one of the fathers of the Reformation, and certainly one of the most pious and learned men of his age, rejects the Hebrews, 2 Peter, and Revelation; and Luther himself set aside Hebrews, Jude, and called St. James's Epistle an Epistle of straw; an opinion in which I cannot agree with him.

53. Now please to open your Prayer-books at the Sixth Article, which is about Holy Scripture. If you will read it over carefully, you will see Holy Scripture is not defined. For it is said to consist of those books about which there has never been any doubt in the Church (which are those books?); and then mark! the whole of the Apocryphal books are cited, and then comes a general assertion that we receive them all as canonical -a distinction being drawn apparently between Holy Scripture and Canonical Scripture; but what the distinction is nobody seems to know. We cannot avoid the conclusion that the framers of our Articles intended to leave a freedom of judgment, on a point upon which the greatest Continental Reformers were divided. This license the great writers of the Church have not availed themselves of, and hence the false and superstitious colouring of popular theology, which has created such confusion since the Reformation, and given birth to such theories as the verbal inspiration or literal infallibility of the Bible.

54. My brethren, what is the moral of what I have now set before you? These things are not done in a

corner; they are set down in every class-book, they are known to every student; nay, they are written out in every college examination, no curate is allowed to be ignorant of them, and yet there is hardly a clergyman who will get up into the pulpit and say, to the great relief of thoughtful and educated persons, and even little children, who constantly find their parents out in teaching them what they do not believe themselves, that the Bible is not free from all taint of human error, and that for the simple reason that it was compiled by man. But do the clergy think they can any longer conceal this from the people? Why, the people know it already, they have no interest in ignoring it, the confession of it clears their minds and explains many a religious difficulty, sweeps away many a superstition, reveals many a bright and shining truth, and gives them many new and consolatory views of a previously obscured God.

55. Why then this terror of examining the Bible, at least as carefully as we examine other valuable books? Why this halting timidity, this fear of discovering the truth about the Bible or about anything else? People do not like to have their conclusions unsettled. People think that when a certain theory, their theory about the Bible, has been destroyed, all faith in the blessed words contained in the Bible must go with it; just as, at the time of the Reformation, when people denied the temporal power of the pope, some thought all religion must disappear with that dogma. Yet, religion was alive

before the dogma of Biblical Infallibility, and is likely to survive the dogma of Papal Infallibility.

Brethren, if a theory can be destroyed, it ought to be destroyed; the only value of a theory is, that it explains facts and corresponds to facts; if it does neither, however venerable, however seemingly entwined with precious truth, it is doomed-it must go.

The venerable character of a doctrine cannot save it when that doctrine is seen to be false. Idolatry was old enough, but idolatry was doomed. The whole church accepted for centuries, without question, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, but at the Reformation it was declared to be a lie. Time brought out that lie, and time is bringing out the truth about the Bible.

Well then, since, as I shall presently show, things have been found out in the Bible to be incorrect, and whole books have been proved to be untrustworthy in some respects, many people are getting alarmed, as if, when we began to remove cautiously the clay and the mud and the loose stones, we were going to destroy the precious jewel itself. If I have a real diamond here, do you think I am afraid to cleanse it, to rub it, to hold it up to the light of the sun? Why, what would happen ? You would see every speck of dust that was upon it, but you would not ruin the diamond. So, if I hold this Book up to the most searching inquiry, what will happen? All that is human and fallible, all that is corrupt, will fall away in due time, and the truth of God will come out more pure and crystalline than ever, and we shall be the better for it.

56. I know a great many people who say, 'We believe all this ourselves, but we cannot bear that our children should hear it.' I know people who have lost faith in verbal inspiration long ago; they know better themselves, and yet they want their children to be brought up in the faith they received and have had to unlearn, and so they have removed their children from churches where the doctrine of Biblical Infallibility was untaught. But reasonable opinions about the Bible are in the air; they are like floating seeds; you cannot control their flight. Shut them out at the front door, and they will float in by the window; sweep them from your dwelling, and they will spring up in your garden. The soil is prepared for them; they will alight, they will fructify. The working out of the truth goes on from age to age, you cannot stop it any more than King Canute in his royal chair could stop the waves of the sea. And you teach your children a lie, and what you know to be a lie, your children will find you out in a few years, just as the people have found the clergy out; and do you think they will honour you for this-that knowing the truth, you kept it back from them, that believing yourself, you never tried to give them the best truth you knew, because you were afraid of it? Oh! do what is right and honest, be true to yourself, and leave the consequences to God. My brethren, the promise is unto you and to your children. It is better for you to acknowledge what is true, and abandon what is false. That is the way to make a beginning, and although you may not see very far or very clear, be sure that God will lead you on to

if

something better and higher as soon as you are ready for it.

57. Persons say, 'I don't like these new views. They were not taught in my time. I hate science and historical criticism, and all this so-called enlightenment, when it is applied to religious questions. I hate it when it is applied to the Bible, because, in fact, it brings my puny mind into collision with the mind of God.' Nothing of the kind. You are not doing this when you examine the Holy Scriptures, and ask who it is that has handed them down. You are not questioning God. You are examining the history and transmission of certain records. You are examining the form in which men have expressed Divine truths from age to age. You are not examining direct inspiration from God to you. People immediately think, when we speak of criticising the Bible, that we are going to examine some inspiration God has made directly to them, but it is not so; you are only examining a chain of evidence, the testimony of eye-witnesses, the authenticity of certain writings, which must be examined like other historical documents only that, and nothing more. I implore you to take reasonable views of the Bible. It is futile to believe in its infallibility; such a belief, logically carried out, must lead you into both immorality and error. I implore you, both young and old, children and parents, to consider what the Bible is, as reasonable beings, and not to injure the Bible by claiming for it what it nowhere claims for itself, and what it does not possess.