philosophy and theology by the toil of the brain. But meantime, if we are faithful the great truths of morality and religion, the deep sentiment of love to man and love to God, are perceived intuitively, and by instinct, as it were, though our theology be imperfect and miserable. The theological notions of Abraham, to take the story as it stands, were exceedingly gross, yet a greater than Abraham has told us Abraham desired to see my day, saw it, and was glad. Since these notions are so fleeting, why need we accept the commandment of men as the doctrine of God?
This transitoriness of doctrines appears in many
instances, of which two may be selected for a more attentive
consideration. First, the doctrine respecting the origin
and authority of the Old and Now Testament. There has
been a time when men were burned for asserting doctrines
of natural philosophy which rested on evidence the most
incontestable, because those doctrines conflicted with
sentences in the Old Testament. Every word of that Jewish
record was regarded as miraculously inspired, and therefore
as infallibly true. It was believed that the Christian
religion itself rested thereon, and must stand or fall with
the immaculate Hebrew text. He was deemed no small
sinner who found mistakes in the manuscripts. On the
authority of the written word man was taught to believe
impossible legends, conflicting assertions; to take fiction
for fact, a dream for a miraculous revelation of God, an
Oriental poem for a grave history of miraculous events,
a collection of amatory idyls for a serious discourse
“touching the mutual love of Christ and the Church;”
they have been taught to accept a picture sketched by
some glowing Eastern imagination, never intended to be
taken for a reality, as a proof that the Infinite God spoke
in human words, appeared in the shape of a cloud, a
flaming bush, or a man who ate, and drank, and vanished
into smoke; that he gave counsels to-day, and the opposite
to-morrow; that he violated his own laws, was angry, and
was only dissuaded by a mortal man from destroying at
once a whole nation—millions of men who rebelled against
their leader in a moment of anguish. Questions in
philosophy, questions in the Christian religion, have been
