revision of the doctrinal basis of communion or lay aside their membership. All the time, be it understood, their Christian character is not disputed; their only fault is a difference of opinion on some points from the accepted standard. As the terms are irrevisable, their communion is of course terminated, although by the granting to them of unimpeachable honesty and Christianity the disputed points are acknowledged not to be essential. The church or body so acting thereby becomes schismatical, and prepares the way for its own moral downfall by excluding the highest conscientiousness from within its boundaries. It is held that no societies of Christians have the right to exclude other Christians from full fellowship for differences of belief, as the basis of union is not intellectual but spiritual-love to the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity and truth. The reservation other Christians is of course necessary, inasmuch as the society may, and justly, consider certain items of belief essential to personal Christianity. Even then it will be fully recognized that in the scheme which they accept there is nothing binding on those who are without. "Should my best endeavour To share (truth) fail-subsisteth ever That God, by God's own ways occult, God's care for me-no more can I; It is but for myself I know. I cannot bid The world admit He stooped to heal My soul, as if in a thunder-peal Where one heard noise, and one saw flame, I only knew He named my name." In the next place, standards of faith, whether irrevisable or otherwise, have always utterly failed to secure uniformity of belief. The number of sects is a proof of this; and so far from their (almost) constant practice being a witness to the efficiency of creeds, it is a powerful testimony against their value and advisability. If the divine revelation has proved unavailing to unite Christian people in harmony of intellectual belief-a work for which it was never intended, it should be premised,—it is surely too much to expect that any human expedients can compass so great an end. Notorious for its irrevisable articles of faith, the Church of England stands proclaiming loudly to the present age what rotten bulwarks of the truth they are. It is of no use to say that, but for these, matters would have been worse. They cannot possibly be worse, though the creeds and Prayer-book be wholly swept away. Opinions more widely asunder on the most important and essential points of Christian truth it would be difficult to con ceive, than are now taught by its recognized and authorized ministers, and under shelter of its venerable institutions. Uniformity there is none, except in outward and non-essential mechanical organization, and in the receipt of its emoluments. Notwithstanding what has been urged against the finality of creeds, it must not be supposed that they are wholly without use or value in the economy of the Christian Church. They are convenient signs—expressions of opinion-marks, whereby Christian men can more readily find other Christians sharing the same views, with whom they can associate in full sympathy and union. But they must never be held as if they contained the whole and the unadulterated truth, but only as summaries of the convictions (not by any means infallible) of the members forming the body which adopts them, and even as such they must not be imposed too strictly upon others who seek admission to its communion. They must be alterable with increasing light, otherwise the right of private judgment is laid aside, and religion becomes mere obedience to external authority instead of an inward impelling life. Turning to the arguments of the supporters of articles of faith as presented in this debate, and commencing with R. S., a singular piece of reasoning in a circle at once arrests the eye. A standard of faith ought to be irrevisable: therefore there ought to be a standard of faith! Admitting each of these statements to a certain extent, there is certainly no actual necessity for the second to follow from the first. His other opening remarks apply solely to the Scriptures, the only revealed statement of religious truth, and these are at once admitted to form the standard of faith for Christians, from which there is no appeal, and which is placed high above all alteration or reconstruction. But not the standard, but standards, of faith, are in question in this debate; the term evidently being intended to apply solely to the creeds or articles of faith which distinguish the different sects or churches included under the Christian name. If R. S. or any other friend claims for the creed of his church a paramount authority, the assumption is at once met with utter denial, and reasonably so, for its proof is altogether fanciful and vague. The Jewish standard was irrevisable, and so were Christ's teachings, but it is again asserted that these have nothing to do with the matter, for their divine origin was direct and unmistakable. Exception might be taken to the reasoning of R. S. upon passages in the New Testament, and the meanings he imputes to them shown to be unnecessary and unnatural; but as his article is based upon the confusion now pointed out, of two things that differ widely, there is no necessity to devote more space to its consideration. His appeal to the solemn closing passage of the book of Revelation may, however, be justly held of great force against all attempts to supplement or perfect the New Testament teachings by the imposition of other standards of belief. "Austine's "paper is declamatory rather than logical. It is only necessary to reply that so far from creeds being, as he asserts, the result of the gathered energies of thought, the sum of epochs, the product of all the influences of the ages, they are the exact contrary of this. All this might be true of them when formed, but the continued "energies of thought," the "epochs" which follow, the ever-new "influences of the ages" which come after, are ignored when once they are imposed and held sacred from revision. They are, so far as we quarrel with them, the opinions of former ages, not of our own, yet held binding upon our thoughts and organizations; or the opinions of our own age transmitted with an assumption of infallibility to our descendants. We wish them to expand, so that they may truly contain within them the full Christian experience and thought, ever increasing as the years roll onward, of the followers of the Redeemer, and not to continue arbitrary boundaries fixed long ago, when there was at least no greater vividness or clearness of light than now. If they are altered for the Christian body, that which is the "soul of life" to individual believers is not altered. They can still hold what opinions present themselves as embodying the truth of God; we only want these not to be thrust on others, as devout and truth-loving, by whom they cannot honestly be accepted. Faith in God and Christ, and belief in creeds as such, are widely different in their nature, though it is a common mode of argument to employ them as interchangeable, particularly when professedly appealing to the inspired writings of the apostles. In answer to "Howard," the case he supposes of a bare majority wishing to change the old creed connected with a Christian society does not