ing the captivity in Egypt, Moses welded together the separate fragments for the second time, and they always persisted in their endeavor to preserve their monotheism.' It is the direct intervention of God which makes it possible for this people to emerge once more. And so the process continues through the centuries until the Messiah, foretold and announced by prophets and psalmists, at last appears. This was the greatest revelation of God in the world. For he appeared in the Son himself; Christ is God; God in human form. He delivered us; he inspires us; he attracts us to follow him; we feel his fire burn in us, his compassion strengthen us, his displeasure destroy us; though, at the same time, we feel that his intercession rescues us. Assured of victory, relying on his word alone, we endure labor, scorn, wretchedness, distress, and death; for we have in him the revealed word of God, and God never lies.

THE OLD TESTAMENT AND ITS DEFECTS.

For ex

"That is my view upon this question. For us Evangelicals in particular, the word has through Luther become our all, and as a good theologian Delitzsch ought not to forget that our great Luther has taught us to sing and to believe, the word they must allow to stand !' It is to me self-evident that the Old Testament contains a number of passages which are of the nature of purely human history and are not 'God's revealed word.' There are purely historical descriptions of events of every kind which are accomplished in the political, religious, moral, and spiritual life of the people of Israel. ample, the act of the giving of the law on Mount Sinai can only symbolically be regarded as inspired by God, inasmuch as Moses was obliged to resort to the revival of laws which perhaps had long been known (possibly they originated in the codex of Hammurabi) in order to draw and bind together the structure of his people, which in its composition was loose and hardly capable of offering any resistance to outside pressure. The historian may be able, by aid of the sense or the words of the text, to establish at this point a connection with the laws of Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham, and the link would perhaps be logically correct; but this would never invalidate the fact that God prompted Moses and to this extent revealed himself to the people of Israel.

THE KAISER'S CREDO.

"The conclusion which I draw from the whole matter is as follows:

"(a) I believe in one God, who is one in substance. (Ich glaube an einen, einigen Gott.)

"(b) In order to set God forth, we men require a form, especially for our children.

"(c) This form has hitherto been the Old Testament as at present handed down to us. This form will certainly undergo considerable alterations under the influence of research and of inscriptions. That does not matter, and another thing which does not matter is that much of the nimbus of the chosen people will disappear. The kernel and the contents will always remain the same, God and his dealings.

66

Religion was never a product of science; it is an effluence of the heart and being of man arising from his relations with God.

"With cordial thanks and kindest regards, always your faithful friend, WILLIAM I. R."

Professor Harnack's Criticism.

As might have been expected, this remarkable declaration of faith met with considerable criticism in Germany, and Dr. Harnack felt called. upon to deliver himself of an article in the March number of the Preussischer Jahrbücher, from which the following are the salient passages:

Dr. Harnack remarks that "the Babylonian origin of many of the myths and legends of the Old Testament' has long been recognized, and that in the general opinion of scholars this fact has been recognized as fatal to the popular conception of the inspiration of the Old Testa

ment.'"

It is, however, going much too far to say that on this account the Old Testament has now be come worthless. The traditional forms in which the Old Testament has been authoritatively handed down to us are urgently in need of alteration.

THE UNITY OF REVELATION.

Professor Harnack expresses his agreement with the Emperor when he asserts that the revelations of God to mankind are persons, and, above all, great men, whose individuality and power constitute their secret, but he cumbers his theory of the revelations. He says:

"There can be no question of two (separate) revelations, for surely religion, moral power, and intellectual knowledge are most closely connected. There is, on the contrary, only one revelation, the instruments of which doubtless differed from each other and continue to differ altogether in respect of their character and their greatness, their calling and their mission. If Jesus Christ loses nothing of his peculiar character and his unique position when he is placed in the line of Moses, Isaiah, and the Psalmists, he likewise suffers no loss when we regard him in the line of Socrates, of Plato, and of those

others who are mentioned in the Emperor's letter. The religious contemplation of history can only, in fine, attain unity when it delivers and raises to the position of children of God mankind, whom God leads forth out of the state of nature and emancipates from error and from sin. This is without prejudice to the view that the history of God in Israel represents the specific line in ancient times.

