"When Christianity came into the world, it came into it as a new view of the world. The doctrine of salvation is founded on a view of the world that was new. Its way had been prepared, and points of contact furnished by previous knowledge, by philosophy, and still more by man's conscience and intuitive sense of truth; but in its essence it is entirely new.

In first and fundamental principles, the unity of God and the unity of the human species, it could not but produce an entire revolution in the world of mind. It taught the Fatherhood of God, to whom the most remote is not too remote nor the least too small; also, a notion of which the old world knew nothing, that God made of one blood all nations, and all ought to be united in one common brotherhood, that the stranger is no stranger, but a neighbour.-Whose imagination had such ideas entered?

. . . It was to be expected that this new view would be resisted.

But

it was not resisted by any system of opinion. The world of ancient thought was dissolved. The process of decomposition had begun with the rise of philosophy in the sixth century before Christ. For philosophy had set itself to work upon traditionary religious notions, and had substituted for the intellectual forces which had hitherto governed society, the world of its own ideas. Ancient philosophy, indeed, had sought to fill the place of religion itself. It was no merely speculative theory, but was practical both in nature and tendency. Great statesmen passed through its schools as a preparation for their practical labours. It dealt in moral and political as well as scientific problems. But its power was never a popular Always somewhat aristocratic and confined to a small circle, it was incapable of taking the place of religion, for, in the place of those facts which religion requires, it was capable of supplying nothing but thoughts, of its own devising, and soon resolved itself into the most opposite tendencies. Hence its chief result was the establishment of a doubt of ali truth, the overthrow of all conditions and certainty.

one.

A whole world of views and notions had accumulated as the result of the previous development. But it was a world of opinions. Leading minds collected these fragments and sought to form them into a new structure. Laborious efforts were devoted to this restoration of heathen opinions. The Neo-Platonism of Alexandria was an experiment in which imagination and profundity united to construct an edifice which, in fulness of thought, should far surpass the Christian, and by its profound philosophy should conquer the meagre doctrines of these "barbarians," as Christians were called. It was, indeed, a wondrous compound. All religions and all nations were forced to contribute to it. But it remained only a splendid experiment. It failed. The Christian view prevailed over the heathen, and has since ruled the civilized world.

The intellectual powers of Judaism and heathenism, thus conquered by Christianity, took their revenge by seeking to make their influence felt within the Church, and upon the very soil of Christianity, in the form of heterodoxy. The special object of attack was the doctrine of Chrisi's Person, which they sought to misinterpret in either a Jewish or a heathen sense. By the Judaizing spirit the significance of this doctrine was limited by lowering the dignity of Christ's person to that of a mere prophet; by the heathen spirit, by evaporating His historical reality into a mere idea; either His proper divinity was denied, or His true humanity impugned; and justice done neither to the unity nor the distinction of the two natures. In all this, it was no single dogma, but the very essence of Christianity itself that was attacked. But even this antagonism within the Church to the full truth of the Christian view was overcome, and the exclusive supremacy of the latter established.

The Middle Ages formed the period of this exclusive supremacy. The vicar of Christ and the German Emperor reigned. The heathen mind did indeed practically make its influence felt, but was obliged to bow to the authority of the Church. The Middle Ages were eras when a single view of the universe prevailed. It is that which forms their charm and greatness. In the great poems and works of art of this period, we encounter this single view. This never happened in any subsequent age. Reason was the handmaid of Faith, and philosophy of Theology. In the Summa, the great theological work of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest doctor of the Middle Ages, the heathen Aristotle and Plato appear as witnesses to Christian truth; so also in the great Cathedrals, those most characteristic representatives of the age, everything, even the most heterogeneous, the very world of goblins and demons, contributed to the great yet simple edifice. The Church held in one compact unity the whole fabric of human society. Yet the heathen spirit was but repressed, not annihilated. The revival of the ancient world, The Renaissance, in the classical studies pursued with such passionate ardour in Italy at the close of the Middle Ages, revived also the spirit of heathenism, harboured it in Rome itself, and upon the throne of the Romish bishop; and threatened the world with a new heathenism unless the Reformation had averted this danger. This is one of the greatest, though the least known and least acknowledged, of the services rendered by the German Reformation to western Christendom.

We are apt to be dazzled by the splendour of the revival of learning. Things have, however, a different appearance on closer observation. Assuredly the arts and sciences flourished in Italy, in the Medicean era, as they had never done before, as they have never done since, and adorned life with an unwonted refinement of manners. But, at the same time, there prevailed a hitherto unheard-of licentiousness of life and motive. Count Picus was a brilliant exception. It was he who was the author of the saying, "Philosophy seeks truth, theology finds it, religion possesses it." The heathen spirit ruled in the Medicean court. The Platonic academy at Florence put the Platonic philosophy in the place of Christianity, and Savonarola strove against heathen immorality and belief, as defended by the highest prelates.

It was a blessing to the whole Church that in contrast with the refined heathenism of Italy, the German Reformation exhibited, in Luther, a moral earnestness of conscience and faith, and in Melancthon, a union of classical cultivation and Christianity. The Reformation repulsed the negative spirit; and it has needed more than three centuries to arrive again where it then stood.— Abridged from Luthardt's Fundamental Truths of Christianity.

THE WEAKNESS OF INFIDELITY.

On one occasion when William Dawson, the Yorkshire Preacher, was giving out a hymn, he suddenly stopped, and said: "I was coming once through the town of Leeds, and saw a poor, little, half-witted lad, rubbing at a brass plate, trying to rub out the name; but the poor lad did not know that the harder he rubbed, the brighter it shone. Now friends sing :—

'Engraved as in eternal brass

The mighty promise shines;

Nor can the powers of darkness rase
Those everlasting lines.'

Then, as though he saw the devil rubbing, he said: Satan cannot rub it off:—

'His hand hath writ the sacred word

With an immortal pen.""

THE

BIBLE CHRISTIAN MAGAZINE.

GOD: HIS PERSONALITY AND OMNIPRESENCEHOW THEY HARMONIZE.

T will not be my purpose in writing this article to pursue an argument with the idea of proving the existence of God.

place.

t

Such existence I shall postulate; to do otherwise for the major part of the readers of this magazine would be out of

Personality. When we speak of the personality of God, we are applying a term to Him, which may be applied to any other personality. It is a common term which may be applied to all beings who have peculiarities in common. And this is pursuing an easy method. "The notions expressed by common terms, we are enabled to form, by the faculty of abstraction: for by it, in contemplating any object (or objects) we can attend exclusively to some particular circumstances belonging to it (some certain parts of its nature as it were), and quite withhold our attention from the rest."* We speak then of the Personality of God as that which is common to all beings of personality, without speaking of what He is else as God; as you would speak of the personality of a king without speaking of what he is else as a king. But what is personality? As our ideas of God will greatly depend on the views we take of personality, we should have as clear and correct a conception of it as possible. I find such definitions as the following:-"A being capable of exercising understanding and will-a self-determining intelligence;" "a thinking, intelligent being that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places;" "a being intelligent and free, every spiritual and moral agent, every cause which is in possession of responsibility and consciousness, is a person." That is one class of definitions. Now let us look at

* Whately's Logic, p. 83.

+ Dr. Fleming's Vocabulary of Philosophy, p. 365.

I