ted into an icy light where there is
neither life nor warmth?

How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present
the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those
recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the
title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again
tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the
world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of
the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have
satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that
religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.
Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the
religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the
machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and
denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.
It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the
want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear
about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is
indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and
shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak
that an honest investigation would fail to find it.

Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the
minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a
reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is
required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard
seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they
would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we
should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant
whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects
or our hearts.

It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on
dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher
sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which
could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely
sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church
conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,
Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the
Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other bo