the wind.

But has doubt quenched the light of any star? Has doubt taken away from
the glory of the universe? Rather, as the result of the work of these
myriad investigators, whose one aim and end was truth, at last we have
a universe worthy to be the home of an infinite God, a universe that
matches our thought of the Divine, a universe that thrills and lifts
us, fills us with reverence, and bends us to our knees in the attitude
of worship.

The same spirit has raised no end of questions concerning God. What has
been the result? We have lost the old thought of God in the shape of a
man sitting on a throne located in the heavens just above the blue or
on some distant star. We have lost the thought of a God as a tyrant, as
a jealous being, as angry every day with his children, as ready to
punish these children forever for their ignorance, for their
intellectual mistakes, for their sins of whatever kind. We have changed
our conception of him; but have we lost God? I will not answer that
question at this stage of the discourse, because I wish merely to
suggest it now, and dwell on it a little more when I come to the
positive treatment of our morning's theme.

Let us glance at the Bible a moment. Doubt and investigation have been
at work there. What has been the result? Have we lost the Bible? No. We
have gained it. We have lost those things about it which were
intellectual burdens because we could not believe them, which were a
moral burden because they conflicted with our highest and noblest sense
of right. We no longer feel under the necessity of reconciling human
mistakes with divine infallibility. Professor Goldwin Smith has told us
recently that these old theories of the Bible were a millstone about
the neck of Christendom, and that they must be gotten rid of if
Christianity was to live. This is all that doubt and investigation have
done to the Bible. They have cleared away the things that no sane and
earnest and devout mind wishes to keep; and they have restored to us in
all their dignity and beauty and sweetness and power the real human
Bible, the Bible which poured out of the heart of the olden time, and
which is in all its truth and sweetness, so far as they go, a
revelation of the divinest things in human thought and human dream.

Preachers tell us every little while that those who ask questions have
taken away our Lord, and they know not where he has been laid. What has
this spirit done concerning Jesus? Has