"If medicine," said Froude, "had been regulated three hundred years ago
by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-Nine Articles of Physic,
and every licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains and
penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the
Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it is easy to conjecture in what state
of health the people of this country would at present be found."
Christendom does not yet realise how greatly, how grievously, it has
suffered in spiritual health by having sent to Coventry or to the stake
so many theological Simpsons, Listers, and Pasteurs simply because they
could not rest their minds in the hypotheses of very ill-educated men
who strove to grapple with the highest of all intellectual problems at a
time when knowledge was at its lowest level.
It will perhaps rouse the vitality of the Church when it finds twenty or
thirty years from now that the great protagonists of Christianity in its
future battles with science and philosophy are drawn from the ranks of
nonconformity.
Dr. Selbie is certainly preparing his students for these encounters, and
preparing them, too, with an emphasis on one particular aspect of the
old theology, and a central one, which the apologists of more orthodox
communions have either overlooked or find it convenient to ignore.
One of his first postulates is that man inhabits a moral universe, and
from this postulate he has no difficulty in moving forward not only to
contemplate the hypothesis of immortality, but to confront the
difficulty of punishment for sin.
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