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Even if it be said that Priestley has all the vices of that rationalism which, as with Bentham, oversimplifies every problem it encounters, it is yet adequate to retort that a confidence in the energies of men was better than the complacent stagnation of the previous age.

Although its clergy had for some time been supported by the State, they had not met in public synod until June, 1872, after an interval of more than two hundred years. During that period many things had become changed. Rationalism had invaded Evangelicalism.

Both results will be as remote as possible from future reality, for the reason that they are so near to present reality. And yet some germs of the future must be enfolded even in the present moment. The course of wisdom is to seek them neither in the old romance nor in the new rationalism, but in the subtle and ever-changing spirit of the times.

I have been preaching the plea for Christian union on the primitive gospel ever since, and the longer I preach it the more I see its beauty and power. Having been delivered, through the goodness of God, from this blinding cloud of rationalism, let us take a backward look at it and its chief product Unitarianism and let us see what lesson God would teach us through it.

The fact that the antipathy of the humanists to music was extended to that of their own great countrymen, to Palestrina, Vittoria, Suriano, cannot be entirely accounted for by their dislike of everything clerical, still less by want of taste. The cause lay far deeper. It was the transition from the old order to the new, from mediaeval faith to modern rationalism, from art to science.

Yet look at German rationalism, look at Protestant theology what do you see there?

In the former shape, it appears in the speculations of Martineau; in the latter, it is advocated by Cousin; and in one or other of these shapes it constitutes the ground-principle of RATIONALISM. The theory, again, which places the principle of Certitude in AUTHORITY has also assumed two distinct shapes.

Thus the Renascimento period was followed by the century of the Reformation, and that again by the inauguration of the era of modern philosophy, while the eighteenth century has been claimed as the Saeculum Rationalisticum, the age of rationalism, in which the claims of reason were pushed to the forefront in the domains of religion and politics.

Instead of doing this, we have often enough seen friend and foe of the idea of miracles, as soon as the question was even touched upon, at once set to work with the insufficient conceptions of old rationalism and supernaturalism, and thus raising objections and attempting solutions which could satisfy nobody.

Only a year ago he had bounded forth to welcome Mr Hawke's sermon; since then he had bounded after a College of Spiritual Pathology; now he was in full cry after rationalism pure and simple; how could he be sure that his present state of mind would be more lasting than his previous ones?