reason. Upon all minds, unless they be grossly sensual, or hopelessly depraved by sophistry, the CHRIST of the Gospels enters by right of His eternal fitness so to enter, and so to be honoured. The force of these impressions is so much the greater, because they come to us through the medium, not of a rotund and voluminous memoir carefully prepared, but as sparkling and burning from every point of these fragmentary records. It is thus that we gain our idea of THE MAN who, though He has no peer among men, yet is confessed to be one of ourselves by every human spirit. And thus it is that CHRIST has hitherto ruled in the heart of Christianized communities; and thus too, of late, that He has received the homage even of those who come forward to put to Him the factious question, "Who gave thee this authority, tell us?" This question, in its modern guise, is thus worded, "Was Christ a Divinely-commissioned Teacher of Truth?" and the writer who puts the question believes that he may answer it in the negative. Nevertheless, he says (a passage often cited) "It is difficult, without exhausting superlatives, even to unexpressive and wearisome satiety, to do justice to our intense love, reverence, and admiration for the character and teaching of Jesus. We regard Him not as the perfection of the intellectual or philosophic mind, but as the perfection of the spiritual character, as surpassing all men at all times in the closeness and depth of His communion with the Father. In reading His sayings, we feel that we are holding converse with the wisest, purest, noblest Being that ever clothed thought in the poor language of humanity. In studying His life, we feel that we are following the footsteps of the highest ideal yet presented to us upon earth."1 Thus far, then, BELIEF and DISBELIEF are at one! To this point has Modern Thought advanced itself, or rather, thus far it has been pushed forward by the insensible progress of the intellectual tastes, and of the purified moral habitudes of these times. Several parallel and very recent testimonies might be adduced in proof of the fact that this CHRIST, such as we find Him set before us in the Gospels, lives, and must ever live, in the moral consciousness of all men, Christian and non-Christian. Thus He lives, not merely in His precepts, but in the Idea of Himself, for the perpetual rectification of confused and deranged moral principles, and for the solving of interminable perplexities. Wearied as we may have been by the spectacle of the contradictions of the human system, ever and again turning up the wrongful and the untrue, now at length THE MAN appears on earth who not only is exempt from fault and sin, but from 1 Creed of Christendom, p. 227. And its Contradictions. 329 Incoherence, from Incongruity, from interior Contradictions. In this bright Reality, although nowhere else within the circle of human experience, there is demonstrated, in the view of all men, PERFECT MORAL ORDER;-it is even that perfection which human nature is ever yearning for, and which it dimly imagines, but which it has never found in itself, or elsewhere than in this One Instance. The Order of Nature-we must not forget it-is twofold. It is constancy in the sequence of events-that is to say, Order in Time; and it is also the constancy of Congruity; or, in technical terms, Order in Space. The second of these fixed connections is as real and as certain as the first, and is equally to be relied upon. Yet if we follow the leaders of Modern Thought whither they are themselves gone, our position will be this:We admit, on the one hand, that CHRIST was, as they, and as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews affirms, "the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express image of His Person;" but, on the other hand, affirm that He claimed to be what He was not-that He played with the credulity of His followers-that He winked at and cherished the superstitions of His times that He proclaimed Himself to be "the Light of the World," and "the Resurrection and the Life," of which Himself was to be the sample; but that, in truth, He died as other men die, and perished bodily as others perish. Where shall we stop in giving words to the monstrous contradictions of this creed? Let the reader, and whether he be religiously-minded or not so, take his New Testament in hand, and, with the recent admissions of the writers referred to before him, make his way, as he can, through the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles. No sane mind can do this so as to bring into accordance, on any imaginable hypothesis, these repellant conceptions, which, if they offend piety, do in an equally extreme degree shock the consciousness of historic truth, violate the tastes of a well-ordered mind, and affront the irresistible dictates of Reason. Already we have said (p. 320), that when the clerical promoters of this present movement shall have put away the evasions beneath which they now screen themselves, and when, like open-faced and out-spoken Englishmen, they shall set forth with distinctness what it is they believe, they will, in doing so, drive their congregations helter-skelter out of Church. This confidence we have in the force and soundness of the British mind, as to be sure that church-going habits would not outlive a year the honest announcement, in any church or chapel, that, in the preacher's opinion, there is not a word of truth in the Gospel miracles, and that CHRIST, the Saviour of the World, did not, as is affirmed by the Evangelists, rise from the dead. If congregations are thus dispersed, what is it that shall be taking place within the saddened sanctuary of individual hearts? An answer need scarcely be given to this question. Souls that once were glad, that once were, to all appearance, cheered by a "good hope" of the life eternal, even the life that is "hid with Christ in God"-souls, it may be years ago, that were exulting in the assurance of the forgiveness of sins-obtained for His sake who shed His blood for them "on the tree," such spirits, once abounding in works of mercy done "as unto CHRIST," and, moreover, "patient in tribulation, rejoicing in hope, and continuing instant in prayer," what are they now? The pernicious insinuations of Modern Thought have been listened to. The Saviour of sinners has been removed from His place in their view, and instead of being the supreme object of devout and humble trust, He has been summoned to the bar of a captious criticism: His cause has been heard, and judgment pronounced: the arraignment has been admitted to be proven in part; yet still He is to be thought of as "our Divine Teacher;" but no longer is He-Sacrifice, Propitiation, Mediator, Lord!