certainty[8]. He spoke continually of an offended God. Between
this offended God and His creature Man sin had dug an impassable chasm.
But Christ had thrown a bridge, from heaven's side of that chasm, over
the dreadful gulf. This is why Christ described Himself as the Way. He
is the Way over that chasm, and there is no other.

[Footnote 8: "It is a very singular and important fact that, from the
appearance in Genesis of the account of the creation and sin and
punishment of the first pair, not the faintest explicit allusion to it
is subsequently found anywhere in literature until about the time of
Christ. . . . Jesus Himself never once alludes to Adam, or to any part of
the story of Eden."--ALGER.]

But Christ also described Himself as a door. What is the definition of a
door? It is not enough to say that a door is a thing for letting people
in and letting people out. It is a thing for letting _some_ people in,
and for shutting other people out.

To whom did Christ entrust the key of this door? To St. Peter--to the
disciple who had denied Him thrice. What a marvellous choice! Would you
have thought of doing that? Should I have thought of doing that? Would
any theologian have invented such an idea? But that is what Christ did.

And ever since, St. Peter and his successors have held the keys of
Heaven and Hell, with power to loose and bind. What? you exclaim, were
the Keys of Heaven and Hell entrusted to even those Popes who lived
sinful lives and brought disgrace on the name of religion? Yes. To them
and to no others in their day. Whatever their lives may have been at
other moments, when they were loosing and binding they were acting for
St. Peter, who stood behind them, and behind St. Peter stood Jesus
Christ.

Such in brief was the sermon delivered that Sunday evening to the
faithful in Westminster Cathedral by one of the wittiest men now living
and one of the cleverest young men who ever came down from Oxford with
the assurance of a great career before them.

How is it that he has come to such a pass?

I feel that he is in part whistling to keep up his courage, but in chief
forcing himself to utter an extreme of traditional belief in order to
destroy the last vestige in his mind of a free intellectual existence.
Auto-suggestion has a power of which we only begin to know the first
movements.

The man who has said that he would not choose as the battleground of the
Christian religion either "the credibility of