and grace of God have been, and are now, preparing room for His own vine in that land. By these, or by whatsoever human agents He may choose, may He be pleased to carry the work onward to perfection; and may the day speedily come in which it may be said that the Gospel vine has not only taken deep root, but has filled the land!

ON "HANDLING THE WORD OF GOD DECEITFULLY.”:

THERE are two ways of handling or receiving the Word of God. According to the first, we accept it as our supreme authority in all matters of doctrine, faith, and practice, recog nising it as the revelation of the mind and will of the Infallible, and prepared to bow to its decisions, even although those decisions should be found to be discordant with the conclusions of our reason or the intimations of our preconceived opinions. Reason, according to these views, has nearly fulfilled her office, and almost exhausted her functions, when she has arrived at the conviction that the Bible is the Word of God. It may have strained her powers, and taxed her habits of independence, to have reached that conviction; for in the Scriptures there are many things hard to be understood, and many things that cannot be understood at all. But, having reached it, she is thenceforth bound to accept its contents as being too true to be suspected, and too authoritative to be questioned. In other words, she surrenders her own judgment to that of Revelation. For, if Revelation be the expression of the wisdom and knowledge of God, and if God be infallible, there remains for reason little else to do than to accept what she dares not deny, and to submit to what it were, after such a conclusion, unreasonable to doubt. We say not that there are not many things in the Bible utterly outside the province and powers of reason, and many other things contradictory to her discoveries and deductions; but that, in the one case, it is her duty to believe where she is incompetent to comprehend, and in the other, to draw the distinction between modes of expression and the obvious truth intended.

But there is another way in which the Word of God is accepted. According to it, reason puts herself in a position of equality with the Revelation of God, declining to accept anything which is not level to her own power of comprehension, or in harmony with her own deductions. Doctrines, communications, there may be in the Scriptures, perfectly plain and intelligible as to what they seem to assert, although the thing

*The above is the substance of a Sermon preached, May 3, the Anniversary of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, by the Rev. Canon Boyd, on the words forming the title of this Article.

asserted by them may be utterly mysterious and incomprehensible. In such cases, the action of reason is clearly to inform herself whether such a communication be made; and if so, at once to accept it. To go a step beyond this, and demand that the thing revealed should be intelligible in itself, is to demand either that the Infinite should be as the finite, or the finite exalted to the capacity of the Infinite. "Men would be as gods, knowing (in the widest sense) good and evil." If that demand be reasonable, then "faith is made void, and the promise made of none effect." The Bible has nothing in it but what man could invent, or, if not invent, confirm out of the powers of his own understanding. It were easy to show that, according to this theory, things undeniably and demonstratively true ought to be rejected by those who had not opportunities or means of testing their truth. To us, the solidation of water into ice is an accepted truth; to the men at the Equator, an unreasonable impossibility. To the men of the Arctic regions, the appearance of the sun at midnight is a truth; to us an improbability. Yet, things such as these are universally accepted on sufficient testimony, even although there be nothing demonstrative to confirm them. It is this temper of demanding satisfaction for reason in everything, that has in all ages been the parent of resolute infidelity. Three centuries past, Socinus wrote his views respecting the Satisfaction of Christ. "If not once only, but often, it should be written in the Sacred Scriptures that Christ made satisfaction to God for sins, I could not therefore believe it.... Any, even the greatest force, is to be used with words. rather than take this, in this the obvious sense." Here, the truth revealed is confessed to be "obvious" as a revelation, yet denied as a fact. The difficulty of belief lies not in the obscurity of the communication, but in the nature of the thing itself. To us it is enough, however clad in difficulties, that the Word of God has announced the "satisfaction;" to the great apostle of Socinians, a thousand declarations are nothing, because declaring that which reason chooses not to accept. A century past, Dr. Priestley wrote in a similar spirit respecting the pre-existence of our Lord; denying that truth-not because dimly revealed, or resting on an insufficient amount of testimony, but because transcending the powers of reason to conceive. Each individual around him began existence at his birth into this world, and therefore Christ could not have had an existence previous to His entrance on this world. That which the Pythagorean or the Hindu can believe on dreamy suggestion, a professing Christian cannot believe on God's assertion. "So strange and incredible does the hypothesis of a pre-existent state appear, that sooner than admit it I would suppose the whole verse (John vi. 62) to be an interpolation, or that the old apostle dictated one thing, and his amanuensis

wrote another." To a mind of this description, so utterly undisciplined to reverence or trust, repeated revelations or harmonious statements of any amount, or of any unambiguity, could avail positively nothing. Its creed is not, "Let God be true, but every man a liar;" but, "Let reason be infallible, even though God should be proved untruthful." Proud wilfulness, not trustful humility, is its very attitude and characteristic; for we have it in a recent avowal of opinion: "I will believe the statement about the angels, because I like it; but I will not believe that about the devils, because I do not like it."

