It is with Christianity, in this respect at least, as it is with the sunshine. That may be hidden behind thick clouds. It may seem grotesquely or hideously tinted, by steaming vapors rising to intercept it from forges and factories, from chemical laboratories, or from the noisome reek of slums. But these pass away, and the sunshine continues: the same to-day, when we untwist its strand into the crimson, gold, and blue, as when it fell on the earliest bowers and blooms of the earth; of a unity too perfect to be impaired by assault, of a purity too essential to contract de filement from what in nature is most foul. So Christianity, which has certainly been variously tinted and refracted in the representations which men have made of it, continues, nevertheless, in its spiritual substance, in whatever it has of an irradiating beauty or of vitalizing force, in these primitive writings; and it still will shine from them, in all that it possesses of grace or glory, till man's labor on earth is ended. As it was at the beginning, and will be to the end, the religion remains manifested to the world by Gospels and Epistles. They did not create, but they certain. ly represent it. Each student is to search them, with candid attention, to find it for himself, with a practical certainty than which the scientific should not be more sure; and as long as these writings continue to be read, the Christianity which preceded them, which gave them form, which has been the chief element of their power, and which still becomes articulate through them, will not cease to be discernible by man.

The system of religion thus anciently introduced to the knowledge of men, and thus preserved and presented to us in its original meaning and spirit in these remarkable writings, has been affirmed from the outset, is now believed by multitudes of persons, to be of Divine origin and authority: to be so in a sense so paramount and unique that no other system known among men can claim similar origin or an equal authority. It is not affirmed, certainly, that everything in other religions has been untrue: that they may not have had in some respects an eminent value, as coming from minds greatly gifted, and from hearts pervaded by devout and discerning religious feeling. But it is affirmed that this system alone is so fully representative of the Divine Mind, revealing itself to and through the human spirit,

that it, and it only, has a complete and peremptory claim to be believed and to be obeyed, whatever difficulties its disciples may encounter, whatever dangers, shames, or deaths, they may have on its behalf to face.

This is not an impression among the ignorant or the credulous alone, or among those practically indifferent to the subject, whose traditional impressions hardly rise to the dignity of definite convictions. It is the matured and assured belief of many of the most thoughtful, cultured, free-spirited of men, whose attainment and aspiration are exceptionally high, by whom the question thus determined is recognized as one of superlative significance, and in whom this affirmative persuasion has oftentimes been slowly produced, sometimes against great inward reluctance, and only after a searching scrutiny of arguments and proofs. At the close of all, as the crowning result, they have this conviction: that the Christianity implicitly contained in all the Bible, but specially declared in the New Testament, it, and it only, comes to man as the religion designed for him by God: that it issued from the sovereign wisdom and the unshadowed goodness of the Infinite Mind, and has upon it the authority of that; that it is, therefore, to be the universal religion of the world; while he who now trusts it, trusts the same intelligence and holy will which set stars in their courses, and hung upon them the pendulous planets. In the judgment of such minds, Christianity is an authentic instruction given to mankind by the Author of the Universe, as to what in the highest departments of moral life it is needful for men to believe and to do. It is the one system of religion on earth for which the eternal creative Spirit from whom the spirit of man is derived is directly responsible, and to which His veracity is pledged.

This is certainly a stupendous claim: which it is well-nigh blasphemous to make, unless it is sustained by sufficient evidence, of whose validity and force we are sure; which it is in a high degree perilous to admit, if our minds and moral natures are not satisfied of its justness; but which, on the other hand, it involves a large responsibility to deny, unless we do this upon good grounds, and are confident that the claim should not be allowed. No other question can be to us of superior importance, as

matched against the question whether the religion of that New Testament which is our inheritance has come to us from God, or is the product of human logic, conjecture, or legend. The compound question of the existence and character of God is the only one which concerns more deeply, if even that does so, ow moral life.

It is a claim, as we know, which is not peculiar to this rcligion, but which has been made, and is still made, by others, though not perhaps in a tone as imperative, or as contemplating relations equally universal. Other schemes of religion, for the most part at least, claim rather to be Divine each for its locality and people; to have been a gift from the unseen Powers to those who possess them, rather than to all the families of mankind; and the missionary instinct-though in the instance of Buddhism it has been singularly active is thus not common under the teachings of the ethnic religions. At the same time, however, these claim to have a supreme authority over the peoples to whom they severally pertain; to have come to them, not from man's wit or device, but from the inexhaustible sources of wisdom in the heavens above. Gautama, Confucius, or Lao-tse, may neither of them have claimed for themselves celes tial inspirations; but their followers have, with a growing enthusiasm, ascribed such to them, and no other religions, outside of Christendom, have had wider power, have held their adherents with firmer grasp, or have been more emphatically honored as Divine, than these, which started on a basis of natural ethics and of human philosophy.

