tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">30] to the world, and by his great learning, but more especially by the power and irresistible charm of his treatment of the subject, has popularized the conceptions of the Rationalists, until now the virus of their infidelity may be said to be poisoning all Protestant Christendom.

What must ever be an occasion for chagrin, not to say humiliation, to orthodox Christendom, is, its inability to meet in any effectual way the assaults of this new criticism. In Germany they complain against Strauss for having written his "Life of Jesus" in the German language. If he must write such a book, so full of unbelief in the orthodox conception of Jesus, he ought at least to have had the grace to have written it in Latin!^[31]

For his rationalism Renan is driven out of the Church of Rome; but this only gives notoriety to his views, creates a desire to read his books and spreads abroad his unbelief. When the Presbyterian Church takes to task one of its most brilliant scholars^[32] for accepting the results of the new criticism, he is sustained by the powerful Presbyterian Synod of New York and acquitted; and when an appeal is taken to the general assembly of the church and he is finally condemned, he is able to retort that while he was condemned by the general assembly, it was by numbers and not by intelligence that he was overcome; it was the less intelligent Presbyteries of the rural district that gave the necessary strength to his opponents. The better informed members—members from the cities and centers of education and enlightenment—were with him.^[33] The defense commonly made for orthodox Christianity is an appeal to its antiquity and its past victories. Its defenders point with pride to the failure of the proud boast of Voltaire, who was foolish enough to say: "In twenty years Christianity will be no more. My single hand shall destroy the edifice it took twelve apostles to rear." "Some years after his death," say the orthodox, "his very printing press was employed in printing New Testaments, and thus spreading abroad the gospel." Gibbon with solemn sneer devoted his gorgeous history^[34] to sarcasm upon Christ and his followers. "His estate," say the orthodox, "is now in the hands of one who devotes large sums to the propagation of the very truth Gibbon labored to sap."^[35]

All this may be very well, but even in their day these men of the eighteenth century had a large following, and did much damage to orthodox belief. In fact, it is not inconsistent to claim that, in an indirect way, they were the forerunners of our new school of criticism; for many Christian scholars not satisfied with the answers made to the infidel writers of the eighteenth century have accepted the results of this new criticism as a solution of the difficulties urged against christianity by the infidels of the eighteenth century.

It is time now to pause and summarize what has been thus far discussed:

First, the divided state of Christendom of itself argues something wrong; for nearly every page of holy scripture urges the unity of Christ's Church. "Is Christ divided?"^[36] is the ringing question that the apostle of the Gentiles asks the schismatically inclined church at Corinth. "I beseech you, brethren," says he, "by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no division among you; but that ye be perfectly joined together in the same mind and the same judgment."^[37] He then proceeds to tell them that they are utterly at fault in one saying that he was of Paul; another that he was of Apollos, and another that he was of Cephas.^[38] What he would say of divided, not to say warring Christendom of today, one may not conjecture, further than to say that if the incipient divisions in Corinth provoked his condemnation, the open rupture and conflicting creeds of the Christianity of the nineteenth century would merit still harsher reproof.

Second, the failure of Christianity to evangelize the world in nineteen centuries, sixteen of which, to all human judgment, appear to have been especially favorable to that evangelization, since at the back of Christianity stood the powerful nations of Europe whose commerce and conquests opened the gates of nearly all nations to Christian missionaries—argues some weakness in a religion bottomed on divine revelation and sustained through all these centuries (so Christians claim) by divine power. To be compelled to admit after all these centuries favorable to the establishment of Christianity that now only a little more than one-fourth of the population of our earth is even nominally Christian is to confess that the results do not do credit to a religion making the claims and possessing the advantages of Christianity.

Third, the existence of a broad and constantly widening stream of unbelief, not only in Christian lands and apart from Christian communion, but within the very churches claiming to be churches of Christ, together with the inability of the orthodox to meet and silence the infidel revilers of the Christian religion—tells its own tale of weakness; and bears testimony of the insufficiency of the Christian evidences to bring conviction to the doubting minds of many sincere and moral people.

All these considerations proclaim in trumpet-tones

"'Tis time that some new prophet should appear."

Mankind stand in need of a new witness for God—a witness who may speak not as the scribes or the pharisees, but in the clear, ringing tones of one clothed with authority from God. The world is weary of the endless wrangling of the scholastics. They settle nothing. Their speculations merely shroud all in profounder mystery, and beget more uncertainty. They darken counsel by words without knowledge. Therefore, to heal the schisms in Christendom; to bring order out of the existing chaos; to stay the stream of unbelief within the churches; to convert the Jews; to evangelize the world; to bring to pass that universal reign of truth, of peace, of liberty, of righteousness that all the prophets have predicted—the world needs a new witness for God.