Alas! from this new school all that is gone. It will no longer do, it seems, to hope that by whispering to the Christian sufferer "The very hairs of your head are all numbered." doubts of Providence will vanish; for, however true in itself, the voice of Him that uttered it adds nothing to its weight. While standing by the bedside of a dying Christian we must not expect the shadows of death to be lifted off by the words, "This mortal must put on immortality;" for not only has this school ceased to believe in the resurrection of Christ Himself, and, of course, in the resurrection of any others, the statement carries no more weight as coming from an apostle, than if it came from me. How different is this from the faith even of Joseph Priestley! When he was dying in America, he caused part of the 14th of John to be read to him, and then spoke as follows:-"I shall soon be a heap of unconscious dust" (for Priestley believed in what was then called the corpuscular theory, or, we should now say, he was a materialist); "but, resting on these words of Christ, I am as sure that I shall again live in the body as that I am now speaking."

But to resume. "Are we then to despair of our office because what was once used as a divine text-book has become a human literature? On the contrary, we claim it as a noble though severe advantage that we are driven from words. to realities, and must sink right home to the inward springs. of religion in our nature." But what, you will ask, are those inward springs of religion in our own nature? those " unwritten oracles of God that," our lecturer says, “have most deeply stirred the hearts of the devout"? His answer is, "The beauty of the heavens and the earth, the secret heroism of duty, the mystery of sorrow, the solemnity of death." But are these "silences" what indeed "most deeply stir the hearts of the devout"? Does experience proclaim the potency of such shadowy abstractions as reflection on the beauty of the heavens and the earth, the felt mystery of sorrow, and such like, in hours of suffering and on a deathbed? Nay, does not all history attest the truth of the Apostle's words, that "the world by wisdom knew not God"? and even in our own times it is notorious that any such knowledge of God as even Dr. Martineau himself would count true, is to be found only among those who either still believe in Divine Revelation, or, though

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they have given it up, were yet reared within its pale and hopefully nurtured in the faith of it. He may claim it as a noble advantage to be driven out of his faith in the written, down into the unwritten, oracles of God within us. But he is constrained to admit that it is a "severe advantage ;" and, far from wondering at his calling it so, I honour him for the noble sincerity which it evinces, and only regret that at the expense of such "severity" his new position has been taken.

But now for the second of those "Losses in Recent Theology" enumerated in this Lecture :

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"And now take the measure of another great change, which, though timid in its advances, has reached its completion within our own memory— the disappearance from our faith of the entire Messianic mythology. I speak not merely of the lost 'argument from prophecy,' now melted away by better understanding of the Hebrew writings, or of the interior relation, under any aspect, of the Old Testament and the New; but of the total discharge from our religious conceptions of that central Jewish dream which was always asking, 'Art thou He that should come, or must we look for another? and of all its stages, its drama, and its scenery. It no longer satisfies us to say that Jesus realised the Divine promise in a sense far transcending the national preconceptions, and revealed at last the real meaning of the Spirit which spoke in Isaiah. Such forced conforming of the Jewish ideal to the Christian facts, by glorifying the one and theorising the other, was inevitable to the first disciples, and could not but colour all that they remembered and thought and wrote; and the imagination of Christendom, working with undiscriminating faith on these mixed materials, has drawn upon its walls a series of sacred pictures from which Art has loved to reproduce whatever is tender and sublime, and which have broken silence in the Divina Commedia, in the Paradise Lost and Regained, in plaintive passion-music, and the kindling popular hymn. All this is of intense interest to us as literature, as art, as the past product of devout genius. Nor will I too rigorously question those elements of it which fairly admit of symbolic use in setting forth the truths we really mean and the affections we deeply feel. But as objective reality, as a faithful representation of our invisible and ideal universe, it is gone from us; gone therefore from our interior religion, and become obsolete mythology. From the person of Jesus, for instance, everything official, attached to Him by evangelists or divines, has fallen away: when they put such false robes upon Him they were (that is, the evangelists were) but leading Him to death (!) The pomp of royal lineage and fulfilled prediction, the prerogatives of King, of Priest, of Judge, the Advent with retinue of angels on the clouds of heaven, are to us mere deforming investitures, misplaced, like court-dresses on 'the spirits of the just; and he is simply the Divine flower of humanity, blossoming after ages of spiritual growth,-the realised possibility of life in God. And if He is this, He has no consciously exceptional part to play, but only to be what He is, to follow the momentary love, to do and say what the hour may

bring, to be quiet under the sorrows which pity and purity incur, and die away in the prayer of inextinguishable trust. And to see Him thus, we go to His native fields and the village houses of Galilee, and the roads of Samaria, and the streets and courts of Jerusalem, where the griefs and wrongs of His time bruised Him, and brought out the sublime fragrance of His spirit. All that has added to that real historic scene-the angels that hang around His birth, and the fiend that tempts His youth, the dignities that await His future, the throne, the trumpet, the great assize, the bar of judgment, nay, the very boundary walls of the kosmic panorama that contains these things,-have for us utterly melted away, and left us amid the infinite sea and the silent stars."

