motives "quick and powerful," applicable to the myriad exigencies of human feeling, and actually persuasive and prevalent. We have never learned how. We slight our training, and then expect God to supplement our raw work. We dash through an ephemeral noviciate, and then expect God to make the world wise through the foolishness of our preaching. We plunge into the holy ministry, and expect God to overrule our maladroitness and save souls in spite of us. No, perhaps Minerva sprang full-armed from the head of Jove; but this is no day of miracles or mythologies; and we cannot expect to vault into the pulpit in full panoply by any such process of sudden parturition.

A due preparation for the ministry requires at least all the three years of a seminary course, and as much of previous academical training as it is possible to obtain; and not only this, but in many cases a post-graduate year could be added, and ought to be added. Milton was famous for his scholarship at the university, and yet felt that he must give himself at least five years more of hard study in the privacy of home before he dared embark in the labors and responsibilities of life; it was the dictate of his own sagacity, that "he cared not how late he came into life, only that he came fit." When we realize the amount of time and reading which must be given to the exegetical study of the bible, to the investigations of theology, to the almost boundless field of history, sacred and secular, to the study of preaching, and the entire art of expression; and beyond these, the vast range of philosophy, science, art and belles lettres, touching human life and representing human interest at every point, and demanding attention from every thoughtful mind, and preeminently from him who assumes to be a public teacher of morals and religion; and still further, when we consider how many faculties of mind are to be developed, and how diverse they are, and how different their handling-how perception, reflection, judgment, attention, memory, are all to be developed, magnified, sharpened—and the imagination too is to be evoked and harnessed to the service of all the rest; and finally, when we remember what pains-taking labor, through a wide reach of reading, and over a long-continued stretch of personal training, must be needful for the mastery of the English language, for the study of the great models of elo

quence, for the culture of that instrument of marvellous possibilities, the human voice, and for drill in all the appurtenances of oratory-when we take all these and more into account, how can we desire to convince ourselves that a "partial course" will amply suffice, or will ever suffice, for an office so sacred, and a preparation so vast? If we bring to our labor only the "small Latin and less Greek" which "rare Ben Jonson" ascribed to his friend Shakspeare, are we for that reason to enter the great profession by a shorter path? Could we imag ine an artist encouraging a pupil with such indulgent sophistry? "My young friend," (would he say?) "since you have received so little of the rudimentary training which you need before entering my studio, I will for that reason make an artist of you in a shorter time!" No, the less Greek, the longer course; that is more logical, and more consistent. The forty years Ghiberti spent on the two gates of the Baptistery at Florence were not wasted years; Michael Angelo himself pronounced those shapely doors worthy to be the gates of Paradise. And we who aspire to the august privilege of opening the gates of Paradise to our fellow-mortals, should count it our joy to rival these illustrious workers in the time and toil and brains we put into our qualifications for so transcendent a task. We may not hope to become the peers of Augustine, or of Chrysostom, or of Savonarola; but we may expect that any earnest preacher of fair abilities, who has been lifted by the grace of God into great convictions and into a mighty purpose, and who will patiently submit intellect, heart, will, and body, to years of toil and training, will be honored by his Lord with great power of persuasion and with abundant trophies of success.

There is doubtless in some minds a lurking suspicion that all this elaboration may tend to refine away the intense convic tions and the solemn purpose with which the student in the ardor of his Christian love hastens to qualify himself for his ministry. Perhaps some will be reminded of Lessing's fable of the hunter, whose ebony bow was so precious that he wished to adorn it, and had an entire hunting-scene deeply carved upon it; "My beloved bow," he cried when it came home from the engraver, "you deserve this embellishment!" but when he tried it, the bow broke! I have only "darkened counsel by

words without knowledge," however, if I have even suggested the thought that any portion of the ministerial training is to be spent upon the embellishments and decorations. The preacher's convictions of divine truth are by these labors not to be frittered away, but rather moulded and brought to utterance. His intense purpose is not to be enfeebled, but shaped and aimed the more exactly at its mark. There are wondrous charms in the purely intellectual study of divine themes, which we well know may become temptations. But he who is inspired by great convictions and a great purpose, we must remember, is pushing his work forward on a very high plane; so high as to unvail to him something of the spiritual wealth of that upper region, so high as to dwarf the allurements beneath him into pigmy trifles, so high as to be very near to the great sources of divine aid. Profoundly convinced as he is of the vital necessity of just that long and hard and patient drill, he presses on in humble self-distrust, but with unbounded confidence in the guardianship of God. The same divine hand which has pointed out to him the labor, will shield him in performing it. He holds himself to be but an instrument in that loving hand. He rejoices to feel that every stroke of patient toil, every day of costly training, every month and year of consuming study, is adding so much to the keenness and force of the blade, and will make it so much the more worthy of the divine hand that is to wield it. It is his to complete and perfect the instrument, to offer to his Lord the finest results of his wisest training; it is the Lord's to use the costly gift in His own divinest way.

