Scepticism," I only pretend to deal with the question put in page 148 "Is faith in God, the faith which Jesus taught? or is Christian faith more complex in its manifold requirements?" and I hope I have been able to make it plain that Christian faith is more complex in its manifold acquirements, thus answering the one question put in page 148, by producing the state of consciousness necessary to create the other, referred to in page 143, as a faith which could combine the conviction of the intellect with the obedience of the heart; and by showing that the faith that Paul teaches is the same now as ever, and that the aspiration to the elevated doctrine of St. Paul means simply increased spiritual experience, which all may claim as the heritage of Christian belief.

The germ of the system of Christianity rests in Christ, and belief enables us to realise Christ as our Saviour. Christ in the heart germinates or causes love; love causes action; and thus Paul's experience becomes the heritage of each Christian, and may be realised as such. Christ as the centre of the system puts man in a position to act.

PART I.

CHRISTIANITY REDUCED TO PROOF.

CHAPTER I.

THE DISCRIMINATING POWER OF THE INTELLECT.

WORSHIP and Morality are possible when man

possesses a religious and moral element, together with discrimination and similarity, the power by which he is enabled to recognise and classify differences: this power teaches him the nature of good and evil, and by it he knows the difference between a good action and a bad one; hence the knowledge as taught in the Bible, just before the fall of Man-"Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. iii. 5.) Reason or intellect in man may have been so weak when the revelation was first given, in consequence of his low state of civilisation,* that he could only receive the truth by figurative language, but, as intellect developed, God revealed truth as truth; though, in order to prove that, the Bible and mental science must join hand in hand, for truth in the Bible cannot contradict truth out of the Bible. The one is God's revelation of truth, the other God's expression of truth in mind; teaching man that God has given him an intellect so vast that, as it develops, it may comprehend more fully God, the eternal Creator, as God. Truth

* Civilisation will be understood to include a state in which the moral and religious element is highly developed.

will thus be tested by truth; for what is intellect, but the symbol of God's power in man?

The time has now come that truth in the Bible must be tested by proof, and Christianity treated as a science ; for it is of the greatest importance to man that it should be fully understood, as much for his spiritual as his temporal benefit.

We Christians, holding the Bible as inspired, and given to man from God as His rule of life, when enlightened by God the Spirit through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, may be fully assured that nothing can take from us the internal evidence of the spirit of truth, as revealed in the Bible. If we more fully realised what is meant in the 38th and 39th verses of the 8th chapter of Romans, we should be less concerned as to the way in which the truth is expressed in the Bible. The absence of this internal evidence is the reason why man, in his natural state, can see no beauty in the spiritual teaching of the Bible-hence the difference that has arisen between man in his natural state, and man in his spiritual state. In his spiritual state, he is conscious of the warfare going on in his mind between faith and reason; or, to put it more plainly, "his will and God's will," or the flesh and the spirit, as described in the 7th chapter of Romans, from the 13th verse to the end. Paul tells us why man in his natural state cannot receive or comprehend the things of the Spirit of God, as seen in the 11th and 14th verses of the 2nd chapter of Ist Corinthians: "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned".