CONTENTS. ARCHDEACON HARE. BY DEAN STANLEY, PAGE хс 63 OFFICE AND PROVINCE OF FAITH, PREFACE. THE sermons on the Victory of Faith, by Archdeacon Hare, have for some years been out of print. They are now republished, in the belief that as they were the utterance of one who was in no small measure in advance of his own generation, measuring forces and watching currents of thought of which few then took account, so they are not yet altogether left behind by its advancing waves. Rapid as that advance has been, tending to an ever keener and more sharply defined antagonism between the schools of superstition and unbelief, clearing the middle ground and threatening to leave no room for those who belong to neither school, and enter their protests against each, there are still, it is believed, many who cannot accept either the theory of Ultramontanism or that of Secularism, who cannot even attach themselves to any of the parties in the Church of England, whose drift seems, consciously or unconsciously, to be sweeping them on to the one or the other issue. Seekers after truth, who, when they pray "Increase our faith," do not B mean "Enlarge our capacity for believing without evidence or against it," who shrink from the thought that all man's knowledge of God is that there is nothing to be known, will find, it is hoped, something in the witness which this volume bears that may sustain and cheer them. Here was one who, though caring little for the ritual which symbolizes Romish dogmas, not anticipating, it may be, that because it does so symbolize it, it would have been deliberately revived within the Church of England, and therefore giving little heed to its history and meaning, had yet gone into the controversy with Rome precisely in the regions where it touches on the innermost depths of man's intellect and heart, and, as the result of that study, came forth with a profounder reverence for Luther, and a more assured conviction that the great movement of the sixteenth century, which we must still speak of as the Reformation, was, in spite of incidental drawbacks, a great gift from God. Here too was one whose knowledge both of the lower and the higher criticism which the scholars of Germany have applied to the documents of our faith was wider than that of any theologian of his own time, wider, perhaps, than that of any who are living now, and who yet cherished to the last the conviction that those documents contain the records of a divine Revelation given "in sundry times, and divers manners" to our fathers, and are still an instrument of priceless value for the education of mankind. Here, lastly, was one who had gone beyond the controversies between rival churches and questions as to the date or |