why is this? Because nature, simplicity, and freedom are too often banished from the pulpit: because the preacher is doomed to tread a weary round of platitudes and truisms, which the world may not dispute, but does not, therefore, believe; and on themes where interest is intense, and thought ever active, and thousands would gladly hear a true and honest word, he must only speak what is prescribed. Why should not the teacher of religion go to the Bible, as he would go to any other ancient history and literature-simply to see it as it is, and to unfold the ideas which it contains-with that reverent feeling which the spirit of truthfulness always inspires, and that genuine humanity which cannot dwell on any record of our race without a heart of sympathy? Let the Psalms be explained and applied with that keen sense of beauty and delicate perception of high and holy sentiment, with which a scholar of taste and feeling would interpret the Odes of Pindar; let the picturesque touches and the curious traces of antique manners and belief be brought out with the same fidelity and unreservedness from the books of Samuel and Kings, as a classical commentator would use in expounding the histories of Herodotus; and hearers would soon begin to feel that there was a human element in these things with which they could not but sympathize, and because human, therefore divine. Upon an interest thus awakened, however little it might contribute to build up a doctrinal system, it would be easy to found those searching appeals to the common heart and conscience of our humanity, in which the divinest lessons of religion are constantly conveyed. Canon Stanley's Lectures on the Jewish Church furnish an admirable example of

the way in which the narratives of the Bible may be invested at once with all the interest of a romantic history and all the moral influence of a sermon. I am sure that here is a means of imparting new freshness and vitality to religious teaching, which may be employed with the greatest advantage by those who have acquired the competent learning and know how to use it with a reverent freedom. What I have said of the Old Testament applies as much to the New. We must get at its religion through its history,-not through the elaboration of doctrines separated from the circumstances under which they were delivered, and which unavoidedly modified the form of their enunciation,—but through fervent sympathy with the words and actions of men who were the vehicles of its living spirit and who made up its history. There is a still wider range of pulpit instruction than that which I have just indicated. It is right, in the first instance, to get the spirit of the Bible direct from the study of the Biblethe spirit of Christ from the history of Christ. But when we have seized that spirit and verified its authenticity, then must we apply it in the broadest way to all the interests and concerns of human life, bringing the whole world-its pleasures, its businesses, its politicswithin the scope and influence of Christianity, and resolutely effacing the artificial distinction between things secular and spiritual. Everything human has in it the essential matter of religion. We must establish our title to the Christian name, we must prove the identity of our mission with that of Christ and his apostles, by shewing that the same spirit which made them what they were, is still at work

H

among us; that it brings us, like them, into communion with the Living God; that it keeps open for us, as for them, the passage from earth to heaven;-that as, in that first age, God was in Christ reconciling an alienated world to Himself, so is He now in us, just in proportion to our fidelity and earnestness, giving us, as we are one in heart and aim with Christ, the same victory over the sin and evil of the world. Such appears to me the way in which the Gospel should be now preached, to make it still a living message to the world; and the very freedom with which an honest criticism compels us to use the primitive records of the Bible, instead of impairing its authority, only extends and deepens its moral and spiritual power,

VI. Theology in its Relation to Progressive

Knowledge.

BY JAMES MARTINEAU, D.D.*

THE College which resumes its work this day

professes to impart a special training for the Christian Ministry: and the Christian Minister is one who, in discipleship to Jesus Christ, aims to guide the reverence, to ennoble the conscience, and sustain the piety of men. To treat such an office as the object of a particular discipline, not simply for the character and affections, but for the intellect too, takes for granted, what has not always been admitted, that Theology is, in some sense, a Science, and admits of being methodically taught. This assumption would be false, if religious truth were simply a natural intuition, or a supernatural inspiration, in each individual mind. Just as Aristotle, in order to save Ethics for scientific treatment, dismisses the hypothesis that virtue is either a native faculty or a given feeling, and insists that it is a formed quality and developed order of preferences in the mind; t so, if our "schools of the prophets" are to have any justification, we must be prepared to shew that religion contains matter for teaching, and is neither inborn like

* An Address delivered at the Opening of the Session, October 9, 1865, by the Rev. James Martineau, D.D., Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy. + Eth. Nic. II. v.

eyesight, nor an arbitrary visitant like a trance or dream for, in the one case, training would be superfluous, and, in the other, impossible. All teaching is communication from mind to mind: it implies that one mind may know more than another, and the same mind more at a later time than at an earlier. And, using the inequality as instrument for the progress, it further assumes that teacher and taught, instead of being abandoned to lonely inspiration,-" words that cannot be uttered,"—have a common medium of thought and mutual intelligence, and can meet, when they speak together, upon the same real objects. As every Medical school takes for granted, by its very existence, that the animal body is real, and its physiological constitution permanent and cognizable; as every Law school takes for granted that human society is constant, and throws its self-regulating forces into a machinery but little variable; so does a Theological school assume that God and his relations to man are objective realities, perpetually there and approachable by human faculties. Two things therefore, with regard to the nature of religion, are denied by every such institution as this: (1) it is not a mere natural instinct; (2) it is not a mere supernatural grace. And two things about it are affirmed: (1) it presents something real and permanent for the intellect to hold by; (2) it has its undetermined and progressive lines, on which it is the business of the teacher to move, and mark the fixed points as they

emerge.

Without this mixed composition of the constant and the variable, it may be doubted whether, intellectually, religion would retain its interest at all. Were it nothing