eighteenth century, like much other skepticism, was in itself wholly barren, bespattering and defacing the then current picture of Christian reality, but not putting anything in its place; that there are innumerable points where biblical criticism with all its efforts will probably never make good a claim to dictate; that it is clearly possible for the labors of Assyriologists and Egyptologists to throw fresh light upon portions of the Old Testament that had been prematurely or imperfectly explained by the literary critic; that many statements and sections of the Pentateuch may ultimately be shown by the archeologist to have a higher antiquity or a more definite historical value than the critic has granted; that archæology is transforming our knowledge of the ancient world; that the early culture of the Hebrews is in all probability both more ancient and more complex than any critic of fifty years ago could have supposed; that Professor Ramsay's vivid work upon the Acts, based mainly on the first-hand knowledge of an archæologist, is believed to have undone a great deal of German criticism; that modern scientific knowledge fights against the deists who denied the conformity of Christianity to nature, while increasing historical knowledge fights against their denial of the validity of the Christian evidences.

The essay observes that historical theology concerns itself chiefly just now with the life of Christ, the criticism of the Old Testament having taken a secondary place, while the problems of the gospels have once more moved to the forefront ; that there is still wanting an English Life of Christ which shall enrich, not the literature of popular edification, but the literature of a true and responsible knowledge; that more discoveries like that of the Logia are possible and would teach us more than we now know of the origins of the gospels; that scholarship is throwing ever fresh light on the conceptions and beliefs which prevailed in the age when Jesus was growing up.

The essay notes that in the past all phases of Christian teaching have at some time undergone gradual modification from the progressive thought and experience of man's religious life. As Luther and Wesley, each in his day and way, modified the faith of Christendom, so also the Calvinism of the Scotch peasant of to-day in that delightful Thrums which a novelist pictures is not the Calvinism of John Calvin and the Genevese ordinances; and the Anglicanism of this century is far from the Anglicanism

of the eighteenth century which busied itself in "hewing and chiseling Christianity into an intelligible human system, represented as affording a remarkable evidence of the truth of the Bible;" and the Catholicism of a Manning, ready to join hands with any heretic so long as temperance be preached, the child protected, or the laborer raised a step nearer to manhood, was not like the Catholicism of Newman, only a generation earlier, with its eagerness about speculative theory, its abhorrence of Liberalism and Liberals, its remoteness from this workaday world, and its comparative indifference as to whether there be "too many public houses in England or no." Even where the same great old words of creed and argument are retained, the emphasis, the place of the accent, the pronunciation of the words have been changed from time to time, and such change has altered the leading, urgent meaning of the whole, the meaning which stirs the blood and attaches the heart.

The essay remarks that this historic progress of Christian thought has not now come to a halt; to-day does not "stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon; " in almost all Christian bodies are felt the vibrations of change if not the pangs of new births, the stir of movements neither retrograde nor tardigrade; and various forces operate, both from within the Church and from without, for the gradual modification of religious opinion, for a different arrangement or a slightly altered point of view, giving a new perspective. But while the religious consciousness contains always two elements-the transient and the permanent so that what is to last makes its way at first in human life by virtue of that which is to pass away, yet the Christian battle of doctrine and belief moves without any real check toward a unifying knowledge. And although the order of the apologetic argument may require to be reset the inviolable root-beliefs of Christendom will remain, however the deductive constructions of inferential doctrine may be pruned and trained. If any hold that, by reason of growing knowledge, we are on the eve of a new Christian philosophy and restatements of beliefs, yet, because the faith of nineteen centuries has been no delusion, all must admit that the history of those centuries and of the part played therein by that force called "the Life of Christ "will enter into the new statement whenever it appears, preserving the vital continuity of doctrine and making the faith of the future a normal development and enlargement of the

faith of the past, so that rational coherence and essential constancy will live through all the transformations and constitute a living and lasting growth of human thought.

The essay asserts that Christianity is a system founded on perennial needs of human nature, bound up with the hopes and sorrows, the tears, the agonies, the joys of eighteen hundred years, which has added to the ethical thought of Greece and the governing power of Rome an emotion and an enthusiasm all its own; that the distrust of Christianity seen among some of the present day is the most wasteful and uncalled-for surrender of its own wealth that modern life can make; that this age is not so rich in symbols and rallying cries, nor is it so easy to touch, to bind, to lift men, that we can dispense with the images, the thoughts, the aspirations and inspirations which have touched and bound and raised them in the past, and which come to us, therefore, steeped in and consecrated by an unfathomable human experience; that Christianity still claims our faith and our devotion because in its best form it is the most moving and beautiful, the most striking and concrete testimony that history affords to the power of a divine and eternal life, a life which is perpetually revealed in conscience, law, and knowledge, and which so presses on and appeals to the human spirit that it can generate, within the sphere of contact between it and man, a faith that can transfigure these passing years and take the terror from the face of death.

