noblest sons of science, again, as has been shown in former Annual Addresses before this Institute, have almost always, perhaps always, been men of reverent faith. They are so to this day. Criticism, also, has now and again seemed to threaten precious portions of our Christian inheritance of Holy Scripture; but up to the present time it has really done us little but good. It has been far more our friend than our foe. It has furnished marvellous historical confirmation to the Scriptures, both of the Old and New Testaments. It may possibly hereafter remove some difficulties from our faith, but it will never impair its integrity, nor the integrity of the record of God's revelations to man. The Acts, the Fourth Gospel, as well as the great Epistles of St. Paul, will come forth, are coming forth, from the crucible of criticism brighter than ever; they stand immovably firm, the impregnable pillars of our historical faith in Christ. The Gospel by St. Luke stands unassailable by the side of the vindicated Acts. The other Gospels are abundantly safe when St. John and St. Luke are safe. The Old Testament is better established by far as historically true and authentic, taking it in all its length and breadth, than it was fifty years ago, when modern criticism had only just begun its course. Let us, as believers in divine revelation, be content to wait in steadfast, patient faith. Let us not be cramped by à priori notions. We do not understand the meaning of all the sacred words which have been handed down to us. that believeth shall not make haste" and shall "not be confounded." Let us precipitate no controversies, above all no controversies with science. When texts seem to contradict each other, we are content to leave the apparent contradiction unsolved, and yet we retain our faith. Christianity does not depend for its evidence on particular texts, nor on the interpretation of any special passage or paragraph; its evidence lies in grand historical lines of argument, and in broad illustrations of fact and truth. By these its principal books and its main outlines of fact and doctrine are conclusively established, and the faith which may have needed first to learn to stand on these, and which has thus been enabled to embrace the spiritual truths which they establish, is thereby afterwards strengthened and enlarged spiritually to appreciate and to receive with a sympathetic and growing assurance other points of divine truth, the harmony and beauty of which shine forth more and more to the believing soul. But when dealing with unbelievers, as one of our own number, Prebendary Row, has so ably shown in his "Bampton Lectures," it is with the citadel we have to do. If we hold that, we, in effect, hold all ; that commands all the rest, both enceinte and precinct; while

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it is, in itself, uncommanded and unassailable from every point. The historical evidence of Christ's life, death, and resurrection is the citadel of our fortress.

It is remarkable, after all, how little, notwithstanding all our modern controversies, the ground of the evidential argument, the basis of our Christian defence, has been shifted. Essentially in his "Bampton Lectures" Mr. Row stands on the selfsame ground as Paley in his "Evidences of Christianity." Both defenders disencumber themselves of whatever is non-essential, of whatever to the eye of mere intellect is incapable of evidential proof, and then address themselves. to their argument; and both argue on virtually the same principles. So also Paley's argument from design, instead of being torn up, as we were told it was to be, and cast away as worthless, has been effectually rehabilitated. Having been modified in accordance with the language of modern thought-by such writers, for example, as the Rev. Brownlow Maitland, in his excellent manual entitled "Theism or Agnosticism," and by the Rev. Eustace R. Conder in his Congregational Lectures entitled, "The Basis of Faith "—that grand common-sense argument holds good its ground, unanswerable as before. And as respects science and philosophyto recur now to these points for a few moments-there is, I venture to believe, no reason for panic, no reason for despondency.

How far it is from being true that the highest teachers of science have given, or do give, any countenance to the Agnostic unbelief of to-day, you have, as I have already intimated, heard before, on occasions similar to the present, from men eminently competent to speak on the subject. I may, however, be forgiven for referring again for a moment to a point so important. We all know that among the list of devout believers in these modern times have been included such men as Faraday, Sir John Herschel, Professor Phillips, Professor Sedgwick; we know to-day that such men as Professor Stokes, Professor Pritchard, Professor Clerk-Maxwell are among the number. But I wish to ask your attention to the judgment and testimony of the well-known Professor Tait, of Edinburgh. This distinguished man adopts and makes his own a passage from the Church of England Quarterly Review, in which, after referring to that branch of science of which Professor Huxley and Professor Tyndall are such distinguished professors, the branch as the writers call it, of scientific phenomenology, as "a most valuable but lower department of" natural science, the reviewer thus proceeds:

"But the inferior and auxiliary science has of late assumed

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a position to which it is by no means entitled. It gives itself airs, as if it were the mistress instead of the handmaid, and often conceals its own incapacity and want of scientific purity. by high-sounding phrases as to the mysteries of nature. It may even complain of true science, the knowledge of causes, as merely mechanical. It will endue matter with mysterious. qualities and occult powers, and imagines that it discerns in the physical atom the promise and the potency of all terrestrial life."

Professor Tait, in the same work, declares that "science. enables us distinctly to say that the present order of things has not been evolved through infinite time past by the agency of laws now at work, but must have had a distinctive beginning, a state beyond which we are totally unable to penetrate; a state, in fact, which must have been produced by other than the now [visibly] acting causes." He speaks furthermore of "the absolute necessity of an intervention of creative power to form or to destroy one atom even of dead matter," whilst he declares that "it is simply preposterous to suppose that we shall ever be able to understand scientifically the source of consciousness and volition, not to speak of higher things. ("Some Recent Advances in Physical Science," pp. 349, and 22-24.)

