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tion and reverence to the great Father who made and loves us all, and requires us to love, pity, and help one another, because of this our common origin and family relation. Eeligion also requires us to be sober or temperate — regulating the appetites of our bodies and the emotions and affections of our minds, so that we be not carried away by them beside or beyond the purposes for which they were implanted, but that they may further us in attaining perfection in this world, and at last eternal felicity.
Now, though theology deals in great part with the same subjects with which religion is concerned, it differs from it in several respects. Eeligion deals with those subjects in a practical way, chiefly with reference to conduct or life ; and it appeals to all parts of our nature, to the affections and emotions as well as to the understanding. It works through hope and fear, and seeks to influence, to restrain, to stimulate, and to regulate — in short, to make us wise, holy, good, in all manner of conversation, that we may be " perfect in all the will of God." On the other hand, theology is wholly theoretical or speculative. Its object is to reconcile certain apparent contradictions or inconsistencies, not only between different parts, or passages, or expressions of Scripture, but between Scriptural statements or doctrines, and the phenomena of the physical and moral world. For it must deal not only with the Bible but with facts ; regarding the facts of nature and providence, and of general history and experience, as being, no less than the histories, doctrines and teachings of Scripture, revelations or manifestations of the Maker and Governor of the world. These all, proceeding from the same Divine source, are and must be really consistent, however at first sight they may sometimes appear to conflict one with another. It is therefore the province of theology to point out the harmony which underlies seeming opposition and discordance in the Word or ways of God, so that we may discern a real and profound order where at first sight confusion or contradiction presents itself to our minds. Thus, in the natural world, the law of gravitation being demonstrated to be a law operating throughout the universe, it is available to explain and reconcile a multitude of facts or appearances which seemed, to minds not instructed in this law of gravitation, to be unrelated, or even opposed and contradictory, one to another.1
(2) Still more true is it that it is Jesus Christ, and not feelings about Him. Feelings are great aids to devotion; they are often special gifts of God, the play of His Blessed Spirit
1 Robert Lee.
ioo THE TEACHER'S GREAT TEXT
upon our life of affection, raising it towards high and heavenly things. Yet what is so fugitive, so protean, so unreliable as a feeling ? It comes and it is gone ; it is intense, and forthwith it wanes; it promises much, and presently it yields nothing but a sense of moral languor and exhaustion that succeeds it. Feel- ing shouts " Hosanna " to-day, and to-morrow " Crucify " ; it would pluck out its right eye for the apostle of its choice, and then suddenly he is become its enemy because he tells it the truth.
TJ I will tell you of a want I am beginning to experience very distinctly. I perceive more than ever the necessity of devotional reading. I mean the works of eminent holy persons, whose tone was not merely uprightness of character and highmindedness, but communion — a strong sense of personal and ever-living communion — with God besides. I recollect how far more peace- ful my mind used to be when I was in the regular habit of reading daily, with scrupulous adherence to a plan, works of this description. A strong shock threw me off the habit — partly the external circumstances of my life, partly the perception of a most important fact, that devotional feelings are very distinct from uprightness and purity of life — that they are often singularly allied to the animal nature, the result of a warm temperament — guides to hell under the form of angels of light, conducting the unconscious victim of feelings that appear Divine and seraphic, into a state of heart and life at which the very world stands aghast. Cases of this kind came under my im- mediate cognizance, disgusted me, made me suspect feelings which I had hitherto cherished as the holiest, and produced a reaction. Nevertheless, the only true use of such a discovery is this, that our basest feelings lie very near to our highest, and that they pass into one another by insensible transitions. It is not true to take the tone so fearfully sounded in Tennyson's u Vision of Sin," or that of Mephistopheles when he sneeringly predicts to Faust the mode of termination for his "sublime in- tuition," after the soliloquy in the forest, when Gretchen's image has elevated his soul. The true lesson is* to watch, suspect, and guard aspirations after good, not to drown them as spurious. Wordsworth says —
True dignity abides with him alone Who, in the silent hour of inward thought, Can still suspect, and still revere himself, In lowliness of heart.
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