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DIVINITY.

MODERN INFIDELITY:

A SERMON TO YOUNG MEN:

DELIVERED IN GROSVENOR-STREET CHAPEL, CHORLTON-UPONMEDLOCK, MANCHESTER, APRIL, 1847,

BY THE REV. JONATHAN CROWTHER.

"Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ." -Col. ii. 8.

TRUTH is, or ought to be, the great object of all human inquiry, in morals and religion, in history, in tradition and testimony, and in philosophy and science; there being nothing that is worthy of the name of knowledge, or on which the human mind can properly and safely rest, in these or any other departments of inquiry, which is not really true, and may be demonstrated to be so. All else belongs to the province of speculation and conjecture, and requires to be estimated and dealt with accordingly.

The inquiry, "What is truth?" is not in all cases easy of solution. And in some cases it would scarcely seem to be capable, at least for the present, of any solution at all. The data and phenomena which constitute the complex forms and indications of the truth sought after, are too scanty, or too mysterious and perplexing, to admit of its distinct and definite development, by any process of induction or analysis, to which those forms and indications may be subjected. This is pre-eminently the case, in those departments of inquiry which relate to God and to ourselves. There is no man who, "by" his own "searching can find out God, or know the Almighty to perfection." Neither is there any man who, by his own searching merely, is able to find out himself, so as to know, with perfect truth, either his origin, his nature, or his destiny.

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These are the primary facts, on which is built the antecedent necessity of a specific and divine revelation on those subjects. God must himself declare his own existence, and attributes, and law; or, with all their boasting of the faculties which they possess for such investigations, He whom the sages of this world "seek after, if haply they may find him, though he be not far from every one of them,' "disappointeth the devices of the crafty, so that their hands cannot perform their enterprise." And he must also declare whence man came, and what he is, and whither he is going; or, even in this lower field of inquiry, with all the prospects they may seem to have of being more easily successful, they "meet with darkness in the day-time, and grope in the noon-day as in the night."

Herein, therefore, the God of all truth has, in his compassion and goodness, condescended to our weakness, and come to our assistance.

VOL. IV.-FOURTH SERIES.

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On one hand, he has proclaimed his own existence, and the character in which he claims to be acknowledged, and the great principles of his administration, in terms which cannot be honestly mistaken; and on the other hand he has, in language equally explicit and intelligible, removed the veil which must otherwise have concealed from us the knowledge of ourselves; unfolding to us the circumstances under which man first came into existence, and defining to our view the facts and conditions, both of his present state and of his future destiny. And thus, in that particular department of inquiry, which is the most important to us, and in which the task of investigation, had we been left merely to our own unaided powers for its accomplishment, would have been the most perplexing and hazardous, instead of putting us upon that task, he has taken the more gracious and benignant course of simply calling us to the safer and more easy -and, as it is designed to be, the happy-duty and privilege of accepting all the knowledge that we need, and perhaps all the knowledge of which, in our present circumstances, we are capable, upon these subjects, from the authentic and infallible "oracles of God."

But here all revelation, properly so called, is found to terminate. And, with respect to other and minor subjects of inquiry, if we would ascertain the truth, its discovery must be accomplished purely by investigations of our own. This sore travail hath God given to the sons of men, to be exercised therewith." And between this field of merely human inquiry, and that of direct and positive revelation, there is this characteristic and monitory difference, that the latter is emphatically a land of light and of vision, an exhibition of certain and unalterable truth; whereas the former (especially in the first outset of inquiry) is, for the most part, a region of "doubtful disputations." Even after all that has been done, with the exception of a few bright spots which philosophy and science have been partially successful in irradiating, it is still a field of conjecture, rather than of clearly ascertained and demonstrable truth; and

"Shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it."

