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in which it is temporarily manifested, and utterly overwhelmed by the error with which it is associated, so that the whole manifestation becomes a corruption, needing to be put away.

V. Christianity, even while subject to Modification by the Civilization and Spirit of the Age, Creates a Higher Civilization and a Purer and more Christian Spirit. By the very action of Christian truth and life through the forms of an existing civilization, the old becomes inadequate, and new customs, sentiments, laws, and institutions are demanded. Christianity, by acting in the old medium, makes it useless. It has worn the garment out, and, patching it no longer, throws it away for a new one. By working in the old form, it has created the necessity for a new; then, the fulness of time having come, it comes out of the old, turns against it, and thrusts it away.

But men, mistaking the form for the life that had worked in it, insist on the form after it is no longer needed; and continue to patch the garment after it has become too rotten to be worn. This is the source of corruption. It is not that Christianity is corrupted; but the old forms, through which in an earlier period Christianity had naturally mani fested itself, are perpetuated as essential after Christianity can no longer act through them. Christianity, in whatever form of civilization circumscribed, is a power of life, like the germ within the seed, bursting the seed-envelop and leaving it to decay. Hence Christianity in one age may be found. protesting against the very forms and institutions through which, when civilization was less advanced, it had exerted its life-giving energy. Christianity is not subject to the civilization and spirit of an age; but, while temporarily acting through them, it creates a new civilization and spirit of the age, before which the old must pass away.

It is the error of Rome that it adheres to the form, instead of to the life; that it adheres to the form after the life is gone; that it opposes the life itself in the new and higher

forms in which it appears. The true Christianity, on the contrary, protests against the form after the life is gone, and adheres to the life in its new manifestations. This is the true and Christian Protestantism. Rome is as really protestant; but the protest is against the old truth and life when the form is new. The protestantism of Rome is the loudest protestantism now extant; but it is protestant against Christ's truth. Romanism sits patching the old garment; and the last patch put on was the dogma of infallibility, which declares that the garment never was patched, and never needed it. Hence Rome sits in impotent and scolding protest against all Christian progress.

I may remark, in passing, that it is not necessary to determine precisely how far new thoughts, methods, and agencies are the direct result of Christian influences, and how far the result of civilization only. The revival of letters may have been, and probably was, the result of Christian influences quickening the human mind; or it may have been the natural outgrowth of the progress of human thought. But the essential point is that Christianity was in the civilization of that day, laid hold of the new powers and influences developed in the revival of letters, and made the revival of letters issue in the Protestant Reformation. The hierarchy protested against the study of Greek as endangering the church; but Christianity gladly laid hold of it, and consecrated it to Christ.

Christianity is not only in general a power of progress; it is also a power of revival and reformation. If it is ever hidden, it is fire beneath the ashes, with all its power of burning when it is raked out. No other religion carries in it this power. Other religions manifest themselves in connection with the civilization of their times; but they have no power to quicken and advance the civilization; the civilization remains stationary, and the religion moulders in its old forms. Let any higher civilization from without come in contact with it, it crumbles and passes away. Once decayed, it is impossible to revive it. No power could revive

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the worship of Jupiter and Venus. The divine origin and power of Christianity, the presence in it evermore of God's grace are declared by the contrast, - always quickening progress in civilization; always outgrowing the forms of the civilization into which it enters; always a power of renovation and revival when its forms have become effete and are ready to pass away.

VI. In the Progress of Christ's Kingdom the Present is always the Outgrowth of the Past.

The new is not a new creation, but is a development of the old. The progress has the continuity of a vital growth. We have seen that Christianity is perfect, and cannot be transcended; not so the measure of its apprehension on the part of mankind, nor of its appropriation in the consciousness of the church. This has the character of a growth. Hence the new has a unity with the old; the truth, spirit, and life pass out from one temporary form of manifestation into another. And the change, when it comes, is the natural result of the growth: first, the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear.

It is often objected against Protestantism that it is unhistorical. But the objection is of no force, since Protestantism drops only the old forms, which, having lived their time, were already waxing old and ready to pass away, or even were already corrupted, and accepts the new manifestations of the truth and life. In fact, Protestantism is the true historical development of the church. It is in it that the spirit and life have found their genuine outgrowth. All the wealth of piety and thought of the ancient Catholic church belongs also to Protestantism, which is the genuine outgrowth of that piety and thought, and the legitimate offspring of that Catholic church.

On the other hand, the Romish church is, in reality, unhistorical, since it has retained the effete forms, and allowed the unfolding and growing life to pass away from it.

The right of private judgment does not imply that every

man is to cut adrift from the past, and by his own meager intellect think out a system of truth for himself. That would be as absurd as if in secular life each man should strip himself of the knowledge and civilization acquired in the past, and begin, in puris naturalibus, as a barbarian, to study nature and acquire the arts of civilization. The right of private judgment is the right of judging in the light of the past. Some truths we may assume as settled by the thought and life of the past. Man is not always learning, and never coming to the knowledge of the truth. We rightly reject the Romish doctrine of tradition. The tradition of that church is not merely the clearer and fuller unfolding of the meaning of the Bible by the Christian experience and thought of the church, resting ultimately for its authority on God's word; but it includes the dicta of the church, resting on the infallibility of the church, and superadded to the Bible as of co-ordinate authority with it. Protestantism has its tradition; but it is simply the fuller exposition of the Bible, gained by the experience and thought of successive generations, and the application of the Bible to the new and changing conditions of man. Protestant tradition is the truth which flows from the fountain of God's word, and rolls down through the centuries, widening and deepening as it rolls the stream which Ezekiel saw issuing as a little rill from the threshold of the sanctuary, and swelling as it flows into a great river. Protestant tradition is the Bible itself as it has flowed into human thought and life.

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Because the kingdom of Christ is perpetually unfolding out of the past, the unchanging grace of God ever manifested under new conditions, the old truth and life appearing in new manifestations, the history of redemption is necessarily typical, that is, an epoch is the type of a succeeding epoch. A prominent actor in one epoch will be the type of a promi nent actor in another epoch. In every epoch there is seen "The baby figure of the giant mass

Of things to come at large."

Thus we have a philosophical basis for the theological doc

trine that events and persons in the Old Testament are typical of events and persons in the New Testament.

VII. The Progress of Christ's Kingdom tends to produce a Homogeneous Civilization throughout the World.

The broad differences of civilizations must gradually disappear; the insignia of an outlandish man become less marked; thought and products be more fully and rapidly interchanged; interests will become more identified, and wars impossible; and the world will become a family of fraternal states.

It remains to apply these principles to determine what is the duty of the modern missionary in respect to teaching civilization.

If Christianity is taught to a people by preachers having the same civilization with themselves, then the full significance and scope of its principles will be gradually discovered, and Christianity will manifest itself in varying forms, and sometimes in alliance with error. But it is different when the missionary goes from a people having a superior and Christian civilization to a people of inferior and unchristian civilization, or still barbarous. In the civilization with which the missionary is familiar, the principles of Christianity have been carried out to many of their remote applications, and the results of ages of thinking and acting under the light of Christianity are embodied. Thus a new element is introduced into the problem. Shall he preach only the grand facts and broad principles of the gospel, leaving the people slowly to discover for themselves their remoter applications? Or, shall he also teach the detailed applications of Christian truth to the customs and institutions of society as already known to him, and teach therewith the industrial arts of the higher civilization?

1. He must not preach civilization antecedent to the gospel, and as a preparation for it. The preceding course of thought has demonstrated that a people is incapable of

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