discovered spiritual meanings in natural objects and events! And we ought, in some degree, to do the same. To the far-seeing man the vision of nature is the vision of God. Secondly, there is the truth involved in and revealed by man,-by man, that is, considered as a mental and spiritual being. The facts and laws of the human mind are worthy of study, partly for their own sake, partly for the intellectual vigour and discipline to be gained in the process, but especially, I apprehend, because the mind of man is in some respects similar to the mind of God. Were it different in kind as well as in degree, knowledge of God, and still more communion with God, would be impossible. He has breathed into us His spirit, we have been created in His image, we are the sons of God. Such expressions as King, Judge, Sovereign, Father, when applied to God, mean nothing if they do not mean that there is a resemblance between the divine and human natures, as well as between the divine and human relationships. The late Dean Mansel, I know, in his Bampton Lecture on 'The Limits of Religious Thought,' maintains the opposite view. He says that we cannot argue from ourselves to God; that the words personality, justice, love, &c., when applied to God, are used in different senses from those in which we apply them to men, and that in the one application they may mean quite the contrary of what they may mean in the other. Now nothing could have been further from the Dean's intention than to reduce the Christian God to the same level of abstraction as Herbert Spencer's "Unknowable"; but this is the only possible conclusion from his premisses. If words meant one thing when applied to man, and another when applied to God, then all reasoning and speaking about the Divine Being would be a ridiculous waste of time. It is of no use to say that God is just, unless we mean by "just" what we generally mean when we use that word. We had better say we do not know whether He is just or unjust. And the same remark applies to every other attribute. It is evident, therefore, that God can be for us, on this view, nothing more than the Great Unknown. The doctrine of St Chrysostom and St Augustine seems to me far more correct. Through my own mind I ascend to God." "Self-knowledge is the highest of all knowledge, for he who truly knows himself knows God." Just as an orrery will enable a child to understand something of the mechanism of the heavens, whereas he would be perfectly bewildered if he were to contemplate the heavens themselves, so the finite could never know anything of the infinite, except through the medium of its own finitude. God, like the noonday sun, can only be seen "through a glass darkly," in other words, through the human mind. The macrocosm and the microcosm, then,-the great world without us and the little world within, are important spheres of truth; important for their own sake, but especially important for what they suggest and reveal of God. There is, however, as I have intimated, a third sphere more important still,—namely, that which is contained in and revealed by Christ. Christ taught men that their Creator was no capricious or spiteful being, but a God of love, who is their Judge and King only in virtue of and in subserviency to His Fatherhood. Christ taught men that their profound, and hitherto unintelligible, yearnings were but the natural longing of the human heart for filial communion with the divine; and He declared that there was no barrier between themselves and God, except their own mistaken notion that He was unforgiving and revengeful. Christ's ministry, crowned, completed, and glorified by His death, was one pro longed manifestation of love, and of the fact that God is love. "In Him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily." Christ was therefore the great Revealer of religious truth. He was, we. may say, that truth itself, in its deepest and sublimest phases, sensibly presented before the world, so that to look on Christ is to see the truth. "The truth of truths is love." Now let us ask, What is the relation between creeds and truth? Surely I need scarcely say, that if you wish in the very faintest measure to apprehend any fragment of the truth as it is in Jesus, you must penetrate far below the surfacemeaning of any mere form of words. The knowledge of a creed can be, at the best, but elementary knowledge. It should be the beginning of our acquaintance with truth-it can never be the end. A creed is just a register of results in the search for truth. It has been transmitted to us, or should have been transmitted, for the guidance, and not for the extinction, of future thought and investigation. It is a starting-point-not a goal. Just as an invading army makes good each position gained by planting a citadel, so creeds are fortresses as it were, from which we can make further incursions into the still outstanding, still unconquered realms of truth. How vast are those N outstanding realms which still remain for us to conquer Truth cannot be symbolised by a circle, but rather by an infinite line. Theology, like all other sciences, should be progressive. The Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford drew attention some time ago to the danger of theology becoming stagnant, and warned theologians against resting contented with a mere reproduction of the past. But there are many persons who believe that theology ought to be stagnant, who regard any attempt to get beyond our ancestors as a sort of juvenile impertinence. This is not the doctrine of our Church. Our daily services are brought to a close with the prayer of St Chrysostom, in which we use the words, "Granting us in this world knowledge of Thy truth." The self-satisfied dogmatists, if they were consistent, should say instead, "Granting us in this world remembrance of our creed." All earnest, thoughtful men and women must feel the force of the words, "Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be: You laugh at the infant who cries for the moon, and thinks that his nurse, if she were only so |