g forward along a road wholly different. Breaking
early away from the gods of nature, they advanced along
the line of their moral consciousness; and leaving the
nations to study physics, philosophy, and art, they
confined themselves to man and to human life. Their
theology grew up round the knowledge of good and
evil, and God, with them, was the supreme Lord of the
world, who stood towards man in the relation of a ruler
and a judge. Holding such a faith, to them the toleration
of paganism was an impossibility; the laws of
nature might be many, but the law of conduct was one;
there was one law and one king; and the conditions
under which He governed the world, as embodied in the
Decalogue or other similar code, were looked upon as
iron and inflexible certainties, unalterable revelations
of the will of an unalterable Being. So far there was
little in common between this process and the other;
but it was identical with it in this one important
feature, that moral knowledge, like physical, admitted
of degrees; and the successive steps of it were only
purchaseable by experience. The dispensation of the
law, in the language of modern theology, was not the
dispensation of grace, and the nature of good and evil
disclosed itself slowly as men were able to comprehend
it. Thus, no system of law or articles of belief were or
could be complete and exhaustive for all time. Experience
accumulates; new facts are observed, new forces
display themselves, and all such formulae must necessarily
be from period to period broken up and moulded
afresh. And yet the steps already gained are a treasure
so sacred, so liable are they at all times to be attacked
by those lower and baser elements in our nature which
it is their business to hold in check, that the better pan
of mankind have at all times practically regarded their
creed as a sacred total to which nothing may be added,
and from which nothing may be taken away; the suggestion
of a new idea is resented as an encroachment,
punished as an insidious piece of treason, and resisted
by the combined forces of all common practical understandings,
which know too well the value of what they
have, to risk the venture upon untried change. Periods
of religious transition, therefore, when the advance has
been a real one, always have been violent, and probably
will always continue to be so. They to whom the precious
gift of fresh light has been given are called upon
to exhibit their credentials