Lecture I.INTRODUCTORY.
It is impossible for any one, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers.
The contrast is patent. If any one thinks that it is sufficiently explained by saying that the one is a sermon and the other a creed, it must be pointed out in reply that the question why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and a metaphysical creed in the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century, is a problem which claims investigation.
It claims investigation, but it has not yet been investigated.There have been inquiries, which in some cases have arrived at positive results, as to the causes of particular changes or developments in Christianity—the development, for example, of the doctrine of the Trinity, or of the theory of a Catholic Church. But the main question to which I invite your attention is antecedent to all such inquiries. It asks, not how did the Christian societies come to believe one proposition rather than another, but how did they come to the frame of mind which attached importance to either the one or the other, and made the assent to the one rather than the other a condition of membership.
In investigating this problem, the first point that is obvious to an inquirer is, that the change in the centre of gravity from conduct to belief is coincident with the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil. The presumption is that it was the result of Greek influence. It will appear from the Lectures which follow that this presumption is true. Their general subject is, consequently, The Influence of Greece upon Christianity.
The difficulty, the interest, and the importance of the subject make it incumbent upon us to approach it with caution. It is necessary to bear many points in mind as we enter upon it; and I will begin by asking your attention to two considerations, which, being true of all analogous phenomena of religious development and change, may be presumed to be true of the particular phenomena before us.
1. The first is, that the religion of a given race at a given time is relative to the whole mental attitude ofthat time. It is impossible to separate the religious phenomena from the other phenomena, in the same way that you can separate a vein of silver from the rock in which it is embedded. They are as much determined by the general characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of a geographical area are determined by its soil, its climate, and its cultivation; and they vary with the changing characteristics of the race as the fauna and flora of the tertiary system differ from those of the chalk. They are separable from the whole mass of phenomena, not in fact, but only in thought. We may concentrate our attention chiefly upon them, but they still remain part of the whole complex life of the time, and they cannot be understood except in relation to that life. If any one hesitates to accept this historical induction, I will ask him to take the instance that lies nearest to him, and to consider how he could understand the religious phenomena of our own country in our own time—its doubts, its hopes, its varied enterprises, its shifting enthusiasms, its noise, its learning, its estheticism, and its philanthropies—unless he took account of the growth of the inductive sciences and the mechanical arts, of the expansion of literature, of the social stress, of the commercial activity, of the general drift of society towards its own improvement.
In dealing, therefore, with the problem before us, we must endeavour to realize to ourselves the whole mental attitude of the Greek world in the first three centuries of our era. We must take account of the breadth and depth of its education, of the many currents of its philosophy, of its love of literature, of its scepticism and itsmysticism. We must gather together whatever evidence we can find, not determining the existence or measuring the extent of drifts of thought by their literary expression, but taking note also of the testimony of the monuments of art and history, of paintings and sculptures, of inscriptions and laws. In doing so, we must be content, at any rate for the present and until the problem has been more fully elaborated, with the broader features both of the Greek world and of the early centuries. The distinctions which the precise study of history requires us to draw between the state of thought of Greece proper and that of Asia Minor, and between the age of the Antonines and that of the Severi, are not necessary for our immediate purpose, and may be left to the minuter research which has hardly yet begun.
2. The second consideration is, that no permanent change takes place in the religious beliefs or usages of a race which is not rooted in the existing beliefs and usages of that race. The truth which Aristotle enunciated, that all intellectual teaching is based upon what is previously known to the person taught,[1]is applicable to a race as well as to an individual, and to beliefs even more than to knowledge. A religious change is, like a physiological change, of the nature of assimilation by, and absorption into, existing elements. The religion which our Lord preached was rooted in Judaism. It came “not to destroy, but to fulfil.” It took the Jewishconception of a Father in heaven, and gave it a new meaning. It took existing moral precepts, and gave them a new application. The meaning and the application had already been anticipated in some degree by the Jewish prophets. There were Jewish minds which had been ripening for them; and so far as they were ripe for them, they received them. In a similar way we shall find that the Greek Christianity of the fourth century was rooted in Hellenism. The Greek minds which had been ripening for Christianity had absorbed new ideas and new motives; but there was a continuity between their present and their past; the new ideas and new motives mingled with the waters of existing currents; and it is only by examining the sources and the volume of the previous flow that we shall understand how it is that the Nicene Creed rather than the Sermon on the Mount has formed the dominant element in Aryan Christianity.
