This saying, false as it is in its rhetorical aspect, is, with one comment, strictly true in its logical force. If right and wrong are predicated of the faith or doctrine of an imperfect believer, it is a contradiction in terms. But if they be predicated of his own life and moral state before God, it is an axiomatic truth. No man's life can be wrong before God, if it is right before God. The saying, then, is a mere paradox, a rebuke not undeserved by rigorists, who, while they cannot stand too stiffly for truth, may easily be too blind to the fruits of God's good Spirit. Why should we have any fear at all of adopting the whole proverb? Let no Christian fight, but suffer for the faith and let us rejoice that no man can be wrong in his obedience, who, so far as his light goes in that obedience, is right. Nay, we may carry this much more boldly onward, and with the whole Catholic Church affirm, that no ignorance of truth is a personal sin before God, except that ignorance which springs from personal sin. The measures of truth possessed by, or presented to, individuals are so extensively determined by external states and circumstances over which they have no control, that multitudes never are brought face to face with the full orb of faith. Birth, nation, religious community, education or

the want of education, faithfulness or unfaithfulness in parents and pastors, changes and contingencies of life, and the whole world of intricate and inconceivable agencies which mould and dispose the lot of individuals, -all these determine with infinite variety the measures of truth proposed to each. And we know that, "if there be first a willing mind, a man is accepted according to that he hath, not according to that he hath not." And how shall they believe in that of which they have not heard?

Now this also opens a further and inner fold of this deep subject. Blameless ignorance does not arise only from the want of having truth actually proposed from without. The intellectual and spiritual perceptions within are so deeply formed and controlled by agencies under which we are passive, and for which we are, therefore, not responsible, that there may be an ignorance wholly without personal sin even in the presence of the full faith of Christ. Such is the state of unknown multitudes, who have been trained from childhood to regard certain errors with religious love, and certain truths with religious fear. These affections of the soul, matured in them by others, become almost instincts, and take their place beside the clearest dictates of conscience. Such persons have

1 2 Cor. viii. 12.

often no intellectual gifts to rise above their teachers, still less any powers and faculties to analyse and unravel the texture of their religious perceptions. As they have been taught, so they believe. Filial love, dutiful submission, habitual reverence, humble self-mistrust, fear of wandering in religion and of illusion in eternal realities, consciousness of past mercies and still more of present blessings,

all these make them hold with the full power of reverence, affection, trust, persuasion, and religious perseverance to the teaching of their home and childhood. This is what theologians call 'prejudice' in its pure etymological sense-a judgment foregone, formed for us by others or by events; and this prejudice has always been held to excuse the error; and the ignorance founded upon it is to be counted invincible, and therefore no personal sin. Can we doubt that this great rule of compassion applies to the wide-spread and numerous branches of the Oriental Church, which for fourteen hundred years have lived and died in the Nestorian heresy ? What but this has been the condition of children, women, poor and uninstructed souls, in the forty generations which have passed since that great schism? And does not the same principle apply to every Christian sect according to its measure, and to every individual born into it? And lastly, shall we not all, on all sides,

have need to shelter ourselves under this law of tender and pitiful compassion at that great day when the members of Christ's Church, now miserably torn asunder, shall stand in the light where all truth is seen without a shadow?

Truth is given for the probation of man; the probation of man is not ordained for the sake of truth. God can prove, and from the beginning has proved, His servants in every measure of light, from the noon of night to the noon of day. We have the warrant of holy writ, that the Gentiles, who had received no revealed law, did "by nature the things contained in the law," being "a law unto themselves ;" and that by their law they should be judged. When St. Peter said, "God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth Him and doeth righteousness is accepted of Him;" it is true that he spoke, with design, only of the admission of Gentiles to the grace given to the Jews; but he enunciated a much larger application of God's law of grace. denied that national distinctions were a bar to mercy, but he affirmed also that fear and righteousness are universally accepted of God. He thereby enunciated the great axioms of the kingdom of mercy, that no obedient soul can perish, no penitent be cast away, no soul that loves God be lost. 2 Acts x. 35.

1 Rom. ii. 14.

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