from sin; from the inward to the outward; from Christ to
Christianity; from Christian doctrine to the perfectness of Christian
faith.

LECTURE VIII. FREE THOUGHT IN ENGLAND IN THE PRESENT CENTURY; SUMMARY OF
THE COURSE OF LECTURES; INFERENCES IN REFERENCE TO PRESENT DANGERS AND
DUTIES.

ECCLES. xii, 13.

_Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and
keep his commandments; for this is the whole duty of man._

In the last lecture we brought the history of unbelief on the continent
down to the present time. In this, the concluding one of the series, we
shall complete the history of it in our own country or language during
this century; and afterwards deduce the moral of our whole historical
sketch, and suggest practical inferences.

In the account of unbelief in England, given in a previous lecture,(895)
we hardly entered upon the present century, except so far as to observe
the influence of the philosophy of the last on works of literature, such
as those of Shelley; or on political speculations, such as those of Owen.
Yet even here we were already made to feel the presence of the new
influences, which have completely altered the tone of unbelief. Even
Shelley's later works, though marked by the outbursts of bitter passion
against religion, contain more of the spiritual perception which is the
characteristic of present thought:(896) and the oblivion into which Owen's
system soon fell, save as it has been resuscitated in moments of political
disaffection, together with its failure to leave a permanent impression,
like the socialist systems of France, arose from the circumstance that the
one-sided survey of man's nature, on which it was based, could not deceive
an age which was characterised by an increasing depth in its moral
perceptions.

The unbelief of the present day differs from that of the last century in
tone and character; and in many respects shares the traits already noticed
in the modern intellectualism of Germany, and the eclecticism of France.
It is not disgraced by ribaldry; hardly at all by political agitation
against the religion which it disbelieves: it is marked by a show of
fairness, and professes a wish not to ignore facts, nor to leave them
unexplained. Conceding the existence of spiritual and religious elements
in human nature, it admits that their subjective existence as facts of
consciousness, no less than their objective expression in the history of
re