ose obligations are; leaving an impression upon
devout Christians that something in their faith is untenable when they
want to find in it what is tenable; suggesting that earnest infidels in
this day have much to urge in behalf of their doubts and difficulties;
never fairly asking what they have to urge, what are their doubts and
difficulties."[221]

On the other hand, the First Broad Church will not unite in the
organized opposition to that work, because the denunciations and appeals
"took an almost entirely negative form; they contradicted and slandered
objections; they were not assertions of a belief; they led Christians
away from the Bible, from the creeds which they confess to certain
notions about the creeds, from practice to disputation. They met no real
doubts in the minds of unbelievers; they only called for the
suppression of all doubts. They confounded the opinions of the day with
the faith once delivered to the saints. They tended to make anonymous
journalists the law-givers of the Church. They tended to discourage
clergymen from expressing manfully what is in their hearts, lest they
should incur the charge of being unfaithful to their vows. They tended
to hinder all serious and honest co-operation between men who are not
bound together in a sectarian agreement, lest they should make
themselves responsible for opinions different from their own."[222]
Thus, while the First Broad Church occupies a neutral ground in the
controversy now rending the whole structure of English theology, its
moral force is all against Evangelical Christianity, and in favor of the
usurpations of Rationalism.

But the theology maintained by the First Broad Church is little above
that contained in the _Essays and Reviews_ and similar Rationalistic
publications. With them, the Scriptures are better than any other books
of antiquity because they contain the most of God's will, not because
they alone contain his will. "These books," says a writer, "have been
filtered out, as it were, under his guidance, from many others which, in
ages gone by, claimed a place beside them, and are now forgotten, while
these have stood for thousands of years, and are not likely to be set
aside now."[223] They are indifferent as to their date, authorship, or
contents. "Men may satisfy themselves," the same writer continues,
"perhaps if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me--that
the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a