The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1871-12-23 00:00:00

HISTORY AT ST. PAUL'S.

The Rev. Canon Lidilon delivered, under the Dome
of St. Paul's, London, on Tuesday evening, the third
lecture of a series intended for young men engaged in
business in the city. The large congregation, consist.
ing entirely of men, led by a voluntary choir, joined
heartily in the musical portion of the short service
which preceded and followed the discourse of the
lecturer.

Canon Liddon proceeded to consider the question, "is
Christianity on the Decline, with reference to Its Intel-
lectual Circumstances S'' It might lie mid, se allow that you
have made out a case for thinking that a religion which has
survived such grave, social, anal political vicissitudes as
those which have befallen Christianity need not fear the
future on the street political or social change. The vital
principle, whatever it be, which har supported it hitherto
will probably cam it forwand through the dangers of the
conning years as it has enabled it to survive the dangers of
the past. Itut a hat Is this vital principle? Clearly, aaid the
lecturer, it was Faith. The secret of that victory over
political and social forces apparently so invincible was the
possession of a conviction that there was an unseen world
much more real and energetic than that which Dikzi the eye.
hut then arose the miestion, What if this faith, which had
been such a force In -the past, should fan in the future
Wind if it be sapped by the progresa of knowledge, which
paralyzed the 1,111 COLVfrti.ll Id its imperative troth at the
yen), crisis of acheS What, if recent science, recent
eriticism, re,nt 11140.19 of thimeht threatened It with
dangers no knewn Intone. and cast a P11.1,•W of heavy pre-
sentiment o,cr its future What if there be reason Oh the

. -
kith; of tlo., who deemed it nothing less than ;thsurd to
suppote the pelt er %hid. commend the Empire, moulded
the barbarians, resisted hihths, and turvivol the great
Devolution, could hope to beep its throne against the
intellect if the iintern world I.:manage was sometimes
heard to the effect that in the 19th centuly, f,,r the brat time
in the history of its existence, 4 %riga:mitt was brought into
conflict with really active t,iiinari 0.401. This language
was partly due to the conceit which every age had Inol of
lulu.: fort nn,tt In the files of time, am! ao in possession of
mental mivant iges ealijehi had never been possessed before.
Hut it was also a result of igliterellee of the past. of its intel-
lectual bistory. and hartiellhiriy of the intell,tual trials
through which Christianity hail gone since its appearance on
the toil of Palestine nineteen centuries ago.
Dr, then reviewed the history of the conflicts of
Christianity witli Judaism and Pnganistn,
the intellectual opposition which the Church bad to face ill
the Mat centuries of her eXiStellee. ThiS opposition wee
at Inice pliil44ollhlcal and popular, it was coarse and refined,
it was argument and invective, it was towelled In the streets
and it was digested into treatises

Passing, then, by a rapid stride to the very heart of the
Middle Ages, he pneveded to study a danger ,t a
widely digerent charaeter. In the 12th and lath centuries
the I burnt, it was alnos.t IltediCES to say, was the dominant
power in Europe. It woo an epoch when, to use Neander's
nerds, religious feeling was more powerful than any
other power of the higher side of mauls nature ; an epoch
when this whole atmosphere of public thought was
controlled and penetrated by the idea of a supernatural
world." At such an epoch as this there was evidence of an
Undercurrent of doubt and unbelief which engaged the
anxious attention of the leading 111i11418 of the slay. Referring,
among other instances of this, to the charges brought
against the Templar. when their curler was suppressed, he
remarked that it was impossible to suppose that anything
of the kind would have been suggested in the Bth, 9th, or
luth centuries. There were at this Muir halls and lec-
ture rooms in this metropolis where the most fundamental
truths if religion wore bell up to scorn and ridicule by lec-
turers, who, if not men of cultivation, were not deficient in
intellectual force. It was natural in Christian believers,
who thought of the many persons who would thus be led
astray on the most momentous of all subjects, to wish that
these temples of unbelief should be closed ; it was natural,
hut he doubted whether it was wise. An outsimken unbelief
was in many ways leas dangenms than a suppressed
one. Its very activity was a safety-valve for Its passion : it
had its any, and Christians knew, as they had known fur cen-
turies, the worst that it had to urge against their faith they
did not live in dread Oi any new elplosion. It was loetter
to control the ravages of a fire in the street than to sit Oil
the mouth of a volcano.

