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Hebrew modes of thought and diction. Anthropomorphic representations, poetical extravagances, and popular though unscientific allusions, embarrass the Bible student no longer. Another stage follows. From the depths of textual analysis the vapours of Higher Criticism ascend. It may turn out a day of vapoury confusion; and yet dry facts are appearing, diluted fancies receding, truthful methods of studying the Bible germinating, and a day of luminaries shedding sunlight on many Biblical questions can be looked forward to. Whether this light will prove the Old Testament to be the classic literature of a uniquely religious people, and the New Testament the documentary heritage of incipient Christianity-no more, no less-remains for critical analysis to elucidate. We dare not frustrate the results of earnest and honest investigation. We ought to be willing at any time to substitute The Bible for Our Bible. Our Bible must contain the Bible. Adherence to the formal principle must lead thoughtful men to make their conception of Scripture wide enough for anything and everything the Bible actually contains.

The tenet of Ernesti, that the exegesis of sacred Scripture must be subjected to the same historical and grammatical rules as other literature, has been universally accepted; but it does not follow that the Higher Critics have established so scientific a rule for their procedure. Higher Criticism as yet is largely subjective, and lacks a defined basis. But will its positive results not prove fatal to the principle under discussion? By no means. All it can do, as has ever been the case, is to make it difficult to believe in the Holy Scriptures without believing in the Holy Spirit. A comparison with the religious literature of other ancient nations will prove the Godled Hebrew race unique. As men go to Greece for art, and Rome for law, they will keep on looking toward Judæa's hills for the sunrise of a pure religion.

Above all, the Bible will ever be regarded as essential to Christianity, from the very fact that it culminates in the unique historical figure of the Christ. Whatever demands for modification, therefore, may beset the tenet that the Bible is the seat of authority in matters of Christian faith and practice, we are thankful that it points out the necessity of a Biblico-circumferencial view of Scripture, and a Christo-centric rest of faith.

PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY. BY REV. DWIGHT M. PRATT (The Homiletic Review).— The ministry is the science of the human soul. It studies the soul as the physician studies the body, in order that by a knowledge of its conditions and needs it may work out its redemption. We may call it pastoral psychology, as it includes the spiritual as well as the mental; it embraces pneumatology, or the scientific knowledge of the human spirit. 1. This knowledge is acquired through personal contact with souls. The heart-beat of humanity, the spiritual hunger of the masses, the sorrows and woes of the weary and oppressed, are not felt on the pages of literature, but in the common walks of life. The soul is a tremendous reality. To know the inner life of an ardent, tempted, struggling, perplexed, aspiring human spirit is not an easy achievement. 2. It is a minister's vocation to gain access to this hidden inner life. Until he does his preaching will be superficial and powerless, and his view of life not only imperfect, but in a large measure false. 3. In order to give spiritual help to those in soul trouble, the pastor must (1) make an accurate discernment or estimate of their psychological conditions, temperament, disposition, mental peculiarities. Skill in reading men is one of the prominent characteristics of eminent and successful evangelists. To know mental characteristics is to understand in a great measure diversities of belief. (2) The pastor must have an intelligent recognition of education and environment. Morals and beliefs are inherited or incorporated by a silent process

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of absorption. A man cannot be understood apart from his environment. intellectual standards, the religious beliefs of the family circle and of the surrounding community have entered into his entire make-up. It requires the capacity to enter intelligently, sympathetically, lovingly, tenderly into all the complex intellectual and moral conditions of communities, as well as of individuals, in order both to know the individual through a knowledge of the community, and to save the community through the redemption of the individual. (3) Pastoral psychology requires a profound knowledge of moral differences and states in men. That which exalts the soul to its unrivalled eminence in the universe of created things is its moral character. The intellectual cannot be considered apart from the moral. Back of all reasoning and thought and argument, back of all shades of doubt or belief, there is down deep in every human soul the secret source of all its moral character. The secret choices and volitions of the heart are the mainspring of life, and the pastor who can find his way into this inner sanctuary, whether it be defiled or pure, is certain to win men. (4) There is a still higher department of psychology. It is that of the soul in its regenerate experiences and relations to God. Here the pastor is expected to possess, according to capacity therefor, the very knowledge that enabled Jesus to so accurately read men. Christ knew men as a man. The accuracy and limitless reach of His knowledge was due to His holiness. The eye of holiness can penetrate the deepest recesses of the human heart. Christlikeness is the highway to spiritual knowledge. One's spiritual vision is clarified, and becomes intense in proportion as his soul is enlightened and sanctified. In the deepest and truest sense we do not know man primarily through a study of man, but through acquaintance with God, in whose image he was made. The knowledge of both God and man comes through the twofold personality of Jesus.

