The matter, however, does not end thus.  The men I have just mentioned agree, all of them, that Christ’s moral example was perfect; and their only disagreement has been as to what that example was.  But the Protestant logic will by no means leave us here.  That alleged perfection, if we ourselves are to be the judges of it, is sure, by-and-by, to exhibit to us traces of imperfection.  And this is exactly the thing that has already begun to happen.  A generation ago one of the highest-minded and most logical of our English Protestants, Professor Francis Newman, declared that in Christ’s character there were certain moral deficiencies;[40] and the last blow to the moral authority of Protestantism was struck by one of its own household.  It is true that Professor Newman’s censures were small and were not irreverent.  But if these could come from a man of his intense piety, what will and what do come from other quarters may be readily conjectured.  Indeed, the fact is daily growing more and more evident, that for the world that still calls itself Protestant, the autocracy of Christ’s moral example is gone; and its nominal retention of power only makes its real loss of it the more visible.  It merely reflects and focalises the uncertainty that men are again feeling—­the uncertainty and the sad bewilderment.  The words and the countenance, once so sure and steadfast, now change, as we look at, and listen to them, into new accents and aspects; and the more earnestly we gaze and listen, the less can we distinguish clearly what we hear or see. ‘What shall we do to be saved?’ men are again crying.  And the lips that were once oracular now merely seem to murmur back confusedly, ‘Alas! what shall you do?’

Such and so helpless, even now, is natural theism showing itself; and in the dim and momentous changes that are coming over things, in the vast flux of opinion that is preparing, in the earthquake that is rocking the moral ground under us, overturning and engulfing the former landmarks, and re-opening the graves of the buried lusts of paganism, it will show itself very soon more helpless still.  Its feet are on the earth, only.  The earth trembles, and it trembles:  it is in the same case as we are.  It stretches in vain its imploring hands to heaven.  But the heaven takes no heed of it.  No divine hand reaches down to it to uphold and guide it.

This must be the feeling, I believe, of most honest and practical men, with regard to natural religion, and its necessary practical inefficiency.  Nor will the want it necessarily leaves of a moral rule be the only consideration that will force this conviction on them.  The heart, as the phrase goes, will corroborate the evidence of the head.  It will be felt, even more forcibly than it can be reasoned, that if there be indeed a God who loves and cares for men, he must surely, or almost surely, have spoken in some audible and certain way to them.  At any rate I shall not be without many who agree with me, when I say that for the would-be religious world it is an anxious and earnest question whether any special and explicit revelation from God exist for us; and this being the case, it will be not lost time if we try to deal fairly and dispassionately with the question.