THE DISTINCTION OR THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST?

"The Christian community must reject every estimate of Christ which obliterates the distinc tion between him and the other masters. He himself, his disciples, and the history of the world have spoken in such clear terms on this point that there ought to be no room for doubt; and in his word he still speaks to us as clearly as in the days of old he spoke to his disciples. Yet the question may and must be raised whether the rigid formula, the divinity of Christ, is the right one. He himself did not employ it; he selected other designations; and whether it was ever adopted by any of his disciples is, to say the least, very doubtful. Nay, the early Church itself did not speak of the divinity of Christ without qualification; it always spoke of his 'divinity and humanity.' 'Godmanhood' is, therefore, the only correct formula, even in the sense of the ancient dogma. This formula implies the almost complete restoration of the 'mystery' which, in accordance with the will of Christ himself, was meant to be preserved in this question. Of the truth that he is the Lord and the Saviour, he made no secret; and that he is so was to be experienced and realized by his disciples in his word and his works. But how his relationship to his Father arose, this he kept to himself and has hidden it from us.

A VISION OF REUNITED CHRISTENDOM.

According to my reading of history and my own feeling, even the formula 'man and God' (Godmanhood) is not absolutely unexceptionable, for even this formula trespasses upon a mystery into which we are not allowed to look. Nevertheless, this formula may well remain, since it really does not profess to explain anything, but only protects what is extraordinary from profanation. The Pauline phrase, God was in Christ,' appears to me to be the last word which we can utter on this subject after having slowly and painfully emancipated ourselves from the delusion of ancient philosophers that we could penetrate the mysteries of God and nature, of humanity and history.

"If ye love Me, keep My commandments; ' thereby shall every one know that ye are My

disciples if ye love one another;' it is more important to meditate on these words and to live in accordance with them than to put into formulæ what is incomprehensible and venerable. And moreover, the time will come and is already approaching when Evangelical Christians will join hands in all sincerity in confessing Jesus Christ as their Lord, and in the determination to follow his words; and our Catholic brethren will then have to do likewise. The burden of a long history, full of misunderstandings and replete with formula which are as rigid as swords, the burden of tears and of blood, weighs upon us; yet in that burden there is vouchsafed us a sacred inheritance. The burden and the inheritance seem to be inextricably linked together, but they are gradually being severed, although the final let there be' (sic) has not yet been uttered over this chaos. Straightforwardness and courage, sincerity toward one's self, freedom and love, these are the levers which will remove the burden. In the service of this exalted mission the Emperor's letter is also enlisted."

AN ENGLISH VIEW OF THE GERMAN EMPEROR.

OF

F the anti-German literature constantly appearing in the English reviews, no small part is aimed at the Kaiser himself. The spirit of many of these articles is well represented in a paper contributed by " Scrutator" to the March number of the National Review, entitled "The Kaisers" (note the plural form).

Scrutator" regards the Kaiser as a psychological study, and sees the explanation of his vagaries in his "multiplex personality," the symptom of which is that the individual affected pursues contrasted courses at one and the same time. There is something protean and extraor dinary in the Kaiser's temperament, and just as he is in external dress-private individual, hussar, British admiral, the wearer of a dozen uniforms all on the same day, so he is mentally the friend and enemy of everything at the same time.

of the United States; he risks a rupture at Manila; the pro-American Kaiser sends his brother, Prince Henry, to flatter and coax the American people. In his relations with France and Holland, there has been a pro- and an antiKaiser.

