"The Gospel of the Resurrection," 207. Its Appendix on Positivism, Positivism the creed of the last Antichrist, 209. Newton's Scho- Rationalism; its source and effects, 214. Rationalism and Superstition, 215. The darkest stage of Rationalism, a revelation impossible, 216. If not impossible, it might be superfluous, 218. If possible and desirable, yet it may never have been given, 219. The two forms of German Rationalism; naturalist, 220, mythical, 221. They contradict each other, 222. Steps of the evidence to an honest inquirer, 223. Three varieties of doctrinal Rationalism, 224. Parker's "absolute religion," 225. Undogmatic Ra- tionalism, 227. Depreciation of the Old Testament, 229. Coleridge's "Confessions," 231. The Gospels affirm the contrast between the Old and New Testaments, 232. The Ceremonial details and Genealogies of the Old Testament, 231. The severity of the Old Testament, 234. Real harmony of both Testaments, 236. The truth on which Rationalism builds, 237. Man's reason is appealed to in Scripture, 238. Historical study of the New Testament is the practical antidote of unbelief, 239 ) WAIVERSITY ALIFORNIA SUPERNATURAL REVELATION, OR FIRST PRINCIPLES OF MORAL THEOLOGY. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. THE SCEPTICAL STARTING-POINT. THE anonymous work named "Supernatural Religion has attained sudden notoriety within the last few years, and flashed like a lurid meteor across the theological firmament, It is a formal challenge to all believers. in the old and everlasting Gospel to give a reason of the faith that is in them. The writer complains. that Dr Lightfoot and Dr Westcott have not touched his main thesis and central argument, but have turned aside to a secondary issue as to the Ignatian Epistles. I intend, in this work, to take up the main issue alone, though if life be spared I shall hope to resume, with the added light of thirty years' further study, the subject treated in "Horae Evangelicae," and to place in a still clearer light the concurrence of external and internal evidence for the truth, authenticity, and Divine authority of the four Gospels. For thirty years I have been mainly engaged, in more than twelve works, in labouring to vindicate the truth and authority of the Scriptures and the Gospel of Christ, against several of the persevering attacks to which they have been exposed, both from open unbelievers and halting or timorous half-believers, whose groundless surrenders of the truth of God are sometimes more dangerous than the assaults of its open opposers. The works against which I have especially contended are (1) Strauss's "Life of Jesus," with its mythical theory of the Gospels. (2) The assault on the authenticity of the Books of Moses by Bishop Colenso and the German critics whom he has followed. (3) The "Seven Essays and Reviews," with their varied attacks on the fundamentals of Christianity. (4) The "First Principles," of Mr. Herbert Spencer, and the Bampton Lectures on "The Limits of Religious Thought," with their common theory which makes all genuine revelation strictly impossible. (5) In my "Commentary on Isaiah," I have replied to the attack of Dr Davidson and the German sceptical critics on the authenticity of that Book. The present century, following close on the shortlived infidel outbreak of the French Revolution, has been marked through its whole course by a series of earnest attacks on revealed religion, and the very foundations of morality and religious faith, by a series of writers. of reputation and ability. Besides an immense mass of loose and popular writing in the cause of scepticism, there have been many leading schools of unbelieving thought, each with a multitude of attached and credulous followers, but distinct from, and even opposed to each other, agreeing in little else than a rejection of the Bible, and the Gospel of Christ, and faith in the God of the Bible, whom some of them style "the wrathful Jehovah of the Old Testament." An exhaustive list would be impossible, for the varied forms of unbelief, like the heads of a Hydra, are intertwined with each other, and agree in little else than a common antipathy to the truth of God's Word. The following are some of the chief divisions of the embattled array. (1) The destructive criticism of Germany, aimed against the authenticity and truth of the Old Testament Scriptures, beginning with Strauss's "Life of Jesus," and the work of Renan, followed in our country by the writings of Bishop Colenso, and a multitude of similar works. (2) The assaults on the historical truth and authenticity of the Gospels, forming the mythical School of modern German criticism. (3) The Positive Philosophy of M. Comte, with its double rejection of Metaphysics and Theology, as superstitions of the infancy and youth of mankind, and its fictitious law of human progress culminating in the rejection of the living God, as a dream of superstition, to be replaced by a new religion, and a "new Supreme Being," the worship of Collective Humanity; a kind of earnest of the last manifestation of that "Man of Sin" who will "seat himself in the temple of God," averring that he is God. (4) A fourth variety of unbelief is the agnostic philosophy of Mr Spencer, summed up in this one statement; that Pantheism, Atheism and Theism-meaning by the last faith in a personal God-are three equally futile attempts to solve the great problem of the universe, with the added axiom that the unknown cause of the universe is, and must ever remain, completely inscrutable. (5) This Cimmerian creed of midnight darkness receives a further supplement. Its author propounds to us a new Trinity of Matter, Force, and Motion, each alike indestructible. This supplement of the agnostic theory is an apotheosis of solar force, embodying itself in the monstrous paradox that force and motion are indestructible, but that the sun, which is their great source, is being steadily exhausted by his own activity, and his diffusion of light and heat, so that all motion is constantly tending to equilibration and rest, and the universe, under its new Divinity, tending steadily to the reign of Omnipresent Death. (6) A sixth form of unbelief is the elastic materialism of Dr Tyndall in his Belfast Address, who thinks that modern science binds fast all nature in the bonds of fate, and that matter contains in itself the promise and potency of every kind of life. (7) A seventh is what may be called the negative materialism of Mr Mill, and his sensational philosophy; he denies that matter exists at all, but allows us to speak of minds as if they did exist, though strict philosophy would lead to the nihilism which denies both mind and matter, and replaces both by permanent possibilities of sensation." (8) The doctrine of Evolution, and Natural Selection, as held by Mr Darwin and his disciples, which fills up by conjecture the intervals between a hundred thousand existing or extinct species of plants and animals by a thousand times the number, or ten thousand thousand intermediate varieties or types of being, which must have existed if the theory be true, and have passed utterly away without leaving a trace of their existence either among the fossils or the actual flora and fauna. This gigantic mass of conjecture, when supplemented by the doctrine of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, or by millions of millions of acts of choice where there is no one to choose, and the survival of millions of millions of organisms, on the ground of their superior fitness to accomplish some wholly unconceived end or purpose of the great scheme of the universe; this pyramid of pure conjecture, of telescopic magnitude, |