to see how you can settle doctrinal questions with texts. Almost every opinion has been proved and disproved over and over again out of the Bible.

And here Rome has really a strong position when she says, 'Because private interpretations of the Bible are twisted and contradictory, hear the Church's interpretation of Scripture, and abide by it; the Church of Rome's interpretation is alone infallible.' The reply to which is, 'We don't believe it. Every sect uses the Bible to serve its own turn, and to prove its own doctrine, and the Church of Rome does no more and no less.'

85. Then, shall we hope to come to some agreement on the formularies of the Established Church of England, the Articles, and the Creeds? Well, what do we find to be true about them? We find that these formularies were partly founded on traditional authority, and partly on the Bible; therefore, I am afraid, when you speak to an intelligent inquirer, and tell him that he is to found his religion upon Creeds and Articles alone, simply because there are such things as Creeds and Articles, he will say, 'Why these are partly founded on an authority which I do not acknowledge, and partly on a method of treating the Bible which I dislike and repudiate.' Well, then, the Church, the Bible, and the Formularies seem to grow more and more insecure the more we look at them. What is to be done? Something is wanted to settle us, to re-settle us; what is wanted?

I reminded you in my last Address, that the first

thing needful to the theology of this age is the love of truth; no stable resettlement will come, unless that point first be settled. Then, when you have got that glowing light in your heart, you must neglect nothing— absolutely nothing all things are yours. Tradition, and authority, and creeds, and articles, and the Bible, and interpretations of the Bible; but you must just bring the Lamp of the Love of Truth, and turn that in upon the creeds, and when persons appeal to the authority of tradition, you must say, 'Will your tradition bear the shining of the Lamp of Truth?" And when you turn that light upon the tangled mass of dogmatic theology, you will probably discover this. You will find, as the Reformers found 400 years ago, that some traditions will stand the test, whilst other traditions will not stand the test; and when you thus bring the ray of knowledge, the ray of experience, the ray of intuition, all which are different rays, which go to make up the great white Light of Truth-when you turn these rays upon any tradition, you will find whether that tradition will bear the only safe test which God has given you to try the spirits by. This may not be an easy task-nothing worth doing is easy: you may be able to help only a little towards it, others may have to labour, and you to enter into their labour; but the labour must be undertaken in every age, and gone through with. The truth about our theologies is certain to come out sooner or later, and those who can, ought to help it. You cannot stop the sun from shining by pulling down the blind, although you may sit in the dark yourself if

you like. Every age has something to part with, and something to win; we ought not to be afraid of doing either.

Well then, turning from tradition to the Bible; when you turn the Light of Truth upon the Bible, do you reject the Bible? No; that is the only intelligent way of receiving the Bible. For what do you do?

you

You first try

You find that

and ascertain what is the history of it. it is a mass, and a very peculiar mass of records, as I have explained at length elsewhere; you find that different parts are authoritative in very different senses; find that some parts are not authoritative at all, and do not profess to be. So then, the time is happily gone by, when, burning with indignation against Church authority, in a fit of Protestant enthusiasm you are called on to swallow the Bible whole; it will not do you good So. The records of the Bible must be looked upon by us with the truth-loving, God-fearing spirit. We must read our Bibles humbly, but intelligently, not blindly. We must not refuse to learn something about its history; we must be anxious not to receive any utterance in any of its records as the Word of God which, upon careful investigation by the best light we have got, is shown to be not the Word of God, but only the word of man. If religion is so important, we ought to take great care of our religious opinions; greater care as to the authority of records brought forward for our spiritual guidance; greater care in investigating these than in investigating anything else, just in proportion to the extrenie importance of the subject matter which we have in hand.

Now bring the weight of the previous remarks to bear upon the Creeds and Articles of the Established Church. Last Sunday, you will remember, I tried to turn the Lamp of Truth, i.e., the light of the best information which we have got, upon the doctrine of the Trinity, as stated in our Article. What was the result of that? The result of that was, I hope to a great many of you, most satisfactory. We pointed out two things: first, that when you read the Article on the Trinity in the Prayer Book, it left your mind perfectly cold, perfectly uninfluenced, because, on examination, we found that the terms used there to express this truth were so conceived in the metaphysics of a bygone age, that nine out of ten persons in our own age could not understand them. Therefore the heart remained untouched, it realised nothing but the sense of its own emptiness. But did we therefore come to the conclusion that the doctrine of the Trinity was itself in every sense a mere figment of theology? I think not. On the other hand, we found that this doctrine in its essence did not belong to the Christian religion alone, but to almost every religion in every age; that there was something in it at the bottom, which was apparently fundamental truth, if only that fundamental truth could be presented to the human mind in such a form that the mind could receive it; that the form of one age might not suit another: then, before the new age could lean on it, the doctrine of the Trinity would have to be re-presented or restated, in order to become living truth once more. So, in view of this necessity for restatement, we proceeded to point

out with reference to the Trinity how at times the human soul rose sympathetically into union with the Divine Spirit, the Indefinite, the almost impersonal 'Oversoul;' how at other times the mind revolted from the notion of such a diffused God, and felt the need of investing the Divine Being with human attributes; and at such times the human nature of God seemed to come forth and stand before us in Christ Jesus, whilst at other times He was withdrawn from us in the flesh, to reappear and abide with us for ever in the Spirit. Having thus placed the doctrine of the Trinity on what I may call an experimental basis, we discussed the doctrine of Original Sin, and we treated that from a similar point of view, and in the same practical manner.

86. But I am sorry to say that when we come to some of the other Thirty-nine Articles, it is very difficult to know what to do with them. Suppose, for instance, we take the Article on Predestination; it is rather difficult to know what to do with that Article. Let me read it to you, and then tell you how I think we ought to deal with it. I cannot too often beseech you to deal most tenderly and patiently with these forms of the past. You cannot do the Prayer-book or the Articles and Creeds justice, unless you look at them through the eyes of past generations. Remember, they have done an enormous amount of good; they have done their work, and they have also done a great deal of harm, and inflicted irreparable injuries on the religion of Christ. I think that any great good in this world is always accompanied