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RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE.

The Christian View of a Time of Change. By Rev. A. J. LYMAN, D.D. Pp. 16. Printed at Amherst, Mass. Pamphlet. Paper cover.

Dr. Lyman is a preacher much in demand for sermons and lectures at colleges, universities, and theological schools, especially in New England. This is the baccalaureate sermon delivered last June at Amherst College, which was then without a president. The text is 2 Cor. 3. 11: "For if that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious." We transcribe here the introduction: "The second letter of St. Paul to the church at Corinth seems to have been written hurriedly from Macedonia, about A. D. 58, when the apostle had reached the age, perhaps, of fifty-five years. These two letters to Corinth are the saddest letters in the New Testament, shadowed with that peculiar and noble sadness which ensues where a brave man and leader becomes aware of dishonor, of defection, and even treachery among his followers. Bad news had come from Corinth. The little church there, hardly yet emerged from the turbid surrounding Corinthian tide, had become torn by dissension, and, worse still, invaded by flagrant immorality, which had even been tolerated and condoned. A scurrilous attack had been made upon the authority of St. Paul himself. All this cut the absent leader to the heart, and he writes in a tone of amazed but utterly chivalrous expostulation. Read the entire letter through rapidly from beginning to end, which is the only way to feel the life in anything Paul ever wrote, and one sees how the brave heart bleeds. Into the midst of this troubled, personal warp of the letter, however, there is shot another thread, like gold into gray-a strain of triumphant religious faith, regal with the full Pauline vigor and fire of conception and statement, and voicing at the highest level the victorious confidence of his inspired intelligence. The entire context exhibits this latter strain, every phrase a flash, the whole paragraph alive with spiritual valor and swung aloft into the firmament of faith, like the sword handle of some Orion, sparkling with stars. Among these gems is the text, If that which is done away was glorious, much more that which remaineth is glorious.' St. Paul forgets his own worries at Corinth; he remembers only the broad kingdom of God, the glory of its antecedents, the secret of its continuing power, the law of its progress, the certainty of its ultimate victory. The peculiar feature in this attitude of mind is that it unites what we should call the conservative and the liberal tones. Our popular habit of thought, as you know, is accustomed to divide them. We are nothing if not extremists in one direction or the other. Our religious discussions, whose too frequent partisan clamor might bet

ter befit a wrangle of politicians than a conference of theologians, have forced these two sentiments, the conservative and the liberal, into a false antagonism. Loyalty to the past has been treated as alien to the progressive modern temper. And thus men who are really brethren have allowed themselves to be driven into hostile camps. Our relish for onesided and half views of things recalls the satire of Aristophanes in Plato's 'Symposium' about the gods splitting men in half after they had made them. Say a generous word for an old creed, and you are labeled 'conservative.' Say an equally generous word for the new criticism, and you are labeled 'liberal,' and God only knows what would happen if both labels were found on the same coat. In rebuke to this onesidedness St. Paul's view is as broadly intellectual as it is nobly spiritual. Because he is an apostle of the new economy he does not therefore regard the old with any 'contempt, dispraise, or blame,' to use Milton's phrase. He perceives the dignity and value of the past, while at the same instant he is alive to the fresh moving of the winds of God, and is ready for providential readjustments. The old was 'glorious.' With what noble eagerness the man must have written the word. The old economy was voiced in holy oracles. Through it the prophets had spoken and psalmists sung. At its summit Sinai blazed and the Ten Commandments enunciated the majesty of moral law. It had been the mother of a majestic and fervid patriotism. It was forever eloquent with the sentiment of duty and the vision of God. Even the ancient forms which had clothed it were glorious, because suited to their day, and the principle of suiting form to environment survived still in other forms equally suited to different environment. More than this, the very soul of the past lived on in the new economy. Christianity had not so much supplanted Judaism as supplemented it and fulfilled it. St. Paul is not a critic observing a transition so much as he is a prophet announcing an evolution. He would have felt little sympathy with our cheap chaff about archaic and obsolete creeds and the men and methods of ancient days. To him the old was the mother of the new. The law of heredity, to use a common phrase, applied also to these vaster processes of the divine kingdom. The God of the past in its form was the God of the present in its form, and the mind of the apostle, alive to its continued divine rhythm in the stream of things, flames up in loyalty and joy. The past had been glorious; much more the present and the future. Here, then, is the principle of the rational Christian optimism in times of agitation and change, of which I beg to speak one simple word to-day. This Christian optimism in tumultuous times is distinctly and specifically nonpartisan. It possesses two chief characteristics: First, it honors the past, and, secondly, at the same time it believes in development, and therefore it glories alike in the continuity of substance and in the change of form. Things are getting better, so it believes, because, to start with, there was more good than evil, and the ratio of preponderance of good over evil is all the while increasing. It believes that God is ever forcing the