come within the principle we contend for, but gives rise to a question of expediency alone, or rather of justice and Christian charity between the two opposing parties. Both parties exist within the supposed society, and one has equal right to consideration with the other. Would it not be just as wrong for the minority to insist on the acceptance of the old creed by the new majority as for the contrary to be the case? It would be as dishonest in the majority to accept the formerly recognized standard, as for the minority to accept it when altered in some of its particulars. There would be no remedy but separation or revision; which would be the greater evil the nature of any particular case must determine. "Howard" seems to take for granted that all revision must of necessity be a change from the expression of one opinion to its opposite. But the disputed point might, when the creed was once held open, be expunged, and the cause of difference removed. In the Church of England and elsewhere the "parties" already get their own interpretations of Scripture, and contend for them as vigorously and dogmatically as if no standards of faith had ever received their adhesion. This is done in spite of, and too often in manifest opposition to, the creeds professed, a state of things which is far worse than any confusion which might ensue upon their revi sion. It is denied that there is greater division of sentiment among those who hold creeds subject to alteration with new light which God may vouchsafe to grant, than among those who rely for uniformity upon an irrevisable statement of doctrine to which all who unite in their communion must subscribe. It is asserted that there is less-infinitely less; and that the lapse from evangelical, scriptural faith among the Congregationalist churches is not for a moment to be compared with that which has taken place within the “Church of England," notwithstanding its Thirty-nine Articles, its Prayerbook, and other machinery, for securing stability and uniformity. Finally, as to "Howard's" opinion, that to the eye of faith all the fundamental doctrines of the Bible are clear as noonday; if this is so, what need can there be for creeds to give them greater clearness and authority? Two quotations may fittingly conclude: "If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of His, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded-I am very confident, the Lord hath more truth yet to break out of His holy word. For my part I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the Reformed Churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go at present no further than the instruments of their first reformation. The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of His will our God has imparted and revealed unto Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it. And the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things! This is a misery much to be lamented."—Robinson's "Advice to the Pilgrim Fathers." "The Christian intelligence of to-day possesses every right that the Christian intelligence of the fourth century, or the sixteenth century, possessed. And not only has it the same rights, but there can be no doubt but that upon the whole it possesses a higher capacity of exercising these rights. In many respects it has both more insight into spiritual truth, and more freedom from spiritual prejudice. And it claims, therefore, not only in one church, but in all living churches, to reabsorb, as it were, the great spiritual ideas of the past, and review them in the light of Scripture, to take them up from the dogmatic moulds in which they are apt to lie dead in an uninquiring age, and to bring them face to face once more with the living Word and with all true knowledge. Theology ceases to be a living science when it ceases to move, when it imposes itself as a mere mass of dogma upon the conscience, instead of soliciting the continual criticism and purification of the spiritual reason. Nor is such a process of movement necessarily of an unsettling character in theology any more than in other sciences. Whatever true principles theology has reached in the past remain true principles. Truth has nothing to fear anywhere from the most rigorous inquiry. But whatever is not of the truth, whatever has been imported into theology from the darkness of human error or the misconception of human reason, or in other words, from the misreading of divine revelation, this is, no doubt, liable to be unsettled and exploded. Unsettlement of this kind is the very purpose of the movement, but only that in the end the truths of divine revelation, the great thoughts of God towards us in Christ, may be seen more clearly, and understood more comprehensively.”—Principal Tulloch, in the "Contemporary Review." Oswestry. W. Philosophy. DOES SCIENCE INDUCE SCEPTICISM? AFFIRMATIVE ARTICLE.-V. To faith FAITH is the most sublime of human characteristics. rather than knowledge all the blessings of the gospel are attached. All knowledge, even in its ultimate reach, originates in and depends on faith. Facts are only facts because we have faith in eyesight, in testimony, in records, in inferences. Science, indeed, rests on faith, faith in hypotheses, in experiments, in instruments, in prior discoveries, in axioms whose bases are postulates granted as true and taken as such in faith, that Science may build thereupon or therefrom her structures of infallible (as she calls them) truths. Yet science opposes faith; and, like the serpent nursed in the countryman's bosom, stings the breast from which it gained heat and life. Science is proud of knowing. Yet truly without faith all that it knows is, nothing can be known. Is it not strange that science should be found advocating scepticism, and stirring up men to doubt the highest and holiest of all truths ?-should endea vour to unsettle men's minds regarding the grounds and evidences of things, though at the same time its own foundations are laid in precisely the same allotment as that of religion,-for the last word of science, as well as that of religion, must be faith. Withdraw from that certainty of certainties, mathematics, your consent to the postulates, and your assent to the axioms, and where is it ?—and all that is built upon it? Like the baseless fabric of a vision! J. O. may zealously maintain that scepticism is not induced by science, but he cannot deny that scientific men are notably sceptics; that the chief arguments used against religion in the present day come from science; and that so great has the hostility of men of science increased against religion, that they recently used the holiest fruit of the gospel-the sabbath day-to dispel men's illusions (as they called them) regarding the Word, and the faith of the "Lord of the sabbath." This is a question of fact. We are not debating, as J. O. seems to think, whether science ought to induce scepticism; hence J. O.'s array of arguments as to how scientific sceptics may have gone wrong; and yet these sceptical arguments have no effect as against religion, are wholly irrelevant. We are not con cerned in the present question with anything but this,-" Does science induce scepticism?" the insertion, by implication, of justly into the question, on which the whole of J. O.'s article proceeds, is |