Nor is there any reason to conclude that in the time of the apostles Christianity attained to the summit of its development, or that even now it stands revealed to us in all its perfection and beauty.1 On the contrary, we know that from our progress in civilization, and the extension of our knowledge, there are many points of divine truth, now plain to us, that were unknown to those of the early Church;2 and in like manner it cannot be doubted that, as men continue to advance and improve, there is much that is now hidden from us that will at a future time be revealed.3 The Canon of Scripture is, undoubtedly, closed, but it by no means follows that there is to be no further progress in divine truth—no deeper insight into the divine will. The millennium will doubtless afford a clearer and brighter revelation of the nature and character of God and of his dealings with man than what we now possess, and heaven itself will be a

new spirit, not new observances, but a second birth. The ancient law said do, the new law says be."-(VINET.)

"It may be freely admitted that gospel truth-the truth as it is in Jesus-even when communicated directly and immediately to the inspired apostles, for instance, was not to them, absolutely and perfectly what it is to God. Even they knew in part, and they prophesied in part." (Dr. CANDLISH: Reason and Revelation.) "We are of the number of those who do not shrink from avowing the opinion that the system of Christianity as it has been held in the world is capable of progressive improvement in the mode of its exhibition.”—(ALBERT BARNES.) "I am not one of those who would lay an arrest on progress in the science of divinity and compel it to be stationary."-(Dr. CANDLISH.) "Men have generally come to recognise the fact that every period of history contains a message from God to man, and it is of vast importance to find out what that message is."-(Dr. JAMES Donaldson.)

2 "In no age since the time of the Apostles has God so clearly and abundantly revealed himself as in the present."-(ALBERT BARNES.) "The mediæval and reformational aspects of truth are now being superseded by a perception of the fatherly character of God, and more practical uses of conscience."-(Bishop EWING.)

"As it is owned that the whole scheme of Scripture is not yet understood, so, if ever it comes to be understood before the restitution of all things, and without miraculous interpositions, it must be in the same way as natural knowledge is come at, by the continuance and progress of learning." "Nor is it at all incredible that a book which has been so long in the possession of mankind should contain many truths yet undiscovered. For the same phenomena, and the same faculties of investigation, from which such great discoveries in natural knowledge have been made in the present and last age, were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand years before. And possibly it might be intended that events, as they came to pass, should open and ascertain the meaning of several parts of Scripture."-(Rev. E. C. TOPHAM.)

farther step in the same direction, a higher revelation of the divine Being.1

One who believes that God is the Author of nature as well as of revelation would naturally expect that the one would tend to advance and throw additional light upon the other; and that with the extension of our knowledge of nature, our knowledge likewise of Him and of His revealed will would be promoted.2 Farther, that He who in the beginning established those laws and principles of nature, the beauty, harmony and uses of which we are only now beginning to discover, had likewise left much in Scripture for subsequent ages to unveil.3

It is, indeed, one of the chief evidences for the truth of Christianity that it is so admirably adapted to all the wants and necessities of our nature, so well fitted to elevate and ennoble all the duties and relationships of life; and it is

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"Heaven and the Millennium are developments of Christianity. They develop its facts, for Heaven and the Millennium are developed facts of Christianity. They develop its knowledge, for now we see through a glass darkly, but in heaven face to face. They develop its methods, for they shall not teach every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, know the Lord; for all shall know Him, from the least to the greatest."―(Rev. J. MILLER: Nature of Christianity.)

2 "The two volumes of nature and grace are so divinely perfect, contain so much true beauty and solid worth, that, in order to be thoroughly admired, they can want nothing more than to be well understood. And, moreover, they correspond so strictly, and tally so exactly in numberless respects, and are so peculiarly fitted to illustrate, unfold, and enforce each other, that nothing can redound more to the credit and esteem of either than a nearer contemplation of both."-(Dr. M'Cosн.) "Nature is saturated, so to speak, with God. She bears in her structure the feeling and disposition of the Divine Creator, as a picture bears in its parts the feeling and disposition of the man who painted it."—(H. W. BEECHER.) "Every advance which is made in science supposes a correspondent advance in theology, and is, in fact, a new development, which is to throw some light on some obscure part of revelation.”—(ALBERT BARNES.)