Now, in our own days a school has arisen representing to a great degree these principles, and claiming for itself to express the Theology of the age. We mean not to impute to it the unreasonable dogmatism of Socinus, or the coarse irreverent flippancy of Priestley; but are unable to acquit it of holding principles which only require a certain amount of intrepidity and indulgence to expand into errors as serious. For that which lies equally at the root of both is a doubt and distrust of the very truth of the Word of God. If Socinus disliked the doctrine of Satisfaction, and thought an atonement through suffering altogether at variance with his preconceived and arbitrary notions of the character of God, he hesitated not to discard it, as a notion which reason could not tolerate. It mattered not to him, that the book of appeal (if we have such a thing) affirmed it in passages too plain and numerous to be gainsayed; for that book must be in error, because reason-that is, himself-had decided differently. The words of Scripture he admitted to be strong, but "the greatest force was to be used with them, rather than admit the obvious sense." Of course, such a man had no Bible. He was his own Bible, and Reason was the high priest of his profession. The case is only altered as to the peculiar doctrine selected for rejection. In the instance of Priestley, the text could not be denied as to its meaning, but it could be got rid of as an interpolation or a clerical mistake. Is there nothing of this spirit, nothing of this practice, nothing of this daring encroachment on the authority of the Bible, to be traced to this school of the theology of the age? So much of them all there is, that almost every expedient is resorted to, to break down that authority, and to make its clear voice to utter sounds indistinct, ambiguous, meaningless, contradictory. If the early historic facts of the Bible be, to reason's estimate, unreal or unlikely, let them stand, not as facts, but as myths. If the statements of the Bible are too strong for the diluted theology of the nineteenth century, let these assertions be modified, and their inconvenient angles rounded off by allowance made for poetic exuberance and metaphorical exaggeration. If texts sturdily maintain, or appear to maintain, the old creed, which the Church in all ages has revered; and if their insurmountable testimony is not to be

refined away by explanation, let there be grave doubts thrown over their authority, by cautions as to the various readings and various versions of the Scripture. If passages there be, which appear too strong for reason's acceptance, too decisive, too dogmatic, too stern, too vindictive, it is well to remember that Inspiration is a questionable thing, that the human element is so mingled with the Divine afflatus in the mind of the writer, that it becomes a matter of difficulty to determine how much of the writing owes its parentage to God, and how much to man. If the startling question be asked by the timid enquirer, how much of this discredited record, of this doubtful authority, is to be considered truth, and how much possible error,-how the line is to be drawn between the trustworthy and the uncertain,-how we are to know when Isaiah wrote, as "moved by the Holy Ghost," or when he moved himself,-we are cast, not so much upon solid criticism, or parallel confirmation, as upon the "verifying faculty" in man. In a word, man is made, by this school, a "law unto himself;" or, in language cited, "I believe, because I like the doctrine; and I will not believe the doctrine, because I do not like it." Surely, this is no satisfactory position in which to leave the great question of the criterion or test of truth. If facts and history, texts and passages, doctrines and promises, threats and warnings, prophecies and experience, inspiration and the question of the soundness of the sacred text itself, are thus to be left to the mercy of fancy, reason, conjecture, and shallow criticism, the result is likely to be this,-that all trust in Revelation will be shaken to its centre; and that, notwithstanding the grand successes of Christianity effected through the preaching of the Bible, as God's word of unquestionable truth, we are to be left to the exploded conjectures of philosophy, and a wisdom which knew not God.

Now, there is no question whatever, that in our own day there is a strong and alarming current in this free-thinking direction. That, whether it be that appetite for novelty is on the increase, or the old and simple reverence for things sacred is passing away, or the fascinations of daring scholarship are carrying men beyond those limits by which the truth is guarded, there is a growing disposition to bring down the communications of God to the level of human wisdom. It is true that, in the positions taken up by this school, there is nothing deserving the name of originality or novelty. There is scarcely a thought put forward, or a suspicion whispered, or a doubt suggested, which has not struck the minds of sceptics ages since, and been made the subject of repeated refutation. The questions of the formation of the canon of Scripture, of the various readings which have disfigured the original text, of the poetic element in the sacred writings, of the amount and kind of in

spiration which produced them, these have been before the Church, from the days of Origen and Chrysostom, and have been re-produced in the various forms of inquiry and accusation from those of Porphyry to Paine. But, nevertheless, notorious as it is, that questions of this nature are discoverable in all ages, they are claimed as being specially the characteristics of the present. Floating, as they have been, through the writings of many past periods, they are considered so distinctly to culminate in this, as to warrant their being called " The Theology of the Nineteenth Century." It may be as well, therefore, at this stage of our subject, to speak a few words on the consideration of the point, what, as to its permanent impression, the theology of an age may be worth.

It is impossible to look back on the line of Church history without feeling that almost every age has had its peculiar theology; that that theology exercised for a time a certain influence, enrolled under its banners a large body of disciples, and then, in its turn, gave way to some other theology more fresh and attractive. The theology of the fourth century was, for example, confessedly Arian. The hesitating doubts and whispered objections of the earlier heretics then resolved themselves into a dogmatic system, so influential and welldefined as to call for Conciliary rebuke. True it is, that in the Nicene Council, orthodoxy appeared to represent the views of the Church. But history has revealed the fact, that many who voted for the creed of Nice were themselves Arian, and that that creed was more of an equivocal compromise than a real and final affirmation of truth. With the removal of imperial influence, the real theology of the age came so fully to light, that the firmest defenders of the faith were obliged to bend before its power. And yet that school of opinion passed away. Again, the theology of the eighth century was confessedly sensuous. If the first Council of Nice failed to arrest Arianism, the second Council ruled that Scripture itself must give way to edicts, and that the Second Commandment must yield to the desire for material representations of Deity. And yet that theology was scorned by the Schoolmen and the Reformers. The theology of the twelfth age espoused the doctrine of the religious value of pilgrimages and bodily exercises, placed the seal of its warm eulogy on monastic institutions and ascetic discipline, and held that to translate the Word of Life into the common tongue understood by the people, was to do disservice to piety, and open the door to the incursions of heretical or questionable opinions. And that theology, though upheld by the full strength of the monastic orders, and the weighty influence of a selfish priesthood, broke down under the force of the growing intelligence of the close of the middle ages. The theology of the sixteenth century is looked upon with reprobation by the nineteenth; for the Creed of Trent is repudiated