"But the pro-British, the anti-British, the proAmerican, the anti-American, the pro-Russian, the anti-Russian, the pro-French, and the antiFrench Kaisers do not exhaust the catalogue. There is the Christian Kaiser who declared that 'the foundations of the empire are laid in the fear of God;' that whosoever does not base his life upon faith is lost; that only good Christians can be good soldiers;' who preaches sermons on board the imperial yacht; who has conferred upon the Almighty the distinction of being the special ally of Germany, in words which certainly astonished the reverent world, and who has graciously beatified the old Kaiser Wilhelm and Frederick the Great. Side by side with this Kaiser stands the ruler who directed his troops, when embarking for China, to give no quarterto kill all they met. And the people who obeyed this behest, whose army's line of march was marked by a trail of burned villages, outraged women, and murdered children, found fault with British humanity in South Africa !

MANY OTHER VARIETIES OF KAISER.

"Time and space fail us to exhibit side by side the Socialist Kaiser and the Kaiser who punishes strikes with penal servitude, instructing his soldiers that they must be ready to fire on their own kinsmen at his behest; the poet Kaiser, author of the quaint ode to Aegir; the dramatist Kaiser, the terrible volubility of whose letters and telegrams drove his collaborator, Signor Leoncavallo, into the mountains of Italy, where he might at least have rest from these messages; the theater-critic Kaiser; the artist Kaiser, who draws everything, from pictures of the armed Michael to diagrams of battleships; who produces a perfect shower of memorial cards, postcards, paintings; who dictates the rules of their profession to German artists; who is, in a word, omniscient and omnipotent, but whose works must not be criticised under penalty of lèse majesté; the crusader Kaiser, who made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and, while speaking in that thrice holy spot of his devotion to the service of the Redeemer's cause, at the same time complimented the Sultan, though that potentate's hands were then red with the blood of the Armenians, and avowed friendship with him ; the absolutist Kaiser, who has written Sic volo, sic jubeo, regis suprema voluntas, and who has said, There is one law only, and that is my will;

the soldier Kaiser, who turns out garrisons, rehearses maneuvers, and commands the most formidable army the world has ever seen; the sailor Kaiser, who knows every detail of his fleet and who is persistently pressing for its increase, who dismisses admirals, captains, and lieutenants where they fall below the standard which he sets, and who orders Venezuelan bombardments pour embêter les États Unis.

"But the real puzzle has yet to be solved. Which of all these twenty-odd Kaisers is the real one? That, perhaps, the history of the next few years may reveal."

nia.

THE MACEDONIAN ATROCITIES. AST month, we quoted at some length from Mr. Charles Johnston's article on MacedoIn the Contemporary Review for March, Dr. E. J. Dillon writes of the Macedonian atrocities and the futility of Turkish reforms. He describes scenes which, as he truly says, come to us "like deadly visions from out the plague-polluted mist of hell."

He ridicules the idea that the Sultan will execute any of the reforms recommended in the Austro-Russian note.

"All these reforms-with the exception of the administration of the provinces by the Ottoman Bank-have over and over again been decided upon and announced by the Sultan, but they have always remained on paper."

The Turk, while promising to carry out the reforms, is preparing to fight.

"The best Turkish generals have been appointed to the chief strategic positions in the country; Ali Riza Pasha-who served for sev eral years in the Prussian army and will probably be commander-in-chief in the future war-is at the head of the province of Monastir, and Mehmed Hafiz in Uskub."

WHAT IS GOING ON IN MACEDONIA TO-DAY.

Dr. Dillon quotes from the reports of Mme. Bakhmetieff, the American wife of the Russian consul at Sofia, and from the official report of M. Westman, Russian vice-consul at Philippopolis, details of atrocities enough to make the blood run cold. He says that one-third of the male population of one of the best-behaved districts in Macedonia have been compelled to flee the country.

"The Russian vice-consul at Philippopolis, M. Westman, crossed over into Macedonia in order to verify the incredible statements of many of the fugitives, and the startling results of his investigations were sent to the foreign office in St. Petersburg. Among other interesting facts, he

there informs his government that a belt of ter ritory thirty versts broad, running parallel to the frontier, typifies the abomination of desolation; the churches having been defiled and the villages partly burned to the ground, while the inhabitants have fled no one knows whither.

