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What tells us that is poetry? The voice of the understanding? 'Night's candles are burnt out,' it says -'it is a ridiculous statement of the fact that the stars have ceased to shine. Day never stands tiptoe on the misty mountain-tops. Is that poetry? It is nonsense.' But the understanding rarely acts alone in this way; a higher power in man proves to him, he cannot tell how, that the lines are magnificent poetrynay, that the poetry is in the very passages which the understanding despises.

Let each keep to their own spheres and do their work therein. Christianity has no weapons in her original armoury which can be wielded against science, and science cannot attack spiritual truths with purely intellectual weapons. No one asks for a spiritual proof that the earth goes round the sun; it is equally absurd to ask for a purely intellectual proof of the existence of an all-loving Father. And it would be wiser if science kept her hands off Christianity. Mankind will bear a great deal, but it will not long bear the denial of a God of love, the attempt to thieve away the hope of being perfect and our divine faith in immortality. These things are more precious than all physical discoveries. The efforts made to rob us of them, when they are made, and they are but rarely made, are not to be patiently endured. They are far less tolerable than the ill-advised attempts of Christian men to dominate over science. These latter efforts are absurd, but the former are degrading to human nature.

It really does not make much matter to the race in general, whether the whole science of geology were

proved to-morrow to have been proceeding on a wrong basis, or whether the present theory of force be true or not; but it would make the most serious matter to mankind, if they knew for certain to-morrow that there was no God of justice and love, or that immortality was a fond invention. The amount of suppressed and latent belief in these truths, which we should then discover in men who now deny them, would be perhaps the strangest thing we should observe; but it hath not entered into the heart of man to imagine the awfulness of the revolution which, following on this denial, would penetrate into every corner of human nature and human life.

Both science and Christianity have vital and precious truths of their own to give to men, and they can develope together without interfering with each other. Should science increase its present knowledge tenfold, there is nothing it can discover which will enable it to close up that region in man where the spirit communes in prayer and praise with its Father, where the longing for rest is content in the peace of forgiveness, where the desire of being perfect in unselfishness is satisfied by union with the activity of the unselfish God, where sorrow feels its burden lightened by divine sympathy, where strength is given to overcome evil-where, as decay and death grow upon the outward frame, the inner spirit begins to put forth its wings and to realise more nearly the eternal summer of His presence, in whom there is fulness of life in fulness. of love. No; as Christianity can expand to fit into the progress of politics, and to adapt itself to the

demands of art, so it can also throw away, without losing one feature of its original form, rather by returning to its purer type, all the elements opposed to the advance of science which men have added to its first simplicity.

It will be pleasant, if what I have said be true, for all of us to meet five hundred years hence, and, interchanging our tidings of the earth, to find that the thoughts and hopes of this sermon, in which many of you must sympathise, have not been proved untrue.

THE HIGHER JUDAISM AND CHRISTIANITY.

'Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.'-Matt. v. 17.

And the common people heard him gladly.'-Mark xii. 37.

ONE of the most interesting positions in which a Christian teacher can find himself is when, under the pressure of new discoveries in science or in history, he is forced to change his front and take up new ground for either attack or defence of his faith. It has often happened that after the army of Christianity has defended for many years its cause from a particular place of vantage, that place becomes untenable. It is the business then of the army to change that position, and it almost invariably changes it under a cry from the enemy that the Christian cause is overthrown. The weaker members of the host itself, who have grown so fond of the position as to identify the cause with the ground they held, add to the noise of the enemy their own feeble wail that Christianity itself is in danger of destruction. Both the cry and the wail are out of place. That the Christian army should alter its front and take up new ground is a known necessity of the contest. It has done so often in the course of history, and we must expect that it will have to do so again. And the

fact is that in all these changes it has never lost ground which it has not more than regained. It has left behind several positions which were useful at their time, and in these some stragglers are still fond of loitering; it is even true that some large portions of the army have gone back to hold abandoned positions in order to keep up their communications with the past, but the vanguard is still in advance, ready to meet any difficulties introduced into the contest by the discoveries of science or the advance of criticism. It does not deny the truth of proved discoveries, nor the value of criticism, it only opposes the inferences drawn from them by persons afflicted with fanatic infidelity. Their attack is made upon Christianity as seen entrenched in the old position. Our answer is that we have abandoned that position, that it was only temporary, and that its abandonment has nothing to do with the abandonment of the cause. 'We have,' we say, 'absorbed what is proved true in your discoveries. And now attack us here if you will; but do not go on storming into an empty camp and then saying that you have conquered the Christian host. It is only a few camp-followers whom you are slaying; the veteran army is untouched.'

At this moment, however, the mass of the army is making the transition. It has not yet understood where it is going to, nor the capabilities of the position it will occupy. Naturally it is harassed in its march, and though it does not lose its faith and courage, it does suffer a little from confusion. Some, on the assumption that it still holds verbal inspiration, prove that the whole of the Bible is unworthy of credit as a revelation,

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