humanity. Perhaps the philosophy of the unbeliever could not or would not directly reach and elevate them, though it may be claimed that methods which elevate the race as a whole bring up the very lowest layers and let light into the darkest places. The results of scientific study and of progressive thought enlighten the every-day common sense of the people, and it is not merely the student and thinker who refuses to be a believer, in the sense imposed upon the word by the Church. The mass of the people are coming more and more to reject the old dogmas, and less and less to need them.

Systems of theology in the past have been the product of human need in the lower stages of mental and moral development, and they have served their purpose in the progress of civilization. To-day, theology is in the rear of thought and not in the van. It holds to worn-out dogmas, potent in times of ignorance and superstition, impotent in the light of science and philosophy. The latter are destroying religious belief as it has been held in the past, and the result is not a lower standard of moral conduct. To the man who reasons clearly the promises and threats of religion are futile, and it is through promises and threats that it has done 'its work. Such a man can govern his own conduct and try to improve others without these. We have reached the stage where society generally can do without them; they are losing their effect, and agencies of moral support and improvement can be made quite as effective without any regard to the doctrines that are now held by the Church as essential to salvation. The belief of the "unbeliever" is as good for the moral well-being of man as the belief of the Christian.

Nor do we ignore the needs of what is called the spiritual nature of man, or, more accurately speaking, his emotional nature. But we contend that the highest intellectual view of the life and destiny of mankind, a view based on knowledge and reason and requiring no other revelation, gives room for the loftiest development, the fullest exercise, and the amplest sustenance and support for that part of man's nature usually denominated spiritual. To admit that it requires a belief which intelligence and reason do not accept would be equivalent to holding that delusion is necessary to the comfort and consolation of the human soul.

What we contend for is simply this: The position of unbelief in the distinctive dogmas of the Christian Church to-day is the result of scientific investigation and critical study, and is gener

ally accepted, not only by students and thinkers, but by the intelligent common sense of the mass of mankind. It is strengthened by every advance in discovery and in that philosophy which is the outcome of human knowledge. The prevailing type of Christianity, on the other hand, clings to superstition and credulity as the basis of its influence. It will not, so far as it can help it, permit common sense to assert itself in the place of unreasoning faith in the dreams of the olden time. The consequence is that the Church is losing its hold on the convictions of men and on the conscience of the community. The belief that is founded on scientific conclusions and common sense affords as solid a basis for moral character and as firm a support for virtue as belief in the religious doctrines of the past or present. It is not denied that the Church, as an organization, has done and is doing good to humanity, nor is it claimed that it makes no difference what a man believes, or whether he believe anything, in matters of ethics. But it is claimed that if the Church abandoned its outworn creeds, and gave up old superstitions about Divine revelation, vicarious atonement, salvation by faith, and future retribution, it could do far more good by reaching and elevating a larger number of people. It is certain that if it does not keep up with the mental progress of the race, it will fall behind in moral progress, and will lose its influence upon the intelligent and thinking part of mankind.

F. A. KIDDER.

PROF. HODGE.

It is quite possible that, during the long history of theological disputation, some orthodox dogmatist may have equaled, in disconnected utterance of unproved assertions the agnostic text furnished us, in the stead of a subject, as a basis for this discussion; but it is impossible that any one of them could in this regard have surpassed it. From the eddy of remark we disentangle three unsupported assertions, each of which could be adequately met by a simple denial.

First. It is asserted that the designation of those who reject as untrue the common faith of Christendom, by the term "infidel," is unjust, and that "the difference between them (Christians and non-Christians) is not that one believes and the other does not believe, but that they do not believe alike." Now, this has

always been understood equally by both parties in the use of the word. We maintain that when the epithet "infidel" is applied, as is universally intended, to one who holds the characteristic truths of either or both natural or revealed religion to be incredible, it expresses with scientific accuracy the facts of the case and nothing more nor less. These persons are "infidels" in relation to those objects of faith understood definitely on each occasion of its application. The radical significance, the infinite importance, the practical consequence of the truths rejected; the millennial continuity, the catholic consensus, the venerable dignity of the Church; the substantial agreement of the vast majority of the European peoples,―require that dissent from this faith should be emphasized as the "infidelity." As believers, we wish to be known only precisely for what we are. Why should skeptics desire to apply to themselves the designations which centuries of association have inseparably bound to the faith they despise? If the term "infidel" carries with it unpleasant suggestions, arising from historical associations, which party is to blame for the fact?

