orbis
terrarum_ of Augustine. The verdict of the world is against you, he
had urged against the Donatists, and what was conclusive against them
appeared to be conclusive against Anglicans, who could only appeal for
support to their own kith and kindred. However that may be, what
answer is forthcoming to the retort which the phenomena of to-day
unmistakably suggest? If the universal consent of the fourth century,
semi-barbarous, uneducated, profoundly credulous, and avowedly
uncritical, serves to prove the truth of that form of Gnosticism known
as orthodoxy, what are we to say of the uniform rejection of it, as
such, by the decidedly cultivated intellect of the nineteenth century?
If the prior unanimity was adequate to prove its dogmatic truth, why
should not the spectacle offered by educated Europe and America be
sufficient to show its groundlessness? Whatever it may be to "babes"
and "little ones" to whom it loves to appeal from the "undue exaltation
of intellect" which can see no basis whatsoever on which to rest the
_historical_ Christianity of the Churches, certain it is to those who
know, it is among those things which "have their day and cease to be".
It cannot be a cathedral vast as the race, it can never be more than a
system among systems, a chapel isolated in the infinite.

The truth of this will be more clearly seen if we reflect on the nature
of the claim of the Churches to be in exclusive possession of Divine
knowledge, the sole revealer of God to man. Ever since the words of
the Gnostic gospeller, "He shall lead you unto all truth," were
written, it has been claimed that the authentic medium of Divine
communications has been a corporation or a book, one or the other being
affirmed to be an exhaustive and infallible philosophy of God and man.
Solomon is said to have had grievous misgivings as to the Lord of
heaven and earth being enclosed within the temple he had built, but no
such anxieties beset the framers of the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds, or
their imitators in subsequent ages. What a spectacle for gods and men!
"All truth" summed up in Thirty-nine Articles, or a score of
Oecumenical Councils! It is the profanity, I had almost said the
sacrilege, of it, which is so shocking to the instinctive reverence of
our minds. And what truths, too, are commended to our keeping in these
canons and articles! Beginning with the natural depravity of human
affections, purposely inflicted upon us because of an