ture of solace, that the path of Truth
has always been rough. The Master, who declared himself "The Truth,"
premonished us by his own life that his doctrines were not destined to
pervade the mind and heart of our race without encountering violent
blows, and passing through whole winters of frost and storm. Many things
attending the origin and planting of Christianity gave omen of
antagonism to its claims in coming generations. Nor could it be expected
that the unsanctified reason of man would accept as the only worthy
guide of faith and life what Judaism, Paganism, and Philosophy had long
since decidedly rejected. But the spirit of Christianity is so totally
at variance with that of the world that it is vain to expect harmony
between them. Truth, however, will not suffer on that account; and when
the issues appear it will shine all the brighter for the fires through
which it has passed. The country where Rationalism has exerted its first
and chief influence is Germany, than which no nation of modern times has
been more prospered or passed through deeper affliction. At one time she
was the leader of religious liberty and truth, not only in Europe, but
throughout the world. She was thirty years fighting the battles of
Protestantism, but the end of the long conflict found her victorious.
Since that day, however, she has lost her prestige of adherence to
evangelical Christianity; and her representative theologians and
thinkers have distorted the Bible which she was the very first to
unseal. We rejoice that her condition is more hopeful to-day than it was
twenty-five years ago; but recovery is not easy from a century-night of
cold, repulsive Rationalism. As a large number of those stupendous
battles that have decided the political and territorial condition of
Europe have been fought on the narrow soil of Belgium, so has Germany
been for ages the contested field on which were determined the great
doctrinal and ecclesiastical questions of the European continent and of
the world. Happily, the result has generally been favorable; and let no
friend of evangelical truth fear that Rationalism will not meet its
merited fate.

We must not imagine that, because the term Rationalism has been
frequently employed within the last few years, it is of very recent
origin either as a word or skeptical type. The Aristotelian Humanists of
Helmstedt were called _Rationalists_ in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, and Comenius applied the