Spirituality conducts one to the very highest grade or department of psychological science. The psychology of mature Christian life is the profoundest study of the human soul. It lets one into the very secret of man's most intimate relationships with God. It reveals to him the nature of God, the philosophy of the atonement, the law and process of spiritual redemption and growth, and the significance and spirit, the aim and trend of the historic revelation. And spirituality is the result of an intimate and experimental acquaintance with the redeeming love of God in Christ. The key to all success, personal growth, knowledge of men, deep insight into truth, spiritual power, skill in winning souls, and psychological acquaintance with the very nature of God, is the redeeming love of Christ, possessing, transforming, energizing, enlightening, and sanctifying both the preacher and the pastor.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INDIVIDUAL SOCIAL GROWTH. BY PROF. CHARLES M. Moss (The Andover Review).—The following are crucial points in sociological phenomena. What is the basal fact entering into the problem of the mutual relation between an individual and the society into which he is born? What must the education of that factor be, if it shall be found to need instruction? What does the man bring to society, and what does society say he shall do with it? Whether primitive society was savage, and whether primitive man was rude, in no wise answers the question of their mutual relation. In any case, the single man stood in some tolerably definite connection with others like himself, and the problem confronting us is to determine the significance of this connection. A study of origins is fallible in proportion to the discrepancy between things as they are and things as we conceive them to have been in some ancient status, especially when we have some preconceived theory to uphold. A study of social phenomena which isolates a single man from the community at large, must be mixed with error. Conversely, any doctrine of the social man which

views him solely as a component part of a great whole will have failed to emphasize some important elements in the equation which seeks solution. A man is a man, and he is a member of a community; and, as being both, the true ground of individual development must be sought in the part the individual and society take in the process of his growth. Each must add something to the other-the man to the social momentum, and society to his natural endowments. And each must in some measure submit to a divesting of prerogative-the man of his spontaneous individuality, and society of its spirit at the time he enters upon his estate. The individual yields some of his natural rights readily, society yields slowly. In the individual, therefore, we can discover the most manifest exhibition of society's action and effect.

Every individual is ushered into the midst of a social sphere whose laws have been cast in the mould of community-needs as these needs arose, enlarged, and asserted themselves under the stimulus of the underlying spirit of men. A constant effort is necessary to subjugate one's self to a form and line of activity at wide variance from his natural dispositions. Society trains, disciplines, rewards, or punishes him at every corner, till he falls into ready obedience to its behests, and squares his personal notions to its larger intuitions. The aim pursued is the education of the individual will into harmony with the social will. The reaction of society infinitely surpasses the feeble movement of a single will; society restrains it from the use of all its expulsive propensities, and divinely guides it to its best estate. A self-will comes into contact with a community-will crystallized in the myriad devices of civilization or uncivilization. Up through this superimposed mass of form and ceremony, of permission or prohibition, each soul has to thrust itself as a plant does through the mould. It is elbowed here, applauded there, in a compulsory attempt to suit itself to the soil in which it, and all others like it, has to grow. Its spontaneity is somewhat curbed, and in return it fractures in some degree the frame built for it; but the man meanwhile is becoming a man and a social unit by this process of repressing self and acclimating it to the atmosphere of organized life. We do not know that society always does the best thing for the man. It is patent that no man does the best thing for it. We are concerned to know that the united will of society, expressed in its permissions and compulsions, works in the main beneficently, though more or less mechanically, for the welfare of men, and that they come nearer, age by age, to a generous acquiescence in the bettering state society opens to them at their introduction into it.

Each and every step of the child, in moving towards wise self-direction, is guarded, hedged about, restricted, or furthered, as appears advantageous to society through him. Heredity can never do more than prepare a man for a general sympathy with the social framework. School is the potent instrument of society for preparing suitable members for itself, and there the boy's rebellions against discipline and the rights of others are cultivated out of him in the schoolroom, and knocked out of him in the playground. The practical aim is not so much to reduce him to subjection to any one or anything, as to bring him into symmetry with the needs of a society whose law is that of self-preservation. To the last atom of man's life beneficent designs are formed for him, and his regeneration from himself into an ideal manhood is never lost sight of.

The individual will, then, is in conflict with the will of a rather definite portion of humanity, namely, that into which the man is born, or in which he remains. By humanity we mean that quiet, consistent operation of a multitude of human spirits in a substantial unity, this unity representing the best ideal of the race at the time. The personal will on coming into action is inevitably brought into collision

with the general sentiment. The individual demands licence; society offers freedom under law. He demands the freedom of the selfish, the untutored, the crushed, or the vicious. Society erects against this belligerency a network of institutions educative, corrective, elevating, and depressing, to suit the material it has to deal with. In return it merely asks the new-comer upon the stage of life to come to terms with itself by using the means already provided therefor.

Life presents its gifts to a man accompanied by a permission and an obligation. He is permitted to conform to his environment because the reaction redounds to his development. He is obliged to do so, because refusal reacts with killing recoil of the very elements of life that otherwise are constructive for him. The recoil may be either that lessened capacity follows his opposition, or that life renders him a less generous support, or that it enters into judgment with him. In the normal process both sides of the equation are wrought out in harmonious adjustment; in the abnormal, the punitive, or at least mandatory, side is prominent. The internal freedom of caprice, the unrestrained and undeveloped individuality, is not only harmful in itself, but also to the static condition in which it plies its activity. What the issue of a vagrant will upon its possessor is any one can see by looking about him.

