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precedent. Even in their unfortunate and aimless wanderings in the desert, Israel left a record of their stations and erratic departures.

The sceptical argument is constantly reappearing. It is native to the heart, and does not vary much with the generations in its manifestations. Is it intolerance to dismiss it with some promptness? After eighteen centuries of Christian light and study, a Christian people have a right to assume some things as settled in religion. The divine authority of the scriptures, the moral code of Sinai, and the law of life as laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, are no longer open questions. Issues made on these points must not expect much attention, certainly no excessive courtesy, except as new evidence is brought into court. For the For the ages have constituted them religious axioms in all Christian countries.

Rarely can the attacks of infidelity on them attain to the dignity and importance of being original or novel. The most it can say is a matter of the libraries, and not of living studies. It must not, therefore, expect a long hearing, or a labored reply. The larger part of those who covet the notoriety of assaulting Christianity must be content with an answer that refers them merely to the alcove, volume, and chapter, where all their arguments were disposed of before they came on the stage. To him who is a tyro in working up, according to the original suggestions of his own heart, a system of scepticism, and is fresh, in his discoveries and readings of what he desires, in the writings of Volney, Parker, and the Westminster, we may seem bigoted and intolerant, if we give him "no place, no, not for an hour," in the hearing and reply. As he brings no original objections, he is not entitled to any original answer. Nothing is original in his scepticism but his desire to be a sceptic. Let him solve his difficulties where he found them, in the library, and under our references. If a man now denies that the world moves, we do not feel called on to repeat the arguments of Galileo, or rehearse for his edification a volume of Kosmos. Yet, for youthful learners and honest inquirers, we have years to spare in hearing and answering questions.

If the sceptic will show as much originality in fact and argument against the divine authority of the scriptures as Rawlin

son has shown for them in his Bampton Lectures, he will merit and obtain a very candid hearing.

But scepticism asks for a free work-field, and equal rights and patronage in practical life. Is it persecution to hold it in check? With bolts, chains, and fagots, it is, but not with the pulpit, the platform, the press, and the ballot-box. Christianity has attended to the experiment as well as to the logic of living without a divine rule, and she is satisfied with neither. She covets not for her domains the polytheistic culture of Greece, nor the atheistic of France. She cares not to try the experiment. The many records of it are enough. There have been people who "did not like to retain God in their knowledge." They had their way, and now we blush at the recital of it, though drawn by the euphemistic pen of inspiration. No demand for equal rights can subject a Christian people to the repetition of such experiments. Total obliviousness to the code of Sinai, as in pagan Rome, and temporary and partial repeals of it, as in France, are our brief answer to him who asks for the legislation, the popular education, the morals, and the amusements of infidelity. We have no patronage for it. If this be intolerance, these historical references are our defence. Infidelity has its rights, but they are the rights of an alien who is hostile to the entire genius of Christendom. It is not bigotry, intolerance, or persecution, that denies it the fullest liberty, equality, and fraternity. It is rather the honorable warfare for life against a confessed and well-known foe.

The questions concerning toleration, bigotry, persecution, and the like, present themselves with most earnestness when directed toward the public teachers of morals and of religion. Such fill professorships and pulpits, or are lecturers on certain foundations. They are set apart to teach, preach, and defend certain ancient schemes and creeds. What is obligatory on such incumbents? It is a simple question.

For a certain stipend, accruing from the pecuniary foundation on which he stands, or for certain payments guaranteed in his settlement, the incumbent receives in trust, and for proclamation and defence, a certain faith, a specific system of theology, or of church polity. He is supposed to be capable of understanding it, and to be so far a positive and sectarian man

as to favor it according to what he thinks was the understanding of it by the founders of his position.

He is then, a party to a contract. For considerations that are acceptable, he agrees and promises to elaborate, teach, and promulgate the creed, system, theology, or polity of his pulpit or chair. But wanting in good-will toward it, or in moral integrity to keep a contract, or having personal and sinister ends to serve, he perverts his position. What is toleration in such a case?

Let us illustrate by supposed examples. Rawlinson, standing on the Bampton Foundation, and with all his rich material and felicitous manner for executing the intent of the Canon of Salisbury, among other things, to confirm and establish the Divine authority of the Holy Scriptures," warily prepares for and invites the reproduction of the arguments of Hume.

