the Son means Humanity, which derived its power over all flesh from the Divinity, the Father. Yes, the Humanity must have been a Divine Humanity to be able to receive Omnipotent Virtue, and Infinite Love, and give eternal life. "God gave not the Spirit by measure unto Him" (John iii. 34). "The Father loved the Son, and gave all things into His hand." He was no merely human being; He could give eternal love. What a sublime gift! To be the SOURCE of eternal love to angels and to men is to be God manifest: THE SON, the REVEALER of the Father. "No man could know the Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son would reveal Him" (Matt. xi. 27).

To give eternal life to prepared souls was the very object of the incarnation and glorification of the Lord. He has power over all who are in good, who are spiritually all flesh; He regenerates them, and makes them finitely like Himself, and they know Him, because their new nature is in sympathy with His. To know God implies to love God. The wicked do not know God. Their selfishness, their lusts, their passions, their coarse and sordid natures, are utterly foreign to His. Every one that loveth is born of God, and KNOWETH God. He that loveth not, KNOWETH not God, for God is Love (1 John iv. 7, 8). He who is in eternal love knows the God of Love, the only True God. And he knows, too, that the God of Love would certainly become a Saviour. He would not suffer His children to be lost. He who made them would seek and save them. The loving hearts of the regenerate would know that the Heavenly Father would become a Redeemer. "Thou, O Jehovah, art our Father, our Redeemer, Thy name is from everlasting" (Isa. lxiii. 16). They know the only True God, and they know that He would become Jesus Christ, SENT BY HIS OWN LOVE into the world. They know that Jesus Christ is not another God, but the one Infinite Love in the lower sphere; God manifest in the flesh. They know from the love which they feel in themselves-which will stoop, and labour, and suffer, if by those means it can save-that God's Love would undoubtedly impel Him to come at the right time, and save His children from the powers of hell (Isa. xlix. 25).

A late affecting story will illustrate this. Some colliers, by a sudden burst of water into their pit, were driven up a remote passage, where they were just above where the muddy torrent reached, but whence by any means of their own escape was quite impossible. Their own loving hearts, however, told them that their friends at the top would leave no means untried for their rescue. They knew the sterling principle of those who loved them, and in darkness, but in hope,

trust, and patience, they waited for six days and six nights, while their friends were manfully toiling to reach them, and at length they were saved. Mankind had sunk down into a pit of thick darkness. They sat in the valley of the shadow of death. They could not save themselves. But Eternal Love watched over them. And those whose hearts were still in sympathy with love, knew that the one only God, the God of Love, would come to His own. And when they saw the Lord Jesus Christ redeeming, saving, healing, blessing, giving eternal life to those who believed in Him, they adored the Man Divine, the First become also the Last, the Father in the Son, and they said, "Blessed be the name of the Lord God of Israel, for He hath visited and redeemed His people." It was life eternal to them to know this, to be sure of it. It was from life eternal they knew it, and came to the Lord Jesus as the Resurrection and the Life, fully assured that living, that is loving, and believing in Him, they would never die (John xi. 25).

J. B.

RATIONALISM WITH IT AIMS, AND REASON WITH ITS DUTIES, IN RELATION TO THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. EVERY phase of thought which has attracted the attention of a considerable number of mankind, must, in the process of its development, have created for itself a history. The facts and circumstances which may have contributed to its existence, the arguments invented for its defence, and the parties it may have formed, are among the materials for such a history. Rationalism is a case in point. This consists of certain forms of thought which reason has urged against various subjects commonly associated with the Christian religion. These forms of thought have been adopted by a large class of educated men, who, without relinquishing faith in the loveliness of Charity, which they consider to be the spirit of Christianity, call in question some of the old forms of belief in which it has been so long accepted. They think and say that those forms were generated in times and under influences which were not favourable to the development of religious truth, and they believe that a period must come when many of the more subtle questions connected with the origin and progress of Christianity will have to be reargued and forced into other forms better adapted to satisfy the requirements of modern thought.

These are the general aims of all their teachings; which, for the

most part, are conducted with refinement, ability and learning. Of course they illustrate their meaning by numerous examples, ranging from criticisms on Holy Scripture to animadversions on ecclesiastical dogmas. Many of them, in this country, belong to what is called the Broad Church party: but High Churchmen and Evangelicals contend that rationalists have no proper place in Christianity, and they speak of them not only as disturbers of the faith of ages, but as the patrons of infidelity in some one or other of its dangerous forms; and they have succeeded, to some extent, in fixing an odious meaning on the word rationalism for the acceptance of the populace. It is possible that this severe opinion may be correct of individuals among them: but the party, as such, do not accept it as a fair representation of their position; they say that it is neither charitable nor just, and maintain that they hold the plain living principles of Christianity with the truest reverence, and only stand aloof from those opinions which are doubtful, or which the Church has made so by its ecclesiastical interpretations. Without expressing any sympathy with the position of this party, it must be confessed that some apology may be found for their opinions in many of the articles which are maintained by their opponents as the essentials of Christian faith.

