naturally is jealous of any attempt to undermine the Bible or to overthrow the Church.

But sometimes, in his anxiety to maintain the truth, or what he believes to be the truth, he resents the developments of scientific investigation, which appear to him to contradict his views of the truth, and, in his efforts to defend a possibly. untenable interpretation, he goes astray, and, perhaps, unconsciously, but really falls over to the side of the enemy.

This

we believe is true of those who exalt Jesus in one breath and discredit His Church in the next. To divorce Jesus from His Church is disloyalty to Jesus. We often hear and often read the war cry, "Back to Christ," as if His Church had actually wandered away from Him! This watchword appears to mean that Jesus, apart from His Church, is to be followed as the model man. His incarnation, sufferings, death, resurrection and exaltation, as well as His teaching of heavenly truth, all seem to be side-tracked in the interest of His sociological teachings which are emphasized as supreme, referring mainly, if not wholly, to the present life. Thus He is made a sort of Epicurus, teaching men how to make the most of and to enjoy the life that now is. The aim seems to be to elevate society, to make the poor rich, to contribute to present pleasure and gratification, and, in this materialistic way, to follow Christ. Such, in some quarters, is taught for a true interpretation of the aim and purpose of Jesus, and the pulpit and the press alike are used to advocate this idea of Christ and Christianity. This is a sort of bread-butter Christianity, which has no use for the church, because it emphasizes the spiritual and eternal interests of men, and demands submission to a moral code which condemns worldly mindedness and immoral practices. If this idea of Christianity were correct, it would not be much better than the systems of Confucius, Laotze, Zoroaster and Buddha, who would then rank with Jesus as inspired men. And the heretofore supposed inspiration of biblical writers, like many of the ancient worthies named therein, would become a myth.

All this, of course, the sound theologian repels as neither scientific nor Christian; and all Christians and scientists might unite in repudiating it as discreditable both to science and religion.

Jesus taught infinitely more and better than such a system. He claimed not only to be a moral leader, but also a Saviour from sin. He never wearied in pointing men away from the beggarly elements of this world, and in directing His hearers to God and heaven and eternal life. To Him these constituted the aim, and the supreme purpose of human existence. And so He insisted on faith in God as our Father, and on the cultivation of love to God and men, supplemented by a life of holiness. To this end He assured His disciples that the Holy Spirit would be given them, as their Advocate and Helper, and that, after bringing them into life union with Himself, as the source of salvation, He would guide them into all truth. Then, in addition to the heavenly doctrines He taught, and the miraculous works He did, to manifest the love of God to men He laid down His life as a voluntary sacrifice that men might be thereby reconciled to God. He rose again from the dead that they might be justified or saved by His life.

With these facts before us concerning Jesus and His place in history and Christianity, the one-sided and earthly-minded caricature of Him noticed above is manifestly out of all harmony with the truth, and may be dismissed as unworthy of further notice.

More scientific, and far more worthy of notice, is the higher criticism, which, by its radical and sweeping blows, aimed at tradition and previous interpretations of Holy Scripture, has provoked a good deal of adverse comment and animadversion, as well as elicited much favorable discussion and praise. And, we think, there are good reasons for both the adverse and favorable comment. As we understand it, the higher criticism is an effort to discover the date, the authorship and the manner of their composition of the books of the Bible.

This effort is characterized by a careful study and a diligent comparison of the several books, and a thorough examination. of their contents. It inquires whether they are original in their present form, whether much of their contents were handed down by tradition or whether they were compiled from such tradition, and from documents handed down from an earlier age. By such efforts it seeks to bring us to a knowledge of the true, genuine origin of the books of the Bible, of its authors and of the approximate dates at which they were written or compiled. In the interest of such knowledge we are required, by at least some of the eminent critics, to ignore all traditions of the past, to place ourselves in the position of learners, without faith or unbelief, without prejudice or prepossession, and, with open minds, like tabula rasa, proceed to the investigation, and then accept and record whatever we discover. In this way it is proposed to give us a Bible pure and simple as it came from its original authors, freed from superstition and from the errors of uncritical and indiscriminating tradition. These statements, we think, are fair.