lie passed on to the Renaissance that estraordinary re-
vival of Mate and feeling for the literature mid manners of
the old Greek and Roman world which took s.aitheni Europe
by storni in the ltth and 10th centuries. The Renaissance
was not merely a taste, it was a passion and as a passim' it
wet impatient or rather Intolerant of anything that came in
Its way. The Christain Creed and Church did no come in its
way ; it represented the state of mind which had superseded
said oliscredited the old Pagan world of thought. It was a singu-
lar attempt on the part of a world of thought and feeling
which had hem. dead and buried for 1,000 years to rise front its
grave and to dethrone the religion which hail succeeded it.
hoarding himself against being supposed to forget the lame-
fits which Europe I owed to the Renaissance, and the ntiniu-
Inns id. it undoubtedly gave to literature and to art, he
passed from the struggles of the Reformation epoch, which
were In the main internal to Christendom, and examined
the dangers which beset, Christianity in the ISth century,
when the Church again timid herself face to face with an
active school, who ',produced the objections of the early
Pagan opponents of Christianity. Lord Herbert of eherintry
had died in Fits, and from him to Collins, who died 1729,
there waso grave descent. limiest step in the descent of Eng-
lish Deism won matte by Thom olChubb, who died at Sallebury
in 1717. The English Deists were tranalated into French and
German the 4:ernians stuuied them scientifically, and
developed their opinions into tho system which was now
spoken lif as the older Rationalism the French brought
their sparkling imagination to hear on these generally dry
writers; in France they became poetry and epigram. and
the wit and sarcasm Id Voltaire, only to make way for
the blank, undisguised atheism of the later Encyclopedist
school.

Certainly, about the middle of the last century, the cur-
rent seemed to be setting strongly in the world of thought
against Christianity. But there were accomplished Christian
apologists in this Cathedral, to molt other great names, he
might mention one of the greatest of its Deans Joseph
huller, Ile turned the Deistic position by showing that
diffleultics which • mlght he urged against Christianity
might be paralleled in natural religion ; and that unless
men insisted upon having for revealed rdigion a wholly
different kind of evidence from that which they
accepted as sufficient in the ordinary affairs of life,
they ought in reason to accept Christianity as
true. but in Enghool, at least, the apologists were
reinforced by a !awake, demonstration of the surviving
mover if Christianity in what was now called the Evan•
eelical movement. Amid the dialectics of the time chrid-
inns were forgetting 'the spiritual life. Wesley, Whitfield,
Newton, Cecil, Venn, Wilberforce, all represented the ten-
dency to test the truth of Chriatianity by its power in chang-
ing the heart and will. No doubt this school might have
made mistakes. its point if view was, from the first. a narrow
I ale, but it achieved in England the regenerating w otk which
in Yranee could only be effected by the blmsly experiences of
the Reign of Ter,r : it re-instated Christ in the thought
and heart of the nation. It wan said ,•indeed, that Christ-
ianity was pressed now more hardly than ever before : and
he did not deity that it was a very Nolemn and saddening
consideration to reflect how much if the highest intellect in
Europe W. ranged against it. But the very thoroughnesa
of modern attacks on the Gospel were a: • our safeguards.
The most earliest thinkers who opposed Christ attacked not
merely christianity, but Theism : they were in opposition
not merely to the supernatural element in the New Testa-
ment and the Creed, but to the dein:nide of the moral sense.
Christianity accordingly found defenders beyond its frontiers,
anti the quickened moral sense of our time was itself an els-
moit in public thought favourable to the appreciation of its
true poser and beauty.

chrioth.city hail eyes ioneutions to Settle, no doubt, with
historical snit with physical science. hilt of these history
wan. as time ',shoed, bringing fresh Illustrations of the truth
of the Male narrative—illuotratfous which were out of reach
in the last century, and with the physiologists, if they ad-
mitted the primal truth of a Creator , and they had in
their limb, one of the best evidences if His existence),
there could not ultimately be any real quarrel. Christians
might have to re-adjust SOMe popular misconceptions as to
the necessary meaning of scripture where it touched upon
physics, just as they hail before had to do at the bidding of
Galileo : they might discover, for Instance, that there was
no necessary contradiction between the evolution hypothesis
wisely stated, and the revealed doctrine of Creation •, and
physicists might learn to admit that because their elperience
only carried them to the utmost frontier of the natural uni-
verse, tills did not prove that there was not another world
beyond, and that man had at command means of investiga-
ting it. . . . .

....„
loony case, no one who considered the intellectual history
of Christianity would conclude that it wax II the decline
merely tns acciamt of its present intellectual dream.

stances. It fought its way, through intellectual curretts
as subtle and as strong as any around us now, to Its throne
In Europe; it was inaccessible to the subterranean
murmurs of a wide spreading scepticism In the Middle
Ages : it resisted the disintegrating enthusiasms of the
Renaissance it had looked English Delon and French Athe-
ism, and it might be added, the various forms if Gentian Pan.
theism, well in theism Probably lathe swaying to and fro
of the surging tides around us: there would occasionally be
histories such as those of Lamennals or Blanco White, se
others nearer our Own time, who would be named by anothee
generation, which seemed to some despondent minds t•
imply that the Church was making her last retreat befose
Stir intellect of man in its full measure of strength. Ent
It was easy to exaggerate the value of such individual action,
and the broad outlities—the general conditions of the ivies-
tion between faith and unbelief—did not really change any
more than the outlines of the heavenly bodies. The into
history of Christianity was at least as reassuring as
Its politlcal history.