LECTURE I.

A PARTICULAR and commanding scheme of religion, commonly known by the name Christianity, has for many centuries been in the world. The name is not one given to it in its own early books, but one which, by the common consent of its advo cates and its opponents, has come to describe it. It is primarily presented in a collection of writings, about the date of the authorship of which, or of some of which, there has been prolonged discussion among scholars, but which all now admit to have come from the earlier part of that era of time in which we live from a period not later, at the latest, than the age of Hadrian, or of the first Antoninus.

In these writings, familiarly known in the homes of all of us, are declarations purporting to set forth facts and truths concerning God, on the one hand, and Man, on the other, with the reciprocal relations between them. They include, also, distinctive rules for conduct and for character, which are intimately connected with these alleged declarations of fact. They present impressive warnings, with astonishing correlative promises, as offering incentives for obedience to these rules; both warnings and promises having reference in part to the present experience of man on earth, but in another and larger part to that which is affirmed to be waiting in reserve in realms of being beyond the grave. They all culminate, these Christian writings, in the assertion of the presence in the world at a certain great epoch, synchronizing closely with the historical age of Augustus and Tiberius, of an extraordinary Person: remarkable in power, yet more remarkable in wisdom and character; who lived in obscure circumstances, who attracted no wide immediate attention, who died before his middle manhood by a painful and shameful anticipated death, but who called himself "the Light of the World," who claimed a preeminent relationship with

God, and to whom his followers rendered an homage, with a voluntary service, as singular and transcendent as was his surpassing self-assertion.

The career of this Person, from his birth-place to his sepulchre, and even afterward, to the time of his alleged final disappearance from the eyes of his followers, is traced in these writings, with anch extraordinary grace, vividness, and felicity of narration, as seem to many to make the records quite unequalled in human literature; while, with this principal public career, and the por. trait of character conspicuous in it, are connected also biographical allusions which bring many others incidentally before us, with an account, brief but animated, of the stir which was made in Jewish, Greek, or Roman communities, even among semibarbarous peoples, by the teachings of him whom the narratives present, as those teachings were eagerly distributed by the men who had taken from him their lessons and law.

I am not now concerned to put any interpretation upon these ancient and memorable writings, or to declare what in my opinion is the system of religion which they include. I am not concerned, even, to ask to what precise date they should be ascribed, or by whose pens they were probably written. The only point to which I have occasion to call attention is the fact that they exist, and have long existed; and that there is a something in them, the exact extent and nature of which it is not now my province to indicate, which constitutes the religion known as Christianity. Before the time when these writings were traced upon the first papyrus or parchment, that religion had been declared to individual minds. The writings only seek clearly and permanently to present it to mankind. It is to be found today in them, in its original meaning and scope, and not in any subsequent writings displacing them, or adding to them discordant elements. Whatever changes have since occurred in human opinion, whatever varieties of controlling interpretation have been sought to be imposed on the New Testament Scriptures, it is undeniable, certainly among Protestant disciples, that they hold Christianity, as nothing else does; and that in them, first and supremely, must be sought the religion whose impression upon history has been positive and enduring.

It is with Christianity, in this respect at least, as it is with the sunshine. That may be hidden behind thick clouds. It may seem grotesquely or hideously tinted, by steaming vapors rising to intercept it from forges and factories, from chemical laboratories, or from the noisome reek of slums. But these pass away, and the sunshine continues: the same to-day, when we untwist its strand into the crimson, gold, and blue, as when it fell on the earliest bowers and blooms of the earth; of a unity too perfect to be impaired by assault, of a purity too essential to contract de filement from what in nature is most foul. So Christianity, which has certainly been variously tinted and refracted in the representations which men have made of it, continues, nevertheless, in its spiritual substance, in whatever it has of an irradiating beauty or of vitalizing force, in these primitive writings; and it still will shine from them, in all that it possesses of grace or glory, till man's labor on earth is ended. As it was at the beginning, and will be to the end, the religion remains manifested to the world by Gospels and Epistles. They did not create, but they certain. ly represent it. Each student is to search them, with candid attention, to find it for himself, with a practical certainty than which the scientific should not be more sure; and as long as these writings continue to be read, the Christianity which preceded them, which gave them form, which has been the chief element of their power, and which still becomes articulate through them, will not cease to be discernible by man.

