But these applications of our intellectual faculties to Religion have always been admitted as coming after, not as preceding, the teaching to which they are made. The prophet does sometimes reason when he is deducing from principles already accepted, new precepts, or new prohibitions; but he does not confine himself to such reasoning in the fulfilment of his mission. He professes to have a message to give. He will accredit it by such means as He supplies Who has sent him with this message. He will, in order to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to past revelations which they have already received, and with which his new message is in thorough harmony; but he often appeals also to his power over nature to bear witness that the Lord of nature has sent him. The Hebrew prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, will repeat

Armed with this title, he will go on to predict the coming of the Great Restorer, the Messiah; he will insist on the judgment of all things, sure to be passed in its appointed day; he will hint at the immortality of the soul, and the execution of the Almighty justice on every man that lives. It is probable enough that many of the inferior religions have grown up with no such claim at all. The worship of ancestors, where it has prevailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, grown out of dreams, in which loving memory has brought back in sleep vivid images of the dead who were reverenced while they

Such worship barely attains to what may be called in strictness a religion. Its connexion with the spiritual faculty, the true seat of religion, is weak and vague. It is like the honour paid to a sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only the difference that those who receive this worship are supposed to reside not in a distant capital, but in another world. So, too, the worship of fetishes, of trees, of serpents, of the heavenly bodies, while they have some of the inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly deserve to be called religions. There is in them the sentiment of fear, the acknowledgment of persons or some resemblance of persons imperceptible by the senses; the acknowledgment of powers possessed by these persons. But the central idea of a rule of holiness is either altogether wanting, or so very feeble and indistinct as to contain no promise of developing into ultimate supremacy.

These religions do not often lay claim to a revelation from a supreme authority. And they have withered away with the growth of knowledge and with clearer perceptions of what Religion must be if it is to exist at all. All the higher religions have claimed to rest on a divine revelation, and the Christian Religion on a series of such revelations. The Christian Religion does not profess (as does for instance the Mahommedan) to be wrapped up in one divine communication made to one man and admitting thereafter of no modifications. Though resting on divine revelation it is professedly a development, and is thus in harmony with the Creator's operations in nature. Whether we consider what is taught concerning the heavenly Moral Law, or concerning human nature and its moral and spiritual needs, or concerning Almighty God and His dealings with us His creatures, it is undeniable that the teaching of the Bible is quite different at the end from what it is at the beginning.