a considerable period the main body of the English Church, ignoring the philosophy and the history of the Continent, clung with tenacity to obsolete conceptions, and failed not only to further the progress of Scriptural study, but even to avail themselves of the sources of knowledge which other Churches so largely used.

Fifty years ago the Shibboleth of popular orthodoxy was the indiscriminate anathema of "German theology." If in later days the Church of England has made an immense advance, the progress is perhaps more due to Samuel Taylor Coleridge than to any ordained or professional theologian.1 He helped to deliver English Churchmen from their ignorance of German literature, and their terror of German speculation. In his Aids to Reflection he sketched out a philosophy of religion in which he combined the highest teaching of the best English theologians-of men like Hooker, and Jeremy Taylor, and Archbishop Leighton-with influences derived from the Neoplatonic studies of his youth, and with truths which he had learnt from Kant and Schelling in his maturer years. In his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit he was the first to show his fellow countrymen 2 with convincing illustrations and impassioned eloquence that the Rabbinic, mediaeval and post-Reformation dogma of inspiration could only lead to irreverence or casuistry. He taught them to acquire their estimate of Scripture from the contents and from the claims of Scripture itself, not from the theories and inventions of men respecting it. He proved how clearly a Christian thinker could see that the various books of the Bible greatly differ from each other in value, and could yet honour the Bible as deeply as the Apostles

1 In his later years (1816-1834) Coleridge more or less entirely abandoned poetry for philosophy and theology. His Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit were not published till 1840, six years after his death.

2 Archdeacon Hare, Professor Maurice, Sterling, and Cardinal Newman all testify to the influence of Coleridge, nor will their estimate be weakened by the characteristically splenetic sneers of Carlyle (see J. S. Mill's Dissertations: Dr. Hort in Cambridge Essays for 1856; Rémusat, Rev. des Deux Mondes, October, 1856; Dr. A. S. Farrar's Bampton Lectures, pp. 475-479; Rigg's Mod. Anglican Theol. 1857; Principal Tulloch on Coleridge as a Thinker in the Nineteenth Century for January, 1885).

Influence of Coleridge.

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themselves. He showed how possible it was to love the Bible as a book which contains the word of God, and yet to read it as one of the most unimpeachably orthodox of German theologians says that it should be read-" as a book which, with all its Divinity, with its divine origin and divine ends, is still written by human hands for human beings, for a human eye, a human heart, a human understanding; as a book which, though written for all times, even for eternity, still refers to certain times and occasions, and must from these given times and occasions be interpreted." It was for every reason which made him prize and revere the Scriptures -prize, revere, and love them beyond all other books-that he rejected as no longer tenable a theory which falsified the whole body of their harmonies and symmetrical gradations, and "turned their breathing organism into a colossal Memnon's head with a hollow passage for a voice."

It was this spirit which animated many great English teachers in modern days. To it were due the sermons of Arnold and of Robertson, of Whately and Thirlwall, of Hare and Kingsley, which have been so rich in the noblest influences alike upon the young and the old. It was in this spirit that one whom the foremost of living statesmen has rightly called "a spiritual splendour" Frederic Denison Maurice laboured for years amid religious obloquy and opposition, leaving to the English Church the legacy not only of writings full of thought, beauty, and tenderness, but also of a stainless. example and a holy life. It was this spirit which has given us in the Greek Testament of Alford, in the dictionaries of the Bible and of Christian biography, and in some recent commentaries, worthy monuments of English candour and erudition. It was this spirit which shone forth in Milman's History of the Jews and History of Christianity. It was this spirit which enabled the vivid historic genius of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley to recall before us the stately and heroic figures, the stirring and memorable scenes, of Scripture history, till the pages of Genesis, Exodus, Judges, and the

1 Hagenbach, Germ. Rationalism, p. 192.

Kings, once more thrilled with the life and teemed with the instructiveness of which they had been deprived by an irrational conventionality. These men during all their days had the honour to endure the beatitude of malediction. They were pursued by the attacks of no small portion of the clergy, and of those who called themselves the religious world. But they handed on the torch of sincerity and truth. If their works were received at the time of their appearance with vehement dislike and strong denunciation, as regards the dead at any rate the opposition is silenced, the denunciation has rolled away into idle echoes. They have taken their place among the acknowledged worthies of their Church and nation, and in spite of derision and reproach," how are they numbered among the children of God and their lot among the saints!