8 "Bishop Law," says Southey, "advances an opinion that the true nature of revealed religion is gradually disclosed as men become capable of receiving it; generations, as they advance in knowledge and civilization, outgrowing the errors of their forefathers, so that in fulness of time there will remain neither doubts nor difficulties." "In this opinion," continues Southey, "he is borne out by history. Providence condescends to the slowness of Christian understandings, as He did to the hardness of Jewish hearts."

"If there be found in the world a positive religion adapted to the guidance of life, and favourable to the progress of the human mind, which meets with no limits in any circumstances of time and place, that religion

not the less true that the study of nature and the cultivation of our reasoning powers tend to give an increased beauty and significance to the truths of Christianity.1 Indeed, we everywhere find in Scripture that its highest teachings are drawn from or illustrated by nature, that its leading principles are appealed to reason.2

The very fact that we are to expect no further revelation of a direct kind must lead us to look for what progress is yet to take place as resulting from the improvement of our

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is of God."-(VINET.) "All the doctrines of a true theology are adapted to something in the nature of man, or in his condition and wants." (ALBERT BARNES.) His soul is formed for religion, and the Gospel has been adapted to the constitution of his soul. His understanding takes cognisance of its truths, his conscience applies them, his affections are capable of becoming interested in them, and his will of being subject to them." (H. WARE: Christian Character.) "That which pre-eminently distinguishes Christianity amongst all religions and all philosophies is its humanity. There is such a correspondence between the Christian religion and humanity that each, well apprehended, should lead back to the other, as also should faith towards nature and nature towards faith." —(VINET.) "The Bible fits into every fold of the human heart.' (ARTHUR H. HALLAM.) "The Gospel is in harmony with the most profound wants of our nature."-(VINET.) "I cannot, for my life, but think that to be the best religion which makes the best men, and, from the nature of its principles, is apt to make them so; most kind, and merciful, and charitable, and most free from malice, and revenge, and cruelty."(TILLOTSON.) It has been well said that "the principles of religion are based upon the necessities of our nature;" and that "the intelligent Christian should learn to estimate religious opinions more than has been customary, according to their moral tendencies and religious customs and observances, by their adaptation to human nature." "We must learn to know that revelation is the complement and not the contradiction of nature, and that any interpretation of Scripture which is contrary to nature and conscience must be erroneous."-(Bishop EWING.)

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1 "Though reason and revelation be derived to us by different ways, yet they have both the same divine Author, and, therefore, cannot possibly interfere or disagree. And, indeed, revelation supposes reason, and is built upon it," for we find the Scriptures expressly enjoining men the use and exercise of their reason."-(Rev. J. BALGUY.) Learning," says Clemens Alexandrinus, "is profitable to Christianity for the clear and distinct demonstrations of its doctrine, in that it helps us to the more evident understanding of the truth."

2" I deem it impious and absurd to hold that the Creator would have given us the faculty of reason, or that the Redeemer would, in so many and varied forms of argument and persuasion, have appealed to it, if it had been either totally useless or wholly impotent."-(S. T. COLERIDGE.) "Since our Lord blamed the Jews for neglecting or overlooking the proofs of His authority it clearly follows that men are not only allowed, but obliged, to make use of their understandings, in order to satisfy themselves concerning the grounds of their religion.”—(Rev. J. BALGUY.)

It

understandings and the extension of our knowledge.1 was well said by Origen, that, "he who believes the Scriptures to have proceeded from Him who is the Author of nature, may well expect to find the same sort of difficulties in them as are found in the constitution of nature itself; and we would add may well also expect to find a like system of development. In Origen's time, the difficulty was to convince men that the Author of nature was also the God of the Bible; but in our day the difficulty with a certain class is to convince them that the God of the Bible is also the Author of nature.2

The sacred Scriptures were originally communicated to a particular people, living at a particular time, to whose modes of thought and outward circumstances frequent reference is made. To all who live in a different time and under different circumstances much of the original beauty and force of the sacred writings is therefore lost; but on the other hand, with advanced knowledge and more highly de

1 "If we are to be at all guided by what we observe in the course of nature, or the gradual unfolding of truth around us, we should conclude that the mode of attaining to this perfection must be effected through natural means, or rather I would say through the medium of mankind." -(Rev. E. C. TOPHAM: Philosophy of the Fall.)

