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the Son of God. ( Saphir, Divine Unity, p. 27.) To turn now to the Christology of the Bible and of the Twentieth Cen tury. When we come to the subject of Christology, we find that it is very fashionable now in many theological circles to openly deny those constitu tive beliefs which were universally accepted as the explicit affirmations of the Creeds, and that the Church has been not a little shocked of late by what seems to be the surrender of the citadel faiths of the Bible on the part of some of her foremost teach ers. AVOWED ENEMIES. Years ago it was the habit of all earnest students of theological tend ency to familiarize themselves with the works of the leading antagonists of Christianity and the arguments of the infidels from Julian, Celsus and Porphyry, and Bolingbroke, Hume, and Voltaire, to the casuistries of a more modern age, in such works as Renan’s Vie de Jesu, Greg’s Creed of Christendom, and the more brilliant effort of “Supernatural Christianity.” These men were all of them actuated by intensity of conviction, and in genuity of suggestion, and like the ablest of the German and Dutch criti cal theologians, especially such as Spinoza and DeWette and Votke and Wellhausen, exhausted their philoso phy and scholarship in undermining the foundations of Christianity, espe cially with regard to the authority and credibility of the Bible, the Deity of Christ, and the actuality of His Virgin Birth, His miracles and Res urrection. But they were all of them infidels. They gloried in their free- thinking. They stood unabashed out side and like daring foes brought up their batteries. They made no pre tense to belief. When they tore to pieces the texts they hated, and pro truded ingenious theories about the
tion as a sinner, and his reconciliation to God. But perhaps the most stub born verse in the New Testament is Acts 4:12.. It plants itself four square against the creed of Modern Liberalism, which has been popular ized in Pope’s jingling apothegm in his “Essay on Man” : “For Modes of. Faith let graceless zealots fight; His can’t be wrong whose life is in the right.” There is perhaps no more popular creed to-day than that of the man who regards with a complacent and equal izing generosity all creeds and sects; and glories in his conviction that after all it matters little what a man be lieves, whether it be a jumble of leg ends from the Talmud, the Vedas, and the Koran, the stories of the Greek Mythology, the Lives of Saints, or the teaching of the Scriptures—all of equal importance or non-importance. Faith—that is, true faith in God through Jesus Christ the Son of God —is a matter of indifference. Wheth er these ideas, so current to-day on this continent, are due to the wide spread tenets of Unitarianism, or the subtle diffusion of Swedenborgianism and Christian Science, which have percolated from the radiating centre of German rationalism, the German Universities, it would be hard to say; but there can be no doubt that an age that calmly accepts the doctrine of man’s evolution, through long natural processes, is hardly likely to accept a Gospel which has its basis in an In spired Word which declares the fall and sinfulness of the man God cre ated, and instead of wild dreams about the evolution of the Superman reveals the coming glory of the sons of God when we shall bear the image of the heavenly, not through evolu tion, but by the renewing of the Holy Ghost and the resurrection power of
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