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agandism she must ceaselessly endeavor to create in all the lands of the world indigenous native churches; for it will be through the native churches, taken from among the peoples of the various lands, that Christianity will most readily find the point of contact, the bond of sympathy, and will best illustrate the superiority of Christ's personality and teaching. While at the beginning the reproach of foreignism may be brought against the missionary camp, after a native Church has been formed and begins in its own movement to add to or subtract from the missionary's statement of Christianity there will be evolved in each land a native Christian Church which, in sympathy with its surroundings and in touch with those mysterious but very real inward tendencies that differentiate. each race from the other, will produce a type of Christianity which will best commend the Gospel to the nation at large; there will be seen a world-wide Christianity with unity in essentials and widest variations in all else.

And, (3) there should be hung up over the portals of every missionary society, "Wanted, men and women of largest caliber and warm hearts, with passionate love for Jesus Christ, and with great hospitality of mind and heart for the opinions and beliefs of those whose training differ by a world's diameter-men and women who can be trusted to have an insistent fidelity in essentials, emphasizing conduct, breathing the spirit of largest love, and at leisure from themselves in all nonessentials." With such men and women leading the infant churches in all the lands of the earth Christianity could not but make large and direct gains, and still more largely influence the nations of the world, indirectly, by leavening their religious thought. In a measure all three of these propositions are already working facts, and the future is rosy with hope. All the thinking and living of this world is being swept up into the teaching and life of Jesus.

Mothave

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

PROFESSOR JOHN TYNDALL, in his essay on "The Scientific Use of the Imagination," expressed his admiration for the courage of the clergy because they show a manful willingness to engage in open contest with fair weapons over the conclusions and theories of science. Speaking as a scientist he says:

The clergy of England have nerve enough to listen to the strongest views which anyone amongst us would care to utter; and they invite, if they do not challenge, men of the most decided opinions to state and stand by those opinions in open court. No theory upsets them. Let the most destructive hypothesis be stated only in the language current among gentlemen, and they look it in the face. They forego alike the thunders of heaven and the terrors of the other place, smiting the theory, if they do not like it, simply with honest secular strength. In fact, the greatest cowards of the present day are not to be found among the clergy, but within the pale of science itself.

WHATEVER theories men may formulate of the nature, mode, and extent of inspiration, the fact will remain manifest, and we may say self-demonstrated, that the Bible is a divinely and supernaturally inspired book. It is simply impossible that its authority should ever be set aside, because its contents are of such quality as to force upon men the conviction of its divineness. The sinful and disobedient feel the sword of its truth, piercing even to the dividing of the joints and the marrow; and the upright and pure feel that it satisfies the highest ideals conceivable by the best man at his best. This heart-searching quality, this ethical pungency, and this unequaled spiritual loftiness prove it divine. An authority not to be contemned or resisted resides in this manifest divineness of the Holy Scriptures. The Reformers held that impregnable position, and in agreement with this the Westminster divines wisely defined inspiration as that quality of Holy Scripture which proves it to be the word of God.

THE following words from so eminent and competent a scholar as Sir Monier-Williams are timely, weighty, and authoritative:

Only one name is given among men whereby we may be saved. No other name, no other Saviour, more suited to India, to Persia, to China, to Arabia, is ever mentioned-is ever hinted at. "What," says the enthusiastic student of the science of religion, "do you seriously mean to sweep away as so much worthless waste paper all these thirty stately volumes of sacred books of the East just published by the University of Oxford? No, not at all; nothing of the kind. On the contrary, we welcome these books. We ask every missionary to study their contents and thankfully lay hold of whatsoever things are true and of good report in them. But we warn him that there can be no greater mistake than to force these non-Christian Bibles into conformity with some scientific theory of development and then point to the Christian's Holy Bible as the crowning product of religious evolution. So far from this, these non-Christian Bibles are all developments in the wrong direction. They all begin with some flashes of true light and end in utter darkness. Pile them, if you will, on the left side of your study table, but place your own Holy Bible on the right side—all by itself, all alone, and with a wide gap between.

LIBERAL CHRISTIANITY.

Few things are more misleading and injurious than misnomers, which are a source of endless mental confusion and moral depravation. Liberal Christianity is such a misnomer-frequently a mere alias to conceal the identity of infidelity and rationalism. Much so-called Free Thinking reminds Tennyson's readers of his expressive line:

Freedom free to slay itself, and dying while they shout her name.

