earthly life, a Power which will hold him responsible for that breach of law; a Power from whose reach even death shall not certainly enable him to escape. Thus it follows that from the very beginning of his moral activity, man must have been brought face to face, in the spontaneous operations of his conscience, with a revelation, more or less clear, of the being and will of God; a revelation which was also a revelation of his character, in so far at least as this, that He must be a moral Being and the absolute Ruler of all men.

But the external world has also ever been to man a revelation of the existence of a Power above man, and above all nature. Never, except in rare and erratic cases, have men been able to believe that the sensible world was its own. sufficient cause and explanation. To say no more, man cannot well help seeing that the universe reveals a Power which, even if it be immanent in the universe, as it is, is yet in so far distinct from it that in some way the universe must be its product and effect. Even such an extreme extreme evolutionist as Reville is

willing in this sense to admit that the phenomena of religion require us to believe that God has revealed himself to man; and that man" was so constituted that, arrived at a certain stage in his psychical development, he must become sensible of the reality of the Divine influence. "In this sense," he says, "which leaves perfect freedom to history, we also could accept the idea of a primitive revelation."1

We find, then, the origin of religion in these two factors: the one, subjective, the other, objective; the former, the constitution of man's nature, in virtue of which he necessarily believes in the existence of a Power invisible and supernatural, to which he stands necessarily related; the latter, in the actual revelation of such a Power in the phenomena of conscience, and in the physical universe without us.

1 "Prolegomena," etc., p. 36.

LECTURE VI.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION: SIN AS A FACTOR.

THE history of religion undoubtedly presents us with an evolution, as the popular modern phrase is. Religions have not arisen suddenly and independently of what had gone before. It is true of religious history, as of all history, that the roots of the present are in the past, as those of each past, in a yet earlier past. In many instances, we are able to trace the genesis of a religion out of a preceding religion, historically; as in the rise of Buddhism out of the earlier Brahmanism, or of Muhammedanism out of Christianity and Judaism. Nor is Christianity an exception to this law. Though it was, in one sense, a new religion, supernaturally introduced through the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection, of the Son of God, it was yet so related to the antecedent Judaism as without it to have been impossible. The affir

mation of a supernatural factor in Judaism or Christianity in no wise requires us to ignore or deny the co-operation of natural causes also, in their origination and development, any more than the recognition of the natural causes involves, as some seem to suppose, the denial of the supernatural factor.

Again, in every religion, when it has been once established, we observe a progressive development. No religion has ever remained, in the apprehension and practice of those who profess it, exactly what it was in its beginning. Religions are modified as the years and centuries go by, whether in the way of elevation and progress, or, on the other hand, of regress and degradation. It takes little careful reading to discover in the Christian Scriptures, historically regarded, a very manifest progress in the development of doctrine. Only a school of interpretation, now about extinct, will seek to discover everything in Genesis which appears in the Gospels or Apocalypse. The theology of Genesis is very simple and elementary, as compared even with that of the prophets; and

when it is compared with any of the New Testament books, the contrast is still more obvious.

This fact is now so commonly recognised by intelligent Christians, that it might seem superfluous to remark it, except that many of the chief authorities who have written of late years on the history of religion, have so unaccountably misapprehended, and hence misrepresented, the belief of intelligent evangelical Christians on this point; assuming that because such maintain that man began his history with a true knowledge of the one living God, they also have intended therein to affirm that the first men enjoyed a full knowledge of all those truths which are now the possession of the church.

A striking illustration of this is found in Reville's "Prolegomena to a History of Religion," in which the learned author, contending against the Christian doctrine of a primeval supernatural revelation, urges that "it is infinitely hard to imagine that in the beginning of his slow and painful development, man, yet