When Amrou the Saracen was asked to exhibit the sword which had made such havoc in the ranks of the Crusaders, he drew forth his well-tried cimeter. "This is the sword," he said; "but without the arm of its master, it is neither sharper nor more weighty than the sword of Pharezdak the poet." We also, brothers in the ministry of Christ, ascribe all the success we can win to the arm of the Master. It is His. And let us count it so high honor to be chosen for that service, that no labor shall be too great, no time too precious, no care too burdensome, no sacrifice too vast, to spend upon the instrument, before we dare offer it to Him who is to employ it in an enterprise so illustrious and divine.

ARTICLE IV.-IMMER ON THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES.*

THE views which have been held regarding Holy Scripture have always exerted an essential influence upon the treatment and explanation of the same. Once the church considered the Bible a through and through inspired book, and the sacred writers merely as God's amanuenses and pens, persons to whom the Holy Spirit dictated the contents and expression of their compositions. In consequence of this view of its origin, the whole Bible from the first verse of Genesis to the last one of the Apocalypse was looked upon as absolutely and infallibly authoritative. In modern times, a contrary view has obtained, namely, that Holy Scripture is all a completely human book, a literary product of the ancient Hebrews and of the earliest Christians, in the same sense in which the writings of the Greeks and Romans are the literary products of these peoples, so that the Bible is to be treated just as these other writings are. The truth lies in neither of these views, nor in a mean between the two, but above both. Both can be derived from it. This true view can only be arrived at by tracing the history of religion.

"Holy Scripture" presupposes a revelation. But revelation is the incoming of a new truth, overpoweringly important, which has so seized and filled the soul of a human being as to make him conscious that he has not himself discovered and brought forward this truth but received it from above. Such a revelation was it by which, in the midst of peoples given up to a sensual nature-worship, there was awakened in Abraham, with all its primitive power, the consciousness of the one God, distinct from nature, all-working and holy; the consciousness of a Personality above all other personalities, the knowledge of whom he was to regard as no secret doctrine but as a common blessing intended for the whole people. Thus the descendants of Abraham became possessors of an ideal blessing of infinite worth. They were made in a quite peculiar sense the people

*Translated from Immer's Hermeneutik des neuen Testamentes; by E. D. BURTON, Instructor in Kalmazoo College, Michigan.

of God. This, however, at first only potentially (Exod. xix, 4-6). The problem remained for them to become actually what, in God's purpose, they already were, "a holy people” (Levit. xi, 43-45, xix, 2). As this process went on, the actualization of the idea of a people of God was looked upon wholly as God's work; the difficulty of the same, wholly as the fault of the people themselves. Here, in total contrast with the history of other peoples, all honor is given to God alone. This view of God as the invisible King of the people, and of the people as the object of his guidance and discipline, could have been no mere human thought. This also like the notion of one invisible, all-efficient God must have been a divine revelation. Thus too, it was a revelation, or rather a whole line of revelations, when prophets were called of God and by him impelled to hold up the people's sins before the people's face, to denounce God's judgments against them, and then foretell the glorious time of mercy afterwards to come, when God would again pity his people and bless them with a theocratic and moral restoration. Prophetic revelation thus displayed Israel's history as a history of divine guidance, as a conflict on God's part with his stiffnecked people in trying to educate them. To this prophetic revelation, this talking and struggling of God with his people, there corresponds on the part of the pious Israel a talking with God, which as a rule could only take a poetic form. Now, the pious man celebrates God in the song of praise; now, in silent religious satisfaction, he sings of his safety in his God's protection; still again, we find him in the stern fight of faith, struggling in ardent longing after his salvation or seeking the answer for the deepest riddles of life. Thus the whole history of this people appears in the light of the revealing spirit, as on the one hand God's struggle with the people in educating them (see especially Hosea and Jeremiah), on the other hand a praying struggle of the people with God, typically set forth at Gen. xxxii, 24-32. Comp. Hos. xii, 4, 5. This, the Holy Spirit of revelation prevailing over and in the people of Isreal, is a reality presupposed by all Holy Scripture.

There is no direct necessity that such a divine revelation should be expressed in writing. The revelation is a revelation wholly apart from such an expression of it. In general, one