The system of religion thus anciently introduced to the knowledge of men, and thus preserved and presented to us in its original meaning and spirit in these remarkable writings, has been affirmed from the outset, is now believed by multitudes of persons, to be of Divine origin and authority: to be so in a sense so paramount and unique that no other system known among men can claim similar origin or an equal authority. It is not affirmed, certainly, that everything in other religions has been untrue: that they may not have had in some respects an eminent value, as coming from minds greatly gifted, and from hearts pervaded by devout and discerning religious feeling. But it is affirmed that this system alone is so fully representative of the Divine Mind, revealing itself to and through the human spirit,

that it, and it only, has a complete and peremptory claim to be believed and to be obeyed, whatever difficulties its disciples may encounter, whatever dangers, shames, or deaths, they may have on its behalf to face.

This is not an impression among the ignorant or the credulous alone, or among those practically indifferent to the subject, whose traditional impressions hardly rise to the dignity of definite convictions. It is the matured and assured belief of many of the most thoughtful, cultured, free-spirited of men, whose attainment and aspiration are exceptionally high, by whom the question thus determined is recognized as one of superlative significance, and in whom this affirmative persuasion has oftentimes been slowly produced, sometimes against great inward reluctance, and only after a searching scrutiny of arguments and proofs. At the close of all, as the crowning result, they have this conviction: that the Christianity implicitly contained in all the Bible, but specially declared in the New Testament, it, and it only, comes to man as the religion designed for him by God: that it issued from the sovereign wisdom and the unshadowed goodness of the Infinite Mind, and has upon it the authority of that; that it is, therefore, to be the universal religion of the world; while he who now trusts it, trusts the same intelligence and holy will which set stars in their courses, and hung upon them the pendulous planets. In the judgment of such minds, Christianity is an authentic instruction given to mankind by the Author of the Universe, as to what in the highest departments of moral life it is needful for men to believe and to do. It is the one system of religion on earth for which the eternal creative Spirit from whom the spirit of man is derived is directly responsible, and to which His veracity is pledged.

This is certainly a stupendous claim: which it is well-nigh blasphemous to make, unless it is sustained by sufficient evidence, of whose validity and force we are sure; which it is in a high degree perilous to admit, if our minds and moral natures are not satisfied of its justness; but which, on the other hand, it involves a large responsibility to deny, unless we do this upon good grounds, and are confident that the claim should not be allowed. No other question can be to us of superior importance, ab

matched against the question whether the religion of that New Testament which is our inheritance has come to us from God or is the product of human logic, conjecture, or legend. The compound question of the existence and character of God is the only one which concerns more deeply, if even that does so, ow moral life.

It is a claim, as we know, which is not peculiar to this religion, but which has been made, and is still made, by others, though not perhaps in a tone as imperative, or as contemplating relations equally universal. Other schemes of religion, for the most part at least, claim rather to be Divine each for its locality and people; to have been a gift from the unseen Powers to those who possess them, rather than to all the families of mankind; and the missionary instinct-though in the instance of Buddhism it has been singularly active-is thus not common under the teachings of the ethnic religions. At the same time, however, these claim to have a supreme authority over the peoples to whom they severally pertain; to have come to them, not from man's wit or device, but from the inexhaustible sources of wisdom in the heavens above. Gautama, Confucius, or Lao-tse, may neither of them have claimed for themselves celes. tial inspirations; but their followers have, with a growing enthusiasm, ascribed such to them, and no other religions, outside of Christendom, have had wider power, have held their adherents with firmer grasp, or have been more emphatically honored as Divine, than these, which started on a basis of natural ethics and of human philosophy.

Christianity, therefore, is but one among many religions, in claiming Divine authorship for itself, with a correlative Divine authority over the hearts and minds which it reaches.

It is a claim, I need not remind you, which many wholly and vehemently reject, who are not partisans of any other religion, but who confidently affirm that all religious faiths and forms, Christianity included, have had common origin in the native religious sentiment of man; that no one of them, therefore, has any peculiar Divine authority; that all are of necessity imperfect, if not as yet wholly rudimental; and that others surpassing them are doubtless to appear, as other forms of science, philoso