rnatural, and it thus
practically has all the qualities of a religion that is wholly natural.
In so far as it professes to be revealed, it of course professes to be
infallible; but if the revealed part be in the first place hard to
distinguish, and in the second place hard to understand--if it may mean
many things, and many of those things contradictory--it might just as
well have been never made at all. To make it in any sense an infallible
revelation, or in other words a revelation at all, _to us_, we need a
power to interpret the testament that shall have equal authority with
that testament itself.

Simple as this truth seems, mankind have been a long time in learning
it. Indeed, it is only in the present day that its practical meaning has
come generally to be recognised. But now at this moment upon all sides
of us, history is teaching it to us by an example, so clearly that we
can no longer mistake it.

That example is Protestant Christianity, and the condition to which,
after three centuries, it is now visibly bringing itself. It is at last
beginning to exhibit to us the true result of the denial of
infallibility to a religion that professes to be supernatural. We are at
last beginning to see in it neither the purifier of a corrupted
revelation, nor the corrupter of a pure revelation, but the practical
denier of all revelation whatsoever. It is fast evaporating into a mere
natural theism, and is thus showing us what, as a governing power,
natural theism is. Let us look at England, Europe, and America, and
consider the condition of the entire Protestant world. Religion, it is
true, we shall still find in it; but it is religion from which not only
the supernatural element is disappearing, but in which the natural
element is fast becoming nebulous. It is indeed growing, as Mr. Leslie
Stephen says it is, into a religion of dreams. All its doctrines are
growing vague as dreams, and like dreams their outlines are for ever
changing. Mr. Stephen has pitched on a very happy illustration of this.
A distinguished clergyman of the English Church, he reminds us, has
preached and published a set of sermons,[38] in which he denies
emphatically any belief in eternal punishment, although admitting at the
same time that the opinion of the Christian world is against him. These
sermons gave rise to a discussion in one of the leading monthly reviews,
to which Protestant divines of all shades of opinion contributed their
various argum