Page:Dr Stiggins, His Views and Principles.pdf/21

 Jerusalem, a city whose largely imaginary glories would not compensate a modern thinker for the lack of the elements of sanitation and of democratic government. The dogmas of the writer were no doubt clearly enough defined—to us, of course, they would be impossible—but we have no reason to suppose that his drains were in the like case. Indeed, it is highly improbable that such things existed in any form at the period in which these words were written, and I need scarcely remind you that the sense of Liberalism and of the Free Churches is not uncertain on the point of Dogma versus Drains. The "City of God" then, as the Inspired Writer viewed it, was, probably, something very different from the City of God to which modern progress is daily approximating; and I need scarcely say that the visions of mediæval dreamers, of men who lived in the heated opium den of Catholicism and Feudalism, are still less likely to image forth the Model City of to-day. The old Hebrew who used the phrase thought of Jerusalem, the centre of