natural occasion for it here presented to you, is to live in a very earnest fellowship with one another, with your fellow-students-as you are younger or weaker, with those who may lift you up-as you are older and stronger, with those whom you may encourage, animate, or preserve from danger. It is thus only that the fitting life of this College can be maintained by inward forces, and your own unity of life through the harmony of your present spirit and efforts with the offices that await you.

And, in conclusion, if any one should think that in anything I have been aiming too high, with too much of strain or pitch, he will not continue to think so if he will only call to mind the measure of sympathy with spiritual life which every one of us habitually asks for himself, as the proper benediction of our nature—even to the extent of the love of God, and the grace of Christ, and the fellowship of the Divine Spirit. And certainly it is a wonderful proof of the natural religiousness of man, that we can use words so high and comprehensive, implying such a conception of our spiritual capacity and place, without a feeling of being unreal or presumptuous.

X. Religion and Liberty.

BY JAMES DRUMMOND, LL.D.*

Οὗ δὲ τὸ πνεῦμα Κυρίου, ἐλευθερία.

THE

It

demand for free inquiry in matters of religion may spring from two very different sources. may arise from antagonism to the religious temperament, combined with an intellectual impatience which cleverly exposes the blemishes in an argument, but has no eye for those deeper problems that press upon the human heart, and still recur from age to age, though they may never receive from our limited thought a perfect and final solution. To one with this defective range of mind, religion is synonymous with superstition. He views it only as an engine of oppression, and an obstacle to the advancement of individual culture and social improvement; and if he condescends to study its history, he discerns in its persistent vitality merely a human phenomenon, and in the various forms which it has assumed in the past, nothing more than the ghosts of dead illusions. Its secret life is hidden from him; and, however acute may be his intelligence, he remains a shallow interpreter of the mysteries of faith. His zeal for liberty is consequently one-sided. He can

An Address delivered at the Opening of the Session, October, 1882, by the Rev. James Drummond, LL.D., Professor of Theology.

recognize impartiality only in assaults upon venerable beliefs; and while he cheers on a destructive criticism and applauds every crude innovation, he has nothing but contempt for the efforts of constructive genius or the holy calm of ancient piety. Nevertheless, his cry for freedom is good. Every mind has a right to the exercise of its own best powers, and, so long as it is honest, is capable of some divine work. Even a Secularist who blindly smites popular errors with the rude blows of vulgar declamation, may be an unconscious instrument of God, and help to break up the soil for some new and fairer growth of religion. The eccentricities of heresy are largely due to the hardness and tyranny of established creeds, and the demon of intolerance is the parent of reaction and denial. One who is animated by the Spirit of God has room in the largeness of his heart for men of every tendency of thought, and, instead of arrogantly repelling the Agnostic and the Atheist into a defiant and irrevocable unbelief, would recognise in them, too, the children of God, and through the meekness of wisdom and love nurture them into faith.

There is, however, a demand for liberty which grows from a nobler root, and expresses, not indifference or hostility towards religion, but a profound sense of its awful import. Religion is too inward and too sacred to be received as a matter of social custom, and its deepest life cannot be known till we enter into our own spirits, and exercise our own thought upon the visions, clear or shadowy, which we there discern. It is possible to assent to a whole system of dogmas, and yet never to have felt as a reality the touch of God upon our souls or the divine appeal of duty. The absence of doubt is

often only a synonym for the absence of faith; and even he who with a reverent despair shrinks from turning into the articulate language of earth the echoes of the voice of God which he has heard in the inner sanctuary, knows more of the spirit and power of religion than the stoutest defender of the creeds who has never got behind them and explored for himself the truths which they represent. A half truth which lives is better than a whole truth which is dead; and experience seems to prove, what we might anticipate from the general laws of mental growth, that where the hand of authority is heaviest, religion is apt to be superstitious and intelligence to be sceptical. We ask for freedom, then, as the condition of religious vitality, and deny the right of any fellow-man to step between the soul and God, and mar with his bungling fingers the work of the Holy Spirit. We remember, too, that Theology, the intellectual expression of religion, stands in relation to the whole circle of knowledge, and must therefore participate in the great movements of thought which arise from enlarged science and improved methods of investigation. The needed modifications cannot take place without a dangerous friction, unless the theologian be as unshackled in his department of research as the man of science is in his. Extreme pretensions on one side beget extreme denials on the other; but where liberty of thought is reverenced, denial is only the reverse side of larger affirmation. We cannot stop the rising tide of knowledge and reason, though by our foolish interference we may break and fret its majestic flow; and we ask that it should be allowed to come on in undisturbed obedience to the heavenly attraction.

The untrammelled exercise of our highest gifts cannot permanently dash any true ideal, but, by presenting it in fresh form to the eye of thought, will also transfigure it for the more reluctant spirit into a richer beauty and more commanding expression. Many a timid and pious worshipper may have wept for the departing household gods of Greece and Rome, and sighed that the earth had become profane when Olympus had lost its lord; yet the world did not sink into Atheism, and mountains were as sacred to Wordsworth as to Pindar. Nor will the universe become now the trampled and desecrated ruin of an ancient shrine because our limited conceptions have to stretch themselves to a newly-revealed magnificence, and watch the unfolding of eternal thought across immeasurable space and through untold ages. But the theologian must be free in order to meet frankly the new conditions amid which he is placed, and, by framing a Theology in harmony with the conclusions of science, save the religious sentiment from temporary eclipse. The cry for liberty, then, may be raised in the interests of religion itself. It may be the soul's response to a divine command to draw near and hear what the Spirit says, its pledge of fealty to the God of truth. One who takes this view must defend his freedom of thought as an inestimable possession; for it is to him the condition of spiritual wholeness and intellectual sincerity.

It is on this higher ground that our College rests its "principle of freely imparting theological knowledge without insisting on the adoption of particular theolgical doctrines" by either its professors or its students. It is not because it deems religion the hollow prop of unsub