n comprehend the vastness of
our danger. An enumeration of the evil doings of a public enemy is the
best plan to forestall his future misdeeds. We are not to judge
Rationalism by its professions. The question is not, What does it wish?
At what does it aim? or, What is its creed? But the true way to measure,
understand, and judge it, is by answering the inquiry, _What has it
done?_ Its work must determine its character. This work has been most
injurious to the faith and life of the church, and its deeds must
therefore be its condemnation. There are those who say, "Tell us nothing
about skepticism; we know too much about it already." Would it be a
prudent request, if, before penetrating the jungles of Asia, we should
say, "Tell us nothing of the habits of the lion"; or, before visiting a
malarious region of Africa, we should beg of the physician not to inform
us of the prevalent fever and its appropriate remedy? Forewarned is
forearmed. We are surrounded by Rationalism in many phases; it comes to
us in the periodical and the closely-printed volume. Even children are
reading it in some shape or other. Shall we know its danger; then we
must know its deeds.

III. OF RATIONALISM IT MAY BE AFFIRMED, AS OF ALL THE PHASES OF
INFIDELITY, THAT IT IS NOT IN ITS RESULTS AN UNMIXED EVIL, SINCE GOD
OVERRULES ITS WORK FOR THE PURIFICATION AND PROGRESS OF HIS CHURCH. A
nation is never so pure as when emerging from the sevenfold-heated
furnace. It was not before Manasseh was caught among thorns, bound with
fetters, and carried to Babylon, that he "besought the Lord his God, and
humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers;" nor was it
before this humiliation that the Lord "brought him again to Jerusalem
into his kingdom." The whole history of religious error shows that the
church is cold, formal, and controversial before the visitation of
skepticism. When every power is in full exercise, infidelity stands
aloof. God has so provided for his people that he has even caused the
delusion by which they have suffered to contribute great benefits but
little anticipated by the deluded or the deluders themselves. The
intellectual labors of the German Rationalists have already shed an
incalculable degree of light on the sacred books, and upon almost every
branch of theology. But thus has God ever caused the wrath of man to
praise him.

Taking this view of the indirect benefits resulting from skepticism, we
cannot lament, without an admix