parated from the morality of the New Testament.

Nor can we any longer rely upon Old Testament facts, or on anything
there revealed regarding God, as distinct from what could have been
discovered without such a revelation, if our faith has been shaken in
the facts and the characters of the New Testament. He who can reject
the Christ of the New Testament, must necessarily reject the God of
the Old; and he who cannot rely on the apostles, cannot possibly rely
upon the prophets. All must be given up, and the Bible become a mere
curious record of falsehood.

6. Is this all? Enough one would think! But can we even fall _back on
God?_ What evidence has any man of the existence of a living personal
God, stronger than what he possesses of a living personal Saviour? Can
_any_ revelation of God during _the past_, and recorded in history, be
received as worthy of credit, if _this_ alleged history of Jesus is
rejected as unworthy? If the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
is not the only living and true God, where is the true God to be
found? If Jesus neither knew Him truly, nor truly revealed Him, who
can do either? And when, moreover, we have thus lost faith in the
character of Jesus and of His apostles, from what better evidence of
moral character or moral design on earth can we henceforth reason
upwards as to the moral character of a Divine Being?

In what position do we thus find ourselves? The Church of Christ must
be given up as a great falsehood, a huge idolatry, a society of weak,
deluded, or bad men. The character of its early founders, and the
Person to whom it owes its name, must, for the same reason, be
abandoned. The Old Testament can form but a feeble barrier to the
flood which has thus swept away the New, with all which has arisen out
of the assumed truth of its history. And thus each man, cut off from
the past, is left to discover a God for himself, from evidence which,
to satisfy him, must necessarily be more overwhelming than that which
he rejects, and on which the faith of the Christian Church has rested
for eighteen centuries. Can any man be satisfied with such a basis of
religion as this? Having rejected God as revealed in Jesus, _can_ he
peril his soul in peace on the God discovered by himself? Having fled
from Christianity as a religion whose foundations are insecure, can he
repose with confidence in the building which he himself has reared?
Or, if he moves at all, must he not gradually slide into uni