yet lost, to such use of modern science in the microscopic battles of bacteria, in new overflows and filterings and economies, in new chemical resolvents, in new fashions of building and settlement, rendered possible by rapid transit and electric communication, as will divert fresh air funds to bringing fresh air and water into homes instead of sufferers out of them, will found fewer hospitals, almshouses, churches, missionary stationsbecause there will be need of fewer, since the largest need of them shall be anticipated by making the land pure and its people clean, and full of the appreciation that cleanliness is next to Godliness, especially this land and this people, with whom and in whose liberty, all lands and all peoples are being made free-and where least of all, politically, geographically (according to Virchow), or ethnologically, can the earth afford to witness a survival of the filthiest.

CHARLES H. OWEN.

ARTICLE VI.-THE PASTOR AND DOCTRINE.

HOW FAR should the preaching of the pastor be doctrinal? What is doctrine? In the New Testament, doctrine is teaching. All teaching is doctrine, and all doctrine is teaching. There is but one word for the two English words. Therefore, where, as in Mark i. 27, the old version reads, "What new doctrine is this?" the Revision justly translates, "What is this? a new teaching?"

In the Bible sense, therefore, all teaching respecting the Kingdom of God, in the man or in the world, on earth or in heaven, is doctrine, whether respecting its King, its theatre, its principles, its laws, its facts, its characters, its workings, its dangers, its temptations, its duties, its promises, its progress, or its consummation. Our modern distinction into doctrinal and practical is wholly unbiblical.

Stated, therefore, agreeably to the New Testament, the question would be this: Ought the pastor mainly to teach, or to exhort?

The distinction between pastors and teachers is, as we know, clearly made, though not drawn out at length, in the New Testament. We cannot, therefore, exactly define it. But we are safe in saying that the ministrations of the teacher must have inclined rather to the theoretical foundation, and of the pastor to the practical appropriation, of Christian truth. The distinction then appears to be not into doctrinal and practical, in our modern sense, but into theoretical and practical, the difference lying not in the subjects treated, but the more abstract or more living way of treating them.

It may be objected that another distinction is possible between teacher and pastor, namely, between preaching and the cure of souls, in private intercourse. But this is not the only way in which the pastor was to feed or guide. The pastor was the shepherd. And as truth is the food of souls, and truth that which guides them, all communication of truth with a direct view to these two ends, whether given in public

or in private, would be pastoral. The distinction, then, between pastor and teacher would be that between the man who leads to the pasture and the man who provides the pasture. Still it may well be that this would largely coincide with the distinction between the less and the more specialized form of public and private ministration respectively.

One thing is certain: no knowledge which is not gathered and communicated with a fixed view that it shall ultimately issue in practice is worthily pursued or communicated. It has been truly said that knowledge is incipient life. When it has been thoroughly appropriated and has wrought its due effect upon the being, the soul then reaches forward for new nutriment. Knowledge which is not meant to guide hardly deserves the name of knowledge. There are, indeed, many men whose business it is to gather up and provisionally systematize large masses of facts, which are not as yet seen to be very distinctly practical. But such systems of expectant facts, material or mental, however extensive, hardly deserve the supreme name of knowledge until they are thoroughly melted into the main current of thought and become a guiding force of human life. And that this is so appears more and more from the instinct of Christian or Anti-christian intent, which meets you in inquiries the most remote, from the exploration of an ant's nest to inquiries into the origin of the stellar universe.

The Christian church, assuredly, is an institute thoroughly practical, whose aim it is to raise human life and human beings from the lowest earth to the highest heaven, and for which all things else are instrumental to this one great end. Her teachers, therefore, even though gathered into schools, and removed from the public congregation, have no right to divorce their instruction from practice. If even the positivist Comte deplored the evil effect of knowledge severed from love, how much more those whose fundamental belief it is that all objects of knowledge are the expression of Wisdom realizing the Supreme Love! The earthly emotion of curi osity must be held in solution in the supernatural emotion of adoration, or the teacher ceases to be Christian. And if even the professor of theology is bound to a practical and living

spirit of teaching, much more the minister of the congregation, even though he should be the teacher rather than the pastor. He may be regarded as intermediate between the professor and the pastor. But as he is distinctly mentioned among the ministers with which Christ has endowed his Church, it is plain that he is needed in the congregation.

But even in the early Church, where every larger congregation had a body of presbyters, of various gifts, who were all pastors, whether they were all teachers or not, it may be questioned whether the distinction is not rather into two sides of one office than into two offices. At all events, the bulk of our congregations are not likely to have two formally distinguished guides, one a pastor and one a teacher. The same man must be both, so far as they are to have either. us the question practically reduces itself to this: How far should the pastor be a teacher, and how far an applier of teaching previously given? That is, as stated at the beginning, How far should he teach, and how far exhort?

Then for

But even as thus reduced, the question has still an undefined element: What is exhortation? We know what exhortation may be. Exhortation may be merely bellowing. We must not forget that under the mantle of nominal adherence to the Church, there still lurks in Christendom the various forms, not of heathenism merely, but of the lowest grades of heathenism. What we are so fond of applying to the Church of Rome is by no means utterly inapplicable to ourselves, namely, that, compared with the ideal set before us, the best of our Christianity is as yet but little better than a baptized paganism, though it is to be hoped that it is making rapid progress out of these marshy and poisonous lowlands. Southey told profound truth in saying that before the Wesleys, the English peasantry had been Catholics and were Protestants, but had never been Christians. And much as Methodism has done to lift them into heavenly places in Christ, it has not yet wholly overcome the old heathenism. Nay, the mighty spiritual impulse which converted so many to Christ stirred into activity many germs of low, boisterous, unhuman heathenism, which, without it, might have remained quiescent. And many well-meaning, but undiscriminating people came to as

sociate this inevitable shadow of a great Christian work with the work itself, until they imagined that there could not be a true work of God without those animal cries and wild stirrings of the material nature, worthy only of the priests of Baal, with which the true followers of the Wesleys have so long had to contend, in much weariness of spirit, until at last they are slowly but steadily gaining the mastery over them. A consequence of this has been, that to many minds the word exhortation, so highly honored in the New Testament, where it ranges all the way from admonition to consolation, has come to mean only a shallow, noisy outpouring of vague impressions never digested into thought, having no reasonable sequence or order, proceeding from no well-apprehended truth, and leading to no worthy issue in life, a mere stirring of blind feelings into a blind tumult, ending where it had begun, and leaving the being more turbid after every agitation. Not in such a way did the mild and majestic Barnabas gain his name, which, in strictest meaning, signifies rather, Son of Exhortation.

No! True exhortation never leaves the bounds of thought, and of strict thought, and clearly apprehended truth. The moment it does, it sinks towards the inarticulate ignobleness of the brutes. It may, indeed, be encircled by a wide aureola of emotions reaching on towards the unsounded depths of infinity, of heavenly divinings, where distinct vision fails. But it is always poised on a regulating nucleus of distinctly apprehended truth, of which all its more nebulous utterances are but the rarefied expansion.

Therefore, as the distinction between teaching and exhortation is assuredly not the distinction between thought without feeling, and feeling without thought, what is it? We may define teaching as thought thoroughly propelled by feeling, and exhortation as feeling perfectly held in course by thought. And as objects nearest us usually stir feeling the most, and objects farthest from us stir it the least, that preaching which is animated by the mere familiar knowledge may be called practical, and that preaching which dwells on objects more remote, and therefore less immediately affecting the feelings, may be called doctrinal. In this way we have come around to our familiar modern distinction between doctrinal and practical, which