riched with costly marbles, with curious sculpture, with shrines of silver and of gold, rose towards heaven in every country of Europe from the North Sea to the shores of the Mediterranean; and bishops were the chancellors and ambassadors of mighty kingdoms, and great priests outshone the splendour and defeated the ambition of great nobles. They were "Ages of Faith;" but the Faith was not the Faith which listens for itself to the voice of God, and finds in Him absolution from guilt, consolation in sorrow, and the hope which triumphs over death and exults in the vision of an immortality of glory. It clung to the priest rather than to Christ, and was filled with awe and wonder by the power and magnificence of the Church rather than with devout fear and perfect joy by the majesty and love of the living God.' And so, when the rulers of the Church became luxurious, feeble, and corrupt, and when the great resources of the races which they had disciplined and civilised began to be developed, the Ages of Faith gradually vanished away.

Many causes contributed to that great revolution. The orators, philosophers, and poets of the ancient world rising from the tomb of centuries wrested from priests and monks the intellectual supremacy which had been a principal element of their power. States

1 Les évêques avoient remplacé, pour lui [Clovis], non point les prêtres de la Germanie, mais les idoles dans le culte desquelles il avoit été élevé. C'etoient les évêques qu'il servoit, qu'il adoroit, et il pactisoit avec eux comme un homme accoutumé à encenser des fétiches.—Sismondi, Précis de l'Historie des Français, vol. i. page 39.

men and kings, who had learnt the art and principles of government from the Church, began to desire to govern for themselves, and they chafed under the pretensions of ecclesiastical consuls deriving their authority from Rome. The schism widened; the revolt went on; every new generation added new elements of bitterness to the conflict; and now that a great part of Europe has finally broken away from the control of the Church, it has become apparent that though Christendom had submitted to the ascendency of the priesthood, it had never really submitted to the authority of Christ.

The irreligion and the unbelief which were once suppressed by the power of a vast ecclesiastical organization, are suppressed no longer; and the sullen moral resistance which was offered for centuries to the true Faith, and which revealed itself in the violent passions, the coarse vices, and the rude superstitions of an ignorant population, reveals itself now in an active and energetic intellectual antagonism.

There may, however, be as much living Faith in God in these days of open revolt against the throne of Christ as in the days when the Church ruled the nations with an uncontested authority. But the revolt is general. Unbelief has become not only articulate, but eloquent. It is rich in the old learning, and it claims for its own the new sciences. It has the audacity of youth and the restless energy of genius. Its hostility to the characteristic truths and claims of the Christian revelation is relentless and uncompromising. I prefer

the new conditions of the conflict to the old. We are stripped of every adventitious advantage. Henceforth the triumphs of the Church will be real-the triumphs of the truth of Christ and of the power of the Holy Ghost.

In this hour-not of peril, but of fierce strugglethe Church must use all her varied and boundless resources her science, her learning, her logic, her eloquence- and must use them with a patience, a courage, and an energy corresponding to the great issues of the strife.

But our true strength lies in those moral and spiritual forces by which, in all ages, the victories of the kingdom of heaven have been won. We must not be satisfied with an attempt to demonstrate the authority of the Christian Faith; we must so preach it that, even apart from demonstration, its authority shall be confessed. The consciences of men must be made to apprehend the reality of sin, and their hearts must be filled with dread and with hope by the anger and the mercy of the living God. The mysterious instinct, suppressed but not destroyed, which bears witness to the kinship of the human soul to the Father of spirits, must be quickened into activity; and then, without any argument of ours, men will recognise in the voice of Christ an august sovereignty to which they cannot refuse to do homage, and will discover for themselves that in dying, the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God, He has met the deepest wants of their spiritual life as well as revealed the infinite wealth and tenderness of the Divine love.

The power of the Spirit of God is with us, and He, in wonderful ways, finds direct access to the innermost life of man, piercing through intellectual difficulties and antagonisms which seemed to create invincible obstacles to the Truth. The human conscience and There is an indestructible

heart are also with us. conviction in the human soul that God must be on the side of righteousness, and that all sin must be intolerable to Him. There are vague fears of His displeasure which cannot be dissipated; there is a restless craving for access to Him; there is a sense of loneliness and desolation so long as the soul has not found Him, which no intellectual or sensual excitements can permanently stifle; there is a hope, faint and faltering, yet with strange vitality in it, that although God seems no longer "nigh at hand," He cannot have forsaken and forgotten us altogether, and that in some way He will surely return to us.

It is because the great truths and laws, of which the Atonement of Christ is the highest and most perfect expression, appeal directly to these central and enduring elements of the moral life of man, and because the Atonement satisfies what in every age, and through all the changes of his intellectual and social condition, is man's chief necessity, that we in our times should rely upon the power of the Death of Christ for the triumph of the Divine Righteousness and Love over the doubt as well as the sins and sorrows of mankind. We ourselves may derive inspiration and energy from the truths which we must preach to others, for the zeal of the

Church has always been kindled into intensest fervour at the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ; and the Cross has always been the symbol of her strength and the prophecy of her victories.

I

may

be unable to contribute any additional force to the evidence that the Death of the Lord Jesus Christ was an Atonement for sin, and I may fail to illustrate its relations to the life of God, the life of man, and the laws of the spiritual universe; but if any of those who listen to these Lectures, and any of those who read them, are drawn to deeper and devouter thought upon the mystery and glory of His great Sacrifice, I shall not have written or spoken in vain.