THE

THEOLOGICAL REVIEW:

A JOURNAL

ОР

RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND LIFE.

“Our fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is
the place where men ought to worship."

*

"The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jeru-
salem, worship the Father.
But the hour cometh, and now is, when
the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth for the
Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a Spirit: and they that worship
Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." (John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.)

VOL. X. Nos. XL-XLIII.

LONDON:

WILLIAMS & NORGATE, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN,
AND AT 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.

MANCHESTER: JOHNSON & RAWSON, 89, MARKET STREET.

1873.

t-westly 16-17-39

THE

THEOLOGICAL REVIEW.

No. XL-JANUARY, 1873.

I. THE SENTIMENT OF RELIGION.

IT may be asserted without exaggeration that at the present day all systems of religious belief received among us are exposed to a trial such as, until a very recent period, few of us imagined to be possible. Books, long revered as the express. utterances of the Deity, have been reduced by critical inquiry either to collections of ill-attested traditions, or to compositions which can escape the charge of forgery only by taking refuge under the wings of poetry. The sublimest flights of an imagination once considered supernatural, dwindle into insignificance before the imaginations of size, and distance, and movement, built up by astronomical research upon the study and even the observation of infinitesimals; while our imagination of realized time has been widened by geology to a magnitude where the notion that. "a day of the Lord is as a thousand years" shrivels into nothing. At such a time, when the outer world seems in danger of overwhelming, by our perceptions of its durability and vastness, the inner world, the home of religious faith, it seems desirable to take stock of the essential contents of this inner world-that universe whence, as Goethe has said, in one of those little poems which wed profound philosophical insight to pithy verse, "springs the laudable custom of the nations, that each one calls what he finds best and worthiest, God-yea, his God; to Him gives over heaven. and earth, Him fears, and, if possible, loves."* What is the * Im Innern ist ein Universum auch ; Daher der Völker löblicher Gebrauch Dass jeglicher das Beste was er kennt, Es Gott, ja seinen Gott benennt: Ihm Himmel und Erden übergiebt, Ihn fürchtet, und, wo möglich, liebt. Gott, Gemüth und Welt.