Page:The Other Life.djvu/26

 loving the Word of God sincerely, and experiencing in their own hearts the spiritual blessings it promises, live in a state of serene indifference amounting almost to torpor. Thinking, as we may say, from the affections rather than from the intellect, they pass their lives in a delicious day-dream of the sufficiency and infallibility of the Christian theology. They are ignorant or unconscious of the storms that are raging without and within the Church. They see no decay of its strength, no eclipse of its faith, no disintegration of its elements. They have never had the critical and rational spirit awakened in their minds, so as to discover the insecurity of their ground and the difficulties of their position.

The critical spirit, which is the rectifying or verifying power of the mind, arises spontaneously in the natural evolution of the human intellect. One of its earliest manifestations in Europe was the great Protestant battle for the right of private judgment. It has been the means of the emancipation of thought from the subtleties of metaphysics and the despotism of theology, which had their rise in the infancy and childhood of society. The reaction of the critical spirit against the conservative and dogmatic elements which are