The method of the investigation, like that of all investigations, must be determined by the nature of the evidence. The special feature of the evidence which affects the method is, that it is ample in regard to the causes, and ample also in regard to the effects, but scanty in regard to the process of change.
We have ample evidence in regard to the state of Greek thought during the ante-Nicene period. The writers shine with a dim and pallid light when put side by side with the master-spirits of the Attic age; but their lesser importance in the scale of genius rather adds to than diminishes from their importance as representatives.They were more the children of their time. They are consequently better evidence as to the currents of its thought than men who supremely transcended it. I will mention those from whom we shall derive most information, in the hope that you will in course of time become familiar, not only with their names, but also with their works. Dio of Prusa, commonly known as Dio Chrysostom, “Dio of the golden mouth,” who was raised above the class of travelling orators to which he belonged, not only by his singular literary skill, but also by the nobility of his character and the vigour of his protests against political unrighteousness. Epictetus, the lame slave, the Socrates of his time, in whom the morality and the religion of the Greek world find their sublimest expression, and whose conversations and lectures at Nicopolis, taken down, probably in short-hand, by a faithful pupil, reflect exactly, as in a photograph, the interior life of a great moralist’s school. Plutarch, the prolific essayist and diligent encyclopædist, whose materials are far more valuable to us than the edifices which he erects with them. Maximus of Tyre, the eloquent preacher, in whom the cold metaphysics of the Academy are transmuted into a glowing mysticism. Marcus Aurelius, the imperial philosopher, in whose mind the fragments of many philosophies are lit by hope or darkened by despair, as the clouds float and drift in uncertain sunlight or in gathered gloom before the clearing rain. Lucian, the satirist and wit, the prose Aristophanes of later Greece. Sextus Empiricus, whose writings—or the collection of writings gathered under his name—are the richest of all mines for the investigation of later Greek philosophy. Philostratus,the author of a great religious romance, and of many sketches of the lives of contemporary teachers. It will hardly be an anachronism if we add to these the great syncretist philosopher, Philo of Alexandria; for, on the one hand, he was more Greek than Jew, and, on the other, several of the works which are gathered together under his name seem to belong to a generation subsequent to his own, and to be the only survivors of the Judæo-Greek schools which lasted on in the great cities of the empire until the verge of Christian times.
We have ample evidence also as to the state of Christian thought in the post-Nicene period. The Fathers Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and Cyril of Jerusalem, the decrees of general and local Councils, the apocryphal and pseudonymous literature, enable us to form a clear conception of the change which Greek influences had wrought.
But the evidence as to the mode in which the causes operated within the Christian sphere before the final effects were produced is singularly imperfect. If we look at the literature of the schools of thought which ultimately became dominant, we find that it consists for the most part of some accidental survivals.[2]It tells us about some parts of the Christian world, but not about others. It represents a few phases of thought withadequate fulness, and of others it presents only a few fossils. In regard to Palestine, which in the third and fourth centuries was a great centre of culture, we have only the evidence of Justin Martyr. In regard to Asia Minor, which seems to have been the chief crucible for the alchemy of transmutation, we have but such scanty fragments as those of Melito and Gregory of Neocæsarea. The largest and most important monuments are those of Alexandria, the works of Clement and Origen, which represent a stage of singular interest in the process of philosophical development. Of the Italian writers, we have little that is genuine besides Hippolytus. Of Gallican writers, we have chiefly Irenæus, whose results are important as being the earliest formulating of the opinions which ultimately became dominant, but whose method is mainly interesting as an example of the dreary polemics of the rhetorical schools. Of African writers, we have Tertullian, a skilled lawyer, who would in modern times have taken high rank as a pleader at the bar or as a leader of Parliamentary debate; and Cyprian, who survives chiefly as a champion of the sacerdotal hypothesis, and whose vigorous personality gave him a moral influence which was far beyond the measure of his intellectual powers. The evidence is not only imperfect, but also insufficient in relation to the effects that were produced. Writers of the stamp of Justin and Irenæus are wholly inadequate to account for either the conversion of the educated world to Christianity, or for the forms which Christianity assumed when the educated world had moulded it.
