merely modes of his activity which disclose the variety of the powers of the one undivided personality. But this knowledge is not a return to the period of simplicity when man lived unreflectingly in the world, a child unconscious of his powers and prompted by impulse. The knowledge of himself and of his own faculties, a knowledge combined into the unity of philosophy, has accompanied and largely produced his upward progress in the subjugation of nature and in the advances of culture and history. In his later life a Christian scholar said that he held to only a few simple beliefs, that he did not attach importance to many doctrines he once accepted. But his later faith was more than the unquestioning trust of childhood. Years of reflection and experience had sifted beliefs, and he had learned the value of those truths which control life and shape character. What he accepted in childhood on authority had become the intelligent faith of his maturity by a process of separating the real from the nonessential. Thus the church at the outset accepted the facts of Christianity as the spiritual forces of life. Then followed periods of doctrinal development, which were really periods of analysis, when systems of beliefs were elaborately drawn out; but now the truth is seen again in its spiritual magnitude as a complete whole of essential principles emancipated from many of the artificialities and refinements which had encumbered it. But thought has not, therefore, merely moved in a circle and returned to its starting-point unchanged. The doctrinal ideas of the early church needed the enlargement of later reflective thought to be adapted to the personal and social needs of modern life. The elements which were contained in the original gospel required that development through centuries of thought by which they should become the moving forces of society.

At all events, the effort of theology now is to find what there is in every fact and doctrine of Christianity for the religious life of the individual and for the progress of society. A purely speculative interest no longer exists, but the practical aim of religious truth is the controlling consideration.

Therefore it is a step in advance which is about to be taken from the thought of Christianity as a revelation to the thought of it as a redemption. The principal inquiry of the last century was concerning a revelation. Its possibility, necessity, and reasonableness were discussed. Miracles were defended as the proofs of revelation. The knowledge of God was divided into provinces as it was believed to be derived from nature or reason or revelation. The ordinary disclosures of God in Providence and history were distinguished from the extraordinary disclosures of revelation. Theology was on the defensive. It labored to prove that so-called natural agencies could not account for miracles and the person and resurrection of Christ. It constructed exact theories of the inspiration of the writers of the Bible, until even the revelation itself was subordinate to the inspiration which was thought to guarantee its

accuracy. It is, indeed, a gain that the revelation is now considered more important than the mode in which men received and communicated it; but a still larger gain is found in the advance from revelation to redemption, from a body of truth which is not incredible to a body of truth which is the renewing and perfecting power of life. Redemption is the final cause of revelation, and all truth which restores man to his ideal, and transmutes society into the kingdom of God, is a revelation. The interest and value of it are in such relation. And the best evidence that God reveals himself in Christianity is found in the results of the gospel in the world. To put it in a word, theology has, on the whole, in the past, attempted chiefly to establish belief, so that reasons enough shall appear to keep people from relinquishing their faith in Christianity and the Bible; but theology now is attempting to discover the relations of Christianity to life, so that its power shall proceed unhindered to its intended results. Under the old method, its object was to keep men from losing their faith. Under the new method, its object is to give faith its redeeming power in life. At no time have the doctrines of the gospel been totally separated from redemption. But as to emphasis, the change is going on from a speculative and defensive support of those truths which in any view are inseparable from redemption to a constructive and spiritual development of doctrine in its bearing upon the redemption of the individual to his uses and of society to its ideal as the kingdom of God.

It follows from the present tendency of doctrinal development that less interest is likely to be taken in ascertaining the central principle of theology. The phrase "Christo-centric" has had a recent use in recognizing the actual revelation of God in Christ as more important than the decree of God as the expression of his eternal purpose. By comparison it was a step in advance to perceive that not the sovereignty of God but his revelation in Christ is central in theology. But it would be quite as correct to take the result as central rather than the original purpose or the means of redemption, and so to say that the gospel is anthropo-centric. In fact, it is no contradiction to hold that it is Deo-centric and Christo-centric and anthropo-centric. God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself is the whole gospel, and one of the elements may not be separated out as central, that is, most important and all controlling. So it might be said, and with perfect truth, that gravitation is the central law of the universe, or evolution, or force, or rational life, as the thought is of cause, mode, or end. Yet from the temporary magnifying of each truth in theology permanent gain has been secured. The sovereignty of God is not arbitrary, and it does not reduce men to insignificance; but it is the resting-place of thought as well as of trust by its truth of divine power in the service of divine wisdom. The person and sacrifice of Christ are not to be viewed chiefly as satisfactory to some unintelligible demand of God's justice, nor the glory of the Son in the universe as

God's end in creation, but Christ is the object of trust to penitent souls and the source of life to the world. And now that the renewed and perfected life of man in society, that is, the kingdom of God as the end of revelation, is recognized as the test and measure of all doctrine, we are retaining what is essential in former belief, and at the same time enlarging our view to take in the complete horizon of truth.

Dorner's definition of theology is therefore incomplete. He says it is the exhibition of Christianity as truth. But this may be purely intellectual. The task of theology is not completed when Christianity is accepted as reasonable. The complete function of theology is the exhibition of Christianity as truth for life.

It is a significant indication of the recovery of theology to its proper uses that its work is enlarging to include Christian ethics. It sees that ethics is the complement of doctrine. And it broadens the field of ethics to include the individual, realizing his personal ideal, and also the progress and history of the world as portraying the development of man's collective life advancing towards its social ideal.

