it before
them, and as (I trust) their children will find it after them, when
all this present whirlwind of controversy has past,

'As dust that lightly rises up,
And is lightly laid again.'

I have told them that they will find in the Bible, and in no other
ancient book, that living working God, whom their reason and
conscience demand; and that they will find that he is none other
than Jesus Christ our Lord. I have not apologised for or explained
away the so-called 'Anthropomorphism' of the Old Testament. On the
contrary, I have frankly accepted it, and even gloried in it as an
integral, and I believe invaluable element of Scripture. I have
deliberately ignored many questions of great interest and
difficulty, because I had no satisfactory solution of them to offer;
but I have said at the same time that those questions were
altogether unimportant, compared with those salient and fundamental
points of the Bible history on which I was preaching. And therefore
I have dared to bid my people relinquish Biblical criticism to those
who have time for it; and to say of it with me, as Abraham of the
planets, 'O my people, I am clear of all these things! I turn
myself to him who made heaven and earth.'

I do not wish, believe me, to make you responsible for any statement
or opinion of mine. I am painfully conscious, on reviewing for the
Press Sermons which would never have been published save by special
request, how imperfect, poor, and weak they seem to me--how much
worse, then, they will appear to other people; how much more may be
said which I have not the wit to say! But the Bible can take care
of itself, I presume, without my help. All I can do is, to speak
what I think, as far as I see my way; to record the obligation
toward you under which I, with thousands more, now lie; and to
express my hope that we shall be always found together fellow-
workers in the cause of Truth, and that to you and in you may be
fulfilled those noble and tender words, in which you have spoken of
Samuel, and of those who work in Samuel's spirit:

'In later times, even in our own, many names spring to our
recollection of those who have trodden or (in different degrees,
some known, and some unknown) are treading the same thankless path
in the Church of Germany, in the Church of France, in the Church of
Russia, in the Church of England. Wherever they are, and whosoever
they may be, and howsoever they may be neglected or assailed, or