IV.

ADDRESS TO THOUGHTFUL CHRISTIANS.

"Reason is a flower of the spirit, and its fragrance is liberty and knowledge."

"Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

HAVE you ever seriously considered the actual grounds upon which your faith or belief is based? Have you proved all things? or have you ever attempted the contemplation of the rationality of the hope that is in you ? Do you prefer slumbering in error, and resting your trust on fiction and delusion, rather than stirring your mind up to examine into facts which are within your reach, and by which the truth can be demonstrated to you?

Is belief in improbable fables and perverted truths, in your opinion, better than knowledge obtainable by demonstrable facts? Comparatively few have considered that whatever may have been the religion of their parents it is carefully riveted upon their minds, and becomes so deeply rooted through education, early prejudices, habitually hearing one side commended and its opponents condemned, together with the conviction that it is the faith. of those they esteem, and whose goodwill it is their

interest to retain, and the prejudices they feel against all antagonistic faith, that not one in twenty who have been thus educated have forsaken the faith of their youth, however irrational, for one of a more advanced character. Thus most of the religions of the world; originating in the superstitions of the dark ages, founded no doubt by men of more than ordinary wisdom and piety in their day, and who had the benefit of mankind at heart, holding out to them inducements for good, and threats to deter them from evil, each professing to be the only true religion, and their advocates to be divinely commissioned, have from age to age been accepted as genuine by nearly the same proportion of the human race. I admit the general effect of all religions is of a moral tendency, and that each in its time has served a purpose, but that as the new dispensation introduced by the Great Reformer was necessary to supersede the old Mosaic ritual, so now is a more rational religion required to meet the advanced enlightenment of the day, especially in the more civilised nations. Take, for example, Christians of all denominations. Though they still nominally adhere to their various sects, many are now beginning to shake themselves free from the old doctrines concerning the fall, the atonement, the relations of mankind to God, and the ultimate destiny of our race. Some are beginning to hold altogether aloof from churches which offer them the stone of dogma and tradition when they are seeking the bread of life. Others are still sitting under divines of the most undoubted orthodoxy, outwardly

conforming to the rules of the sect to which they ostensibly belong, but secretly cherishing new ideas and• brighter hopes which have sprung out of the religious controversies of these latter days. There is a vast differference between the Christianity of Jesus and that of all subsequent times. The mind of man has been quibbling with the Spirit of God, and substituting human doctrines in place of the simple and really divine doctrine which Jesus taught. Many grow up surrounded by certain forms, accustomed to certain doctrines and formalities, and pass through life without ever questioning the propriety of the one or the truth of the other. But to the thoughtful, the day comes sooner or later, when their beliefs, inculcated into them in childhood, receive a rude shock, and doubt having been once cast on the "gods in whom they trusted," they set to work to "prove all things," only to find, alas! that many of their cherished idols are cast down and broken in the attempt to ascertain their worth. If, after the mind is freed from early prejudice, men will but look around, they must acknowledge the truth that nothing can be more unlike the religion of Jesus than the orthodox Christianity of the present day. All thoughtful students and honest critics of the New Testament admit that the current orthodoxy bears but little resemblance to the doctrine preached by Jesus; and further, that that Gospel has been but very imperfectly

set out.

Immediately after its first propagation it fell from its high ideal, and has never regained it. No doubt

there was a partial return to the teachings of Jesus at the ⚫ time of the Reformation, and a small portion of the crust of human error, which concealed the truth, was then removed. But the reformers, in their eagerness to free the world from the swaddling bands of superstition and tradition, took the readiest weapons that came to their hands, and when, through these instruments, they achieved their purpose, their followers unduly exalted these weapons, until they, in their turn, came to be looked upon as essential truths, instead of being merely instruments, means only to an end, and good only in so far as by those means men have been brought out into clearer light and a purer atmosphere.

A slavish and unnecessary belief in these personal views of the reformers, who did some good in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, has imposed a grievous burden upon the shoulders of orthodox Christians of the present day, and led to an uninquiring adherence to rigid creeds and dogmas of human invention, instead of a loving and filial trust in that living God and Father, who is ever revealing to us more and more of his truth and love, by invisible hands and influences, drawing us, his children, nearer to Him.

We see, in the recent upheavals of religious thought, that revolt against the teachings of orthodox theology which has gladdened the hearts of many. Old things and error must pass away, with the age to which they were suited; but all that is good and true in Christianity will survive and remain. The simple religion which was taught

eighteen centuries since, in the cities and on the hillsides of Judæa, has been so overlaid with cunningly devised fables of man's invention, that it is difficult to recognise the original in the modern travestie. For years and years men have gone on shutting their eyes to the manifest divergence between the teachings and the practisings of the Churches, and the teachings and doings of the Master; but the day has come when it is useless any longer to cry "peace, peace; when there is no peace," or to endeavour to satisfy the hunger of the newlyawakened soul of humanity with the husks of scholastic theology and lifeless creeds. Who that has ever thought of these things with a mind free from bias, will deny this truth-that, day by day, Christians are driven back to rest upon Jesus and his teachings? It is said that people are giving up Christ, that Christ is more than ever a stumbling-block. What is repelling honest minds and true hearts? It is not the teachings of the meek and lowly Jesus, but the God-dishonouring doctrines and dogmas preached in his name. Christians are required to believe in, and subscribe to, dogmas that depict Him whom Jesus taught to call Father as a bloodthirsty and cruel Moloch. They are told they must credit the neverending torment of unbelievers in metaphysical disquisition on the nature of God (couched in scholastic language), or else take their place among infidels. They are told that they must believe in doctrines attributing to our Father such unjust and impossible actions as the pouring out of the unrestrained measure of his wrathful fury upon the son