of Truth which was to shine forth in Christ. It is only when superficially tasted-as Bacon well says-that philosophy leads us away from God; deeper draughts of a thorough and real philosophy bring us back to Him. And, we add, with a more modern natural philosopher (Oerstedt), "every thorough knowledge of nature leads to a knowledge of God." The true spirit of science, the only aim of which is truth, ever points and impels us towards the Centre of all knowledge and all truth; the One "in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and of knowledge." To Him, not only the Scriptures with the ever-waxing light of their revelation, but heathen wisdom, too, amid its gropings for truth in the starry heavens, still point us; to attain to its salvation all history in its ruins, nature in her pangs, the heart in its grief, and the whole creation in its groaning and travailing for freedom (Rom. viii. 19-23) are ever striving.

The wise men come to Jerusalem; but they do not find the path to Bethlehem till enlightened by the prophetical word, -a hint that the light of Natural Revelation needs to be supplemented by that of Scripture. Their heathen knowledge, when aided even by the clearest light of Natural Revelation, brings them at best only into the immediate neighbourhood of salvation; fully attain to it they cannot, unless the Divine Word be vouchsafed as a key to the understanding of the Divine Works.

Lastly, they go from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, guided by the harmoniously blended light of the prophetic utterance and of the Star, which, through its means, has once more appeared to them, a sign that no real contradictions exist between the two revelations in the Word and in nature, but that they are one both in their divine origin and in the end to which they point. We men may, perhaps, by our own fault, and owing to the imperfection of our knowledge, lose for a time the trace of a connection between the two; but he who deals faithfully with the measure of knowledge and revelation entrusted to him, and is obedient to the heavenly guidance, will be led step by step to the full knowledge of the truth. Such an one shall be more and more clearly and harmoniously enlightened by the different forms of God's revelation, until at last he sees how all their manifold beams converge in, and radiate from,

the one Sun, which is the Brightness and the Heart of the Holy Scriptures, as well as the Light of the world and the Centre of its history,-from Him who, as the everlasting Word, unites in Himself at once eternal Reason and eternal Revelation.

IT

THIRD LECTURE.

MODERN NON-BIBLICAL CONCEPTIONS OF GOD.

T has been justly said, that religion is the first power upon earth. Any one who attentively considers the history of the world and its culture, in the light, not merely of surface events, but of the internal motives which determine its development, cannot fail to apprehend this truth.

Even Goethe, in his Abhandlungen zum westöstlichen Divan, acknowledges that "the only real and the deepest theme of the world's and of man's history, to which all other subjects are subordinate, is the conflict between faith and unbelief." As long as the religious question remains unsolved, there will always be plenty of external "questions" on the Tiber or the Rhine, in Constantinople or in Washington. Since the great French Revolution, however, the religious question has entered upon a fresh, and, if I am not mistaken, upon the last stage of its development. The issue, taken as a whole, no longer lies in isolated dogmatical differences between the various churches; even the controversy between Protestantism and Romanism has in public life become a secondary question. The question now is, whether shall continue to exist at all -Christian belief. The battle of centuries between belief and unbelief is in our days nearly tending to the point where the decisive question must be put, whether the Christian religion shall continue to be maintained as the basis and rule of our civilisation, or whether it must be wholly abandoned. "To be, or not to be; that is the question" now-a-days for the Christian faith; and this question, if any, must be the last, just as two thousand years ago it was the first.

Nothing shows this so clearly as the present position of the controversy about the idea of God. We have already remarked that, in the conflict between belief and unbelief, it is the idea of God which always forms the heart's core of the

matter, the vital question, and which decides as to our view of Christianity generally, and of all particular dogmas. The present contest, too, as to the person of Christ, the gospel history, and the entire origin of Christianity, resolves itself into certain fundamental differences in the conception of God. The efforts of Strauss, Renan, and all the negative critics of this class, are, as we shall see, based upon a non-biblical— viz. the pantheistic-idea of God, and this they are seeking to introduce into the world. It is a non-biblical idea of God, the deistical, rationalistic idea, on which the "free-thinking" theology—that is, the theology which denies all that is supernatural-and all its products are based. Hegel's conception of God it really is which makes Baur and his school attempt to derive the entire origin of Christianity from merely natural sources. We shall therefore dwell rather longer on this cardinal point. For when we have once established the untenableness of these fundamental views, it will be all the easier to understand how weak is the criticism based upon them.

The controversy as to the idea of God is no longer the same as it was a hundred or two hundred years ago. At that time, if we except a few pantheists, the existence of a personal God was not generally called in question; and hence the only disputable point was God's action in the world, whether He could work miracles, whether His providence extended to all things, whether Christ was truly divine, and the like. In the present day, however, it is not merely this that is called in question, but also the existence of God at all, and consequently the existence of the human spirit as a distinct essence. Formerly the issue lay between Biblical Christianity and Deism: now it lies between Christianity and-nothing; between belief in God as the personal Spirit who is Love, and the denial of God, which must be the annihilation of man's spiritual and moral being. This you will see in the consideration of our next subject—Atheism and Materialism.

It would be an unprofitable and thankless undertaking were we to attempt in due order to refute all the non-biblical ideas of God which have ever presented themselves. Their number is incalculable. Almost every idea of reason, almost every imaginable conception of the universe, has, one time or

another in the history of philosophy, been maintained as an idea of God. Reason restlessly moves from one fundamental principle to another, and, in its hasty progress towards something new, ultimately returns to that which is old, as in the present day Materialism has reverted to the principles of the older Ionic and Atomistic Philosophy. Under these circumstances, it is better to take in review only the fundamental forms under which all the non-biblical, philosophical, and scientific conceptions of God may be included; and in so doing, we shall, of course, give special attention to the ideas which prevail in our own time. We find that they diverge into three main tendencies, regarding the Absolute either as a universal Material Substance, or as an impersonal, unconsciously working Anima Mundi, or as the Creator of the world—personal indeed, but not exercising any direct influence on its present life. These are the distinguishing marks of the systems of MATERIALISM, PANTHEISM, and DEISM; but before considering them, we will first take a glance at ATHEISM as forming the most direct contrast to the biblical doctrine of God.

I. ATHEISM.

This is the absolute denial of any kind of eós, that is, of any Divine Being, and therefore cannot be classed among the ideas of God above mentioned. This view, that there is abso

lutely no God at all, was so much detested by the ancient Greeks, that they considered Atheism synonymous with wickedness; and those who had the reputation of holding this opinion were more than once banished, and their names (as that of a Diagoras, a Bion, or a Lucian) stigmatized by history. We also find the principle of Atheism-although not strictly carried out in Buddhism, inasmuch as it acknowledges as the Absolute, only the absolute Nothing from which everything springs and to which everything returns.

This view, after having for ages appeared only quite sporadically, first assumed the character of a system-it indeed it be worthy of the name-in the train of French Materialism. La Mettrie, for instance, pronounced the belief in the existence of a God to be as groundless as it was unprofitable. This tendency, as