Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1889, by FUNK & WAGNALLS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D. C. Printed in the U. S. A. THE HOMILETIC REVIEW. VOL. XVII. JANUARY, 1889.—No. 1. REVIEW SECTION. I. THE DUTY OF THE CHURCH WITH REFERENCE TO THE SPECULATIVE TENDENCIES OF THE TIMES. BY REV. F. F. ELLINWOOD, D.D., NEW YORK. IN considering the duty of the Church in respect to current skepticism, I shall not attempt to discuss any department of speculative philosophy or criticism, but shall simply deal with certain practical questions which arise in this age of intellectual conflict. The forms and methods of unbelief which have been encountered from first to last have been legion. Blasphemous denunciation, scathing ridicule, travesties and burlesques in literature and art, wild ravings of communism, thin and vapid theosophies, have all done their utmost to overthrow the Christian faith, and yet it has not only survived these besetments, but has even gained strength in spite of them. It will not be necessary, therefore, to assume any apologetic grounds. Christianity is not beleaguered; it is out upon the field with advancing columns. Yet, like all armies of conquest, it should make thorough reconnaissance of the enemy's position and forces. There are just now three general lines of skeptical attack. First, in science, particularly in biology and metaphysics. By wide inductions of selected facts and the skillful grouping of certain principles supposed to control all activity and all life, science claims to have reasoned out a universe without Creator, Ruler, or Judge. Consciousness becomes simply a molecular movement of the brain fibre; intuition is but the garnered experience of former stages of our animal history. Every man's destiny is written upon his nerve tissues; the human soul itself is a development of the ages. Beholding our faces in a glass, we see no longer the image of God, but instead, there are shown in the cornea of the eye and in the rim of the ear slight traces of bygone types of animal life. Looking up longingly for an infinite Father, we see only a "death's head" of Agnosticism in the blank heavens, and the only providence is "a stream of tendency not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." Instead of anticipating an eternal kingdom in which we shall be like our divine pattern, we are told that our im mortal hope must be found in the solidarity of an advancing racethat we shall be drops in the ever-flowing sea of humanity. A second line of assailment is that of destructive Biblical criticism. It seeks to undermine the sacred Record. It hunts for contradictions, discredits authorship, questions chronology, but is reasonably confident of its own theories, dates, comparisons, and conclusions. It utterly fails to apprehend the sacred Word in its spirit, to measure its breadth and symmetry and completeness, or divine the secret of its power over millions of mankind. A third field of warfare is that of comparative religion. Christianity is allowed an honorable place in the pantheon of ethnic faiths. Its records are acknowledged to have been inspired-as all works of genius. are inspired-and the Great Teacher of Nazareth is admitted to have been superior to Confucius or Gautama, though that superiority is ascribed to evolution. Thus, in the curriculum through which God has educated the race, He has employed all religions as successive grades. Fetichism was the alphabet. Brahmanism and Buddhism as well as Judaism were among the "divers manners" in which "God spake in times past unto the fathers," while in Christianity He hath in these last times spoken unto us by His Son. By the plain logic of all this, the great work of missions is not a struggle between the false and the true, but simply a rising from the lower to the higher. The stocks and the stones, as well as the tabernacle and the cross, are among the appliances of Redemption. Besides these general departments of unbelief, there are various unclassified skepticisms whose methods are less scientific but often more direct. Secularism, with great plausibility, urges the paramount claims of the present life. In popular fiction or in flippant lectures it ridicules the illusions of Christian hope, and calls for a helping hand today. It points to the world's poverty and wretchedness, and rails at the Church for its failure to elevate and relieve-yet itself offers no relief. It poses as the emancipator of men from priestcraft and the tyranny of an imaginary unseen ruler. With its bright "Hellenic culture" it would "throw open the shutters of the soul to the sunlight of this world," and make life genial and interesting now and here. But with the masses the emptiness of all this fine sentiment soon appears. The secularism which they want is bread and wages. Thus it enters naturally into alliance with all social discontent. In its more violent moods it is mad against God and man. It would confiscate this world and gain possession, and it cares for no other. In the last analysis it is Nihilism, and that is always Atheism. While it is admitted that there are multitudes of sincere and honest doubters who are entitled to respect, yet probably nine-tenths of all the positive skepticism of mankind, from Gautama to Schopenhauer, has found its spring in rebellion against the real or imaginary hard ships and inequalities of human allotment. The followers of Ingersoll blaspheme against the God of the Bible, but on precisely the same grounds the school of James Mill are equally violent against the Creator of this actual world whose dark mysteries they cannot deny. Both alike have failed to recognize the terrible factor of sin, and the glorious truth that abounding sin and death are met by superabounding grace. But the issue before us is only half stated: there is a brighter side. There have been centuries of assailment; there have also been centuries of growth. Christianity has conquered savage races and made them the hope of the world. It has overthrown oppressions and instituted a real brotherhood of mankind, and it has a wider and mor? intelligent acceptance than ever before. Often when infidelity has been most confident of success, spiritual religion has evinced new power. In the face of the bold scoffers of the eighteenth century, the revivals of Wesley and Whitefield wrought their triumphs. Just when Voltaire and Hume were supposed to have crippled Christianity, and the blasphemies of the French Revolution had sent a shudder over Europe, the great world-wide movement of modern missions arose. In America, eighty years ago, skepticism triumphed in Virginia, and Unitarianism swept the churches of New England; but the spirit of God attended the preaching of the winnowed truth, and out of that very period sprang successive revivals— out of that very period arose the Home Missionary movements which have covered the land with churches, and the Foreign Missionary enterprises which are reaching to the uttermost parts of the earth. But if it be maintained that now a very different enemy is to be met, that now scientific demonstrations have rendered Christian supernaturalism an impossibility and a myth, the ready answer is that this generation surpasses all others in the advancement of the faith. In the activity and diffused intelligence of the Church, in the growth and power of the Sabbath-school, in the establishment of Christian associations and the development of lay efforts of every kind, and especially in the extension of the gospel to all lands, the times in which we live have had no equal. There is more of the Christlike spirit than ever before, less of bitterness and contention, less of pious selfishness in personal experience. There is an increase of courtesy, a broader charity, greater unity, and a higher conception of universal brotherhood in Christ. And these things we believe to be real fruits of the Spirit and true tests of moral earnestness and divine reality. What school of philosophy has thus stretched forth its hands to relieve the wants and woes of the world? Agnosticism opens no orphanages or mission schools; the religion of humanity rears no hospitals on the dark continents. Only the divine law of love in |