PREFACE.

N issuing the Second and concluding Volume of the ILLUSTRATED BIBLE DICTIONARY, the Editors have not much to add to the statements made by them in the Preface to the First Volume. They may, however, remark that experience has confirmed their conviction of the necessity for such works as the present, and of the principles on which they can be properly constructed.

Two conflicting tendencies exist at the present moment within the circle of religious thought, and every day but serves to deepen their antagonism. On the one side stands the popular religious creed of the orthodox Protestant Churches. In our own country these Churches are yet more strongly united by an almost entire identity of doctrinal belief than they are separated by diversity of opinion on questions of ecclesiastical government and order. Among them the Christian Scriptures stand prominent as the only acknowledged and authoritative rule of faith and practice. By this standard all matters of opinion are absolutely measured. Their teaching has been systematised in creeds and formularies, and constitutes a complete body of doctrine, admitting neither of addition nor of diminution. This body of doctrine is traced back, by an unbroken line of descent, to the days of the apostles, and constitutes the external link of unity between the various branches of the orthodox Church of Christ in all lands and throughout all ages.

On the other side stands the sceptical tendency, which measures all belief by the simple processes of the reason. It is, however, a reason not exercised, in the first place, on the evidences of revelation, and therefore, in its subsequent judgments, allowing room for its Divine and superhuman element; but immediately, and from the first, directed to the internal contents of the revelation, and to them alone. It assumes to decide, by its own consciousness or intuition, or by the verifying faculty of the conscience, not only upon the truth of doctrines, but, what is stranger still, upon the reality of historical facts, as if the course of human affairs could be mapped out and measured by any invariable rules of human theory. The natural basis of such a mode of thought is laid in the sufficiency of the reason, and the ever-advancing perfectibility of human knowledge. With no little arrogance, it claims to possess a monopoly of thought and of inquiry, and speaks as if all students but its own disciples were narrow, bigoted, and ignorant. In short, it assumes the indefatigable spirit of modern research to be a domain of its own, instead of being a common ground on which the orthodox believer and the rationalist are working side by side, and on which they are equally prepared to meet. Hence it measures not itself by the Bible, but the Bible by itself. It allows to Christian doctrine neither definiteness nor perpetuity of its own, but treats it as a variable quantity-just what the progressive enlightenment of a particular age may make it, and neither more nor less. The creed of the orthodox Churches is regarded as obsolete, as the natural expression of men's religious opinions eighteen hundred years ago, but as now out of place, and either to be wholly swept away, or to be indefinitely modified, as individual thinkers may decide.

On behalf of the orthodox creed it may be confidently asserted, that an irresistible mass of evidence attests the Bible to be a Divine book, and Reason herself concludes that it is more probable that the human consciousness should err, than that all the primary principles of evidence should be wrong. We are bound in common consistency either to reject evidence in all things, or to