A minister of the Gospel accepts the pulpit of an ancient church whose creed is coëval and coëqual with the purest Puritanism, and then with suavity and effrontery strikes hands with Arminianism or meets the Universalist half-way. A man is called to the professorship of church history in a Baptist institution, and then undermines the confidence of his pupils in immersion as the only scriptural mode of baptism, or leaves them to the irresistible inference that infants should be taken to the font. Or the Westminster Catechism is sharply defined by a theological school that stands attached to it as a commentary to a text, and on that manual, as thus explained, a theological chair is established, and the occupant in his teachings leads his pupils to reject the leading features of the catechism, and to controvert the peculiarities of the school that founded his professorship.

In any such supposed case what may be justly asked and granted as Christian liberty? The question does not and must not come in whether the teachings required by the contract or endowment are sound, or whether the variations from them are improvements. The agreement made in the acceptance of the lectureship, professorship, or pulpit, is not for the examination of its basis, but for its defence. Expurgating, supplementing, or substituting is none of the labor for which the incumbent is employed. The clearly understood intent of the founders or

contractors must bind his teachings. The business honesty, morality, and Christian integrity that bind one in executing a trust, or the items of a contract, hold him.

That it is a religious trust from the hands of the pious dead, tendered through trustees, and perhaps loosely guarded in terms because of undue confidence in the integrity of men thus dealing in sacred things, increases rather than lightens the obligation to carry out the exact intent of the founders or contractors.

The question in such case resolves itself thus: Is it persecution to enjoin on a man the keeping of his contract, and the maintenance of his Christian integrity, while discharging what is, par excellence, a Christian obligation? May a man claim a wider margin for variations from agreement because the work to be done is moral and religious? May he have fewer scruples and a more uncertain conscience about his oath, promise, or signature, because he is a godly man, and in the godly service of the church? When a Christian minister, or lecturer, or professor in divinity inclines to pervert his position, or to alienate the endowment that gives him a living, is it persecution to press that man to keep his word, and to preserve the institutions of religion from the stain of dishonor at the hands of their appointed defenders?

In secular matters men do not trust each other so much and so far as they do in things sacred. They have carefully drawn contracts, and a regard for them is compelled by the courts. Yet we hear nothing of intolerance in the court-room because men are held to mean what they say, and to do what they promise, and to keep the bond that bears their signature. Why should we in the lecture-room or pulpit?

Undoubtedly a man may change his religious views. Then undoubtedly he should change his position, if that position lie in the gift of a society or trustees whose interest he can no longer sincerely espouse and faithfully serve. Creeds are not to be deemed mutable or elastic because we find their elected defenders to be so.

Perhaps one, under an aspiring stimulus, or in a broad ignorance or imperfect development of his own theories, gains some public eminence. He has little study or interest to know the

definite obligations of the place till he actually fills it.

Now

he discovers that his own predilections are adverse to what is expected and required of him. But his love of place is stronger than his love of consistency. He has not a manly fulness and symmetry of character that enable him honorably to withdraw. Instead of vacating the place, he proceeds to show that his views have no novelty for that place. He affirms that the triangle of Euclid had four sides, that Playfair so understood it, and that the founders of his position held to the same theory, though they did not express it as logically and felicitously and rhetorically as it can be done in these days of improved terminology. The moral sense as well as the mathematics of such a man are at fault, and he must not complain of a growing impatience in the patronizing public.

The Christian community are custodians for the safe-keeping of the reposed charities and trusts of the dead. Is it intolerance, bigotry, or persecution to insist that, when one has rejected the basis for teaching that underlies his support, he himself should be ejected for malefeasance?

Much of this cry against persecution is affectation and a bid for sympathy and a covering for the eyes of the public. Men wish to do what ought not to be tolerated, and what themselves would not tolerate in a change of circumstances. Because the scepticism of the Westminster Review may not enjoy free proclamation and defence on the living of the Church of England, whose incumbents must give pledge for the defence of the Thirty-nine Articles, "Christian creeds have the generic quality of being all addicted to persecution." This changes the entire issue. No one objects to the founding of a Hume professorship for infidelity, or a mosque, or a Pelagian church. The persecution consists in our refusing to give up the halls of Oxford to Hume, the cathedral of St. Sophia to the Mohammedans, and the church of Dr. Spring to Pelagius.

It is true Israel received cities that they builded not, wells that they digged not, and vineyards and olive-trees that they planted not. But when sceptics and heretics propose to take our possessions, pleading this as a precedent, we protest under the double demurrer that we are not Canaanites, and that the Lord is not leading them to do this thing.

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