had come with credentials enough to satisfy the world that the speakers
spoke by authority, and that the matter had from the beginning been
well understood.

It is assumed that we who do not hold these ideas are wilfully wrong,
that we are not inclined to accept the divine truth, that it is on
account of the hardness and wickedness of our hearts, and that we
prefer evil rather than good. We are told that we might know, if we
would, that the matter is definite, and has been perfectly well settled
from the beginning. This, I say, is the assumption.

Let us now, then, investigate the matter for a little while, just as
calmly, just as simply, just as dispassionately as we are able.

I confess to you, at the outset, that I do not like such a task as to-
day seems to be imposed upon me. I do not like to be put in the
position of seeming to criticise my fellow- citizens, my friends, and
neighbors; but it seems to me that it is more than a task, that it is a
duty, and one that I cannot readily escape. I mean as little as
possible even to seem to criticise people; but I must look into the
foundations of their beliefs, and see whether they are valid, whether
there is any reason why we should feel ourselves compelled to-day to
accept them.

Let us take our place, then, at the outset of Christianity by the side
of Jesus and the apostles. Now let us note one strange fact. For the
first two or three hundred years the belief of the Church was chaotic,
unconfirmed, unsettled. There was dispute and discussion of the most
earnest and most bitter kind concerning what are regarded to-day as the
very fundamentals of the Christian faith.

This would hardly seem possible, would it, if Jesus had made himself
perfectly clear and explicit in regard to these matters? If Jesus were
really God, and if he came down on to this earth for the one express
purpose of telling humanity what kind of moral and spiritual condition
it was in, just what it needed in order to be saved, would you not
suppose that he would have been so clear that there could have been no
honest question about it?

If, for example, Jesus knew he was God, ought not he to have told it so
plainly that no honest man could go astray about it? If he knew that
the human race fell in Adam and was in a condition of loss under the
general wrath and curse of God, ought not he to have said something
about Adam, something about the Garden of Eden, something about the
fall? Yet it never