Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. 'I'HE NATURE, AND DEFINITION, OF CHURCH HISTORY. In explaining and applying the idea of development, we have arrived at the nature of History in the abstract, and of that specific concrete form which is denominated Profane,.or Secular. We have now to make a third application of the idea to the history of Christianity. Church History we define to be, the restoring of the true development of the human spirit, by the supernatural agency of its Creator. The doctrine of evolution is now to be applied to that gradual process of recovery from the apostasy of his will, which regenerated man is passing through, here on earth, as a member of the spiritual kingdom of Christ. We shall find this to be a series, and sequence, as organic as any that have passed before our review, or that we can conceive of. The founder of Christianity Himself, so describes it, when He says that " The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field ; which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown it is the r greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof;" when He says, again, that "the kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened." In these parables, two of the most thorough and inward processes in nature, viz: those of germination and fermentation, are chosen by our Lord to indicate the real nature of his religion. And no one can study the illustrations, which He so frequently employs, in order to give a clear conception of his religion as it works in the individual soul, and in the world at large, without being convinced that it is, in its own sphere and kind, as much of the nature o...