Christianity, therefore, is but one among many religions, in claiming Divine authorship for itself, with a correlative Divine authority over the hearts and minds which it reaches.

It is a claim, I need not remind you, which many wholly and vehemently reject, who are not partisans of any other religion, but who confidently affirm that all religious faiths and forms, Christianity included, have had common origin in the native religious sentiment of man; that no one of them, therefore, has any peculiar Divine authority; that all are of necessity imperfect, if not as yet wholly rudimental; and that others surpassing them are doubtless to appear, as other forms of science, philoso

phy, of social manners, of government, of invention, are con stantly appearing, till the Absolute Religion, the Religion of Humanity, shall at last be attained. They do not admit that God has given any religion-according to their conception of things it would be essentially out of accord with His administration to give a religion-in an early time, to a special people, as the ultimate system for the world, in all ages.

Such antagonists of the paramount claims of Christianity are many and able. They have often been nourished in knowledge and power by the religion whose place of solitary preeminence in the world they dispute or deny. Its authority they repel, but its vital impulse is in their blood. They become more numerous, rather than less so, as civilization advances. They are not to be confounded with the ribald and furious assailants of Christianity, whose vulgar roughness of attack, whose malice, and sometimes their mendacity of spirit, have done so much to heap moral discredit on the name "unbeliever"; or with those who, in reckless eagerness for applause, 'to win a clap, would not scruple to sink a continent.' These men, who simply put Christianity, in its origin and authority, on the level of other religions, regarding all as equally destitute of any supreme Divine claim upon human regard, are frequently as delicate as they are diligent and dexterous in their war with the sentiment in which they were nurtured. In the dignity and charm of their social spirit, of their moral habitudes, as in the vigor and variety of their mental action, or the abundance of their mental resources, they are often deserving of cordial esteem.

While then, on the one hand, the Christianity which is brought to us in the New Testament asserts for itself this supreme and enduring authority, as being, in a sense transcendent and exclusive, revealed from God; while other religions claim much the same thing, at least as related to the peoples which receive them, and gather around their ancient origins the shining mists of alleged Divine converse with men; and while speculative philosophers, in indifference to all, with a controlling Pyrrhoric tendercy, rule all alike out of the category of Divine institutes, and attribute all to the more or less cultured spirit of man: it becomes to us a duty, than which hardly any can be more urgent,

to examine this stupendous claim of Christianity. and to see if there appear reason to accept it, or if, on the other hand, there be such an absence of reasons for this that the claim may by us be properly dismissed, as either exaggerated or wholly untrue. There has never been a time, in the last eighteen centuries, when it was not appropriate and important to do this. I might almost say that there never has been a time when precisely this office was not being accomplished, by the inquisitive minds of men, by their reflective and searching hearts. And there will not come a time when the pertinence and significance of such a discussion will not be obvious, so long as there are those still living on the earth, in the same communities, with minds interacting upon each other, who on the one hand with confidence affirm, and on the other hand with eagerness deny, this impressive and surpassing proposition.

But at no time in the Past has the question more distinctly demanded discussion, at no time may it in the Future, than it does at this moment: when the world, by the superb advances of its general civilization, seems in the judgment of many to be growing superior to the need of religion, as it certainly is be coming less sensitive to its influence; when it seeks, as by a general impulse, in cultivated lands, to shake itself free from what it fears as a fetter on its thought; and when science, philosophy, history, are invoked, to show alleged faults or crude apprehensions in this religion, or to overturn its essential declarations. Not any more ingenious objections than had before been urged, not any larger array of learning on the side of unbelief, not any more attractive and elaborate eloquence conveying the materials for assault upon the Faith-not any of these, so much as the general drift of mind, in Christendom at large, toward secular aims and secular success, and toward a correspond. ing indifference or aversion to the sovereign claim of Christi anity upon it-this makes it needful to consider that claim, and to decide for ourselves whether it be as sound and imperative as many have believed it in the Past, as many still gladly believe it. We cannot surely be indifferent to the question; and it is a wise maxim which Carlyle repeats, in closing his second essay on Richter, 'what is extraordinary, try to look at with your owɩ