to all enjoyments. There have been times when men, to save their souls, would go forth into the wilderness or the desert. Such sacrifices are not needed in the present day; there is a very respectable measure of salvation to be won in cultivating a garden.
THE TROUBLES OF ORTHODOXY.
The thought of the age has now reached a point of development at which it has become almost impossible for any man of trained intellect to say that he receives on authority pure and simple any statement which admits or should admit of direct verification—for example, any statement dealing with matters of a historical or scientific character. This, if we mistake not, is the true secret of the troubles over doctrinal questions which have lately broken out in more than one division of the Christian Church. It is not so much that there has been a revolt against doctrines as such, as that a need is felt by thinking and cultivated men to seek for higher grounds of belief than those hitherto deemed sufficient. This has led to a certain generalization of belief, if we may so call it, which to less cultivated minds looks almost like an abandonment of the most essential doctrines of the Christian faith. Such a view of the matter, however, we hold to be entirely erroneous. The men we are thinking of—and Dr. Briggs and Bishop Potter may be taken as conspicuous examples—have the interests of religion and of their fellowmen at heart. They do not wish to force upon others a mode of looking at religious questions for which they are not prepared; but, for their own part, they find it necessary to restate the articles of their religious faith in terms which do not absolutely conflict with the principles of reason. This rectification of terms is imposed in part by the conditions of thought in the modern world, but to an equal extent at least by what may be called an inward expansion of the doctrines themselves. Who that holds any truth, scientific or other, does not feel impelled to seek for it continually a wider interpretation and application? Not otherwise is it, we hold, with religious doctrines; they have their own law of growth and development, and he who would arrest the process condemns them to atrophy and decay.
It is charged against both the scholars we have mentioned that they speak of the Bible as literature, and say that in determining its meaning we must keep in view the same class of considerations which would guide us in dealing with other literary monuments. There is nothing in this which need alarm any thoughtful person. It would be doing less than justice to the Bible to deny that many parts of it are literature of a very high order; and it would be doing less than justice to our own intellects to deny that the conception of the Bible as literature is a great help to its correct interpretation. Religion, in the view of such men as we have mentioned, does not depend upon the meaning given to a text or the acceptance or rejection of any specific statement of fact. There is nothing specially "religious" in believing that the Epistle to the Hebrews was written by St. Paul, or that the adventures of Jonah were precisely as described in the book that bears his name. Grant that the organ of religious apprehension is faith, yet each age must settle for itself the question as to what is the proper scope of faith and what of reason. In the present day reason can deal with many things which at one time were thought to be entirely within the domain of faith, and it would be rash to say that the frontier has even yet received its final rectification. If we rightly understand the position of Dr. Briggs and Bishop Potter, they