Well, this is fine writing, but is it anything more? When M. Renan issued his Life of Jesus, it created a great sensation; but the best judges of historical criticism, even those who criticised it only to try what historical truth there was in it, pronounced it no history at all, but a romance founded upon the Gospel History. But M. Renan has again spoken upon Christianity, and this time in no less a place than Westminster Abbey, as one of the Hibbert Lecturers. Well, his position, as now expounded, is plain enough. He constructs Christianity out of the progress of events. It was simply evolved, and Jesus Himself, as an historical character, was simply the ripened fruit of all the growth of preceding times-there was nothing supernatural in it at all. Now, wherein does our Lecturer's position differ from this? In Jesus he sees simply (to use his own words) "the divine flower of humanity blossoming after ages of spiritual growth," one who "had no consciously exceptional part to play," who had simply "to be quiet under the sorrows which pity and purity incur, the sublime fragrance of whose spirit was brought out by the griefs and wrongs of his time, which bruised him," and who just "died away in the prayer of inextinguishable trust." From the person of Jesus everything "official attached to him by evangelists or prophets has died away" out of our faith. But where does he find such a Jesus? He goes to the right quarter, no doubt—to the Gospels; for, he says, "to see him thus we go to his native fields and the village-houses of Galilee, and the roads of Samaria, and the streets and courts of Jerusalem." Well, I go there with him, but there he finds what others see not; and what to others is in every scene and almost every verse is to him nowhere. Do you ask how I explain this? It is the

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easiest thing possible. You can construct such a "Jesus" out of the Gospels for yourselves, if you will only do what I bid you. First, put your pen through every scene in which He expressly claims a supernatural commission, with all the scenes in which He attests that claim by healing supernaturally every human malady, and even raising the dead with a word; next, blot out every scene and every speech in which He attaches Himself to the Old Testament in His entire teaching and work, as its divinely ordained and predicted completion: this must be all given up as Messianic mythology—a huge heap of myths, pure Jewish dreams. Having done this, proceed further, and put your pen through that scene of mysterious agony and bloody sweat in the prospect of death, which, if He had been a mere man, would sink His courage below that of thousands of His adoring followers, who in every age have cheerfully laid down their lives for Him, but would shudder at being compared with Him; in a word, blot all those scenes in which He dies sublime amid appalling manifestations of a Divine presence, and, after every precaution had been taken to guard His sepulchre from disturbance, bursts the tomb, and, while His guards were quaking and were like dead men, rises the third day, overpowers the doubts of the most sceptical of His own followers, and before their eyes "ascends up where He was before." If this seems rough handling, you will find it rougher still, when on closely examining what you have blotted out, you discover that you have cut out of the Gospels precisely those scenes which, to have invented-and to have been invented by such men and at such a time-would have been a literary impossibility, or a literary miracle. But even this will not do it. For in the small residuum left to you, you will find, in verse after verse, His supernatural claims and character either cropping out in so many words, or so clearly presupposed and implied that they must go too. Well, when you have succeeded so far by picking and choosing, cutting and carving, upon those peerless Records, what have you got? The Christ you have got by such destructive criticism is simply an ideal figure of your own creation, which no genuine, sober criticism. can pronounce historical. Least of all is it the Christ of the Gospels.

In a Lecture which I delivered some years ago from this

place, I adverted to the difference between Francis Newman's view of the character of Christ, and that of Dr. Martineau. Mr. Newman maintained that viewing Jesus of Nazareth as a mere man—as both of them did-it was impossible to admire his character; impossible, rather, not to condemn it-marked, as it was, by an arrogance intolerable in any mere man, by pretensions which, in a mere man, were simply incredible; by manifold inconsistencies, and, in some cases, by what must be set down to moral obliquity. In these dreadful conclusions I was constrained to admit that Mr. Newman was right, following, as it seemed to me, irresistibly from the premises common to both gentlemen. But I added that I would infinitely rather be inconsistent with James Martineau, than terribly consistent with Francis Newman.1 But how sad is it that such as Dr. Martineau, whose instincts resent the conclusions of Mr. Newman, should deem it a noble though severe advantage to have been left, as they say they are, "amid the infinite sea and the silent stars "—a dreary enough region surely-no revelation from Heaven to lighten their darkness, no direct voice from God to men to cheer them.

But now, some who hear me may be saying to themselves This is all very interesting, but what have we to do with it? My answer to this question will close the present Lecture. First, then, if you confine your theological studies to the creed of your own Church, you may be useful enough in some remote place where no such views are likely to be heard of; though even there you may find reading young men who know more than you think, who have their own religious difficulties, and who will not think the more of you if you are not able to help them. Even in your own studies

1 Since the present Lecture was delivered I have received a pamphlet entitled, What is Christianity without Christ, by Francis W. Newman (1881), —which, though not naming Dr. Martineau, seems plainly to have been written in reply to his Lecture on Loss and Gains in Recent Theology, on which I am here commenting. The whole object of that pamphlet is (1), to show that the character of the "Christ" of the Gospels is far worse than anything the writer had ever said of him before (and here his language is such that it would defile these pages to quote even a line of it); (2), that, when you cut out of the Gospels all that goes to prove what is here affirmed, you leave no Christ at all; and consequently, (3) that "a Christianity without Christ" being an absurdity, the name of "Christian" should no longer be retained; but (4) that, when this is done, enough religion remains for all the purposes of a true life, in the fear and love and service of God.