But this I do not hesitate to say, That if we of the clergy can find no other answers to these doubts than those which were reasonable and popular in an age when men racked women, burned heretics, and believed that every Mussulman killed in a crusade went straight to Tartarus, then very serious times are at hand, both for the Christian clergy and for Christianity itself. What, then, are we to believe and do? Shall we degenerate into a lazy skepticism, which believes that everything is a little true, and everything a little false--in plain words, believes nothing at all? Or shall we degenerate into faithless fears, and unmanly wailings that the flood of infidelity is irresistible, and that Christ has left His Church? We shall do neither, if we believe the text. That tells us of a firm standing ground amid the wreck of fashions and opinions; of a kingdom which can not be moved, tho the heavens pass away like a scroll, and the earth be burnt up with a fervent heat. And it tells us that the King of that kingdom is He, who is called Jesus Christ--the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. An eternal and changeless kingdom, and an eternal and changeless King--these the Epistle to the Hebrews preaches to all generations. It does not say that we have an unchangeable cosmogony, an unchangeable eschatology, an unchangeable theory of moral retribution, an unchangeable dogmatic system; not to these does it point the Jews, while their own nation and worship were in their very death-agony, and the world was rocking and reeling round them, decay and birth going on side by side, in a chaos such as man had never seen before. Not to these does the epistle point the Hebrews: but to the changeless kingdom and to the changeless King. My friends, do you really believe in that kingdom, and in that King? Do you believe that you are now actually in a kingdom of heaven, which can not be moved; and that the living, acting, guiding, practical, real King thereof is Christ who died on the cross? These are days in which a preacher is bound to ask his congregation--and still more to ask himself--whether he really believes in that kingdom, and in that King; and to bid himself and them, if they have not believed earnestly enough therein, to repent of having neglected that most cardinal doctrine of Scripture and of the Christian faith.