student turns to experience, he finds that violations of natural order which were supposed to take place in old times now take place no more; that no such violations can be found in times and places where they can he verified. Even in the sphere of Christian apologetics this is admitted more and more. The position of miracles has completely changed. They are no longer the basis of the argument, but are themselves the subject of apology. One accepted writer puts them in the fifth rank of evidences. Bishop Temple, in his "Bampton Lectures," shows by his treatment of them that they have lost their power. It is only the fact that they are supposed to be bound up with the moral and spiritual forces of Christianity which prevents their being treated as wholly indifferent.
We notice next the theory of evolution. Let it be granted that it is still a theory, and that the vast gaps in the geological record, and the chasm between man and brute, are not filled up. Yet the existence of evolution, in a constantly increasing circle of observed phenomena, is clear; and it would be perilous to rest any belief upon a supposition that the theory, even in its full compass, will be disproved. It is said that life must have had a beginning. Is it certain that life itself has not been developed, as some persons believe, or that the potency of life is not inherent in the elements of which the world is formed? The evidence may not at present point toward such a conclusion; but again it would be perilous to build upon the opposite theory. Indeed, the idea of creation must be admitted to be a negative rather than a positive idea. God made the world; but how? As soon as we attempt to put a positive sense into the word creation, it fails us. But what, it is asked, and where, is God, if he be not a creator? We must conceive of him otherwise than as a workman standing outside his work.
If we turn from the physical sciences to the science of language, which is said by Professor Max Midler to be itself a physical science, we are led up through comparative philology to comparative theology. The knowledge of the religions of the East and West shows us in their development points of the closest analogy with that recorded in the Bible, and the question is forced upon us whether there is any line to be drawn between them. Is not the idea of God in some of them both monotheistic and moral? If we fix our minds upon ideas once thought to be exclusively Christian, are there not incarnations and miraculous births and resurrections in the Brahmanical religion? Is there not the idea of self-sacrifice and of the equality of men in Buddhism? Does not Confucius come very near, to say the least, to the enunciation of the golden rule of the gospel? And has not this estimate of the Eastern religion so forced itself upon us that, whereas before the knowledge of the sacred books of the East missionaries were apt to speak only of the perishing heathen, and of their superstition and immorality, which were sinking them to perdition, now they speak rather of the hopeful side of their life, and apply the gospel as the means of evoking
