he divine, character of Christ; but they consider his life to be a mere
example of unrivalled teaching, and of marvellous self-sacrifice; his
death the mere martyrdom that formed the crowning act of majestic
self-devotion. God's gift of His son is accordingly, in their view, to
reconcile man to God; to remove the obstacle of distrust which prevented
man from coming to God, by showing forth the love which God already bore
to the world; not to remove obstacles, known or unknown, which prevented
God from showing mercy to man. Christ is accepted as a teacher, and as a
king, but not as a priest. His work is viewed as having for its purpose,
to inculcate and embody a higher type of morality, not to work out a
scheme of redemption. The ethical element of Christianity becomes elevated
above the dogmatic. The sermon on the mount is regarded as the very soul
of Christ's teaching. And in looking forward to the future of
Christianity, the Christian religion is considered likely to become the
religion of the world, merely because it will have ceased to be the
religion of form and dogma, and become the highest type of ethics.

Views like these are common, and their compatibility with Christianity is
defended in different ways:--sometimes by the bold attempt, as in the
speculations of the Tuebingen school, to prove that primitive Christianity
was such a religion as that just described; that the dogmatic Christianity
of the early fathers was the addition made by philosophy to the first
doctrine, the _idola theatri_, which haunted the minds of the early
teachers; and that the books of the New Testament, to which we appeal to
prove the contrary, belong to a later date than that usually
assigned:--sometimes, with less consistency, admitting the antiquity of the
dogmas, by representing that we can penetrate into the philosophy of the
apostolic doctrine, and express in modern phrase, more clearly than in the
ancient, the meaning which was intended to be conveyed:--at other times, by
regarding all truth as relative to its age, and supposing that Christ's
work was seen by the light of the sacrificial and Messianic ideas common
in the apostolic times.

Connected with this fundamental disagreement with the ordinary teaching of
the Christian church, on the central question of Christ's work and the
nature of Christianity, is the cognate question concerning the relation of
the Bible as a rule of faith. Its superiority to ordinary books is
admitted