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objections, one of a theoretical, the other of a practical kind, which are frequently urged against the principle of development, though, in fact, they only require to be thoroughly sifted to be conclusively disproved.

It is objected, then, often not without contemptuous acrimony, that to maintain a development of doctrine is a dishonour to revelation, and an implicit denial of the faith once. delivered to the Saints; that Scripture can have no place in a religion which is one thing yesterday, another to-day, and may be a third quite different to-morrow; and that it is an accident, whether the journey lands us in the blasphemies of Strauss, or the decrees of Trent. Now, if this is anything more than a simple misconception of the whole question, sufficiently met by the last quotation from Dr. Newman, it is not only untrue, but the precise reverse of the truth. Instead of development being a dishonour to revelation, so far as we are capable of forming any à priori judgments on the subject, it would be a great dishonour to revelation to deny it. If it is certainly a law of the human mind in relation to every other kind of truth, philosophical, moral, or scientific, that our mental no less than our bodily muscles are developed by use, it would be a primâ facie objection to any professed system of revealed truth, that it did not repay by a fresh accession of knowledge the labour and attention bestowed upon it. Or shall we say, that in the highest subject-matter of all the mind is forbidden to energize, or must energize with no results? While development is the law of all God's natural dispensations, are we to predicate an exceptional stagnation

of the kingdom of grace? To imagine that theology, as we now possess it, sprang full-grown from the mind of the first century, like Pallas from the head of Zeus, is but to transfer to the moral what we have learnt to discard from our conceptions of the material world, a succession of miraculous cataclysms with another succession of supplementary miracles to obliterate all traces of them.

But, perhaps, our opponents will join issue on the fact. Let us therefore appeal to facts. And here I will not refer to the obviously gradual education of the Gentile world, in God's Providence, till the 'fulness of time' for the Incarnation had arrived. I will appeal to the more decisive analogy of the Old Testament dispensation. There, if anywhere, we might expect the law of development to be suspended, for the commandment, written on tables of stone, was a letter rather than a spirit, and the Jewish Church, while possessing a divine revelation, had no infallible authority. But was it so? Most surely not. Nowhere is the 'increasing purpose' of revelation more conspicuous than throughout the Old Testament dispensation, from Patriarchs to Prophets, from Prophets to writers later still. Not to insist here on the growing tone of higher spirituality as we advance from the earlier to the later books, as is seen in the marked change from the ritualism of the Pentateuch to the more spiritual tone of the Canticles or Isaiah, I will confine myself to what is strictly doctrinal. We are all familiar with the argument of Warburton's famous work on the Divine Legation of Moses, where he undertakes to prove the inspiration of the Pentateuch from the absence of

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any direct teaching contained in it of a future life. No impostor, he urges, would have neglected so powerful an engine of influence as that belief supplies; certainly all, with whose history we are acquainted, have availed themselves of it. Whatever becomes of his argument, the fact is beyond dispute. But now turn from the Mosaic record to the Prophets, or the Deutero-canonical books. Instead of the curse of sterility and blessing of longevity, we read the praise of virginity, and the happy lot of the man who 'being perfected in a short time hath fulfilled many times,' and is taken from the midst of iniquities, lest malice should change his understanding, or guile deceive his soul.' Instead of old age being 'a crown of glory,' we read, that 'venerable old age standeth not in length of time, nor is computed by number of years, but wisdom is the grey hair of man, and an unspotted life is old age'-(Wisd. iv. 8, 9)—and again, "The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and there shall no torment touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die, and their departure was taken for misery, and their going away from us for utter destruction, but they are in peace. . . . We fools accounted their life to be madness, and their end without honour. Behold how they are numbered among the children of God, and their lot is with the Saints." Wisd. iii. 1, 2, 3, v. 4, 5. And so completely had this doctrine of a future life become part of the national creed, that the Sadducees, who denied it, and on that account rejected all the later books of the Old Testament, were regarded, in the time of our Lord, as little better than a sect of heretics. Nor let it be replied that,

under the Old Law, the fount of inspiration never ran dry, but was sealed up in the first century of our era. For, not to dwell here on the partial inspiration which many have ascribed to such men as St. Bernard, or Savonarola, or Thomas à Kempis, we possess in the divine illumination of the Church of all ages- ȧeì éxλnoia-a surer guarantee against error than could be found in the intermittent utterances of holy men of old.* The same Spirit, who once 'spoke by the Prophets,' abides for ever in the mystical Body of Christ. Now indeed, as then, whenever some special crisis occurs, we need not doubt that a special prophet or preacher of righteousness will be raised up to meet it, from whose lips a fresh energy may be caught for the enlightenment or regeneration of them that come after. Thus, amid the collapse of ancient philosophies, and fabrics of political greatness tottering to their fall, the form of Socrates is revealed against the dark background of heathen antiquity clothed in the radiance of an ideal purity, and, as he conquers by the sacrifice of his life the right to teach a higher wisdom than as yet men cared to listen to, giving dim surmise of a Higher Presence yet to come. Thus, in the deep decline of the fifteenth century, with its hideous moral depravitics, and terrible burden of secret unbelief, the white-robed monk of Florence stands forth, annealed in martyr-flames, to bear witness to an outraged holiness, and

*The Hebrew Prophets discharged an office somewhat analogous to that of the sensus fidelium or public opinion of the Church among ourselves, standing to the Levitical priesthood in the relation of the earnest and intelligent laity to the clergy. This analogy, however, must not be pressed too far, as the ritual and prophetic offices, separated under Judaism, are united in the Christian priesthood.

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give warnings, little heeded, of the judgments that were coming upon the earth. But it is our privilege, as contrasted with our Heathen or Israelite forefathers, that we are not mainly dependent on such exceptional interpositions raised up for an emergency, but can assimilate the intellectual acquisitions of every age as it passes, knowing how to separate the dross from the genuine ore, to refuse the evil and choose the good. If, then, all systems of ancient philosophy, so far as they had any truth in them, contained not mere arbitrary axioms, but germs to be developed in the thinking mind; if the light of divine inspiration, handed down through a long line of Patriarchs and Prophets, like the fire of a Greek torch race, kindled more and more continually towards brighter day —there were little reason and less reverence in denying, that the words of Christ and His apostles are instinct with a fulness of divine life, with capabilities of infinite expansion, of which our creeds and theologies are a true but inadequate expression, which the science of eighteen centuries has fed upon but has not exhausted. Who does not recognize the manifold teaching of the Psalter, as its thunderous echoes roll from age to age along the aisles of our stately Cathedrals, and its whispered music cheers the lonely deathbed, and its tones of awful supplication call out of the depths' of human misery on that divine compassion which watches over the Christian dead? The very form of the New Testament, which contains not

*Savonarola has often been claimed as a forerunner of Luther. It may be worth while, therefore, to observe, that his writings, after a rigorous scrutiny at Rome, were pronounced entirely free from doctrinal error. St. Philip Neri had a special reverence for him.

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