as when a Mr. Schermerhorn offered to present $200 worth of copies of Owen's Exposition on the Hebrews to any association which would organize to help theological students. But in the main the efforts to aid the churches in this way bore fruit. If some of the methods employed have since become either obsolete or positively objectionable, we should not forget to give them credit for the valuable assistance they have rendered in the past.

In conclusion, permit me to call your attention to a few contrasts presented by the religious thinking, activity and life at the beginning and at the end of the nineteenth century. First, with regard to the temperance agitation, which increased with the passage of each decade. This was in part a reaction from social customs in which church members and ministers freely shared previous to 1800, and to some extent after that date. Spirituous liquors were common at entertainments, and even at church gatherings. It would surely occasion surprise if a prominent minister today were known to be the proprietor of a brewery, for instance. But it is only a little more than a hundred years since the Rev. Nathan Strong, pastor of the First Church in Hartford, Conn., was part owner of a distillery near his church. And his eccleciastical standing remained unaffected. The General Association of Massachusetts cast the weight of its influence against the whole traffic in intoxicants, and one result was the organization of the “Society for the Suppression of Intemperance.”

Secondly, we note a striking contrast in the parish work. Formerly the minister did about all that was done; now laymen are to be found in every place and office, except the pulpit, —and they sometimes invade even that. From being silent and inert, except in private theological discussion, they have become vocal and active. This change was partly due to the influence of Methodism, but largely also to the reflex influence of the "new awakening," which brought in its train so many. new institutions, the prayer-meeting, the Sunday school, and the whole circle of parish societies.

In the third place, the changed theology of our time has produced a set of institutions, or allowed them to develop, which would have been inconceivable at the earlier period. Bear in mind, for instance, the older teaching regarding the iniquity of all "unregenerate doings," the condemnation of the "use of means," and the uselessness of any and every endeavor on man's part to secure salvation. Then contrast with that our Societies of Christian Endeavor, and of Junior Endeavor, with the encouragements they hold out to the young to participate in religious exercises, in the hope of leading them along the way of righteousness and Christian character-building, and ultimately of aiding in their conversion. What do you think would be Dr. Hopkins's judgment upon these "unregenerate doings?" Clearly, Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture has intervened between these periods, if nothing more has happened.

Finally, the contrast just noticed suggests another, whereunto it is well that our churches should take heed. New England Christianity a century ago was of a somewhat theoretical or intellectual type, whereas now it is practical and often unintellectual, not to say ignorant. Whatever we may think of the exact content of that faith which our fathers held, there is no doubt that they held it intelligently. I mean they knew what they believed and why they believed it. Every farmer and every housewife was a theologian. There was a precision in the religious thinking of the plain people, which, with all our boasted diffusion of popular knowledge, we must confess has been lost. We know more things, of course, but we do not know some of them so well. This is not the place to enter upon a discussion of reasons for this change. Let it suffice merely to point out the fact. While I would not be misunderstood as pleading for a return to the dogmatic faith of colonial New England, I think we may properly expect and demand of our people somewhat clearer notions of religious belief than they commonly possess in this easy-going age of ours. But this expectation can be realized only when our people again find a clear notion of religious faith presented to them by their chosen spiritual teachers, as they found it at the dawn of the nineteenth century.

THE OPENING OF THE BIBLE1

PROF. HENRY P. SMITH, AMHERST.

What changes have taken place in the church's apprehension of the Bible in the last hundred years? To answer this question is the purpose of my address.

The apprehension of the Bible is closely connected with the apprehension of Christianity. A hundred years ago Christianity was conceived of as a system of doctrines. No doubt it would be easy to put this too strongly. The Protestant churches have always been more or less conscious that religion is a matter of the heart rather than the head. The principal acts of saving faith (says the Westminster Confession) "are accepting, receiving and resting upon Christ alone for justification, sanctification and eternal life by virtue of the covenant of grace."

But while this view of faith was at the basis of church life a hundred years ago there can be no doubt that the intellectual acceptance of a doctrinal system was thought to go along with the faith, or to be a part of it. Christianity was called a system of revealed truth. The controversies of the eighteenth century tended to make prominent this intellectual view of religion.

1 See page 15.

The deists made the same identification of Christianity and theology. Admitting many of the truths affirmed by Christians, they tried to show that for these truths a revelation was not necessary; denying some of the things affirmed by Christians, they of course denied that these could be the content of a revelation. The defense of Christianity was made at the points at which the attack was directed. Hence the earnestness of the eighteenth century in formulating the evidences of Christianity. The treatises published under this title endeavored to show that all parts of the received theology were true and that they can be known only by supernatural revelation.

This shows the place given the Bible in the theory of the church or of her authorized spokesman, the theologians. In this theory, the Bible is a compendium of teaching concerning the being and nature of God, concerning man and his history, concerning the divine plan for the punishment of the race and the redemption of the elect. The theory is perhaps nowhere more distinctly stated than by Dr. Samuel Hopkins, at the opening of his lectures on theology, in a passage that I will quote:

"It is evident from reason, fact and experience, that mankind stand in need of a revelation from God in order to know what God is, what is their own true state and moral character, whether He be reconcilable to them who have rebelled against Him, and, if He be, what is the true method He has appointed in which He will be reconciled; and what man must be and do in order to find acceptance in His sight, wherein true happiness consists, whether there be another state, what are the favors that He will grant in a future state to those who serve and please Him in this life, what are His grand designs in creating and governing the world, etc. The ignorance and uncertainty, with respect to these most important points, in which all men have been and still are who have enjoyed no such revelation, is a constant striking evidence of this."