Second. It is contended that the result of scientific progress and of critical investigation has been to render incredible the distinctive doctrines of the Christian Church, and that this is recognized not only by the highly cultured, but also "by the intelligent common sense of the mass of mankind." This involves the claim (1) that men of high culture, as such, see the impossibility of the truth of Christianity, and (2) that the power of Christianity as a living system of faith is visibly declining among the mass of civilized mankind; and the scope of the contest involves the claim that this disillusionizing effect of modern enlightenment extends to the whole field of natural as well as of revealed religion. No evidence of either of these assertions is suggested, and each alike is preposterously untrue. As to the former it is answered that, of course, a skeptic may also be a man of science; but to claim that culture renders Christian faith impossible is merely to beg the question, by making skepticism a part of the definition of culture. It is absurd to claim that the highest culture in this age renders faith impossible, when Gladstone and Bismarck are orthodox Christians; when Agassiz, Herschel, Sir William Thomson and Owen are at least thorough theists; when Cuvier, Henry, Tait, Balfour Stewart, Clerk Maxwell, Asa Gray, Guyot, Mivart, Charles Young, W..

Kitchen Parker (the most advanced of English evolutionists) are but specimens of a great multitude of earnest Christian professors who maintain their position at the forefront of scientific progress. Multitudes of the highest scientific authorities assert that the proved results of science present no obstacle to faith. The protest against it comes with no force higher than that derived from the vagrant speculations of a transient philosophy. And this is ventured against Christianity, which for two millenniums has retained her serene throne, while a countless succession of such philosophic tides have ebbed and flowed around her feet.

The Church, of all interests, has least need to fear the effect of culture. Plato, Aristotle, Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant have all in succession brought their tribute to her temples. Our ground of complaint is that our opponents are only half-educated specialists. They study the physical sciences and not the humanities; they use the senses and not the intuitions; they prophesy the future, but do not critically study the past; they read the attacks upon Christianity, but not their refutations. We claim that the great conquests of science have been confirming the truth of God's existence and manifesting the glory of His attributes beyond our fondest dreams. We claim that the results of historical and literary criticism have laid bare the foundations of our faith, and in doing so have confirmed their strength and exhibited their credentials in an exact scientific form. Those who take in the whole field of Biblical criticism, not merely one side of it, know that the drift is now decidedly against the postexilic origin of the Pentateuch, and in favor of the Apostolic origin of the New Testament. Luthardt, Dillmann, Keil, Delitzsch, Lightfoot, Westcott, Weiss, Ezra Abbott, and others show the claims of victory set up by the opponents of our faith to be very premature. Zoeckler, in a review of the Old Testament literature of 1882, in the January (1883) number of "Luthardt's Zeitschrift," says: "The works of last year controverting the views of Wellhausen and his school preponderate very decidedly, both in number and in scientific merit, over the works on the opposite side." See also the encyclopedic résumé of the History of Biblical Criticism, in the "Presbyterian Review," January 1, 1883.

As to the second point asserted, viz., that the power of Christianity as a living system of faith is visibly declining among the

mass of civilized mankind, the refutation is no less easily produced, and no less overwhelming. These announcements of the decay and approaching dissolution of Christianity have been repeated, only to be brought to shame over and over again, for the past fifteen hundred years, but never before with so little to excuse and so much to rebut them. In A. D. 304, at the end of the Diocletian persecutions, and only twenty years before Christianity conquered for itself imperial establishment, the Augusti were hailed with new honorary addresses, containing the incidental clauses, "et nomine Christianorum deleto," "superstitione Christiana ubique deleta." Hume, in Scotland, and Voltaire, in France, pronounced in effect equivalent judgments just before the opening of the splendid era of modern revivals of missions and of literary and theological activity, when the Church, supposed to be moribund, has exhibited both intensively and extensively more of the creative energy of the Apostolic age than it had done in any of the centuries that intervene.

We admit, of course, that the external activities of a given community are not wholly commensurate with the contemporaneous mental states and tendencies of its members. The habits of men often remain in action after the faiths of which they are the expression have begun to die at the root, even as the waves of the ocean are often high after the winds which raised them have subsided. We also admit that statistics, like all other systems of facts or of symbols, may be so used as to express untruths. But it is absurd to pretend that a rising wave over an entire ocean can be diagnostic of a falling wind, and statistics, when the induction is broad enough, are among the most solid of all scientific data. Never before has Christianity, nominal and real, advanced as during the present century. The best approximate estimates give as the whole number of nominal Christians on earth at the end of the first century, 500,000; at the end of the seventh century, 25,000,000; at the end of the fourteenth century, 80,000,000; at the end of the seventeenth century, 155,000,000; at the end of the eighteenth century, 200,000,000; and in 1880, 410,000,000. As to the relative political influence of these Christians, we have 100,000,000 of population subject to Christian government in A. D. 1500 as compared with 685,459,000 in A. D. 1876.

As to the religious tendencies prevailing at present in the population of this country, the following statistics, gathered VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. 325.

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