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recurring epochs of infidel assaults upon it, instead of despairing of its progress, will rather admire the sublimity with which Christianity holds on its way, like the sun emerging undimmed from the earthly mists which temporarily obscure it. If we are living in an epoch of skepticism, such epochs have occurred before and are always transient.

3. The recurrence of epochs of skepticism is incidental to the progress of Christianity. This is evident so soon as we rightly understand the true idea, aim and methods of Christianity, and the facts pertaining to humanity which condition its progress.

Its effects are not consummated by resistless almightiness, but by God's gracious influence on men free to consent or to resist-influences of wisdom and love to enlighten them in the knowledge of the truth and to draw them by their own willing consent to conform their character and lives to it. Hence Christianity presents itself anew for acceptance or rejection to every generation and to every man. Hence the conflict which marked the introduction of Christianity is renewed in every age. In the nature of the case Christianity cannot become a consummated effect, fixed unchangeably for all time. In its very nature it is the offer of God's grace which every man in every generation must receive or reject; it is the presence in human history of the divine influences of truth and love to which every man in every generation must consent or refuse to conform his life. The conflict of divine wisdom and love against human ignorance, error and sin must continue so long as man remains a rational free agent, the subject of ignorance, error and sin, and so long as God remains the perfect Reason, the perfect Wisdom and Love energizing in human history to redeem men from error and sin and bring them into harmony with his own wisdom and love. Hence the significance of the scriptural expression that the Spirit of God "abides" among men, "striving" through all the courses of human history to accomplish for men the wise and benignant ends of his redeeming love.

A similar conclusion is necessary if we consider the progress of man in the knowledge of nature, in industrial inventions, in political institutions, in the adjustment of the various relations of men in society. So far as progress involves the abandonment of error and the correction of mistakes, it presupposes skepticism in its better meaning. New knowledge in any department of life makes it necessary to inquire how that new knowledge and the modification of the conduct of life in harmony with it are to be adjusted to the unchanging truth and grace of God, and to the reign of the perfect reason and its perfect wisdom and love. Skepticism in its better sense marks, not merely a transient, but also a transitional state to a larger and wiser knowledge of the truth. And it is not strange that, in such a period, many drop into the baser

skepticism, into the abyss which Carlyle calls the Everlasting No, and deny altogether the reign of Reason, the supremacy and continuous presence and energy of absolute wisdom and love in the conduct of the universe.

That the present epoch of skepticism is transitional to a larger, purer and more efficient faith I cannot doubt. Precisely what the change will be cannot yet be accurately foreseen. "We wait to see the future come," not in fear or despair, but in faith in Christianity as the religion of promise, always throwing forward into the coming time the great light of the Messianic promise, as old as Abraham, as divine as the living Christ, as continuous as the presence of God's Spirit, that the future shall be better than the past. But so much as this seems already assured that human thought can never go back to the Deistic conception of God as a mechanician, which carried to its logical results gives us the Epicurean divinity, shut out from all action in the universe; nor to the conception of Duns Scotus, which has vitiated theology so extensively, that God is supreme will or arbitrary power instead of being supreme Reason energizing everywhere; nor to the attempt to carry theological speculations to the remotest and minutest ramifications of possible inference and to set down precise answers to every conceivable question. And we confidently expect that theology will turn more and more to the living Christ and inspire that love to man and practical endeavor for human welfare which characterized the earthly life of Christ, are set forth for the teaching of all nations in the incarnation, and declared by him to be, at the final judgment, the test of character of those to whom his gospel may come: "Inasmuch as ye have done it, or done it not, to one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it, or done it not, unto me."

Our Saviour himself teaches, not only that his kingdom grows, but that it grows by epochs: "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." These are epochs in the growth of the grain; not that it grows only in these epochs, but that its continuous growth naturally manifests itself in them. And our Lord teaches that the growth of his kingdom is accordant with the same law of growth.

4. It should also be noticed that Christian progress is a vital growth, destructive only of the erroneous or effete, retentive of the truth. The true ideas of Hebrew, Greek and Roman thought are still forces in Christian civilization; and so Christian truth must live and work in the progress of man forever.

5. The common representations of the decay of Christian faith at the present day are greatly exaggerated. Carlyle describes the age as "destitute of faith and yet afraid of skepticism." The fact that the age recoils with a shudder from the plunge into atheism, which it sees

would be indeed, "shooting Niagara," is rather an evidence of faith. Contrast the eagerness with which the French Revolutionists plunged into Atheism and gloried in it. And it is far from being true that this age is destitute of faith. I cannot here investigate the question. But judging from the growth of the churches, compared with that of the population, the activity of the churches in propagating Christianity at home and abroad, the multiplicity of beneficent enterprizes, the energy with which they are carried forwards, and the great sums of money given to aid them, the amount of thought, reading and discussion of religious subjects, the publication of sermons in newspapers and otherwise, the fact that the age is mainly occupied with questions of Christian civilization, such as the political rights of man, the emancipation and subsequent education of serfs and slaves, the condition of the laboring classes, and the like social questions, the suppression of drunkenness and other moral questions, I think it safe to say that Christianity was never more widely, powerfully and beneficently efficient in the world than it is to-day.

