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INTRODUCTORY.

FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT.

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"It is a work that requires our choicest thoughts, the

exactest discussion that can be, a thing very material and desirable, to give unto reason the things that are reason's, and unto faith the things that are faith's; to give faith her full scope and latitude, and to give reason also her just bounds and limits; this is the first-born, but the other has the blessing."-Nathanael Culverwel: "Light of Nature," p. 1 (ed. 1652).

"It was the speech of a good husbandman, 'It is but a folly to possess a piece of ground, except you till it. And how then can it stand with reason, that a man should be possessed of so goodly a piece of the Lord's pasture as is this light of understanding and reason, which He hath endowed us with in the day of our creation, if he suffer it to lie untilled or sow not in it the Lord's seed."-John Hales' Works, vol. iii. p. 153.

"The proof of a system, the guarantee of its truth, lies not in its beginning, but in its end; not in its foundationstone, but in its key-stone."-Rothe: "Stille Stunden," P. 37.

FAITH AND MODERN THOUGHT.1

I.

THE spirit of to-day is a spirit of restless inquiry, of ceaseless search, and of a search that is not always the parent of faith. The men who do our thinking, who lead the march of living mind, are essentially seekers, and they pursue their quest after truth often not very certain what it is or where it may be--only certain that it is somewhere, and can be found. We are all the children of our time, incarnate, in spite of ourselves, its spirit. That spirit floats in the air, penetrates every region of thought, steals subtly, unsuspected, into every mind, pierces the thickest and most seclusive walls authority or tradition can build round the intellect. The present is a universal presence, the daughter of the past, the mother of the future, rich with the wealth of ages that have been, fruitful with the germs of ages that are to be. And in it we live, its common life within, its common atmosphere around, feeling on us those plastic hands of its that are almost as powerful in shaping the resistent as the submissive.

The thought of living men is living thought, gifted with the potencies of a living thing. The doubts of

1 A Lecture delivered in Airedale College, at the opening of the Session of 1878.

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the past are for the most part dead doubts. They have been vanquished by time, if by nothing else; and have ceased to trouble any but the historians of thought. It is only by a strong effort of the imagination that we can appreciate the issues discussed by the early apologists, or realize the dismay with which the religious mind first heard of the new astronomy, or watched the birth of geology. But we grow fearful of our faith in the presence of certain modern doctrines and discoveries in science, or certain speculations in philosophy. The scientific doctrines may be but provisional, the dominant philosophy may only represent a transient phase of speculation, but, all the same, they disquiet, disturb almost as much as if they had been proved to be eternal and immutable truths. We have no right, even if we had the power, to comfort ourselves with the thought that our sons will feel in regard to our doubts much as we feel in regard to those of our fathers. Our duty is to make our faith credible to living minds, reasonable first to our own reason, and then to the reasons we seek to persuade. No man or Church has any right to ask men to believe what they cannot rationally conceive, or what contradicts ascertained and certain truths. If the truths of religion are eternal, they must be in harmony with the no less eternal truths of nature and mind; and this harmony it is the business of the religious teacher to prove. Faith could not have lived so long as it has done had its fundamental truths stood in manifest contradiction with reason. It has lived because it has been necessary to reason, its complement, not its contradiction. The foremost religious teachers of the past showed their respect for reason by doing

REASON AND FAITH.

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their best to answer the doubts it started; that is, to make their faith seem rational to reason. Had they not done so, their faith had died. Authority cannot keep alive what the intellect dooms to death. To be authoritative authority must be rational, and an age of faith simply means an age when faith. satisfies reason. And what has ever been necessary to religion is the pre-eminent religious necessity of to-day. If religion is to live it must live in harmony with living thought, and win over it a rational authority. Only as its teachers speak to the new spirit in language it cannot choose but hear, shall they preserve for posterity the old faith, transmitting it not only unimpoverished, but improved and enriched.

What has just been said must not be understood to mean, that Christian teachers ought to be great apologists, men always engaged in defending their own system and assailing its rivals or opponents. The men who would teach man must respect him, speak to him as to a rational being who, whether he questions or accepts the Faith, but exercises the inalienable rights of his reason. Ours is in a high degree a reverent age, and much of its doubt has come not from dislike but from love of Truth. It is not always the men that love her best that find her most easily. foremost thinkers are men of most noble spirit, honest alike in intellect and conscience, anxious to find and follow the truth. If they doubt what is to many as sure as it is holy, they do it through loyalty to what is held to be the true. It ought to be remembered that, if faith has its rights, so has the intellect, and those who require man to believe, ought to present their truths in forms that shall command his belief. A living religion

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