"M. Westman declares that he saw women who had run away to save their honor and their lives and were huddled together in mountain fastnesses where the snow lay several feet deep, and the wretched creatures were in an almost naked state. Some of them, he adds, had trudged along on foot, floundering in the snow for twenty consecutive days with no shred of clothing but their chemises. Forty of the women who reached Dubnicza and were cared for by Mme. Bakhmetieff, were about to become mothers. Most of these misery-stricken women and men were almost naked, wasted to skeletons, with dull, sunken eyes and pinched cheeks. Several were mutilated or disfigured, and the livid welts, the open wounds, the horrible marks of the red-hot pincers with which they had been tortured, were witnessed by all.

HOW THE TURKS TORTURE WOMEN AND CHILDREN.

"One of the women in Dubnicza, who seemed more dead than alive, was asked by the kindhearted lady why she looked so utterly crushed in spirit, now that the danger had passed and life, at any rate, was safe. Amid tears and sighs and convulsive quiverings of the body, the poor creature told the sickening story of how her brother had had his head cut off before her eyes, after which she had to stand by while the ruffians chopped up his body into fragments. Several witnessed the agony of their tender daughters-children of from ten to thirteen-and heard their piercing cries as the men who wore the Sultan's coat subjected them to nameless violence. Numbers of children succumbed to

these diabolical assaults, their last looks being turned on their helpless parents or their smoking homes. In one place, two children--one aged eighteen months, the other four years— had their skulls split open by the soldiers. Other little girls and boys were deliberately and methodically tortured to death, while a place was assigned to their fathers and mothers where they were forced to listen to the agonizing screams and watch the contractions of the tender bodies each time that the once pretty faces were slowly lowered into the fire, into which Turkish pepper had been plentifully scattered. This is in truth a form of torture which only a devil could have invented, for long before death releases the tiny mite, the eyes are said to start from their sockets and burst.

THE EVIDENCE OF AN AMERICAN LADY.

"We have the authority of Mme. Bakhmetieff -who traveled about in the deep snow with the thermometer at 22 Celsius below freezing point, to bring succor to the fugitives-for saying that two priests of the villages of Oranoff and Padesh were tortured in a manner which suggests the story of St. Lawrence's death. They were not exactly laid on gridirons, but they were hung

over a fire and burned with red-hot irons. In the village of Batshoff, thirty-two peasants were beaten almost to death in the presence of the district chief (Kaimakam) of Mehomia."

The Revolutionary Movement.

In the Nineteenth Century, Mr. G. F. Abbott writes on Macedonia and the revolutionary com. mittees. His article is chiefly valuable because it contains a translation of the rules and regula tions which govern these revolutionary bands. Mr. Abbott makes the most, or the worst, of the case against the Macedonians. He says:

"Macedonians as a distinct and homogeneous ethnic group do not exist. What actually exist are a Greek population in the south of the province, a Slavonic population in the north, a mixed and debatable congeries of nationalities and dialects in the middle, a few Wallachs here and there, and Mohammedans sprinkled everywhere. nological experiment conceived by demons and The whole thing strikes the traveler as an eth

carried out by maniacs-not devoid of a mad sort of humor. Add that the Slavs themselves do not always know whether they are Servians or Bulgarians, and, if the latter, whether they are Schismatic or Orthodox, or, if Schismatic, whether they wish to see the country independ. ent or part of the Bulgarian Principality, and you have a fairly accurate picture of a state of things presented by no other part of the globe of equal dimensions."

A PLAN TO PROVOKE A MASSACRE.

It is, perhaps, not to be wondered at that the revolutionary organization should be subject to splits and schisms.

"At the annual congress, held last August, the adherents of Sarafoff refused to recognize MM. Michailovski and Zontcheff as heads of the committee, and on being excluded from the sittings, proceeded to form a committee of their own.'

But although they differ on the question of annexation versus independence, they agree as to their modus operandi.

