have been
so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered
makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that
as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and
office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to
their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief
object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;
and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed
over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.

With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive
sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people
have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the
well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been
educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in
the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks
on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same
impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights
of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the
inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century
in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in
the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church
walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped
the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of
speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at
last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long
delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people
will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in
some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,
of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and
uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound
enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must
balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,
under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not
placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions
are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold
a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general