Our

And so far from being disturbed or shaken by their free, glad, and earnest investigations, it is by means of those very investigations that the Bible has triumphed over keen ridicule, over charges of fiction, over naturalist explanations, over mythical theories, over destructive criticism. By the combined labours of many learned men, the spirit not of fear but of love, and a sound mind, has given us a Revised Version, which-after having been received as once the Septuagint, and the Vulgate, and Luther's version, and our own Authorised Version were received, with dislike and suspicion-is quietly but surely winning its way into honour and reverence. own day has given us comments on St. Paul's Epistles, and on the Gospel and Epistles of St. John, superior in some respects to any which have yet been produced in any age or any branch of the church of Christ. The history which we have been considering is not exclusively a history of darkness and of mistake; it is a history also of the triumph of light over darkness, of truth over error, of faith and freedom over tyranny and persecution. It is a history of the dawning light and of the broadening day. By the grace of God the majority have not been too obstinate to unlearn the errors, or to pluck up the deeply-rooted prejudices of the past, and hence in a

Church as courageous, as active, as rich in all good works as in any age of the past, we can still say with thankful hearts, Manet immota Fides.

In that Church a living piety was kindled once more by the Evangelical revival; the spirit of reverence, and the sense of historic continuity were renewed by the Oxford movement; and the connexion with all that was progressive in the learning, science, and culture of the age, was maintained in other schools of large tolerance and comprehensive charity. The mercy of God has given us many outpourings of the Pentecost. Unless it be through our own guilt, our blindness, our formalism, our religious factions, our retrogression along the steps of our Exodus from the land of intellectual darkness and spiritual thraldom we may trust that the golden candlestick of our Church in England will never be removed.

But that we may dare to encourage such a hope, something more is needful than that we learn to despise the wrangling pettiness of party spirit, the spurious and dishonest criticism of party journalism, and the idle reiteration of party shibboleths. We shall never rightly understand the Holy Scriptures unless we keep alive among us the Spirit of Freedom and the Spirit of Progress. It is necessary that we should read the handwriting of God written upon the palace-walls of all tyrannies, whether secular or sacerdotal. It is necessary that we should learn that "there is nothing so dangerous, because there is nothing so revolutionary and convulsive, as the strain to keep things fixed, when all the world is by the very law of its creation in eternal progress." It is necessary that we should read in God's Bible of History that "the cause of all the evil in the world may be traced to that deadly error of human indolence and corruption, that it is our duty to preserve, and not to improve." 1 It is above all essential that we should see the hand of God in current events, and understand the thoughts which He is expressing by the movements in the midst of which we live. Since the days of the Fathers

1 Dr. Arnold.

and the Schoolmen every sphere of knowledge has been almost immeasurably dilated, and many conceptions regarded as irrefragable have been utterly revolutionised. Again and again have God's other revelations flashed upon the sacred page a light which has convicted its most positive interpreters of fundamental errors. Nine years before the Confession of Augsburg (1530) Magellan had sailed round the world; three years before the death of Luther (1546) Copernicus had published his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. The Synod of Dort was sitting, and Gerhard was elaborating his Loci during the very years in which Galileo and Kepler were making their discoveries. Newton was discovering the law of gravitation while Calovius was writing his Biblia Illustrata. Since the phases of Venus were revealed to the telescope of Galileo we have learnt the existence of infinite space thronged with innumerable worlds. Since fossil bones were submitted to the prophetic eye of Cuvier we have learnt that infinite time has been peopled with innumerable existences. The search into caves and river-beds has shown us the immemorial ⚫ relics and flint implements of primeval man. The discoveries of philology have laid open to us the earliest records of his language. A scientific observer, second perhaps to none since the days of Newton, after having been treated all his life long as an enemy to religion, was laid, but three years ago, in his honoured grave in Westminster Abbey. His theories, which have been scores of times denounced from this very pulpit, are now not only accepted by the great majority of scientific men throughout the world, but have been admitted by many leading theologians to be in no sense irreconcilable with sacred truths. Entirely apart from his central, and as yet unproven hypothesis, he has illustrated the necessity for scientific methods, and has furnished us with new and startling conceptions of the order, development, and maintenance of living organisms. It would be idle to suppose that discoveries so vast and hypotheses so splendid should have no effect on the deepest beliefs of men. The students of science have exercised a mighty influence