No doubt reason has duties to observe in the formation of our faith; but it is not wise to attach importance to its decisions before we have properly considered the sources and value of its authority. We admit that the conclusions of natural reasonings upon spiritual subjects ought not to be accepted without hesitation and mistrust. Paul has told us that "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. ii. 14). But the natural man is not satisfied with these dicta of the apostle; he may be disposed to respect the authority, but he refuses to be silenced by it; he will, he must Still his best reasoning is but the activity of an obscure principle; the light which he enjoys depends for its existence on the accuracy of the information which he possesses. Hence those reasonings which have been accepted as sound by one generation have been rejected as fallacious by its successors. No reasonings can be conclusive unless the information and principles on which they proceed are true; an inaccuracy or a flaw in these materials is fatal to all the decisions which rest upon them. The progress of information has shown that to be error which had been received as truth. The reasons given by ecclesiastical authorities for the immobility of the earth passed away

reason.

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when science demonstrated the motions by which it is distinguished. If any one had said, a half a century ago, that it was possible to communicate a message some thousands of miles in a few minutes, he would have been laughed at by the reasoners of that day, and yet the fact is now an everyday occurrence. Men can only reason from what they know or what they believe; if they know nothing or believe nothing about spiritual things their reasoning on such subjects must be futile. When reason attempts to solve problems unsuited to its powers, it mistakes its province, and instead of aiding truth, creates a doubt. Merely natural reasonings are no guides to the attainment of spiritual truth. They may assist us in confirming our faith in such truth when it is perceived, but they do not and cannot conduct us to it. Natural reasonings on spiritual subjects are mere struggles with our common ignorance respecting them. These contests are consequent on the obscurity and disaster which humanity has suffered in the process of its fall. The rational principle was one of the issues of that calamity; it was mercifully provided by the Lord, in the lower condition of our corrupt nature, as the beacon of a superior principle preserved in our higher life. Jesus referred to the existence of this superior principle, and also to the calamity in which reason had originated, when He said, "Let your communications be yea, yea; nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil" (Matt. v. 37). The ability at once to affirm a truth or to detect an error belongs to a perception which is the privileged enjoyment of regenerated men. But reasoning on spiritual things "is more than these:" it is a proof of the obscurity of our mental condition, and that obscurity is a result of the evil which men have indulged. Moreover, it is possible to reason without being rational, just as a man may talk of virtue without being virtuous.

If these views are correct it is our duty to approach the arguments of rationalism with caution. It is not requisite to turn away from them because of their liability to mislead: there may be some truths among them serviceable to the progress of both intellectual and practical Christianity. For it cannot be denied that many of its efforts go to question the reality and truthfulness of those dogmatic forms which Christianity has been made to assume through the influences of ecclesiastical decisions. Rationalism as it is presented to us in its general literature may, we

1 I remember Dr. Lardner was reported as saying in Liverpool, at one of the early meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, that it was impossible to cross the Atlantic with steam navigation. Within two years the practical men proved the futility of his reasoning.

think, be fairly described as a negative mental philosophy, pitted against the supernatural claimed for and contained in the Sacred Scriptures. Rationalism and supernaturalism are opposed to each other. The use of the two words is of German origin, and the ideas which they are intended to express are of German planting and German growth. Whatever opinions be entertained of the influences of rationalism upon an uneducated populace, there is no denying that, considered in itself, it is one of the results of unusual learning wielded with great ability by Continental scholars. The materials which they have rescued from a forgotten literature; their genius, perseverance, and power of endurance in protracted research and laborious study, have given them peculiar fitness for the critical work they undertook. And although the conclusions to which they would conduct us are seemingly inimical to what we, as New Churchmen, regard as among the very first elements of Christianity, namely, the divinity and inspiration of the Word, yet fairness and justice require us to admit that they have rendered, and are still rendering, great and valuable services to the critical study of the letter of the Scriptures and to the literature of historical Christianity. It is quite true that their inquiries have, in numerous instances, been above the platform of common thought. Their materials were not accessible to the ordinary student, and their utterances have been mainly designed for the reflection of the learned : hence the populace have scarcely had an opportunity of fairly estimating their performances. How few are there, among the multitude of popular Christianity, who know with accuracy anything about them. Many, indeed, may have heard the names of Strauss and Renan and Dr. Colenso; also of the works called "Vestiges of Creation" and "Essays and Reviews;" but what do the generality of English readers know of the writings of Semler, Michaelis and Eichhorn, of Gesenius, Paulus, and many other Continental scholars, who have written with much ability and refinement in defence of rationalistic theories? Those among us who have read "The State of Protestantism in Germany" by the Rev. H. J. Rose, and the "Reply" to it by Dr. Bretschneider, translated by an English layman, together with Dr. Hurst's "History of Rationalism," will have learned much concerning the nature and quality of this remarkable development of modern thought; but the generality of church-going people know little respecting it, apart from that which has been conveyed to them through the representations of their opponents, and these seem to us to have been more careful in setting forth its presumed dangers to long estab

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