If religion has dropped from its outward manifestation something of its sanctimoniousness, if its speech is no longer in the cant which used sometimes to be called "the language of Canaan," if it turns a less forbidding front to the joyousness of youth and is less in the habit of identifying amusement with worldliness, it may not on that account be less imbued with the self-sacrificing love which spends and is spent in the service of man or with the courageous and overcoming faith which waits always on God for inspiration, guidance and strength. So that we may be beginning to realize in the present what Matthew Arnold sadly sighed for as a bare possibility of the future:

"Years hence perhaps may dawn an age

More fortunate, alas, than we,
Which without hardness may be sage,

And gay without frivolity."

CHAPTER XIV.

THE SENSIBILITIES: THE CONSTITUTION OF MAN AS SUSCEPTIBLE OF MOTIVES AND EMOTIONS.

62.

Definition and Classification.

THUS far I have been examining the intellectual constitution of man. As the result of these investigations we have reached the conclusion that man is capable of empirical, rationalistic or noetic, and theological science; that these are grades of knowledge necessary in attaining knowledge of all that may be known of anything; that they are reciprocally dependent and necessarily in harmony; that in theology all science finds its completeness, its unity and its consummation; and that the denial of the reality of theological knowledge involves the denial of the reality of all knowledge. I proceed now to consider the constitution of man as susceptible of motives and emotions, that is, the Feelings or Sensibilities.

I. The Sensibility is man's constitutional capacity of motives and emotions. The motives and emotions themselves are called Sensibilities or Feelings. The feelings which are impulses to action are called motives. The emotions are simple joy or sorrow, pleasure or pain, which do not impel to action. If I may use a figure derived from mechanics, motives are dynamic, moving the man to action; emotions are static conditions in which the man simply enjoys or sorrows, feels pleasure or pain. For example, hunger, which is the appetite for food, is a motive to get food and eat it; the pleasure of eating it and of the satisfaction of the appetite is an emotion. The same distinction pertains to all the sensibilities.

II. The sensibilities are of two classes, the Natural or Psychical, and the Rational.

The Rational Sensibilities presuppose the exercise of the Intuitive Reason. They pertain to the fundamental realities or ideas of Reason: Truth, Right or Law, Ideal Perfection, the Good estimated by reason. as of true worth, and the Absolute Being or God. Motives and emotions of this class are impossible in a being not endowed with the intuitive Reason.

The Natural or Psychical Sensibilities do not imply the exercise of in

tuitive reason, but are possible to irrational sentient beings. They are common to man and the brutes. All of them may probably be found in the higher orders of brutes.

Both classes of sensibilities are constitutional in man, and arise spontaneously and involuntarily when the appropriate object and occasion are present.

III. Among the natural sensibilities are the following:

I. The instincts, or impulses without intelligence to do what intelligence, if it existed, would require. Such is the impulse of a newborn lamb or babe to suck; or of a young fish-hawk striking a fish, doing what to intelligence would require the calculation of distance, of refraction of light, and of the motion of the hawk and the fish.

2. The impulse to exertion with no object ulterior to the exertion of the faculties and the counter impulse to rest. The impulse to exertion impels children to skip and jump, and to constant intellectual activity. It is the impulse to play. Play is exertion of the faculties with no end ulterior to the exertion itself; and the exertion gives pleasure because it is the satisfaction of a natural impulse. Work, on the contrary, the exertion of the faculties for some end ulterior to the exertion, whether the exertion itself is agreeable or not. Riddles, puzzles, conundrums, chess, and similar games of skill are intellectual play.

This is sometimes called the Radical impulse. It is this in our constitution which makes constant employment necessary, and afflicts us with ennui when we have nothing to do. It is this which makes men dissatisfied with positions in which they cannot put all their faculties into exercise and find full scope for all their energies. It is this which prevents men from stopping business when they have accumulated wealth, and impels them to new enterprises and new risks. When this impulse is weak in a young man, we say he has no ambition, no enterprise. Much that is commonly ascribed to covetousness, or selfish ambition, or other sinister motives, may often be more truly ascribed to this radical impulse. It becomes complicated with other motives, but it always remains one of the deepest and most constant springs of human action.

3. Appetite and desires: as hunger and thirst, the desire of society, of power, of esteem, of property, of knowledge. A desire always implies uneasiness in a sense of want, and an impulse to exertion to get the object desired. Joy in getting the object and sorrow in missing it, are consequent on the desire of the object and would be impossible without it.

4. Natural affection; altruistic natural sensibilities, terminating on another and not on self. Desire is a sense of want impelling the person to get something for himself; affection is a sense of fullness impelling him to impart something to another.

Natural affections are of two kinds: affections of affinity or sympa

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