A Century of Failures of Attacks on Christianity.
THIS century opened in the twilight of declining deism. The greatest brilliancy of deistic writers is found at about the middle of the eighteenth century. Voltaire, you remember, died in 1778; Rousseau, the same year; Gibbon, in 1794. Thomas Paine lived till 1809; Shelley was with us until 1822; Byron, until 1824; and Goethe, until 1832. There beamed over into this century from the eighteenth a large amount of lurid light from the French revolution, and from the foremost deistical writers, and so our century began with an anti-supernaturalistic bent. At the opening of the century, Schleiermacher exerted a profound influence on all Protestant theology in Europe. Mystical in some portions of his teaching, not regarded as everywhere sound by the best judges of to-day, he yet did an incalculably great service for the progress of religious thought. In the middle and toward the close of the last century Christianity found new vigor and new methods in the Wesleyan revival in England. Wesley and Whitefield, as well as Butler and Paley, had shown that Christianity was not likely to disappear. As our century progressed, great revivals swept through large parts of Christendom; missions to foreign lands arose; the religious press became a cosmopolitan power. As it was on the whole evident that deism had not gained the victory over its antagonist, new and more determined schools of infidelity began novel forms of attack. Physical science made prodigious advances, and the key-note of infidelity was anti-supernaturalism. The first school of skepticism which became a large power in our century now seems ludicrously grotesque in its central positions. It was the fashion of Professor Paulus, of Heidelberg, the leader of this school, to explain all occurrences called miracles in the Bible, by merely natural causes. A miracle could not have occurred; therefore, no miracle did occur. Wherever the New Testament record appears to authorize the statement that a miracle occurred, we must explain the facts by natural causes. To give an example: Professor Paulus always insisted that when the New Testament says, "Christ walked on the sea," all it means is that he walked on the shore near the sea. This treatment of the New Testament records was ridiculed even by such a man as Lavater. "We dare not," he says, "pronounce such interpretations of the plainest statements foolish and insolent; for our very tolerant generation would declare that intolerance. But I would like, in all modesty, to ask these philological illuminators, not whether a single philologist for the last seventeen hundred years can be found who stumbled upon the idea that the words, 'Jesus walked upon the sea,' are to be translated, 'Jesus walked near the sea on the shore,' but whether, indeed, the three evangelists intended to teach that Jesus, like ourselves, was able to walk on terra firma! Wonderful statement! Oh! most marvelous of miracles!"—Joseph Cook, in N. Y. Independent.