s having all been
lived does not detract from its poetic value. Nor does the fact of its
being capable of appropriation by the individual Christian of to-day as
still a vital religion detract from its sublimity. Only to a man wholly
destitute of spiritual perception can it be that Christianity should
fail to appear the greatest exhibition of the beautiful, the sublime,
and of all else that appeals to our spiritual nature, which has ever
been known upon our earth.

Yet this side of its adaptation is turned only towards men of highest
culture. The most remarkable thing about Christianity is its adaptation
to all sorts and conditions of men. Are you highly intellectual? There
is in its problems, historical and philosophical, such worlds of
material as you may spend your life upon with the same interminable
interest as is open to the students of natural science. Or are you but a
peasant in your parish church, with knowledge of little else than your
Bible? Still are you ...[64]

_Regeneration_.

How remarkable is the doctrine of Regeneration _per se_, as it is stated
in the New Testament[65], and how completely it fits in with the
non-demonstrative character of Revelation to reason alone, with the
hypothesis of moral probation, &c. Now this doctrine is one of the
distinctive notes of Christianity. That is, Christ foretold repeatedly
and distinctly--as did also His apostles after Him--that while those who
received the Holy Ghost, who came to the Father through faith in the
Son, who were born again of the Spirit, (and many other synonymous
phrases,) would be absolutely certain of Christian truth as it were by
direct vision or intuition, the carnally minded on the other hand would
not be affected by any amount of direct evidence, even though one rose
from the dead--as indeed Christ shortly afterwards did, with fulfilment
of this prediction. Thus scepticism may be taken by Christians as
corroborating Christianity.

By all means let us retain our independence of judgement; but this is
pre-eminently a matter in which pure agnostics must abstain from
arrogance and consider the facts impartially as unquestionable phenomena
of experience.

Shortly after the death of Christ, this phenomenon which had been
foretold by Him occurred, and appears to have done so for the first
time. It has certainly continued to manifest itself ever since, and has
been attributed by professed historians to that particular moment in
time called Pen