No doubt there are ebbs and flows of a nation's life; there are periods of political growth and decline, but its real welfare keeps advancing, and each century marks a higher coast line in the tide of moral progress. There is no fear of any Christian nation, where the Bible holds its proper

place, vanishing from the page of history like ancient Babylon and Tyre, or sinking into that slough of corruption, where Imperial Rome foundered.

CHAPTER IV.

A WRITTEN AND AUTHORITATIVE REVELATION

NECESSARY.-THE BIBLE SHOWN TO BE SUCH.

E now pass from the ground of history

WE

to examine this question in the light of man's nature and necessities, and to inquire, first, whether a written and permanent record of God's Revelation, such as we have in the Sacred Scriptures, is not the best, and indeed the only effectual, plan for preserving a true religion from age to age.

The great quarrel that modern scepticism has is with the Bible; it is not so much with Christianity as being a collection of lofty truths, as with the Inspired Volume that is the repository of these truths. The favourite view of many philosophers now-a-days is that the religion taught by Christ was the best ever made known to man; but it was a mixture of truth and error, which the rational and moral sense must examine for itself

without allowing its deductions to be overruled by any written authority, whether of St. Paul or of what the Evangelists relate of Christ. They hold that the Bible is a book full of errorshistorical, scientific, and metaphysical, and that by rejecting its authority a purer digest of Christianity can be obtained by the enlightened mind of man. These people, represented now-a-days by Strauss and Renan on the Continent, and among English writers by Matthew Arnold, evoke an ideal Christ from their inner consciousness, and put him forward as far superior to the historical one. They strip His character of its miraculous claims, excise from His reported sayings whatever transcends their human reason, and thus construct a nebulous theory of Christianity, which they are weak enough to suppose will supplant the New Testament in the reverence of mankind.

We join issue with this school on the very threshold, and assert that there never could have been a Christian religion at all without an authoritative record. Let us suppose for a moment that the sayings of Christ had been loosely scattered to the winds; that they had been preserved in

uo authentic shape; that His followers used their own judgment in deciding what to receive or reject-think you that such a loose system would ever have made its way against the fiery opposition of a corrupt age? Think you that the early disciples would have been willing to abandon all that men count dear, to lead lives of incessant hardship, with almost the certainty of a cruel death, all for the sake of a religion which existed in no authoritative shape, and which no two of them were agreed about? But the difficulties are enormously enhanced when we pass the Apostolic age. It is possible to imagine that the eye-witnesses of Christ, impressed by the holy words He uttered and the supernatual powers He claimed, might have propagated His teachings with some approach to uniformity, during their lifetime, even without the aid of written records or an acknowledged body of doctrine, or without what the Church claims for them—an indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, which ever kept in their memory what Christ had spoken. All this is perhaps credible, though barely so on mere rational grounds; but what shall we say to the

following age, when the feeble movement commenced by the fishermen of Galilee was to push its way on all sides among the philosophers of Athens and Alexandria, as well as the debased serfs of the Roman Empire-among the savage hordes of Scythia as among the mouldering remains of Oriental civilisation! How was a religion that was entirely based on the claims of a Person, and respecting whom such extraordinary facts were related, ever to make headway, unless the views of its teachers were to be accordant on all essential points? How was the heathen

forsake those unholy

world to be induced to pleasures which were its daily aliment, to give up its gladiator-shows, its impure dramas, its ancient oracles, its sacred groves, to crucify "the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life," if the expounders of this new religion, so distasteful to flesh and blood, had not the invincible sanction of a "Thus saith the Lord"? Christianity would inevitably have foundered amidst the opposition of an ungodly world, had an authoritative record of its origin not been preserved and acknowledged by the Christian