—no more is He to be looked for as coming again "to judge the world in righteousness,"-no more is He to be trusted in as the Giver of immortality, for He Himself "died and was buried," and in that sepulchre, or in some unnoted grave, He underwent the destiny of all men. In that sepulchre, or elsewhere, the "Desire of all nations," the Hope of the world, mingled His dust with the dust of others! What remains to us after this destruction has had its course, is—an empty tomb, the spices that long since have spent their aroma, the grave-clothes, the folded napkin-what remains to us is a "teaching," more pure and sublime indeed than that of the Greek philosophy; and yet it is a teaching which is so intimately commingled with delusions, if not frauds, that Morality will be better honoured henceforth by consigning our Christianity to oblivion, than by conserving it as a perpetual offence to the instincts of virtue, to common honesty, and to sound reason! A strong reaction from enormities of this magnitude will not be slow to come. The very men who have prostituted their learning and talents in bringing Modern Thought to its ripeness, will, some of them, after a time stand aghast at their own work: some, and the greater number, will betake themselves to the silent region of Pantheistic quiescence, and will there find, in an anticipated Nirwana, a refuge from the indignant clamours of offended public feeling. A few, it may be, will retrace their steps, and regain position as Christian men. When we thus look forward to a reaction-and a powerful reaction it will not fail to be-from the offensive extravagancies of this now current scheme, we must not forget that it will take The Coming Reaction. 331 effect in opposite directions; or rather, upon the two parties that are opposed to each other in the most extreme degree: first, upon the Christianizing advocates of this form of disbelief, driving them from their false ground as professed Christians; and, then upon those of the conservative party in theology whose alarms at the progress of criticism have seemed to indicate some unfixedness in their own faith. A genuine Biblical criticism, always ruled and directed by a religious temper, and animated by a thorough belief in the Divine origination of the Scriptures, and consequently in the historic reality of what is supernatural therein, is our proper defence against every midway doctrine between Christianity in its entireness, and that last stage of metaphysic insanity, of which a remarkable sample is presented in the volume named at the head of this article. Genuine Biblical Criticism, in its sure progress beyond its present position, will not fail to bring with it, as a natural result-a Doctrine of Inspiration that shall be better defined than any which the Church has hitherto been possessed of, and which—if not by all among ourselves, yet by better instructed men who may ere long take our places, shall be assented to, and at length accepted by the religious community at large; and shall be rejoiced in as an abiding-place of safetya munition of strength, against which nugatory sophisms, such as those of Modern Thought, shall cease to be hurled. Throughout those publications of recent date in which, with more or less distinctness, the system thus designated makes its appearance, it is observable, that wherever the writer assumes a tone of confidence, as if conscious of standing upon a vantageground, and as if he were sure of his reader's concurrence, it is when he is assailing notions and exegetical usages that were prevalent in times anterior to the rise of the more exact criticism of the present century. The strength of modern disbelief is that which it draws from the misapprehensions, from the groundless alarms, from the superstitions, or the rigid prejudices, and, most of all, from unwarrantable dogmatic reasonings of a time gone by. So long as this untoward antagonism is maintained between these misapprehensions on the one side, and a petulant, captious, and nugatory disbelief on the other side, there will be no definiteness, no fixedness, no agreement among Christian men on the subject of Inspiration. Hitherto a skirmishing has gone on with uncertain advantages, sometimes on this side, sometimes on that -the result being, to the lookers on, disquiet and discouragement. It shall not always be so; let Modern Thought more fully develop its own atheistic quality, and the reaction shall commence which shall put our Bible into our hands with a new feeling of confidence, that we are holding indeed-THE BOOK OF GOD. ART. II.-1. Despatches from Her Majesty's Consuls in the Levant, respecting Past or Apprehended Disturbances in Syria, 1858 to 1860. Presented to the House of Lords by command of Her Majesty, 1860. 2. Papers relating to the Disturbances in Syria, June 1860. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, 1860. 3. Further Papers relating to the Disturbances in Syria, June 1860. Presented to the House of Lords by command of Her Majesty, 1860. 4. Further Papers respecting Disturbances in Syria. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty, 1860. THE long history of Syria might be written in letters of blood. No country in the world has been the scene of such desolating wars, of such fierce contests of tribe with tribe, and sect with sect, and of successive acts of such inhuman atrocity and wanton cruelty. Other nations have had their seasons of political repose and peace; for full four thousand years Syria has had scarcely an hour. Other nations have long ago begun to feel the influence of advancing civilisation,--divesting war of some of its most appalling features, and restraining to some extent the brutal passions of party, tribe, and sect. Syria is an exception. Civilisation has been powerless over the dominant party in that land. It has approached her shores; it has swept past her for more than half a century in one continuous stream; but this has only tended to rouse that spirit of reckless ferocity which is the characteristic of the Muslem race, and that bloodthirsty fanaticism which is no less the characteristic of their faith. Many have read the accounts of early and mediæval Syrian massacres with feelings of semi-scepticism, as if common humanity would recoil from the perpetration of such deeds; and most men have regarded the histories of the wholesale butcheries of Antiochus Epiphanes, of Khaled the Saracen, and of Timur the Tartar, as grossly exaggerated. Yet, in our own enlightened age, in the eyes of all Europe, the Muslems and Druzes of Syria have perpetrated crimes as foul, murders as cold-blooded, massacres as unsparing, and in their detail as fiendish, as ever were recorded even in the pages of Syrian history. One's heart is thrilled at the very thought of them. One's blood boils with righteous indignation against the perpetrators. An overpowering feeling of mingled grief and horror fills the mind, and constrains one to cry aloud for justice. Especially is this the case when we find one |