Now, over against that system stands the theology which starts with God as the center, as the Lord and Sovereign and Judge, as well as the Creator of the earth and men upon it; and it takes what God declares, in that which the history of the world declares to be his Word, and what the devout spirit reverently accepts as the Word of God, concerning himself and man, and man’s need, and the hereafter. Here inspiration and redemption, regeneration by the Holy Spirit, retribution in the future, time as the proof of eternity, come vividly before us as the thoughts of God. He shows them to us in characters as broad as if he had written them in a great theodicy of star-fires and enduring orbs in the heavens. This system of theology does not cast any discredit on human nature; it exalts it by showing it the object of divine solicitude. It casts the splendor and the solemnity of eternity upon the present experience and life of man; and it gives to the Bible an immeasurable and an almost inconceivable importance and value. Now I understand perfectly that the natural tendency of men is to accept the preceding system, as the natural tendency of man is to believe that the earth is the center, and the heavens go around it. Man finds self-consciousness the first element of thought. The impulse of self-assertion appears to be the primary impulse of human nature. It is simply the egotistic man, of whom it might be said, as was said by a friend of mine, speaking rather roughly and not very elegantly about a man who was very egotistic, and who had offended him by his egotism: “I believe that that man thinks that his house is placed where the leg of the compasses was put down when the earth was made round.” [Laughter.] There is a certain tendency in every human heart to feel that it is central, and that it has rights and privileges and possibilities belonging to itself inherently, and with which no being can properly interfere. And civilization works with its multiple forces and instruments and wealth in the same direction, taking a man feeling his lordship of the earth and reminding him more and more, and encouraging him to feel that he is lord of his destiny, and lord of the hereafter as well. There are certain philanthropic sentiments which work in the same direction, no doubt, tending to make men believe that all will be right hereafter somehow or other, and that after some possible brief unpleasantness in the future there will be a universal deliverance and restoration into holiness and its peace. And the secular spirit of the time, intense, widening, ever increasing, moves in the same direction. It enters into literature; it enters into life on every side; it finds no reality in religion; it believes it a matter of poetic aspiration, or of cultivated literary leisure, or of fine speculation, or of social observance, or possibly of ethics, or more likely of æsthetic art; but the grand reality of religion, as a