"I am convinced that all light, of whatever kind, is good, and comes from God; that all knowledge comes from Him, and can be used in His service; that nothing which really adds to a knowledge of the world is for a moment to be despised."-(Bishop TEMPLE.) "We rather rejoice in every extension which is given to it; and feel as if by enlarging it we were restricting the supposed domains of chance, and widening the real dominions of God, and doing what civilization and improving agriculture accomplish when they drive back the ignorance, the wastes and wilds of our country, to spread knowledge, order, and fertility in their room."-(M'COSH.)

3" As every one acknowledges that this religion and this inspiration came through a human medium to men living in those particular times' of civilization, and in those particular 'bounds of habitation,' which God had before appointed and determined for them, we cannot safely dispense with" any "means of knowing by what local influences the divine message was of necessity coloured in its entrance into the world." "If it is clear that the form of the teaching (of Christ) was suggested by the objects immediately present-if the character of the parables coincides with the nature of the localities where they occur-it is a proof incontestible, and within small compass, that even that revelation, which was most unlike all others in its freedom from outward circumstance, was yet circumscribed, or (if we may prefer so to state it) assisted by the objects within actual range of the speaker's vision. . . . And if it was thus suggested by outward existing images, it must also, by those images, be judged and explained."-(Dean STANLEY: Sinai and Palestine.)

veloped faculties, other beauties of a higher and purer nature have been revealed. The progress of civilization, and the advances of the mental and physical sciences, have shed a light and reflected a lustre brighter and deeper than before upon the pages of divine truth, and will continue to do so as long as progress and advancement continue to characterise them.

There exists in the minds of many persons a deep-rooted objection to the application of anything like reason to matters of religion; and they sternly refuse to entertain any idea that would favour a suspicion of anything like error lurking in what they believe to be the truths of Christianity. It is not to be denied that we may err here; but we are con

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1" A groundwork of historical and geographical fact, with a wide applicability, extending beyond the limits of any age or country; a religion rising in the East, yet finding its full development and fulfilment in the West; a character and teaching human, Hebrew, Syrian, in its outward form and colour, but its inward spirit and characteristics universal and divine such are the general conclusions discernible, doubtless, from any careful study of the gospels, but impressed with peculiar force on the observant traveller by the sight of the Holy Land."-(Dean STANLEY.)

"We have sat down in pensive grief when we have heard from the lips of tyros in divinity solemn and measured denunciations of reason in religion. We have asked ourselves whence the herald has derived his commission to commence an assault on what has been implanted in the bosom of man by the hand of the Almighty? ... We marvel not that thinking men shrink from such sweeping denunciations. Nor do we wonder that the ministry is often despised, the sanctuary forsaken, and the day-dreams of any errorist adopted, who professes to give their proper place to the inferences drawn from the government of God."-(ALBERT BARNES.) "There is nothing that I know hath done so much mischief to Christianity as the disparagement of reason under pretence of respect and favour to religion... The denial of reason in religion hath been the principal engine that heretics and enthusiasts have used against the faith, and that which lays us open to infinite follies and impostures."-(Reason and Religion.) "There is no opinion which does more disservice and more dishonour to religion than that which removes reason from it, and sets them at variance."-(Rev. J. BALGUY: Sermons.) "If the Bible is to be put above all science and reformation, and men are to make it the bulwark of every mischief and iniquity, it cannot but be reviled and hated of men."—(H. W. BEEcher.) Most of the clamours that have been raised against reason in the affairs of religion have sprung from men's mistakes of the nature of both. For while groundless opinions and unreasonable practices are often called religion on the one hand, and vain imaginations and false consequences are as frequently styled reason on the other, it is not wonderful that such a religion disclaims the use of reason, or that such reason is opposite to religion."-(Reason and Religion.) "A system of religion which contains anything contrary to reason, with whatever external proofs it may come recommended, can by no

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