fighting with a swifter stroke. In its judgment the past and the future are all of a piece. In its broad vision reason and faith coalesce. The 'law of evolution' and the 'march of the divine providence' are two ways of expressing the same fact. This is the logic of the message of the text." Dr. Lyman makes three practical applications of his text: First, to the proper estimate of present civil conditions in this country. Second, to the changed point of view, both in St. Paul's time and in ours, regarding the Holy Scriptures. Third, to the change of view, both in St. Paul's day and in ours, regarding the Church in its relation to current social conditions. His second division runs as follows: "St. Paul's reverence for the sacred oracles of the Jews is manifest. He is continually quoting those oracles. They furnish the staple of much of his preaching. And yet we do not need to assume his authorship, direct or indirect, of the book of Hebrews in order to prove that he clearly recognizes and daringly adopts a new point of view concerning the sacred writings-a more spiritual method of interpreting them. Paul also was a higher critic in the true sense; that is, his criticism was spiritual insight and served to set the old writing on a higher plane than ever of spiritual meaning and divine authority. But that is not all. Now comes in the special and superb note. St. Paul does not on any account repudiate the older way of regarding the Scriptures. The older Jewish sentiment concerning the holy oracles was essentially true, whatever its defects and limitations. Although the traditional interpretation was now to be superseded by the more spiritual one, the time for which had come in the providence of God, yet the old way had been 'glorious.' Reverent to the old and at the same time generous toward the new-such was the attitude of this man Paul. Now, this is the double note which it seems to me should be struck today in our present critical controversies respecting the Bible. For are we not forgetting our unities in fighting over our differences? One perceives a certain wisdom, as well as wit, in the English collier whom the bishop catechised in theology and asked him, 'Well, my man, what do you believe?' 'My lord, I believe what the Church believes.' 'Well, I know; but what does the Church believe?' 'The Church, my lord, believes what I believe.' 'Ah! but what do you and the Church both believe?' 'Well, my lord, if you must know, then the Church and I both believe the same thing.' But think of our partisan intolerance on both the conservative and liberal side, for the conservatives have no monopoly of such injustice. One hesitates to speak precisely as he feels of this partisan temper, lest the mildest language, which is also true, might seem harsh and severe. It is not that we complain of such an utterance, for example, on the conservative side as the recent declaration of the Presbyterian General Assembly, that the Holy Spirit did so control the writers of the Bible 'as to make their statements absolutely truthful—that is, free from error when interpreted in their natural and intended sense.' This position we may think untenable, but yet it is one