The liberality of liberal Christianity consists chiefly in giving clean away for nothing much, and sometimes all, that is really Christian. The teaching of its various apostles varies in form, but is uniform in its direction and drift as well as in its essentially skeptical quality. The Bible is denied to be exceptionally inspired. The miraculous is ruled out as forbidden on grounds metaphysical, scientific, and, some say, even on moral grounds, being therefore, for manifold reasons, too absurd to be entertained for one moment by enlightened minds. Judgment is pronounced a priori against the possibility of supernatural revelation or a superhuman Christ; and it is declared, in defiance or disregard of all evidence, that no amount of proof can make such things credible. Undesired evidence is shut out with much the same spirit as controlled the juror who in the middle of a case asked the court to excuse him from further listening, inasmuch as he had already made up his mind and wished to protect it from being influenced by subsequent testimony. No evidence of divine communications, interventions, or mani

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festations is regarded as having any weight. No explanation of the existence of anything is found except by going back along the order of nature, as through a closed and buried conduit, to one inconceivably remote hypothetical fountain-head. Nothing has come from the hand of Deity, unless, perchance, the primal germ or germs hid in the original fire-mist from which the universe is imagined to have developed. Since that beginning all on earth is unbroken and unaided natural evolution; and if in heaven or elsewhere there be any God he is retired, reticent, unknown, and unknowable. Monad, mollusk, mammal, man, by purely natural derivation, is reported to be the history of ascending vital order. Adam is declared to be an impossibility. The Bible account of the fall of man is absolutely false; it cannot be even allegorically true, for man's lowest condition was his primitive state. Original righteousness was rudimentary and infinitesimal. The human race began as beastly savages, scarcely distinguishable from brutes. Revelation is impossible. No message comes from above. voice of the Lord was never heard among the trees of any garden. No law was given to Moses on the quaking mount. No prophet was ever commissioned to announce, "Thus saith the Lord." Heaven never "peeps through the curtain of the dark" to say anything articulate or audible, either to warn the sinner or to encourage the saint. No divine Son of God has come to earth to take upon himself our nature. Bethlehem shepherds never saw and heard a company of angels overhead. John baptizing at the fords of the Jordan saw no dove descend upon a holy head. No voice from the unseen was heard on any mount of transfiguration, nor did Moses and Elias show themselves. No angel ever sat in an abandoned tomb and said, "He is not here, he is risen." All that man knows is what he has discovered solely by his own efforts. All that he has become is by a merely natural unfolding of innate, inherited potentialities. Positive authentic knowledge of God is nowhere to be found. The original germ which possibly came from his hand knew him not, for it did not know how to know anything; and since then he has not been seen or heard of, so that the atheist knows as much about him as anybody does. The theories favored, or at least tolerated, by many "liberal Christian" teachers incline more and more to treat all supernatural history as legendary. And if at present they stop somewhere 19-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XV.

short of such sweeping, blunt, and brutal denials of the supernatural as we have above put into words, nevertheless the drift is unmistakably toward comprehensive and remorseless negation. Doctrines not essentially unlike those which we have quoted plow their way like glaciers into the Happy Valley of our Christian faith, chilling and clay-coloring the streams which make it glad, freezing and crushing all life and beauty which they touch, and threatening not to leave one bluebell, spear of wheat, or blade of grass, but to render that sweet, peaceful, and fruitful vale forever uninhabitable for the human soul.

The most deadly assaults upon evangelical Christianity are those made with studious deliberation, scientific coolness, and the calm dignity of learned self-assurance. It is not the noisy, crackling tail-end of the infidel crotalus, shaking its rattles, stirring the gravel, raising the dust, and attracting casual public attention, that does the damage; rather it is the quiet scholarly end, where the brain is and the fangs are, secreting venom and injecting a fatal poison into the human circulation; not the glib-tongued vociferation of a blatant blasphemer, filling his pockets by making gaping groundlings laugh with his coarse and lying caricature of Christian doctrine, but grave, dignified, and erudite rationalists with their subtle and mischievous theories and naturalistic interpretations undermining the foundations of our religion.

One of the weapons of the rationalism with which liberal Christianity consorts is a destructive biblical criticism. So far as rationalizing critics are intelligent and use the resources and methods of scholarship, they can be suitably and adequately dealt with and defeated only by superior or at least equal information and acumen. The battle must, in the nature of the case, be fought in the direction and on the ground whence the assault is made. This can be done only by faithful and trusty as well as thoroughly trained and practiced Christian scholars, studying the Bible along precisely the same lines as the hostile critics pursue, asking the same questions, weighing the same materials, traversing the same fields, but repelling the assault by disproving the conclusions reached and affirmed by such critics, and showing that the materials used to discredit the Bible do rather confirm and strengthen it. The situation does not preclude but imperatively enjoins upon Christian scholars the most exhaustive study of all questions under discussion touching

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