“Take, for instance, the north-west palace of Nimroud, which would almost seem to have been the pattern after which the royal palace at Jerusalem was built. Thus the Nimroud Palace is nearly a square, of about 330 feet each way; and the area of Solomon’s Palace is 325 feet by 290 feet. In front at Nimroud was a great hall, 152 feet long by 32 feet wide; and in front, at Jerusalem, was a hall, the house of Lebanon, 150 feet by 75 feet. The halls at Nimroud were supported by rows of pillars, not of stone, but of wood; and the Hall of Lebanon was supported by three rows of cedar pillars, fifteen in a row, making forty-five in the whole. In the centre, at Nimroud, was a spacious open court; and in the centre at Jerusalem was also a court. On the sides, at Nimroud, were suites of apartments three deep, decreasing in width as they receded from the light supplied from the great court; and at Jerusalem were windows in three rows, and light against light in three ranks. At Nimroud, in the rear was a double suite of apartments; and in the rear at Jerusalem were the separate suites of the king and the queen. At Nimroud, the interior walls were lined with sculptured slabs; and at Jerusalem the apartments were also lined with stones carved in imitation of trees and plants.”
What is Rationalism?
Rationalism, in its widest acceptation, is applicable to all who follow the dictates of reason, whether in their speculative or practical life. In its more restricted signification it is applied specially to that system of religious opinion whose final test of truth is placed in the direct assent of the human consciousness, whether in the form of logical deduction, moral judgment, or religious intuition, by whatever previous process these faculties may have been raised to their assumed dignity as arbitrators.
The Bishop of Oxford, in one of his Charges, has thus eloquently denounced the present dangerous spirit of Rationalism in the Church:
“Are there not, my reverend brethren, signs enough abroad now of special danger to make us drop our lesser differences and combine together as one man, striving earnestly for the faith once delivered to the Saints? When from within our own encampment we hear voices declaring that our whole belief in the Atonement wrought out for us by the sacrifice on the Cross is an ignorant misconception—that the miracles and the prophecies of Scripture are part of an irrational supernaturalism, which it is the duty of a remorseless criticism to expose and to account for, by such discoveries as that the imagination has allied itself with the affections to produce them, and that they may safely be brought down to a natural Rationalism;—by such suggestions as that the description of the passage of the Red Sea is the latitude of poetry—that the Avenger who slew the firstborn is the Bedouin host, akin nearly to Jethro, and more remotely to Israel—when the history of the Bible is explained away by being treated as a legend, and its prophecy deprived of all supernatural character by being turned into a history of past or present events—when we are told that had our Lord come to us now, instead of in the youth of the world, the truth of His Divine nature would not have been recognised; that is to say, that it was the peculiar stage in which flesh and blood then were, and not the revelation of His Father who was in heaven which enabled the Apostles to believe in Him—when in words, as far as opinion is privately entertained is concerned, the liberty of the English clergyman appears to be complete—when we are told that men may sign any Article of the National Church, if it is only their own opinions which are at variance with them—when we are told that they may sign, solemnly before God, that they allow certain articles of belief, meaning thereby only that they allow their existence as the lesser of two great evils, and that under the Sixth Article one may literally or allegorically, or as a parable, or as poetry or a legend, receive the story of the Serpent tempting Eve and speaking in a man’s voice; and in like manner the arresting of the earth’s motion, the water standing still, the universality of the Deluge, the confusion of tongues, the taking up of Elijah corporeally into Heaven, the nature of Angels, and the miraculous particulars of many other events:—when Abraham’s great act of obedient faith in not withholding his son, even his only son, but offering him up at the express command of God is commuted by the gross ritual of Syrian notes into a traditional revelation; while the awe of the Divine voice bidding him slay his son, and his being stayed by the angel from doing so, is watered down into an allegory meaning that the Father in whom he trusted was better pleased with mercy than with sacrifice; when it is maintained that St. Stephen, full of the Holy Ghost, in the utterances of his martyrdom, and St. Paul proving from the history of his people that Jesus was the Christ, would naturally speak not only words of truth, but after the received accounts—when, I say, such words as these are deliberately uttered by our ordained Clergy, while the slowness even of English theologians to accept such a treatment of God’s revelation is scoffed at in such words as the following, even by those in our Universities who no longer repeat fully the Shibboleth of the Reformers, the explicitness of truth and error:—‘He who assents most committing himself least to baseness being reckoned the wisest:’ whilst those who maintained the old truth, I trust with most of us, my brethren, are branded as Baal’s prophets and the four hundred prophets of the grove who cry out for falsehood—whilst, I say, such words as these are heard from ordained men amongst us, and who still keep their places in the National Church, is it not a time for us, if we do hold openly by the Holy Scriptures as the one inspired voice of God’s written revelation—if we do hold to the ancient Creeds as the summary of the good deposit—if we believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as very God and very Man—if we believe in His offering Himself on the Cross as the one only true and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction, and atonement for the sins of the whole world—is it not time for us, laying aside our suspicions and our divisions about small matters, to combine together in prayer, and trust, and labour, and love, and watching, lest whilst we dispute needlessly about the lesser matters of the law, we be robbed unawares of the very foundations of the faith?”
What is Theology?
In the widest sense of the word Theology, including both natural and revealed theology, we have, among theologians who reject revelation, the systems of—(1) Atheism, or that doctrine concerning God which rejects his existence altogether.[24] (2) Deism, or the system which teaches that God is the Creator of all things, but that, having once created them and impressed upon them certain laws for the regulation of their future existence, commonly called the laws of nature, He has left them to the government of those laws, and concerns Himself no more with his creation; or, in other words, this system acknowledges the existence of God, but denies his providence. (3) Theism, the system which differs from Deism by acknowledging the providence of God. The systems of Deism and Theism suppose the existence of an Almighty Creator, whose existence is independent of the universe; but there is another system, according to which the laws of Nature are in themselves the external self-existent causes of all the phenomena of the universe, and there is no causative principle external to Nature. This system takes two different forms: Materialism, which makes all the phenomena of Nature to result from the physical constitution of matter itself; and the various shades of Pantheism, which suppose an intelligent principle (anima mundi) to be inseparably connected with everything that exists, and to pervade the whole creation.
Deism properly means belief in the existence of a God, but is generally applied to all such belief as goes no further, that is to say, to disbelief of revelation. It is always applied dyslogistically, and frequently merely as a term of reproach. But the identical word, in its Greek form, theist, is not a word of disapprobation; and, consistently with established usage, may be appropriately applied as opposed to atheist, when the latter term is correctly used. For it must be observed that the term atheist has been not unfrequently employed in the sense of an unbeliever in Christianity, though at the same time professing theism.—Penny Cyclopædia.