of orthodox dignity. We are not to depreciate it. But from this as an alleged basis the partisan conservatism of which we do complain rushes on to denounce as irreverent and heretical all contrary opinion as to the method of inspiration. This partisan conservatism scouts the notion that a development in the order of revelation may have been part of the plan of God. It would have shut the mouth of St. Paul himself in his new way of handling the Old Testament. It disparages all scholarship but its own. It distorts and perverts the language of Christian ministers. It idolizes tradition, especially that comparatively recent tradition of the seventeenth century. It introduces under the Protestant flag the similitude of ultramontane arrogance, and seeks to clothe sectarian tribunals with quasi-divine authority. Now, I insist that this partisan temper must not be credited to any one of the great Protestant communions as such. It is partisan conservatism, but something of it is widespread. It is a temper easy to slide into, as we say, thinking to do God service. In some quarters it is popular. It poses as 'a defender of the faith,' but it is as far from the spirit of Christ and from the spirit of this text as a battle-ax is from a binocular lens. Now, all this might be an ungenerous and unjust thing to say if, at the same time and in the opposite direction, we did not equally deprecate the spirit of partisan liberalism. For this is equally, if not even more, offensive, though not so widespread or sanctimonious. It is the intellectual counterfeit of true liberality. Ambitious to be 'critical,' it becomes conceited and patronizing. It is proud of its facility in picking flaws. It flaunts its pert challenge against the splendid and tremendous past. Talking loudly of the law of evolution, it dishonors the logic of that very law by disparaging its own antecedents and discrowning its own ancestors, shelving with scant courtesy the conservative veteran whose shoe's latchet it is not worthy to unloose as a 'fossil' and 'back number.' In its practical influence, also, this partisan liberalism is misleading. It unsettles men and does not seem to care. It throws its emphasis on the side of doubt, rather than of faith. It attacks dogma, but puts nothing better in its place. Its whole air is that of the critic rather than that of the believer. It lacks reverence; it lacks earnestness; it lacks religious passion, and flourishes the latest speculative hypothesis as though God had come to town but yesterday—as though the idea that Christ has been present and prevalent in his Church from the beginning were an amiable dream. Again I reassert with utmost emphasis that this is not the attitude of the really fine critical scholarship of the day, nor is it the attitude of the true leaders of progressive thought on either side the sea, but it is the attitude of a certain partisan liberalism, manifest not so much in formal statements as in chance quips and flings. But here and there it appears, and is driving some earnest souls into conservative reaction, if not into bewilderment, bitterness, and scorn. It is hurting our churches and causing heavy hearts in many homes. Now, how noble in contrast to both these phases of partisan prejudice is the large and rational Christian philosophy of St. Paul! "If that which was

done away was glorious'—as it was—'much more that which remaineth is glorious.' What was grand and true in the old view of the Scriptures will be carried on and survive in a new view of the Scriptures, which will perpetuate the essence of the old, and yet add something more and larger. Let us, as Wordsworth says, 'come forth into the light of things.' What shallow fallacy to assume that the contrast between the Puritan view of the Bible and the modern more critical view of it is simply the contrast between the false and the true, the discredited and the verified! To m mind it seems rather the contrast between the good and something still better. The path of true science curves upward by a kind of spiral-from faith through doubt, around to faith again, but on a higher and still more rational level. We are not to surrender reason, as Pascal and Newman did, nor are we to surrender faith, as Darwin did. For we are Protestants. And what is Protestantism? Protestantism is the indissoluble union of intelligence and faith, with justice to both, with detriment to neither. This genius of Protestantism is dual-it asserts both the duty of faith and the right of reason; and if any man declares that the two are inconsistent, he has not reached the living nerve of modern Christian civilization. This was the heart of the old Protestantism, and it is the heart of the new Protestantism, and will live on. The present is an hour when every man that believes anything should stand for all the faith he has, and when every other man should be glad to have him do it. It is not the time to air the doubts we have, so much as to proclaim the faith we have. The administration' of the one 'Spirit' involves 'diversities of operations,' just as all practical industries depend upon the opposition between thumb and finger pressing against each other, and so holding things; but it would be a pity if thumb and finger should consider themselves as combative rather than cooperative. We must remember where our divergencies overlap and become our fraternities. Breadth is the thing. The person on the other side of the fence is also a 'man and a brother.' He may even be a Christian! No sane man would carry this so far as to advocate a colorless neutrality, without preferences, without muscle and blood. But is there not a way of preparing ourselves for the finest work in the opening decades of the new century by training our minds to feel something of the truth on both sides in these great issues between conscientious men? Is not this the highest reason as well as the most Christlike charity?"

Ethics and Revelation. By HENRY S. NASH, Professor in the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge. Crown 8vo, pp. 277. New York: The Macmillan Company. Price, cloth, $1.50.

Professor Nash's book, The Genesis of the Social Conscience, announced him as a man to be sought after and listened to. There was no surprise when he was selected to deliver in Philadelphia the Bohlen lectures, which are now issued in this volume. The author is a thinker who deals with the new problems, takes everything from the modern angle,