The essay declares that the "Christian riddle as a whole is being read with a self-verifying accuracy and subtlety which a hundred years ago were still among the unconceived births of time; that the force of Christian evidence and the power of its argument grows from year to year; that as new conceptions of the Christian reality come with successive decades that reality gains in vividness, fullness, and convincing power, and as it is impressed with irresistible force upon the mind of mankind the figure of the Master becomes ever clearer and grander, all progress of knowledge and thought only strengthening our grasp of that tender and beautiful reality; that it is being more and more fully understood how it happened that Jesus, and not anybody else, stands in history as the leader and symbol of a great movement of converging philosophies and kindling enthusiasms which coincided with the birth of modern Europe under the ægis of the Roman empire and is still capable of infinite expansion;

that in the Christian history God and man have met for the founding of the most significant, the divinest work of human history, by which light has dawned for the slave, the outcast, the woman, the poor; that the personality, life, words, acts of Christ thrown on the fitting moment of history have evoked from the race that electric power of sympathy and passion which is to utilize materials from "the stored labor of Greek ethical thought, the ordered power of Roman life, and the moral and imaginative wealth of Jewish faith, for the actual building in earth's midst of the new Jerusalem, and the practical founding of the city of God."

The essay assures us that if, in our teaching, we so use the life of Christ as to make of it the most compelling and the most fruitful symbol known to our experience of that contact between God and our poor human consciousness which is religion, then we need have no fear that it will ever fail to meet religious need or strike out spiritual response; that by studiously following the Master as he moves among the sins and needs, the sufferings and affections, of Galilee and Jerusalem, and by communing with him, there will be quickened in us, and in those whom we teach, both reverence for the life of duty and of pity and strength for the daily relations and tasks of our own world, each of those relations and duties being connected in our thoughts with the beloved and sacred name of Him who stands, by the irrevocable choice of men, at the head of the spiritual life of Europe and America, and who bequeaths to us the maintenance and spread of his work; that all things may be done to God in Christ, and that only by so doing can men hope for the growth which alone is true life, growth in that temper at once of selfsurrender and indomitable hope which yields all that man has and does to the action of the indwelling, all-transforming God, whose chief representative in history is Jesus Christ.

We have given largely in its own language those parts of the essay before us most closely allied to sound doctrine. Neology adheres by some of its tentacles to the Rock, while its bulk floats and sways about in currents unstable and irregular. The vitality of the Christian creed is manifest in its continuing to appeal with undiminished effect, spite of all questioning and criticism, to the alert and progressive intelligence of civilized mankind—the intelligence which dominates and leads the world.

THE ARENA.

THE SOURCE OF DEPRAVITY.

1. "THE holiness of Adam," says Dr. Miley, "as newly created and before any personal action of his own, was simply a subjective state and tendency in harmony with his moral relations and duties. But such a state, however real and excellent, and however pleasing to the divine mind, could not have any true ethical quality, or in any proper sense be accounted either meritorious or rewardable."* In other words, Adam's holiness was essentially that condition of sinless purity in which he was created. This also constituted the spiritual image of God in him. Both came, it is to be observed, by divine creation, without any cooperative action of human will. These were designed as the foundations, we may assume, upon which character should be built up in the creature, by his free action in right doing. And if this were accomplished it would add to his original holiness the ethical element that it lacked and which for obvious reasons the creative fiat of God could not give. Adam's freedom, however, without which he could not have been a moral being, made him susceptible to temptation, and carried with it the power, against God's wish and will, to make bad character. This, on his first trial by temptation, he elected to do. He sinned, and thereby lost the holiness created in him and the moral features of the divine image as well. Hence he was no longer pure or sinless, but unholy and sinful-before God's law a sinner. This was his "fall." 2. The full penalty of Adam's sin was not visited upon him. Notwithstanding his wickedness he was left in life and allowed to propagate. But for the intervention of the same creative might which gave the first pair their pristine holiness this would mean the entailment of corruption upon those utterly innocent of the "great transgression." That justice demanded they should be saved from this awful inheritance, if possible to divine power and consistent with God's moral government, appears beyond controversy. By permitting them to be brought into existence the equitable basis for such a claim is laid.

Here, none can question the resources of Omnipotence. If, as has been shown, God created the "holiness " of Adam in absolute independence of the latter's will, the adequacy of his power to endow the souls of all the race with a like estate of sinless purity at the beginning of their being is hardly open to debate. And it is immaterial to this proposition which view is taken of the origin of human souls-whether it be by propagation or creation. The ground of the equity now in view clearly is in the fact of their existence under a contingency of evil, to be suffered if not averted, rather than the way it began.

Systematic Theology, vol. i, pp. 410.