And if we look for the literature of the schools ofthought which were ultimately branded as heretical, we look almost wholly in vain. What the earliest Christian philosophers thought, we know, with comparatively insignificant exceptions, only from the writings of their opponents. They were subject to a double hate—that of the heathen schools which they had left, and that of the Christians who were saying “Non possumus” to philosophy.[3]The little trust that we can place in the accounts which their opponents give of them is shown by the wide differences in those accounts. Each opponent, with the dialectical skill which was common at the time, selected, paraphrased, distorted, and re-combined the points which seemed to him to be weakest. The result is, naturally, that the accounts which the several opponents give are so different in form and feature as to be irreconcilable with one another.[4]It was so also with the heathen opponents of Christianity.[5]With oneimportant exception, we cannot tell how the new religion struck a dispassionate outside observer, or why it was that it left so many philosophers outside its fold. Then, as now, the forces of human nature were at work. The tendency to disparage and suppress an opponent is not peculiar to the early ages of Christianity. When the associated Christian communities won at length their hard-fought battle, they burned the enemy’s camp.
This fact of the scantiness and inadequacy of the evidence as to the process of transformation has led to two results which constitute difficulties and dangers in our path.
1. The one is the tendency to overrate the value of the evidence that has survived. When only two or three monuments of a great movement remain, it is difficult to appreciate the degree in which those monuments are representative. We tend at almost all times to attach an exaggerated importance to individual writers; the writers who have moulded the thoughts of their contemporaries, instead of being moulded by them, are always few in number and exceptional. We tend also to attach an undue importance to phrases which occur in such writers; few, if any, writers write with the precision of a legal document, and the inverted pyramids which have been built upon chance phrases of Clement or Justin are monuments of caution which we shall do well to keep before our eyes.
2. The other is the tendency to under-estimate the importance of the opinions that have disappeared from sight, or which we know only in the form and to the extent of their quotation by their opponents. If we wereto trust the histories that are commonly current, we should believe that there was from the first a body of doctrine of which certain writers were the recognized exponents; and that outside this body of doctrine there was only the play of more or less insignificant opinions, like a fitful guerilla warfare on the flanks of a great army. Whereas what we really find on examining the evidence is, that out of a mass of opinions which for a long time fought as equals upon equal ground, there was formed a vast alliance which was strong enough to shake off the extremes at once of conservatism and of speculation, but in which the speculation whose monuments have perished had no less a share than the conservatism of which some monuments have survived.
This survey of the nature of the evidence enables us to determine the method which we should follow. We can trace the causes and we can see the effects; but we have only scanty information as to the intermediate processes. If the evidence as to those processes existed in greater mass, if the writings of those who made the first tentative efforts to give to Christianity a Greek form had been preserved to us, it might have been possible to follow in order of time and country the influence of the several groups of ideas upon the several groups of Christians. This method has been attempted, with questionable success, by some of those who have investigated the history of particular doctrines. But it is impossible to deprecate too strongly the habit of erecting theories upon historical quicksands; and I propose to pursue the surer path to which the nature of the evidence points, by stating thecauses, by viewing them in relation to the effects, and by considering how far they were adequate in respect of both mass and complexity to produce those effects.
There is a consideration in favour of this method which is in entire harmony with that which arises from the nature of the evidence. It is, that the changes that took place were gradual and at first hardly perceptible. It would probably be impossible, even if we were in possession of ampler evidence, to assign a definite cause and a definite date for the introduction of each separate idea. For the early years of Christianity were in some respects like the early years of our lives. It has sometimes been thought that those early years are the most important years in the education of all of us. We learn then, we hardly know how, through effort and struggle and innocent mistakes, to use our eyes and our ears, to measure distance and direction, by a process which ascends by unconscious steps to the certainty which we feel in our maturity. We are helped in doing go, to an incalculable degree, by the accumulated experience of mankind which is stored up in language; but the growth is our own, the unconscious development of our own powers. It was in some such unconscious way that the Christian thought of the earlier centuries gradually acquired the form which we find when it emerges, as it were, into the developed manhood of the fourth century. Greek philosophy helped its development, as language helps a child; but the assimilation of it can no more be traced from year to year than the growth of the body can be traced from day to day.
