that goodly pearls of truth may have escaped the observation of too dim an eye. But in regard to an inherited veneration we need have no alarm. No system of life and thought can be understood by one who stands unsympathetically outside it; and this, as we shall see, is peculiarly true of Christianity. Love is the great interpreter; and if to the shrewd critic it sometimes appears to press beyond the outward facts, it is only that it pierces to the divine ideal, and sees the imperishable truth behind the transient form.

In entering on our subject, the first question which presents itself relates to the source of our information. Are we to confine ourselves to the teaching of Jesus, and believe that Christianity is to be found there complete and unalterable? Or are we to include the Apostolic age, and maintain that Christ's immediate disciples were authorized exponents of his doctrine, but that the living word of God died with the last of the Apostles? Or are we to cast our survey down the ages, and suppose that the original inspiration is still unexhausted, and brings new messages of truth and light to those who have ears to hear? Our answer to these questions must depend on our conception of

SOURCE OF INFORMATION.

7

the essential character of Christianity, whether it is primarily a doctrine, or a law, or a mode of interior and spiritual life.

There are certain great sayings in the New Testament which may help to determine this problem :"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven."1 "Whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, he is my brother, and sister, and mother." 2 "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples,

if

ye have love one to another."3 "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus made me free from the law of sin and death; if any man hath not the

Spirit of Christ, he is none of his,

are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God."4 "Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love."5

"We all, with unveiled

face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are transformed into the same image from glory to glory,

even as from the Lord the Spirit."

1 Matt. vii. 21.

3 John xiii. 35.

5 1 Cor. xiii. 13.

"Pure religion

2 Matt. xii. 50.

4 Rom. viii. 2, 9, 14.

6 2 Cor. iii. 18.

and undefiled before our God and Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." "Ye may become partakers of the Divine nature."2 know we that we abide in him, and he in us,

"Hereby

because

he hath given us of his Spirit.. He that abideth

... •

in love, abideth in God, and God abideth in him."3 These are only samples of sayings with similar import, and have been taken, not from a single book, but from several writers of markedly different temperament and intellectual tendency. Their common underlying sentiment is expressed with varying degrees of fulness and force; but they all point to something different from a law of duty or of ritual, which it would be possible mechanically to obey, and from a doctrine to which it would be possible to give a lifeless assent. They imply an inward experience of life with God of a peculiar and vivid kind; the consciousness of a spirit breathed over the disordered passions and desires, and reducing them to the peace and harmony of love. Whatever may be its source, whatever its channel of communication, whatever the implicit thought on which it rests, whatever the duties or the worship 2 2 Peter i. 4. 3 1 John iv. 13, 16.

1 James i. 27.

CHANGES IN DOCTRINE AND RITUAL.

9

which it requires, I regard the presence of this mighty and transforming Spirit as the fundamental and permanent fact in Christianity.

The doctrine and ritual of Christendom have undergone momentous changes, development or corruption, according to the point of view of the observer, and at this day present themselves in irreconcilable variety; and nevertheless we recognize in Christianity a certain self-identity running through the altered ages, and extending over the most discordant sects. The belief of the first generation that Jesus would speedily return as the triumphant Messiah to establish upon earth a kingdom of the saints, though it nerved the efforts of the missionary, gave point and force to the preacher's exhortation, and consoled the martyr amid the pangs of death, faded away under the teachings of history; and yet the Gospel lost none of its earnestness and power. Justin Martyr assures us that those who were in all respects orthodox Christians knew that there would be a resurrection of the flesh, and a thousand years in a restored and adorned Jerusalem;1 but knowledge passes away, and this immature conception yielded to larger and more spiritual views.

1 Dial. 80.

Nevertheless Christianity remained, and only increased in strength by adapting itself to changing intellectual conditions, and infusing itself into every variety of temperament. It refuses to be bound by the ignorance of man; and when we have tied it up with the most ingenious knots of ceremony and dogma, it often slips away, leaving us in that arrogant self-righteousness which was and is its most deadly foe, and robing the heretic in the sweet simplicity and gracious lowliness of Christ. Where, then, are we to find that element which binds together Catholic and Protestant, Quaker and Ritualist, Calvinist and Arminian, Unitarian and Trinitarian, in the unity of a common name, and marks them as belonging to the same religious genus? We can find it only in the quality of the inward life. We may describe this as the life of Christ within the heart, as a life of saintly fellowship with God, as the life of sonship, as the incorporation of the Divine life in humanity. This is what its greatest teachers have recognized as its essence. Whatever else might admit of dispute, it was an undeniable fact of experience that it had entered as a new power into their lives; and whatever importance they may have attached to sacrament or dogma, the end in view was always the