There is a oneness in human nature. oneness in its wants and necessities.

There is a There is a

oneness in the great questions relative to our relations to the Almighty, which are suggested by that sense of sin and infirmity which is common to all earnest minds. This is why all earnest thought of one mind may be of interest and use to other minds. This is why all earnest thought of an age bygone may be of interest and use to the age that is. At the same time, every age has its own peculiarities, by which its own thought must be modified. It has its own questionings and its own answers to them. We ought not to fear these questionings; nor need we hope to be able always to settle the inquiries of the present by the answers of the past. Thoughts that were apposite at one time, and in one set of circumstances, become less suitable to the wants of another period; and views that once were living lose their vitality. A mere repetition of old formulas will not supply the needs of the day that is; though yet, when used not as formulas merely, but as incidents in the history of the human mind, they may help us to arrive at that which will meet our own wants. Let us respect old formulas, but let there be added living thought. Some of the seed which the sower sowed

fell upon a beaten track, and the fowls of the air came and devoured it up. It is possible that the beaten track may be a track that has been beaten by the very feet of the sower himself. So it is possible that dead repetition of things once living may deprive them of all, or nearly all, their power of growth and fertility. Therefore there is need that even old truths should be presented from new points of view, and that any new light should be welcomed. There is need, in short, for a way of thinking that is not hard and stereotyped, but open to the influence of progress,-open to the calls and suggestions of the time. There is need for a theology which, while it respects the past, shall not refuse the light which the present can supply; and, while it venerates the old paths, shall not be content with merely going over them again and again, as if mechanically in a circle.

It does not fall within the scope of the present papers to enter upon questions of controversy, and therefore I confine myself at present simply to indicating the spirit in which, as it appears to me, the religious questions of the day ought to be approached. It were folly to cast loose in haste from all our old anchorages; but it were equal folly so to hold fast to our traditions as to shut our

minds against any progress whatever. The greatest folly of all is to be afraid for the truth, or to imagine that it can be in any danger from free inquiry.

XXIII.

UNBELIEF AND FAITH.

MARK ix. 24-"Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

FROM the class of subjects with which we have been occupied in the last few papers, let us return for a little to that more inward religious life to which these counsels are intended chiefly to refer.

What a strange blending there often is in the human heart of unbelief and faith! Or rather, for it is hardly a blending, what a singular co-existence of the two,-dwelling together, but not being agreed,—nay, rather on the contrary, fighting against each other continually, and leading-according as the one or the other is victorious-either to rest in God's bosom or else into the outer darkness!

There is, for example, an instinct of prayer. When the ship crashes on the sunken rock, or the train, thrown off the line, is dashing onward to destruction, I fancy there is hardly a seaman or a passenger who will not say in his heart, "The Lord

have mercy on my soul." And yet how many of these may have been utterly careless hitherto,-how many may have been infidels,-how many scoffers and profane persons! It is thus that a certain belief comes up through the prevailing unbelief; the instinct of prayer reveals itself, and tells its tale of that deep, hidden, quenchless sense of God and immortality, which bears such striking witness to our nature and our destinies, and cannot be extinguished altogether, either by the thoughtlessness of the neglectful, or by the positive efforts of those who, because of their sinfulness, would fain forget.

But this which we have looked at is a broad example. It brings before us, in vivid contrast, on the one hand, that instinctive belief which finds expression in a cry to God; and, on the other, the habitual neglect or profanity, out of the midst of which the prayer comes, like a flash of lightning out of a dark and murky sky. There is not always such a contrast as this. In many cases, belief and unbelief mix themselves up together in a strange, and inconsistent, and indescribable way; and what presents itself to our observation, or our consciousness, is not the lightning flash from out of midnight, but the mingling up