these later times. "Its central conception," says our
author, "is the elevation of conscience into a position of supreme
authority as the religious organ, a verifying faculty discriminating
between truth and error. It regards Christianity as designed to preside
over the moral development of mankind, as a conception which was to
become more and more sublimated and spiritualized as the human mind
passed into new phases, and was able to bear the splendor of a more
unclouded light. Religion it believes to be no exception to the general
law of progress, but rather the highest form of its manifestation, and
its earlier systems but the necessary steps of an imperfect development.
In its eyes the moral element of Christianity is as the sun in heaven,
and dogmatic systems are as the clouds that intercept and temper the
exceeding brightness of its rays. The insect, whose existence is but for
a moment, might well imagine that these were indeed eternal, that their
majestic columns could never fail, and that their luminous folds were
the very source and centre of light. And yet they shift and vary with
each changing breeze; they blend and separate; they assume new forms and
exhibit new dimensions; as the sun that is above them waxes more
glorious in its power, they are permeated and at last absorbed by its
increasing splendor; they recede, and wither, and disappear, and the eye
ranges far beyond the sphere they had occupied into the infinity of
glory that is before them.... Rationalism is a system which would unite
in one sublime synthesis all the past forms of human belief, which
accepts with triumphant alacrity each new development of science, having
no stereotyped standard to defend, and which represents the human mind
as pursuing on the highest subjects a path of continual progress toward
the fullest and most transcendent knowledge of the Deity.... It clusters
around a series of essentially Christian conceptions--equality,
fraternity, the suppression of war, the elevation of the poor, the love
of truth, and the diffusion of liberty. _It revolves around the ideal of
Christianity, and represents its spirit without its dogmatic system and
its supernatural narratives. From both of these it unhesitatingly
recoils, while deriving all its strength and nourishment from Christian
ethics._"[10]

The present age, if we hearken to Mr. Lecky, is purely Rationalistic,
because purely progressive. The world has emerged from its blindness and
ig