If, now, one is prompted to advance the interest of pure literary science, without regard to morals or religion, the above canon of inquiry might be admissible, but from the antiquated standpoint of a believing inquirer we cannot gracefully accept it. We are not inimical to higher criticism. We in fact believe in it. But this requirement, together with some of the results of historical criticism, arouses our antagonism. We cannot keep it down. Whatever such research can discover and give us concerning the composition, the compilation and the authorship of the books of the Bible, we are thankfully willing to receive. Let us have all the light obtainable. But when you attempt in a rationalistic way to rule out of the canon, what, from the standpoint of faith, is fundamental, and therefore essential, to a divine record, or a divine revelation, we must, for the present, withhold our assent.

It concerns us little whether Moses wrote the whole of the Pentateuch in its present form or not. Probably he did not.

But it concerns us a great deal whether Moses was a real person, and a God-appointed leader and lawgiver for the Hebrew race; and whether his laws were of his own invention, or whether he received them directly from God, as the record certainly declares. If throughout the Old Testament the supernatural and supersensual are to be eliminated; and if the Bible statements concerning miraculous events are to be relegated to the realm of myth and legend, we are not prepared to accept the conclusions. We may well admit that many his

torical and miraculous occurrences therein recorded cannot be made to square with mere logical reasoning. They may seem contrary to a supposed universal experience. But to deny or explain them away on that account is equivalent to saying that God is not superior to the laws of nature, or that He cannot use them in an extraordinary way for His own wise and righteous purposes.

If we are asked to rule out the creation story as no revelation from God, but as a legend, the fall of man as a canard, Abraham as no historical personage, but only the mythical ideal of the Hebrew ancestry, the destruction of Sodom as a fiction, and the story of Jonah as a fable, we must demur. We may accept the theory of an Isaiah and a deutero-Isaiah; of a Zechariah and a deutero-Zechariah, and the post-exilic date of many of the Psalms, though contrary to tradition and to our former belief; but when the predictive character of the old prophecies is set down as evidence of a more or less successful guess work; and when the heretofore supposed Messianic predictions are denied any direct or immediate reference to the Christ and His mission; and when the miraculous and supernatural conception and birth of Jesus is credited to a legend of a later date, which somehow crept into the New Testament, we wonder what is left for us in the Bible to believe, or accept, as the ground of salvation and eternal life.

Again, when Jesus is held up merely as a moral leader, whom it is profitable to follow, and we are told that His socalled atonement is in no sense a sacrifice for sin and does

not secure our forgiveness from God, but only works a moral influence, inciting us to love God and turn to righteousness, we feel that the simple statements of the Bible are tortured out of all semblance to what they teach and mean for the sinsick soul, and he is left in helplessness and despair. Such interpretations of the Bible seem to us to be out of all harmony with science or logic or the ordinary common sense of intelligent readers.

Can it be possible that all the heroes of faith during the course of nineteen hundred years of Christian history, and whose lives have been a benison and an honor to humanity misapprehended and falsified the religion of Jesus, and died in ignorance of the Bible and its real teaching? Or can it be that God's revelation has been so clouded in obscurity, by the simple language in which it is recorded, that it could not be rightly understood till a race of wise men could arise, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to extract the truth from its pages and enlighten His benighted people?

Tradition, doubtless, is at fault in many particulars, and so far ought to be corrected. Historical research and critical judgment are needful to sift the wheat from the chaff. But it seems hardly in accord with just historical criticism to set aside, with a magisterial wave of the hand, the doctrine of divine inspiration, and thereby destroy the infallibility of the Bible, in which the Church has believed so long, and which the Bible claims for itself as the ground of its authority.

Its claim to infallibility, in spiritual concerns, seems to us not to be a subject of criticism, and we must be permitted to receive the dictum of the destructive critic with some degree of reserve. His reasoning on such a theme may be as fallible as that of the authors of tradition. And it does not strengthen his theory to claim that all respectable students of the Bible accept it as true. In fact, some very respectable students, who are not governed by prejudice, or are not in bondage to tradition, pointedly deny the correctness of his claims.

If the so-called miracles and supernatural interventions re