Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/18

 is no connection between our improved methods of dealing with matter, and any advancement of religious information; that the one has always been open to the influences of progress, but that the other, because it is a revelation from God,—was never admissive of such an issue; and so it is assumed that our knowledge of religious truth has been completed and has reached a standstill!

This may be a plausible way of putting the subject, but it is certainly fallacious, and is contradicted by the history of opinion, in many ages of the Church. Doctrines admitted as true in one period have been debated and abandoned in another; tenets have been added to the popular faith, of which antiquity was ignorant; and interpretations of Scripture, which for centuries were accepted as the truth, have been compelled to recede before the light of modern science and discovery. Respecting those facts there can be no dispute.

It is, indeed, true that the revelation of Christianity came from its Founder in a complete and perfect state; that is to say, the documents called the Bible contain everything that is necessary for our knowledge of Christianity in the most finished and decided form; but that is not the case with men's interpretation of them. It is not true that the perfect revelations of God have always been understood in a perfect manner. The various sections of the Christian Church which now prevail are standing proofs that different interpretations, both of passages and principles of the Word, have found a place among them; and it is amazing, not to say alarming, to many minds, to observe the strong forms in which fresh differences in religious thought are now in the process of being disclosed. They are put forth with the surroundings of elegant learning by the very élite of our national universities, and they are being sought after by