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us to be as negative as we please, as cold and bare in our worship; but it renders available to us all the most elevating and glowing elements of the religious life. Though we be outwardly one of the smallest of religious bodies, we may really be of the largest body in our sympathies and our libraries; we may belong to the most numerous Church, have the fullest calendar of saints, the richest inheritance of the past, and the most glorious hopes for the future. I care little for that freedom which does not make us "riper, and richer, and more enriching." If the freest churches are not the most devout, and the most fruitful in blessings for mankind, they ought to be, and I believe they will be. And if the hope in freedom which animated John Milton were disappointed in his days, those grand words in which he expressed it still remain as a prophecy to be fulfilled, perhaps in our day or yours, with fresh inspiration in them for you and for me: "Now once again by all concurrence of signs, and by the general instinct of holy and devout men, as they daily and solemnly express their thoughts, God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church, even to the reforming of the Reformation itself."

XVI. Old Principles and New Hopes.

BY JAMES DRUMMOND, LL.D.*

IN

an Historical Memorandum, which was circulated in the summer, it was stated that our College would begin the present Session at Oxford "as an open faculty of Theology." This phrase reminds us that it is our avowed aim to serve, not the interests of any particular sect or of any exclusive system of dogma, but only those of Theology itself. The acquisition of theological knowledge, the exercise of theological thought, the attainment of theological truth, these are the objects which we are to pursue, without any extraneous obligations which can lead us astray from the path indicated by our studies themselves, or tempt us to disregard any utterance of the intellect, the conscience, or the spirit. When we say that teachers and students are alike free to go whithersoever the evidence, when carefully and impartially considered, appears to conduct them, we may seem to do no more than state the universal conditions of learning. In no subject but one would men consent to shut up their thought within the limits of prescription, and pledge themselves to teach nothing which could contravene the decisions of bygone centuries. Everywhere but in Theology it is recognised that freedom is the condition of progress, and that to tie up the living in the fetters of dead thought would be not only an insult to human faculty, but an outrage upon truth

*An Address delivered in connection with the Opening of the College at Oxford, October 25th, 1889, by the Rev. James Drummond, LL.D., Principal.

herself. In Theology alone it is supposed that freedom. will plunge men into error, and that he who owns no allegiance but to the God of Truth will follow the bewildering lights of carnal speculation, and lose himself in the quagmires of self-willed heresy. We do not share this apprehension. For more than a century we have maintained an open faculty of Theology, waiting for the time when the ancient Universities themselves would have an open faculty, which would not confine its ministrations to the demands of a particular church, but stretch out helping hands to the inquiring youth of the nation, and lead the way towards a more comprehensive fellowship.

It has been my duty on previous occasions to defend the principle on which our College is thus based, and I might naturally turn on the present occasion to some other theme; but as we are entering on a new period of our history, which more than formerly forces upon us some comparison with the methods of other colleges, we are compelled to recur to the subject, and I would offer a few rather miscellaneous thoughts suggested by the main characteristic of our inheritance, and by the novelty of the circumstances in which we are placed.

The existence, in juxtaposition, of several faculties of Theology representing different schools of thought—an arrangement which we should consider absurd in the case of the physical sciences-must be at least partly due to something in the nature of Theology itself; and it is not difficult to discover a combination of two causes which might seem to justify the present separations. Whatever underlying unity there may be in the religious sentiments, there are profound differences of

religious belief, and doctrines which are sharply attacked by one set of thinkers are defended with passionate love by another. Catholic and Puritan, Calvinistic and Unitarian Theology will not blend, and it is more than doubtful whether any purely intellectual process can ever settle the controversy between them. They represent varying types of spiritual tendency and experience, which, however we may conceive the details to be modified by culture and thought, would still express themselves in corresponding types of Theology, and reproduce the old antagonism under new names. The objects which religion contemplates do not lend themselves to exact observation and experiment, but, transcending as they do our finite faculties, they appear to the religious imagination with some vagueness of outline, and, disclosing different colours to varying kinds and degrees of spiritual sensitiveness, they supply different data to the interpreting intellect. If, however, the resulting systems of Theology were felt to be matters of speculation with which the active life had no concern, they would not divide men into hostile camps. But so far is this from being the case that they affect the very foundations of practical life, and in this respect Theology must be compared with politics rather than with natural science. It may be an entertaining academic or literary question, whether morality would be injured by the loss of faith; but every religious man must feel that the whole complexion of his life would be altered, and that a divine glory would fade from all his thoughts and deeds if the sun of religion set, and left his soul te shiver in cold and darkness before blind material force. Hence the overwhelming importance which men attach

to their religious convictions, and their refusal to allow them to be flung, as common things, into the open arena of discussion. By an almost general consent, doubt has become in religion what high treason is in politics, and those who dare to express a doubt are attacked as rebels, or at best tolerated as enemies within the separate enclosure of their own party.

Now, what is to be our attitude towards these things? What a gloomy contrast religion thus presents to science, which, by the united efforts of mankind, is building up a magnificent and symmetrical temple, where there is neither Jew nor Greek, Englishman nor German, but the same bounteous nature, rich unto all who seek her, is revealing her hidden treasures to every inquiring mind. That unnumbered millions of men, while they worship God in some fashion of their own, look upon Christians as infidels, does not greatly move us; for they live at a distance, and their doubt and scorn do not immediately affect us; but what follower of Christ does not feel a pang that Christendom is rent into a hundred sects, and the Church of God which Paul preached, with its many members in one body, lives on earth no more? In England, indeed, we are so accustomed to this state of things, and have made it so completely a part of our national policy, that we have learned to acquiesce in it, even if we do not admire it as an almost ideal creation of religious liberty; but in moments of reflection we cannot be content that Christianity should be permanently reduced to comparative impotence by the strife and emulation and exclusiveness of those who profess to love it, and we still long for the day when it will marshal its undivided forces to reduce the strongholds

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