We shall begin, therefore, by looking at the severalgroups of facts of the age in which Christianity grew, and endeavour, when we have looked at them, to estimate their influence upon it.
We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of education: we shall find that it was an age that was penetrated with culture, and that necessarily gave to all ideas which it absorbed a cultured and, so to speak, scholastic form.
We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of literature: we shall find that it was an age of great literary activity, which was proud of its ancient monuments, and which spent a large part of its industry in endeavouring to interpret and to imitate them.
We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of philosophy: we shall find that it was an age in which metaphysical conceptions had come to occupy relatively the same place which the conceptions of natural science occupy among ourselves; and that just as we tend to look upon external things in their chemical and physical relations, so there was then, as it were, a chemistry and physics of ideas.
We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of moral ideas: we shall find that it was an age in which the ethical forces of human nature were struggling with an altogether unprecedented force against the degradation of contemporary society and contemporary religion, and in which the ethical instincts were creating the new ideal of “following God,” and were solving the old question whether there was or was not an art of life by practising self-discipline.
We shall look at the facts which indicate the state oftheological ideas: we shall find that it was an age in which men were feeling after God and not feeling in vain, and that from the domains of ethics, physics, metaphysics alike, from the depths of the moral consciousness, and from the cloud-lands of poets’ dreams, the ideas of men were trooping in one vast host to proclaim with a united voice that there are not many gods, but only One, one First Cause by whom all things were made, one Moral Governor whose providence was over all His works, one Supreme Being “of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness.”
We shall look at the facts which indicate the state of religion: we shall find that it was an age in which the beliefs that had for centuries been evolving themselves from the old religions were showing themselves in new forms of worship and new conceptions of what God needed in the worshipper; in which also the older animalism was passing into mysticism, and mysticism was the preparation of the soul for the spiritual religion of the time to come.
We shall then, in the case of each great group of ideas, endeavour to ascertain from the earliest Christian documents the original Christian ideas upon which they acted; and then compare the later with the earlier form of those Christian ideas; and finally examine the combined result of all the influences that were at work upon the mental attitude of the Christian world and upon the basis of Christian association.
I should be glad if I could at once proceed to examine some of these groups of facts. But since the objectwhich I have in view is not so much to lead you to any conclusions of my own, as to invite you to walk with me in comparatively untrodden paths, and to urge those of you who have leisure for historical investigations to explore them for yourselves more fully than I have been able to do—and since the main difficulties of the investigation lie less in the facts themselves than in the attitude of mind in which they are approached—I feel that I should fail of my purpose if I did not linger still upon the threshold to say something of the “personal equation” that we must make before we can become either accurate observers or impartial judges. There is the more reason for doing so, because the study of Christian history is no doubt discredited by the dissonance in the voices of its exponents. An ill-informed writer may state almost any propositions he pleases, with the certainty of finding listeners; a well-informed writer may state propositions which are as demonstrably true as any historical proposition can be, with the certainty of being contradicted. There is no court of appeal, nor will there be until more than one generation has been engaged upon the task to which I am inviting you.
1. In the first place, it is necessary to take account of the demand which the study makes upon the attention and the imagination of the student. The scientific, that is the accurate, study of history is comparatively new. The minute care which is required in the examination of the evidence for the facts, and the painful caution which is required in the forming of inferences, are but inadequately appreciated. The study requires not only attention, but also imagination. A student must havesomething analogous to the power of a dramatist before he can realize the scenery of a vanished age, or watch, as in a moving panorama, the series and sequence of its events. He must have that power in a still greater degree before he can so throw himself into a bygone time as to be able to enter into the motives of the actors, and to imagine how, having such and such a character, and surrounded by such and such circumstances, he would himself have thought and felt and acted. But the greatest demand that can be made upon either the attention or the imagination of a student is that which is made by such a problem as the present, which requires us to realize the attitude of mind, not of one man, but of a generation of men, to move with their movements, to float upon the current of their thoughts, and to pass with them from one attitude of mind into another.