On the other hand, society cannot escape its duties in the man's behalf. As made up of such units as he is, it must have a care for his welfare. As the conservator of current forms and systems, it is bound to apply itself to his instruction in them. As the repository of the human spirit from all ages, and working toward the final fulfilment of the destiny of the whole race, it is under the gravest obligations to see to it that every unit in its organization is induced to help on the general movement. But we cannot acquit society of imperfection and error in dealing with its ever new additions. The whole race lies under the stress and discouragement of thwarted, misapplied, and abortive efforts of society in its behalf.

How far has society a right to interfere with the rights of the individual? What are his rights? Special and general features of restriction are confounded by over-emphasizing first one and then the other factor in the question. Men are apt to view society as a great whole, and then affirm that it is overbearing in its treatment of a single individual. But if it could be borne in mind that he has rights in the main, only because he has membership in society, half the difficulty would vanish. Society recognizes a permissive right in the individual to do some things, and it recognizes also an imperative" thou shalt" do in others. This is the positive side of life, but it is only half of the matter. The other half is the "thou shalt not." This admits of no permission. Nothing but obligation enters here. The most cursory inspection of social phenomena shows that society comes to its estate as much by its negative demands as by its positive, and even more. All law relating to the moral idea has a punitive shadow following it. If society has any right at all, it is to say what shall be done.

THE OFFICES OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. BY REV. E. H. JOHNSON, Chester, Pa. (The Bibliotheca Sacra).-The Church gives herself to only one great subject of theological interest at once, and takes centuries instead of years to arrive at a lasting decision. The doctrine of the Trinity waited four hundred years for definition; the relations of the Divine to the human in Christ were worked out in the seventh century. The Western Church was five hundred years getting at the fact that men are born depraved, and eleven hundred years giving shape to the doctrine of the Atonement. John Wesley first made it understood that a new begetting by the Holy

Spirit and a definite progress in the new life, together with the Spirit's witness to his own work, are within reach at once. Up to Wesley's time emphasis had been laid upon what the Holy Spirit does for the Church, that He gives authority to her teachings and efficacy to her sacraments; Wesley preached the work of the Spirit in the individual. The sense of guilt for past sins was fully satisfied in Luther's doctrine of justification by faith. The spectacle of sin yet reigning in the Church found its corrective in Wesley's teaching concerning the offices of the Holy Spirit. Justification invited an antinomian perversion, and immediate regeneration led to unwarrantable opinions about the nature of the change wrought, and to fanatical misunderstanding of the Spirit's attestation to His own work. We need more fully to apprehend, both in thought and in experience, the relations of the work of Christ to that of the Holy Spirit.

The dealings of God with men, as regards the work of the Holy Spirit, fall under the two dispensations of the Letter and of the Spirit. Why could not the Holy Spirit come until Christ had gone? Christ could not send the Spirit so long as He was in the position of a servant. All authority was given Him in heaven and in earth only after the resurrection, an event which was completed in the ascension (John vii. 39). It is not denied that the Holy Spirit was already at work in the world. But the distinctive office of the Spirit under this dispensation is to testify of Christ (John xv. 26), but that testimony could not be given until the work to be attested was complete. The one all inclusive office of the Holy Spirit is, to minister to the truth. The scope of the ministration will depend upon the nature of the truth to be administered. Under the old dispensation the truth was embodied largely in symbols. An immediate result was restriction of the truth to those who had a symbolical fitness to make use of the symbols; and this work of the Spirit was limited to the Israelite nation. The ceremonies of a ritual religion are apt to hide what they are intended to show, and as probably few of those who strictly kept the Levitical law looked through its emblems to realities, the work of the Spirit could not but be correspondently restricted. Priests incline to lay so exclusive a stress upon the correct performance of functions as eventually to release thought itself from any part in worship. The truth thus passes wholly out of sight, and the Holy Spirit is banished from the temple. The priestly function is conservative, the prophetic is progressive. The priest must adhere to his formulas, the prophet challenges attention to a new word from God. The prophet was, unavoidably, the antithesis of the priest. So far as the prophet's office extended, so far the work of the Holy Spirit might extend. Whether embodied in symbols or declared in words, all the ancient worthies had enough truth in possession to serve as the means of their transformation by the Spirit.

Under the new dispensation the first point to be noted is, that the truth as it is in Jesus is of limitless application. All delimitations have been done away with the limiting symbols and types. That this had been accomplished by Christ was guaranteed by His resurrection, and His resurrection was guaranteed by the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. The corroboration afforded by the Holy Spirit was of the exact, and the exacting, kind which ought to have most weight, and which actually proves irresistible. The aims of the Lord were spiritual, that is, His work was in the sphere of the spirit, and the evidence that it had been brought to a successful close should be of the same kind. No appeal to the senses so fitly or so fully proved the resurrection and divinity of our Lord as does the spiritual fruitage of the Holy Spirit's work. Then, further, the purpose of our Lord's mission needed to be made plain by the Spirit. The Holy Spirit was to make the Master's own teaching available; He

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