The distinction thus existing between the truth revealed in holy Scripture and all other kinds and forms of truth, supplies this practical and leading maxim, to guide and limit our inquiries into truth in general; namely, that the truth which is already clearly and explicitly revealed, must be received at all events, and so received as that nothing else shall be received as truth, however plausible may be its aspect, or the evidence by which it may appear to be supported, which goes to contradict that truth, or to bring it into question. "If any man speak" on any subject on which divine revelation has already spoken, "let him speak as the oracles of God." For "let God be true, though every man be found to be a liar." "To the law and to the testimony," is our appeal in all such cases; and "if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no truth in them.”

Thus to receive the truth as presented in the "revelations of God," is what we call faith, in the more general and comprehensive accepta

tion of that term.

And to admit as truth, or to entertain for a moment as even capable of being true, that which is at variance with any of those revelations, is what we mean by infidelity; dignified sometimes, it may be, by its disciples and advocates, with the attractive and imposing designation of "philosophy," but by the Apostle more justly stigmatized and branded, as being in reality but "vain deceit."

The bolder and more prominent form under which infidelity presents itself, is that of a direct and open contradiction of the doctrinal truth of revelation. Such is the character of the infidelity which denies, or questions, the fact of the Divine existence, and, in so doing, discards at the same time the entire system of the theology of which that fact is the foundation; and which is known under the name of Atheism, a system, if such it may be called, which attributes eternity to matter, and assigns the origin and the continuance of all existing forms and modes, both of organic and inorganic being, to some undefined and unaccountable concurrence of accident and chance. And such also is the character of that form of infidelity which goes under the name of Deism,—a theory which admits the existence and general government of God, but utterly denies the representations, made in Scripture, of the moral and spiritual relationship which we sustain to him; and thence proceeds to substitute, for the "words which the Holy Ghost teacheth," a system of morals and religion "after the tradition of men" and "the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ;" thus scornfully repudiating, as idle and debasing superstitions, both the doctrine of man's fall from his "original uprightness," and that of his redemption and recovery through "the grace of our

Lord Jesus Christ."

The two forms of infidelity to which we have adverted, necessarily involve a denial of the divine inspiration and authority of holy Scripture. And it has been against this point that their attack has mainly been directed; there being no possibility of maintaining either Atheism or Deism, except by the subversion of all faith in the historical and doctrinal statements which the Scriptures set before us. Its writers have been stigmatized as ignorant or cunning deceivers. Its miracles have been rejected as impostures. Its prophecies have been regarded as narratives put forth in the convenient form of predictions, at periods subsequent to the occurrence of the events to which they respectively refer, for the purpose of creating and supporting a false credit. And ridicule and satire, in every imaginable form, have been employed, to bring the whole volume into suspicion and contempt. Men have been thus instructed to set aside the "sure word of prophecy," for the purpose of seeking the objects of their knowledge, and the articles of their faith, on moral and religious subjects, in the ingenuity of their own conjectures, and the conclusions of their own intellect and reason. And they have been taught to dignify their own supposed discoveries with the inviting and plausible name of "natural religion." The folly and absurdity of this particular mode of warfare against the truth, have long since been exploded; and, foiled and disgraced in the more open and avowed attacks which it has made upon it,

infidelity has, in these modern times, applied itself to a more wily and insidious method of procedure.

Sometimes it has accosted us in the apparently innocent and honest garb of historical inquiry. The history, so plainly given in Scripture, of the creation of the world and the origin of man, and of the early modes of faith and worship, has been attempted to be superseded by purely conjectural accounts of all these matters; accounts which go, in point of fact, not only to falsify all scriptural history thereon, but also to undermine and weaken, or entirely to destroy, the great doctrines which lie at the foundation of all scriptural theology. Thus, for example, without any other warrant for such statements than the mere fancy of a capricious and purblind philosophy, it has been represented, that man was produced out of matter previously existing, without any direct and immediate fiat, or vitalizing inspiration, of a divine Creator; that the primeval type of his religion was that of polytheism; and that mankind were left to grope, and did actually grope, their way, by dint of their own simple and unaided intellectual sagacity, to all the knowledge they possess, both with respect to God and to themselves. Thus, also, forms of sacrifice and worship, and various significant and solemn ceremonies, which holy Scripture has taught us to refer to a divine original, have been described as having been merely incidental accommodations,-spontaneously adopted on the principle of an assumed expediency,-to practices having in reality no higher origin than that of merely human superstition. In like manner, the early history of Christianity has, by some celebrated writers, been corrupted into such a form, as greatly to detract from the character and object, both of Christianity itself, and of its Author. The rigid and honest truth of Scripture, and of authentic history in general, has, in both these cases, been sacrificed to certain fanciful and favourite theories, dearer to their advocates than any truth, whether human or divine, and unfriendly to the doctrines which all history, when faithfully recorded and fairly interpreted, goes to support and to illustrate; there being no true and faithful history, either of the time in which Christianity was introduced, or of more ancient times, with which the truth of Scripture is not, expressly or by implication, inseparably interwoven.