2. In the second place, it is necessary to take account of our own personal prepossessions. Most of us come to the study of the subject already knowing something about it. It is a comparatively easy task for a lecturer to present, and for a hearer to realize, an accurate picture of, for example, the religion of Mexico or of Peru, because the mind of the student when he begins the study is a comparatively blank sheet. But most of us bring to the study of Christian history a number of conclusions already formed. We tend to beg the question before we examine it.
We have before us, on the one hand, the ideas and usages of early Christianity; on the other hand, the ideas and usages of imperial Greece.
We bring to the former the thoughts, the associations,the sacred memories, the happy dreams, which have been rising up round us, one by one, since our childhood. Even if there be some among us who in the maturity of their years have broken away from their earlier moorings, these associations still tend to remain. They are not confined to those of us who not only consciously retain them, but also hold their basis to be true. They linger unconsciously in the minds of those who seem most resolutely to have abandoned them.
We bring to the latter, most of us, a similar wealth of associations which have come to us through our education. The ideas with which we have to deal are mostly expressed in terms which are common to the early centuries of Christianity, and to the Greek literature of five centuries before. The terms are the same, but their meaning is different. Those of us who have studied Greek literature tend to attach to them the connotation which they had at Athens when Greek literature was in its most perfect flower. We ignore the long interval of time, and the new connotation which, by an inevitable law of language, had in the course of centuries clustered round the old nucleus of meaning. The terms have in some cases come down by direct transmission into our own language. They have in such cases gathered to themselves wholly new meanings, which, until we consciously hold them up to the light, seem to us to form part of the original meaning, and are with difficulty disentangled.
We bring to both the Christian and the Greek world the inductions respecting them which have been already made by ourselves and by others. We have in thoseinductions so many moulds, so to speak, into which we press the plastic statements of early writers. We assume the primitiveness of distinctions which for the most part represent only the provisional conclusions of earlier generations of scholars, and stages in our own historical education; and we arrange facts in the categories which we find ready to hand, as Jewish or Gentile, orthodox or heretical, Catholic or Gnostic, while the question of the reality of such distinctions and such categories is one of the main points which our inquiries have to solve.
3. In the third place, it is necessary to take account of the under-currents, not only of our own age, but of the past ages with which we have to deal. Every age has such under-currents, and every age tends to be unconscious of them. We ourselves have succeeded to a splendid heritage. Behind us are the thoughts, the beliefs, the habits of mind, which have been in process of formation since the first beginning of our race. They are inwrought, for the most part, into the texture of our nature. We cannot transcend them. To them the mass of our thoughts are relative, and by them the thoughts of other generations tend to be judged. The importance of recognizing them as an element in our judgments of other generations increases in proportion as those generations recede from our own. In dealing with a country or a period not very remote, we may not go far wrong in assuming that its inheritance of ideas is cognate to our own. But in dealing with a remote country, or a remote period of time, it becomes of extreme importance to allow for the difference, so to speak, of mental longitude. The men of earlier days had other mental scenery round them.Fewer streams of thought had converged upon them. Consequently, many ideas which were in entire harmony with the mental fabric of their time, are unintelligible when referred to the standard of our own; nor can we understand them until we have been at the pains to find out the underlying ideas to which they were actually relative.
I will briefly illustrate this point by two instances:
(a) We tend to take with us, as we travel into bygone times, the dualistic hypothesis—which to most of us is no hypothesis, but an axiomatic truth—of the existence of an unbridged chasm between body and soul, matter and spirit. The relation in our minds of the idea of matter to the idea of spirit is such, that though we readily conceive matter to act upon matter, and spirit upon spirit, we find it difficult or impossible to conceive a direct action either of matter upon spirit or of spirit upon matter. When, therefore, in studying, for example, the ancient rites of baptism, we find expressions which seem to attribute a virtue to the material element, we measure such expressions by a modern standard, and regard them as containing only an analogy or a symbol. They belong, in reality, to another phase of thought than our own. They are an outflow of the earlier conception of matter and spirit as varying forms of a single substance.[6]“Whatever acts, is body,” it was said. Mind is the subtlest form of body, but it is body nevertheless. The conception of a direct action of the one upon the other presented no difficulty. It was imagined, for instance, that demons might be the direct causes of diseases, because the extreme tenuity of their substance enabled them to enter, and to exercise a malignant influence upon, the bodies of men. So water, when exorcized from all the evil influences which might reside in it, actually cleansed the soul.[7]The conception of the process as symbolical came with the growth of later ideas of the relation of matter to spirit. It is, so to speak, a rationalizing explanation of a conception which the world was tending to outgrow.
