many cases indirectly connected with its working, form something which we may acknowledge as a rule of life, and which may satisfy our inextinguishable longings after the unseen and eternal.  It is true that such a religion presupposes Christianity, to which it owes its best and noblest features, and that, as far as we can see, it is inconceivable if Christianity had not first been.  Still, we may say that alchemy preceded chemistry, and was not the more true for being the step to what is true.  But what we cannot say of such a religion is that it takes the place of Christianity, and is such a religion as Christianity has been and claims to be.  There must ever be all the difference in the world between a religion which is or professes to be a revelation, and one which cannot be called such.  For a revelation is a direct work and message of God; but that which is the result of a process and progress of rinding out the truth by the experience of ages, or of correcting mistakes, laying aside superstitions and gradually reducing the gross mass of belief to its essential truth, is simply on a level with all other human knowledge, and, as it is about the unseen, can never be verified.  If there has been no revelation, there may be religious hopes and misgivings, religious ideas or dreams, religious anticipations and trust; but the truth is, there cannot be a religion in the world.  Much less can there be any such thing as Christianity.  It is only when we look at it vaguely in outline, without having before our mind what it is in fact and in detail, that we can allow ourselves to think so.  There is no transmuting its refractory elements into something which is not itself; and it is nothing if it is not primarily a direct message from God.  Limit as we may the manner of this communication, still there remains what makes it different from all other human possessions of truth, that it was a direct message.  And that, to whatever extent, involves all that is involved in the idea of miracles.  It is, as Mr. Mozley says, inconceivable without miracles.

If, then, a person of evident integrity and loftiness of character rose into notice in a particular country and community eighteen centuries ago, who made these communications about himself—­that he had existed before his natural birth, from all eternity, and before the world was, in a state of glory with God; that he was the only-begotten Son of God; that the world itself had been made by him; that he had, however, come down from heaven and assumed the form and nature of man for a particular purpose—­viz. to be the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; that he thus stood in a mysterious and supernatural relation to the whole of mankind; that through him alone mankind had access to God; that he was the head of an invisible kingdom, into which he should gather all the generations of righteous men who had lived in the world; that on his departure from hence he should return to heaven to prepare mansions