In the considerations which have been suggested, the importance of theology becomes apparent. Moral progress must be self-directed, if not in its lower, certainly in its higher stages. There must be knowledge of the ends which are worthy to be pursued and of the methods by which those ends are to be realized. As a true scholar must set his own tasks and have in view the large outcome of a lifetime's intellectual industry, so a child of God, after the period of nonage, must see the ideal of character and see the spiritual laws, the motive powers in the moral world which are at his service for making the ideal real. He must have a knowledge of God, of the world, of himself, of society, and of God's plan for the individual and for mankind. That is to say, he must have a theology. All influential religious thinkers are theologians, although some would reject the title. The effective preacher is a theologian as he brings into view the character of God, his purposes for the person and for humanity, and as he interprets the motive powers by which men shall seek that which is highest. As every statesman and every intelligent citizen tries to understand correctly the theory of government, the ends of national life, and the measures appropriate to such ends, so the theologian and the preacher and the intelligent Christian try to understand, and need to understand, the objects, laws, and methods of God's kingdom of righteousness.

The illusion lingers that periods of reflection, when men begin to philosophize, are inferior to periods of spontaneous, impulsive, natural life, and that likewise when reflection on religion begins to construct theology the vigor of primitive piety is weakened. The childhood of persons and of peoples has, indeed, a charm all its own; but undirected impulse and unintelligent trust are not manhood. Progress puts away childish things and travels onwards in ever-increasing intellectual and spiritual strength.

PROFESSOR HUXLEY, CANON LIDDON, AND "LUX MUNDI." THERE could not well be any stronger evidence of the perennial interest of theology, than the attraction which its problems have for minds of the most widely different type and the most untheological prepossessions. Mr. Matthew Arnold is an example which will occur to every one. He was a poet of rare quality, if not of the widest range or the most popular song; a critic who was always bent on discovering the reason for the judgments of taste, and teaching us not only what to admire, but why. In this world of rampant Philistinism, that was surely a mission high enough, hard enough. But his genius bade him annex theology to literature. Interesting as his theological writings are, and valuable as the expression of that literary point of view which the exact scholar is so prone to miss; true as much that he said is, and well said as it all is, when we look at the slender volume of his verse we cannot but regret that, less wise than the vine in Jotham's fable, he let himself be tempted away from his "wine that rejoiceth Gods and men" by the deceitful promise of authority in the forest. Mr. Huxley is another conspicuous illustration of the enchantment of theology. He preaches interesting and instructive "Lay-sermons; " but it is as a controversial theologian that he has won his chief fame. He is, like all born controversialists, a bit of an Ishmaelite, withal, and shows no favor to any party, sect, or school. His point of view is that of a man of science who has engaged himself primarily with the problems of life; and of the godfather, if not the father, of agnosticism, a philosophy which is, he contends, the necessary correlate of experimental science. He thinks clearly, has a straightfor ward way of going to the heart of the matter, and a trenchant style which make him no mean antagonist. More than that, he writes with the earnestness of a man to whom truth is dear. His controversy with Professor Wace is fresh in memory. In a recent number of the "Nineteenth Century " he has taken his position in the discussion which has sprung up in England over the volume of essays entitled "Lux Mundi," especially over the chapter on "The Holy Spirit and Inspiration." In this article Mr. Huxley ranges himself squarely by the side of Canon Liddon in the position that proof of the unhistorical character of the Old Testament narratives, especially of those which are assumed in the New Testament to be true, would be fatal to Christianity. After stating this position as held by an earlier apologist, he writes:

"My utmost ingenuity does not enable me to discover a flaw in the argument thus briefly summarized. I am fairly at a loss to comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value

unless they possess the historical character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh; if the 'ten words' were not written by God's hand on the stone tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus; the story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall a legend; and that of the Creation the dream of a seer; if all these definite and detailed narratives of apparently real events have no more value as history than have the stories of the regal period of Rome - what is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, which is so much less clearly enunciated? And what about the authority of the writers of the books of the New Testament, who, on this theory, have not merely accepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksands?"

He quotes from Canon Liddon's sermon the strong passage in which the preacher declares that,

"For Christians it is enough to know that our Lord Jesus Christ set the seal of his infallible sanction on the whole of the Old Testament. He found the Hebrew Canon as we have it in our hands to-day, and he treated it as an authority which was above discussion. Nay more: He went out of his way if we may reverently speak thus to sanction not a few portions of it which modern skepticism rejects. When He would warn his hearers against the dangers of spiritual relapse, He bids them remember 'Lot's wife.' When He would point out how worldly engagements may blind the soul to a coming judgment, He reminds them how men ate, and drank, and married, and were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered into the ark, and the Flood came and destroyed them all. If He would put his finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted reality, would warrant belief in his own coming resurrection, He points to Jonah's being three days and three nights in the whale's belly."

And he agrees with Canon Liddon that neither the theory of accommodation, nor the alternative, that Jesus shared in these points the popular ignorance, is admissible, quoting his words again:—

"They will find it difficult to persuade mankind that, if He could be mistaken on a matter of such strictly religious importance as the value of the sacred literature of his countrymen, He can safely be trusted about anything else. The trustworthiness of the Old Testament is, in fact, inseparable from the trustworthiness of our Lord Jesus Christ; and if we believe that He is the true Light of the world, we shall close our ears against suggestions impairing the credit of those Jewish Scriptures which have received the stamp of his divine anthority."

Mr. Huxley among the conservaWe do not remember to have seen

Is Saul also among the prophets? tives is certainly an edifying sight. it more broadly or more positively put anywhere, that if the story of Jonah, or Lot's wife, or the account of the Flood, is not true, the authority of Christ, who uses them in argument or illustration as true, is necesrarily destroyed.

But while Canon Liddon and those of his way of thinking generally treat this conclusion as a reductio ad absurdum by which the truth of