(b) We take with us in our travels into the past the underlying conception of religion as a personal bond between God and the individual soul. We cannot believe that there is any virtue in an act of worship in which the conscience has no place. We can understand, however much we may deplore, such persecutions as those of the sixteenth century, because they ultimately rest upon the same conception: men were so profoundly convinced of the truth of their own personal beliefs as to deem it of supreme importance that other men should hold those beliefs also. But we find it difficult to understand why, in the second century of our era, a great emperor who was also a great philosopher should have deliberately persecuted Christianity. The difficulty arises from our overlooking the entirely different aspect under which religion presented itself to a Roman mind. It was a matter which lay, not between the soul and God, but between the individual and the State. Conscience had no place in it. Worship was an ancestral usage which the State sanctioned and enforced. It was one of the ordinary duties of life.[8]The neglect of it, and still more the disavowalof it, was a crime. An emperor might pity the offender for his obstinacy, but he must necessarily either compel him to obey or punish him for disobedience.
It is not until we have thus realized the fact that the study of history requires as diligent and as constant an exercise of the mental powers as any of the physical sciences, and until we have made what may be called the “personal equation,” disentangling ourselves as far as we can from the theories which we have inherited or formed, and recognizing the existence of under-currents of thought in past ages widely different from those which flow in our own, that we shall be likely to investigate with success the great problem that lies before us. I lay stress upon these points, because the interest of the subject tends to obscure its difficulties. Literature is full of fancy sketches of early Christianity; they are written, for the most part, by enthusiasts whose imagination soars by an easy flight to the mountain-tops which the historian can only reach by a long and rugged road; they are read, for the most part, by those who give them only the attention which they would give to a shilling hand-book or to an article in a review. I have no desire, and I am sure that you have no desire, to add one more to such fancy sketches. The time has come for a precise study. The materials for such a study are available. The method of such a study is determined by canons which have been established in analogous fields of research. The difficulties of such a study come almostentirely from ourselves, and it is a duty to begin by recognizing them.
For the study is one not only of living interest, but also of supreme importance. Other history may be more or less antiquarian. Its ultimate result may be only to gratify our curiosity and to add to the stores of our knowledge. But Christianity claims to be a present guide of our lives. It has been so large a factor in the moral development of our race, that we cannot set aside its claim unheard. Neither can we admit it until we know what Christianity is. A thousand dissonant voices are each of them professing to speak in its name. The appeal lies from them to its documents and to its history. In order to know what it is, we must first know both what it professed to be and what it has been. The study of the one is the complement of the other; but it is with the latter only that we have at present to do. We may enter upon the study with confidence, because it is a scientific inquiry. We may hear, if we will, the solemn tramp of the science of history marching slowly, but marching always to conquest. It is marching in our day, almost for the first time, into the domain of Christian history. Upon its flanks, as upon the flanks of the physical sciences, there are scouts and skirmishers, who venture sometimes into morasses where there is no foothold, and into ravines from which there is no issue. But the science is marching on. “Vestigia nulla retrorsum.” It marches, as the physical sciences have marched, with the firm tread of certainty. It meets, as the physical sciences have met, with opposition, and even with contumely. In front of it, as in front of the physicalsciences, is chaos; behind it is order. We may march in its progress, not only with the confidence of scientific certainty, but also with the confidence of Christian faith. It may show some things to be derived which we thought to be original; and some things to be compound which we thought to be incapable of analysis; and some things to be phantoms which we thought to be realities. But it will add a new chapter to Christian apologetics; it will confirm the divinity of Christianity by showing it to be in harmony with all else that we believe to be divine; its results will take their place among those truths which burn in the souls of men with a fire that cannot be quenched, and light up the darkness of this stormy sea with a light that is never dim.