who must be taught something. He has a life in public, intercourse with his fellow-men, which must have one character or another. In his home, in society, he acts upon the hypothesis which commends itself to him more and more. He makes God's will the avowed rule of his life, he adores and loves God, he regularly prays to God. Is it an exaggeration to say that God will become to such a one the most certain reality in the universe? Life puts this constraint upon a man. He cannot always hesitate so much as he would like to do. No doubt this pressure is often trying to the conscience; no doubt it is an influence of which we ought to beware. We are in serious danger of being tempted to profess simply what it is expedient to profess. But this fact, that action is necessary and that it must spring from some assumption, agrees singularly well with the hypothesis that men individually and mankind in general are under a spiritual discipline, and are intended to learn as they go on.

It is a critical point in standing against such formidable assaults as those of the Pall Mall Gazette that we should take the right ground for resistance. But apart from attack and defence, it is of the highest importance for our own faith and life as Christians that we should stand where we are strongest or where God intends us to stand.

Let us be warned that the primary consideration, the question of questions, is whether we are under a Divine discipline or not. Is there a God, the Father of our spirits, dealing with us on the understanding that we are his children and so as to make us his true spiritual children? What are called dogmas assume their proper character when they are referred to this question. When they are separated from it, the assailant of dogmas gains an advantage, the Christian suffers loss, not only as against an opponent but for himself. It would be the removing of a stumblingblock if this misleading word dogma could be got rid of altogether. But let me illustrate by one or two examples from the Pall Mall Gazette the way in which a false issue may be taken about dogmas. Not long since it occurred to Mr Bright to say something favourable of the disposition of people in general. It did not seem a very original or hazardous observation; but the keen eye of our critic saw a use to be made of it. This is one symptom, he remarked, of the downfall of theology. The dogma of universal depravity is the cornerstone of all dogmatic theology, Catholic and Protestant; express any opinion to the effect that most persons mean well, and the whole edifice of theology comes tumbling about your ears. If so, I should say, let it fall. In one of the sermons

of this volume I have endeavoured to explain the right sense and application of the Christian doctrine about human sinfulness. Here I will only remark that when the supposed edifice of dogma built up on the foundation of universal depravity has fallen into ruins, there remains simply untouched the Gospel of a living God who has reconciled mankind to himself and who seeks to make his children wholly pure and good. Again, in the article on the Archbishop of York's Lecture, the subject of self-sacrifice occurs. The writer maintains that absolute self-sacrifice is impossible in the Christian scheme. It is flatly inconsistent with a belief in future rewards. But how does he prove this? By assuming that self-sacrifice means self-injury. But in Scriptural and Christian language sacrifice does not mean injury or destruction, but offering. Sacrifice always implies a God to whom the offering is made. In the true sense of the word, there is no limit to the absoluteness of Christian self-sacrifice. The more thoroughly God is believed in as a just Father who rewards and punishes according to right, the more possible and reasonable does it become for a Christian to offer himself to sacrifice himself-in absolute devotion to God. A third example may be found in what is a very favourite topic with the Pall Mall Gazette, the supposed Divine commission of the clergy. The clergy, it

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is never tired of insisting, have no supernatural functions. They are an educated class, whose opinions have value in proportion to their information. The most salutary of reforms would be to abolish the Ordination services. But suppose, I must repeat once more, that there is a God in heaven desiring that men should be reconciled to himself; then the fact that there is a class or order of men actually existing whose professed function it is to bear witness of the reconciliation which God has laid as the foundation of man's life cannot be thought of as unconnected with that other supposed fact. The supposition is to our minds strongly verified by the existence of such an order. Gospel and the Ministry mutually commend each other. It would be a strange thing that for nearly two thousand years there should have been a succession of men accepting it as their office to declare solemnly in God's name that he had made peace between himself and mankind if this declaration had been a pure fiction. It would be inconceivable also that there should be a purpose of reconciliation in the mind of God and no utterance provided for this purpose. Those therefore who accept the simplest allegation of Christianity will inevitably believe also in some kind of Divine Commission for those whose calling it is to speak for God to men and to speak for men to God. To argue

about the Divine Commission of the ministry of reconciliation as if it could mean nothing but some quackish miraculous powers deposited in the individual priest is surely to "darken counsel by words without knowledge."

In the true sphere of our faith the Gospel and the Church, as I have said, meet and sustain each other. The Pall Mall Gazette theology gives us a scheme of certain elementary propositions which may be considered probable,-as that God exists, that men are immortal, that virtue will be rewarded. and vice punished,—and affirms that all the articles which constitute any " form of systematic theology," as they hang upon those first propositions, become less and less probable in a geometrical ratio. This statement of the case appears to me singularly unreal and unhistorical. That which Christians would substitute for it, to be tested by the proper criteria, would be something to this effect. Jesus Christ, by his actual life and by the witness of him which the Christian Church has carried on from age to age, has led Christendom to the Father. We in this day inherit a great tradition. The Church of our time and the Christian books of the age in which Christ lived tell us of a wonderful revelation of God. But this tradition must fail, as by its own profession it ought to fail, unless it is supported by the experience of the present, that is,