Sceptical Tendencies of the Age

In viewing the work of the Christian teacher in relation to the intellectual phenomena which surround him, it is exceedingly necessary that he should be thoroughly alive to the sceptical and rationalizing tendencies of the age. These tendencies show themselves among high and low, among learned and ignorant, in the playful sallies of the drawing-room, and in the bold cavils of the workshop. But in the higher classes, these tendencies take a more covert and subtle form.

The Bible is disallowed only as the Bible; that is— as an authoritative guide to the religious conscience- as the accredited exponent of Heaven’s law and purposes- as the inspired and exclusive medium through which God’s Spirit communicates to man’s spirit a knowledge of the things which belong to his peace. The disciples of this school have confidence in Revelation, not as it is a fact of history, but as it agrees, and only so far as it agrees, with what they assume to be the light of their own consciousness.

And this principle is applied to all subjects whatsoever. Moral good and evil, the modes of the Divine Subsistence, the inspired veracity of the sacred writers, miracles, angels, devils, heaven, hell,-- one and all of these are to be believed just so far as man has other, beside the authority of Scripture, for believing them to be true. Works of recent date are indications, mighty and portentous, of this diminished reverence for ancient truth - of this impatience of any revealed rule of faith-- of this determination to dislodge the Scriptures from their prescriptive supremacy over the human conscience, and, indeed, to leave every man to be a Bible to himself,- his own law, his own inspiration, his own God !