In other instances, the infidelity against which we are protesting presents itself to us under the still more plausible and seemly guise of scriptural interpretation. Shamed out of its original and appropriate position in "the seat of the scorner," it has, in modern times especially, usurped the chair of the biblical critic and the theological professor, particularly in certain universities and schools upon the Continent. And, in that more dignified and commanding position, it has assumed a style of teaching on the subject of revealed truth, apparently submissive to the divine authority of holy Scripture, but based on principles of criticism and interpretation, which, in their practical adoption, are not less subversive of the true meaning and intent of holy Scripture, than the most barefaced and open infidelity. There may be something less startling and offensive in the name of Rational

ism, or Naturalism, than in some other names, by which the various forms of infidelity have successively been designated. But the direct tendency, and the actual effect, of that Rationalism has been to neutralize the evangelical and spiritual meaning of the truth which it has undertaken to explain and illustrate, and, by a skilful and ingenious process, which leaves the outward system of that truth unmutilated and entire,—to disembowel Christianity of all that constitutes its vitality and power. Under this novel and comparatively unsuspected mode of treatment, the casket of the system has not indeed been rudely broken; but, by an insidious and glozing "philosophy," the jewel it contained has been stealthily abstracted; and it has been left empty of that to which alone it was indebted for its true grace and its substantial value.

There is also, in these days, and in our own country, the infidelity of popular literature. And this form of infidelity is the more dangerous, as the present, if not a deeply-thinking, is at least an extensively-reading, age. It may be readily admitted that, in the current publications of the day, there is much that is calculated to expand and elevate both the intellectual and moral character. But the frivolity and flippancy which characterize so large a portion of our periodical literature, and other widely-circulated publications; the scepticism and ungodliness, which, in sundry notorious instances, have so deeply tinged the stream of modern poetry; the spirit of romance and transcendentalism, which has been so largely infused, especially from Continental writers, into our theories of intellectual philosophy; the habit which has been introduced, and, in some quarters, is even growing fashionable, of confounding the productions of human intellect with those of divine inspiration, as though the heavenly afflatus under which "the Prophets wrote and spoke' were in its nature analogous to, and even identical with, that lower and altogether different inspiration which is known under the name of genius, and which, extraneously to the sphere of heavenly morals and scriptural theology, constitutes the artist, the poet, and the philosopher; the resultant hazard which exists, lest even the Scriptures themselves should in general estimation lose entirely, or to a great extent, the peculiar distinction by which they have hitherto been sanctified and guarded as "the oracles of God," and should thus come to be regarded as being nothing more than a higher and somewhat antiquated species of literature; and the laxity of opinion which is beginning to prevail in our current literature, as well as in our practice, on the subject of the Christian Sabbath;-all these, especially when seen, as they now are, in conjunction and alliance with each other, are "signs of the times" indicative, to say the least of them, of tendencies to infidelity, which cannot be contemplated by any Christian and thoughtful mind, but with the most lively apprehension. The apprehension thus expressed may, possibly, be answered in some quarters with an incredulous, or even with a scornful, smile. But with the recent and affecting instances which France and Germany present, of the ready and rapid process by which a non-scriptural and tainted literature, and a vain philosophy,

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