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Christians need not, therefore, be disturbed by such unphilosophic assumptions and audacities, such unscientific. charlatanry as that of Professor Tyndall in some of his popular addresses. Rashness and recklessness such as his, with whatever gifts of exposition and of address they may be accompanied, merely go to show the defect of thorough training and education in the brilliant Irishman, who, having learnt so much while acting as assistant to the great Faraday, unfortunately never learnt from the example of that profound and sagacious master of experimental philosophy that the "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," and that a childlike faith in God and Christ is compatible with the character of the greatest of philosophers.

Nor, if the fear be laid aside of any lasting danger to Christianity arising from "the opposition of science falsely so called," is there any more reason why Christian believers should stand in fear of a lasting feud between Christian faith and the accepted philosophy of the schools. It is true that during the last five-and-twenty years the nihilistic idealismor nihilistic materialism, for either description would be equally appropriate-of Mr. Mill has infected very largely and deeply the thinking of Oxford and the higher English culture generally. But one chief reason of this was that Oxford, that

England, had no philosophy of its own, and no philosophic culture. There were neither principles of philosophy nor a philosophic discipline and training in our English Universities, whereby a student might be enabled to appreciate, to criticise, or to resist the assumptions and insinuations by means of which Mill undermined all positive faith in any principles either of philosophy or morals. Mill's sceptical phenomenology, his denial of all realism, and all intuitions, moral or intellectual, was not directly taught; not built up into a system, in which form its vast gaps and multiple contradictoriness must presently have become visible to all real thinkers, but was implicated by means of the covert postulates on which was founded the whole fabric of his work on Inductive Logic. It was thus conveyed into the system of his readers' opinions, and into the habits of their critical thought, so that its principles were continually suggested as if they had been axioms. Thus a nihilistic scepticism, in which all principles of religious faith, of morality, or indeed of belief in anything whatever as necessarily true or right, were resolved into mere fallacies, or at best utilitarian conventions, was diffused as a subtle poison into the life-blood of a whole. generation of young Englishmen. Mill's Logic, before they were aware, turned many of these men into sceptics of Hume's school. After this they were prepared easily to accept George Henry Lewes-who, indeed, is a very able and, from his own point of view, a very honest historian and criticas their historian of philosophy, and, under his hands, to become admirers of Comte and professors of the Positivist system of negations. Herbert Spencer, again, seemed to those who had sat under Mill, to be a teacher of a higher order, though fundamentally of the same school. If he could not give them a substantial faith, he at least recognized the utterances of their consciousness and the struggles of their nature after a ground of reality. In some sort, indeed, his seemed to be a philosophy of realism, though of a very nebulous description; and if he did not lead them back to God, he brought them within a dim and distant inkling of the inscrutable mystery of the unknown and unknowable reality, in which subject and object darkly and eternally blend. They accordingly passed with some sense of gain from the school of Mill to the oracle of Herbert Spencer. He became their prophet.

But such a philosophy as that of Mill, such a realism as that of Herbert Spencer, could not, cannot, endure for long. If our Universities had possessed living schools of philosophy, and a living succession of philosophers, such teachers could

never have gained such a hold on the English mind as they have gained. Already it is evident that their day is past. It was a subtle inoculation by which Mill infused his principles into the English mind. But now the retribution has come. The fallacies of Mill's Logic, the false assumptions which underlie its skilful exposition, had been more or less exposed by various writers, including Whewell and M'Cosh. But now the University of London, his own University, holds them up to view. Professor Jevons, long himself a disciple of Mill, has come to see how the nihilistic assumptions of which I have spoken, how the ignoring, or how the explaining away of all except phenomena, of all realities, of all intuitions, mental or moral, have vitiated the entire fabric of his speculations, and made large sections of his work a congeries of inconsistencies. and incoherences.*

And as to Herbert Spencer, his teaching is being sifted by various writers and after a decisive manner. Professor Green, of Oxford, examines him in the Contemporary Review. Mr. Conder and Mr. Brownlow Maitland, to whom I have already referred, have admirably refuted his Agnosticism as related to our Christian Theism.

In short, on all sides round, the forces of Christian orthodoxy appear to be rallying and turning the enemy to the gate. As a hundred years ago, so now, unbelief will be, is being, defeated in argument. The victories of Butler and Paley and Berkeley are being repeated. There is a tone of confidence in the Christian camp such as there was not ten years ago. Our champions have gone out-our unknown Davids-and have met, and, meeting, have overthrown the giants of the Philistines. Ten years ago we hardly knew the intellectual strength of the orthodox side. We are beginning to understand it now, and yet only beginning; in ten years more I doubt not our ranks of defence and, let me add, of aggression will be better filled, better disciplined, and more full of confidence than now.

Nor can I doubt, as I intimated at the opening of this address, that the Victoria Institute has done something towards bringing about this result. It has presented a rallying-point, a centre of union, not only for Christian thinkers in these kingdoms, but also from America, on which continent

* I am not sure that I always agree with Professor Jevons' own positions ; at all events the last paragraph in his last paper on Mill, contained in the Contemporary for April, seems to me to be an inadequate statement; but his exposure of the inconsistencies and contradictions of Mill would seem to be complete and crushing.