"Zontcheff and Sarafoff and their respective

adherents, however, believe that they can induce Europe to intervene by provoking a massacre, and it is not at all impossible that their calcula tions may prove correct. The Porte is incapable

of sustained and vigorous action.'

The committees raised their funds by blackmail enforced by murder, and he asserts that it was they who kidnapped the American missionary, Miss Stone.

"The Central Committee not long since issued postage stamps with the figure of Macedonia as a woman in chains and the legend Supreme Macedonia Adrianopolis Committee.' These stamps were purchased by patriots and used in addition to the ordinary stamps, the proceeds of the sale going to feed the insurrectionary movement."

What Is Needed.

The National Review for March contains a wellwritten article, signed "Diabantos," on the subject of Macedonian reform. The writer maintains that the following are the fundamental requirements of the situation:

Protection of the Christian against the Moslem, without giving the Christian majority of two to one the means of thereby obtaining the ascendency; protection of the peasantry of all races and religions against the officials, without thereby unduly weakening the executive or reducing the revenues; protection of the provincial administration against the central government, without injuring the prestige or power of the empire."

"Diabantos" quotes Sir H. D. Wolff to the effect that the only hope of Turkey lies in decentralization; and he points out that the Padishah was never so powerful as when he was the head of a feudal state. The railroad and telegraph, which put an end to the relative independence of the provinces, put an end also to their comparative prosperity. The writer urges that the present administrative division of Macedonia into three vilayets, or provinces, should be retained, as it breaks up the Bulgar majority of the population and balances the sections against the three rival races- -Serbs in Kossovo, Greeks in Monastir, and Turks in Salonika. He says that the governors of these vilayets should be subordinated to a governor-general whose appointment would be for a fixed term and should be approved by a majority of the powers.

"To sum up in a few words: Reform must be reduced to its lowest expression, to the least common multiple of the three factors-protection of the Christians, the peasantry, and the provinces and this desideratum is to be found in the Lebanon règlement of 1864."

THE FIRST CRADLE OF GREEK CIVILIZATION. T

is a striking sidelight on the near Eastern question, now at the acute phase once more, that the liberation of Crete from Ottoman misrule led directly to the discovery of an early and hitherto undreamed of civilization. This fact appears in a paper by Mr. D. G. Hogarth in Cornhill on the Cretan Exhibition at Burlington House, London. Minoan Knossos was the center of the most significant of the Hellenic myths and traditions of power, and Schliemann had endeavored to institute explorations there; but the Ottoman governors and the Moslem owners of the site interposed difficulties. After Prince George and freedom came, Mr. Arthur Evans, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, had no difficulty in buying out the Moslem owners, and in March, 1900, he put in the first spade. The result of three seasons' work has shown this hillock "to contain by far the most varied and extraordinary evidence of a dead civilization that perhaps has ever been brought to light at one spot in any part of the world."

"Not only could the Knossian builders pile story upon story of massive stonework, connected by broad and easy internal stairways, rising flight over flight, for the first time in the history of architecture, but they could drain and sanitate their constructions better than our own medieval builders.

"There are many indications here of a peaceful prosperity and a sumptuousness of civilization for which one was little prepared in wild Crete in the middle of the second millennium before the Christian era. It is most significant. that this great Palace building, with all its wealth in kind suggested by the presence of hundreds of oil and wine jars as high as a man, and with all its wealth in precious material— gold, silver, ivory, crystal-whose existence actual remains, paintings, and the many sunken treasure-chests abundantly prove, should have been wholly unfortified. Its great portals, north and south, open straight on to the surrounding country; and the town, clustering round, seems to have had no wall."

The Cretan king, it is inferred, had command, not only of his own island, but of the South Egean. Hence the luxurious peace enjoyed at Knossos, which neither Memphis, Thebes, nor Babylon could ever enjoy.

"Thanks to natural advantages of isolated position and fertility, Crete seems to have taken the lead of all its neighboring lands in the third millennium B.C., and to have kept it till the cataclysm which everywhere overwhelmed Egean civilization about the beginning of the first.

"The acme of Knossian culture seems to fall