word of life offered to man-which, if missed, leaves nothing but what is worthless or counterfeit ?

I propose in this discourse, and the following, to remark upon several answers that are commonly given to this question, and compare them with the unchanged record of truth now before us. The Apostolic sentence which I have prefixed as the text of our discussion, is one which, if an answer be indeed possible to the inquiry, might be expected more than almost any other to supply or to suggest that answer. Nor can we better commence the subject, than with the devout wish and prayer, that the same Eternal Life which was from the beginning and was manifested in time to men, may impart its own living spirit to our argument,—that in this, as in all other religious works, our fellowship may be with the FATHER, and the SON, and with the whole body of those who through the Apostles' testimony have believed truly until this day.

If there be any appropriate time for the Church to entertain the question, What is the idea of our Divine Founder's religion? it is assuredly the season of Advent; when after having added another year to our annual survey of the path of that Founder, traced from His Nativity and Circumcision to His Glorification, and Mission of the Divine Comforter, with all the momentous moral considerations which result from this, we are preparing to trace the same course anew, from its first dawning commencement. Beginning as we now do from

that point of view in which the most distant of the generations that are past had the vista of futurity dimly thrown before them; the first coming of the Redeemer as far as it was apprehended, descried as in conjunction and apparent identity with His Advent as final Redeemer and Judge,-it is thus we prepare to behold the obscure and general anticipations of Patriarchs and Prophets first finding their objective realization in the Babe that was born at Bethlehem. And amidst the adoring thanksgiving which that object calls forth in the Christian mind, viewed in connexion with the mysteries of salvation He was to accomplish, and the kingdom of grace which He was to extend to all the families of mankind, some will now be found to raise the question, whether there be not a general idea or form of truth which unites in one the faith of the most explicit and the most remote believer here? If the idea be concluded to be formally and essentially identical in the ages that preceded and those that have succeeded the LORD's coming, there will then follow the further question whether, as the idea clearly admitted of development under the Patriarchal, and Mosaic, and Prophetic dispensations, it may not be further developed under the Christian. And then the question occurs, of what nature is this last development? whether, if anything more than the requisite adaptation of the same truth to different scenes or different states of the world, it be in the same direction with the antecedent development, or

in the contrary one :—whether, as that confessedly was, it be an accretion of new fact or new dogma to the preceding system of religion,—or whether, as an opposite class of thinkers contend, it be the removal of what was before: that whereas in the infancy of the world the advance was from general and obscure views to a distinct impersonation of Divinity to man, -so, in the highest progress of human reason, there may be a retreat from the particular to the general; that as the possession of universal truth must needs be more important than of facts which are only exemplifications of it, the highest spiritual enlightenment may require that explicit dogmatic belief should give way at last to that which is alone essential to the Gospel, in which all preceding dispensations, Christian, Hebrew, or Gentile, find their common ground of devotion and morality.

Both these views of the development of Christianity are conceived and disseminated among ourselves and as illustrating from such opposite quarters the character of that speculation which sets ideal creations in place of a body of objective truth delivered to the Church; it is not uninstructive to observe them even on the first entrance on our inquiry. For it is remarkable that while the idea of Christianity is a main topic in both extremes of this speculation, while the correct preservation of the idea or essential type is with good reason made the very first of the tests by which, in a well-known recent treatise, a true development of doctrine is to

be distinguished from a false development or a corruption, so that the ascertainment of this should appear the most necessary preliminary to any real grappling with the matter at issue; this idea or essential type is itself no where defined. It is taken as something intuitively perceived by the mindsomething to be felt rather than analysed or reduced to definition and in that application of the test alluded to by which it is sought to identify the later forms of Roman Christianity with that of the first three centuries, the sameness of type is elaborately argued not from anything internal in the respective Christians themselves,-not from their words or works, their lives or their deaths,--but from the similarity of the impression they severally made on prejudiced or hostile strangers.* Now how far it is antecedently credible that the same essential type should thus produce a precisely similar image when seen imperfectly and incorrectly from without, and from aspects differing so widely in many most momentous particulars, I will not stop to inquire. My present business is not with the soundness or cogency of this ingenious pleading: but rather with the difficulty which is evinced by this circumstance to hang over the first and most essential element of reasoning on this subject. It should seem to be in despair of supplying an internal analysis to Christianity—even as subjective in the individuals holding it-that a mind thus eminently conversant with the matter, should * Newman's Essay, p. 204-242.

turn from the living substance to a baseless shadow: seeking in the odious suspicions and calumnies of the enemies of CHRIST's Church, a proof of the identity of the Christianity they abhorred with whatever may be seen to excite similar sentiments at present. But let us return at length from this digression to the answers actually offered to the question, what is the essential form or genius of our religion-and see whether these in proportion to their greater confidence will supply us with more light in the obscurity thus apparently hanging over our subject. A large class of persons, and those not the least influential, or the least fluent in speech, will tell us that the idea of Christianity is that of human improvement that the civilization of the age is its Christianity, that advances in arts and science, in government and general freedom of intercourse constitute, far more than any doctrines whatever, the genius and spirit of the beneficent religion we profess by these, as the most efficient missionaries, should it be presented to those who are unenlightened either within or without Christendom; these things imparting much more in the present time to the dogmatic element of religion than they in former ages ever received from it. The persons who thus confidently speak do not generally concern themselves to analyse the civilization to which so much is ascribed, into its moral and material parts: they do not seem even to entertain the question whether it be or be not a purely moral element pervading our fabric of