later days. Every age has hitherto had its heresy. It may be said that the nineteenth century has no heresy, or rather that it has all heresies, because it is the century of unbelief. The intellect of man for three hundred years has broken loose from faith, and the heresy of the day is a heresy against the order of even natural truth; it is the assertion that reason is sufficient to itself. We, as compared with the men of the sixteenth century, have a great advantage. We see the whole intellectual movement which then began fully worked out to its legitimate conclusion. They saw only the first deviation from the path, which then was hardly appreciable. The reason of man either is, or is not, sufficient to itself. If it be, then Rationalism is its perfection. If it be not sufficient to itself, then somewhat higher than reason is needed. Or, in other words, reason is either its own teacher, or it needs a teacher higher than itself. The Christian world till the sixteenth century believed that the teacher of the reason of man is God, that the teaching of God is perpetual by the world and in the world, and that the reason of man is thereby related to Him as a disciple to a guide. The movement of the sixteenth century in its last analysis is the assertion that the reason of man is the critic and the measure of all truth to itself. The Reformation in all its diversities of national and personal character—German, Swiss, French, English,
