three chief products of the Greek mind-Rhetoric, Logic, and Metaphysics. I venture to claim to have shown that a large part of what are sometimes called Christian doctrines, and many usages which have prevailed and continue to prevail in the Christian Church, are in reality Greek theories and Greek usages changed in form and colour by the influence of primitive Christianity, but in their essence Greek still. Greece lives; not only its dying life in the lecture-rooms of Universities, but also with a more vigorous growth in the Christian Churches. It lives there, not by virtue of the survival within them of this or that fragment of ancient teaching, and this or that fragment of an ancient usage, but by the continuance in them of great modes and phases of thought, of great drifts and tendencies, of large assumptions. Its ethics of right and duty, rather than of love and selfsacrifice; its theology, whose God is more metaphysical than spiritual-whose essence it is important to define; its creation of a class of men whose main duty in life is that of moral exhortation, and whose utterances are not the spontaneous outflow of a prophet's soul, but the artistic periods of a rhetorician; its religious ceremonial, with the darkness and the light, the initiation and the solemn enactment of a symbolic drama; its conception of intellectual assent rather than of moral earnestness as the basis of religious society-in all these, and the ideas that underlie them, Greece lives.

It is an argument for the divine life of Christianity that it has been able to assimilate so much that was at first alien to it. It is an argument for the truth of much of that which has been assimilated, that it has been

strong enough to oust many of the earlier elements. But the question which forces itself upon our attention as the phenomena pass before us in review, is the question of the relation of these Greek elements in Christianity to the nature of Christianity itself. The question is vital. Its importance can hardly be over-estimated. It claims a foremost place in the consideration of earnest men. The theories which rise out of it are two in number. It is possible to urge, on the one hand, that Christianity, which began without them-which grew on a soil whereon metaphysics never throve-which won its first victories over the world by the simple moral force of the Sermon on the Mount, and by the sublime influence of the life and death of Jesus Christ, may throw off Hellenism and be none the loser, but rather stand out again before the world in the uncoloured majesty of the Gospels. It is possible to urge that what was absent from the early form cannot be essential, and that the Sermon on the Mount is not an outlying part of the Gospel, but its sum. It is possible to urge, on the other hand, that the tree of life, which was planted by the hand of God Himself in the soil of human society, was intended from the first to grow by assimilating to itself whatever elements it found there. It is possible to maintain that Christianity was intended to be a development, and that its successive growths are for the time at which they exist integral and essential. It is possible to hold that it is the duty of each succeeding age at once to accept the developments of the past, and to do its part in bringing on the developments of the future.

Between these two main views it does not seem possible

if

to find a logical basis for a third. The one or the other must be accepted, with the consequences which it involves. But whether we accept the one or the other, it seems clear that much of the Greek element may be abandoned. On the former hypothesis, it is not essential; on the latter, it is an incomplete development and has no claim to permanence. I believe the consideration of this question, and practical action on the determination of it, to be the work that lies before the theologians of our generation. I claim for the subject which we have been considering an exceptional importance, because it will enable us, on the one hand we accept the theory that the primitive should be permanent, to disentangle the primitive from the later elements, and to trace the assumptions on which these later elements are based; and if on the other hand we adopt the theory of development, it will enable us, by tracing the lines of development, to weld the new thoughts of our time with the old by that historical continuity which in human societies is the condition of permanence. I am not unaware that there are many who deprecate the analysis of Christian history, and are content to accept the deposit. There has been a similar timidity in regard to the Bible. It seemed a generation ago as though the whole fabric of belief depended on the acceptance of the belief that Genesis is the work of a single author. The timidity has virtually ceased. The recognition of the fact that the Book of Genesis was not made, but grew, so far from having been a danger to religion, has become a new support of the faith. So it will be with the analysis of Christian doctrine and of Christian history; and therefore I am earnest in urging its study. For though the

Lectures are ended, the study of the subject has only begun. I have ventured as a pioneer into comparatively unexplored ground: I feel that I shall no doubt be found to have made the mistakes of a pioneer; but I feel also the certainty of a pioneer-who after wandering by devious paths through the forest and the morass, looks out from the height which he has reached upon the fair landscape and speaking as one who has so stood and so looked, I am sure that you will find the country to be in the main what I have described it to be, and that you will find also that it is but the entrance to a still fairer landscape beyond. For though you may believe that I am but a dreamer of dreams, I seem to see, though it be on the far horizon-the horizon beyond the fields which either we or our children will tread-a Christianity which is not new but old, which is not old but new, a Christianity in which the moral and spiritual elements will again hold their place, in which men will be bound together by the bond of mutual service, which is the bond of the sons of God, a Christianity which will actually realize the brotherhood of men, the ideal of its first communities.