This quotation shows with perfect clearness the view I am describing. The ignorance and uncertainty of man makes the need of a revelation. The revelation is intended to give knowledge and certainty. No doubt the knowledge serves a practical end; man needs to know God in order to serve Him, to be informed that he can be reconciled to God in order that he may avail himself of the privilege. But when all is said, it remains true that the revelation is to meet and overcome the ignorance of

man.

The need being thus shown, the author goes on to show that the needed revelation is contained in the Bible. "For while all other pretended revelations from God (he says) which have been or now are found among men are without all proper evidence of their being such, and carry evident marks of imposture which has been abundantly demonstrated by those who have examined them, this has stood the test of the severest scrutiny both of its friends and its enemies."

This quotation I suppose to represent the view commonly held a hundred years ago in all our churches. The view is logical and self-consis

tent. It finds man in need of knowledge, it finds the knowledge supplied by the Bible and by the Bible alone. All other alleged revelations are impostures, so that the Bible can be sharply distinguished from them. If we ask for the proofs which established the unique character of this book we shall find them adduced in abundance, miracles, fulfilled prophecy, the nature of the truths declared, the unity and harmony of the different parts of the revelation, the testimony of the Jewish and Christian churches. This imposing array of proofs was supposed to establish the position of the Bible as an instrument perfect and equally valuable in every part for giving an unquestionable judgment on all kinds of truth" (Ladd). If the theologians who held this view and defended it with such ingenuity were confronted by the spectacle of men who did not or could not accept their conclusion, they had a ready explanation in the innate depravity of human nature, a depravity which must blind the minds of some to a perception of the truth.

It is easy for us to see that the view I have been describing was received by tradition. It is, in fact, the view of the church of the Middle Ages, save only that it substitutes the Bible for the church as the source of doctrine. It strikes us with something like wonder to discover that no one of the New England theologians of the eighteenth century felt an impulse to go behind tradition. We should expect these scholars to begin their studies by an unbiassed inquiry into the nature of those Scriptures upon whose assertions they intended to build so much. But we search their works in vain for such an inquiry. It would be possible for us to plead in their defense that, as dogmatic theologians, they had a right to assume the results of Biblical science wrought out by men who were specialists in that department. But where are these specialists? We do not find them. So far as appears, the theologians were content with the exegesis formulated a hundred years earlier; while the questions which we treat under the head of Biblical Introduction simply had no existence for them. This is the point I am making-the science of a century ago was dogmatic. The mind of the church was dominated by a theological system. In this system the Bible was treated as a supernatural revelation of certain truths.

The nineteenth century made immense advance in all lines of investigation, and if I were to characterize the work done during the century I should say first, that it was critical, and secondly, that it was comparative. The students to whom the nineteenth century owed its progress were first of all critical-they resolutely set themselves to re-examine the foundations of knowledge; they would take nothing for granted. And then these students were comparative in their method - they discovered how to make one department of knowledge throw light on another. In both ways they have influenced our conception of the Bible. For the Bible as an object of study has been subjected to the same methods which have been applied to other objects of study.

The nineteenth century was critical and it was comparative. Of

course I do not mean that either tendency is confined to a particular century. Our divisions of time are arbitrary. The tendencies I have in mind were already active before the year 1800 and they continue powerful now that we have passed into the twentieth century. But the tendencies which only began to assert themselves in the eighteenth century may be said to have dominated the nineteenth. It was in 1781 that Kant published the "Critique of the Pure Reason." This work marks an epoch in human thought, because it attempted just what I have in mind-it attempted to re-examine the foundations of our knowledge in the powers of the human mind. Of the influence of this work in the century that followed its publication I need not speak. Another example of the critical tendency is seen in Niebuhr's "History of Rome" (1812). The epoch-making importance of this book was due to its criticism of the sources. It was another case in which the foundations of knowledge were subjected to a fresh examination in order to discover their real nature and their real strength. Wolf's Prolegomena, which applied the critical method to the most famous book of classic literature, are a third example of the same tendency (1795). All these books show the determination to go back to the sources of our knowledge, to build on no foundations whose nature and whose strength had not been thoroughly tested.

In Bible study this determination made itself felt (as we should expect) and the century was a century of Biblical criticism. In the first place may be mentioned the vast work which has been done in the last hundred years in the settlement of the Biblical text. It has long been known that the conditions of transmission of ancient documents were such as to require special care to recover the original wording out of the mass of varying copies that may have come down to us. That this was true of the Bible-at least of the New Testament - was realized before the commencement of the nineteenth century. But a certain hesitation in acting according to this knowledge is visible in earlier times. The great polyglot of Walton, which contained a critical apparatus, was sharply attacked by John Owen, the Puritan theologian, because it unsettled men's confidence in the Word of God. The great divine saw, more clearly than some of his successors, that the dogmatic system requires a certified text if it is to build upon isolated affirmations of Scripture. This hesitation has discovered itself often when men endeavored to treat the text of Scripture like the text of other ancient documents. But the last hundred years have overcome the reluctance. Men have now made a thorough collation of the New Testament manuscripts in our possession; they have patiently worked out the rules by which the original reading may be determined, and they have substituted a really critical text for the one which had by accident been adopted as authoritative in the church. Whatever new developments this science may have in store for us, one period of its successful prosecution is marked by the century just closed. We cannot say as much for