We shall understand this more clearly if we consider one of the first characteristics that a revelation necessarily claims, and the results that are at this moment, in a certain prominent case, attending on a denial of it.  The characteristic I speak of is an absolute infallibility.  Any supernatural religion that renounces its claim to this, it is clear can profess to be a semi-revelation only.  It is a hybrid thing, partly natural and partly supernatural, and it thus practically has all the qualities of a religion that is wholly natural.  In so far as it professes to be revealed, it of course professes to be infallible; but if the revealed part be in the first place hard to distinguish, and in the second place hard to understand—­if it may mean many things, and many of those things contradictory—­it might just as well have been never made at all.  To make it in any sense an infallible revelation, or in other words a revelation at all, to us, we need a power to interpret the testament that shall have equal authority with that testament itself.

Simple as this truth seems, mankind have been a long time in learning it.  Indeed, it is only in the present day that its practical meaning has come generally to be recognised.  But now at this moment upon all sides of us, history is teaching it to us by an example, so clearly that we can no longer mistake it.

That example is Protestant Christianity, and the condition to which, after three centuries, it is now visibly bringing itself.  It is at last beginning to exhibit to us the true result of the denial of infallibility to a religion that professes to be supernatural.  We are at last beginning to see in it neither the purifier of a corrupted revelation, nor the corrupter of a pure revelation, but the practical denier of all revelation whatsoever.  It is fast evaporating into a mere natural theism, and is thus showing us what, as a governing power, natural theism is.  Let us look at England, Europe, and America, and consider the condition of the entire Protestant world.  Religion, it is true, we shall still find in it; but it is religion from which not only the supernatural element is disappearing, but in which the natural element is fast becoming nebulous.  It is indeed growing, as Mr. Leslie Stephen says it is, into a religion of dreams.  All its doctrines are growing vague as dreams, and like dreams their outlines are for ever changing.  Mr. Stephen has pitched on a very happy illustration of this.  A distinguished clergyman of the English Church, he reminds us, has preached and published a set of sermons,[38] in which he denies emphatically any belief in eternal punishment, although admitting at the same time that the opinion of the Christian world is against him.  These sermons gave rise to a discussion in one of the leading monthly reviews, to which Protestant divines of all shades of opinion contributed their various arguments. ‘It is barely possible,’ says Mr.