rtition" which separated two families of sincere
worshippers. Yet we now see stronger and higher walls of partition
than ever, between the children of the same God,--with a new law of
the letter, more entangling to the conscience, and more depressing to
the mental energies, than any outward service of the Levitical law.
The cause of all this is to be found in _the claim of Messiahship for
Jesus._ This gave a premium to crooked logic, in order to prove that
the prophecies meant what they did not mean and could not mean. This
perverted men's notions of right and wrong, by imparting factitious
value to a literary and historical proposition, "Jesus is the
Messiah," as though that were or could be religion. This gave merit
to credulity, and led pious men to extol it as a brave and noble deed,
when any one overpowered the scruples of good sense, and scolded them
down as the wisdom of this world, which is hostile to God. This put
the Christian church into an essentially false position, by excluding
from it in the first century all the men of most powerful and
cultivated understanding among the Greeks and Romans. This taught
Christians to boast of the hostility of the wise and prudent, and
in every controversy ensured that the party which had the merit of
mortifying reason most signally should be victorious. Hence, the
downward career of the Church into base superstition was determined
and inevitable from her very birth; nor was any improvement possible,
until a reconciliation should be effected between Christianity and the
cultivated reason which it had slighted and insulted.

Such reconciliation commenced, I believe, from the tenth century, when
the Latin moralists began to be studied as a part of a theological
course. It was continued with still greater results when Greek
literature became accessible to churchmen. Afterwards, the physics
of Galileo and of Newton began not only to undermine numerous
superstitions, but to give to men a confidence in the reality of
abstract truth, and in our power to attain it in other domains than
that of geometrical demonstration. This, together with the philosophy
of Locke, was taken up into Christian thought, and Political
Toleration was the first fruit. Beyond that point, English religion
has hardly gone. For in spite of all that has since been done in
Germany for the true and accurate _exposition_ of the Bible, and for
the scientific establishment of the history of its component books,
w