their real meaning. Sometimes it is "advanced thought," quite sure that it is historical and critical and correct, but not so constant or clear in proclaiming those truths for lack of which men perish. Too often it is simply a voice busying itself with harmless lesser things, æsthetic, moralistic, hortatory, while the great message of the gospel, simple and powerful, goes unproclaimed. The sign may be seen in our church life, well-intentioned and busy but not very deeply rooted in a clear and definite faith, the happy hunting ground for the folly of every newly invented religion. It may be seen in the moral quality of our social life, with men who fear the daily press but do not fear God, because that is real and powerful and He has faded away into a name. In such a day the church can have no greater task than to ask itself again concerning its faith; to declare that faith in a creed. Let it be, if necessary, with question and debate. There could be nothing more wholesome than to call men from lesser questions to consider what is vital and central in Christianity. Let it bring home to the preacher again, in this day of journals and books, of essayist and lecturer, what that truth from above is whose proclamation alone gives him the right to stand before the people week by week. Let it be a standard to summon the church anew to its great task as it sets up the sign by which the world is to be conquered. Such a creed is to be of service not simply to the preacher. The work of the pastor and the missionary makes the need most plain. Our Articles are not ideal for their purpose. The pastor finds in them too much that is polemic, to him a burden rather than a help, or that is secondary, and thus confusing when he wishes to give the convert the simplest statement of our faith. The experience of the missionary is identical. And yet it is to our Articles that we must turn those who wish to unite with our church and who ask for what it stands. It was a makeshift, but suggestive of the need, when the commission determining the creed for the proposed united Methodist Church of Japan dropped eight of the twentyfive Articles. For this practical work of nurture, whether at home or abroad, the truths of our faith should be stated in the simplest and most direct manner, in their meaning for conscience and heart and faith. It is not necessary that a creed should be

abstract and technical and metaphysical in order to express the full truth.

What the character of such a creed should be has already been suggested. It should be positive. We want no polemic here against Roman Catholicism or Calvinism. It should be modern, speaking the timeless truth in the language of the day. It should be evangelical, expressing that conception of Christianity as a gospel of redemption for which our church has stood. It should be vital, the creed of a religion of experience and life. It should be ethical, true to the spirit of our founder in setting forth Christianity as holiness in life and faithfulness in service. It should be simple and brief, for it is to be not a theologian's system, but the servant of the life of the church. It should not be speculative or intellectualistic, for it should express Christianity as that which can be appropriated by faith, experienced in the heart, and manifested in obedience of life. It will be a Methodist creed, not controversially or narrowly, but only as Methodism expresses the truth of our common Christian faith. And so it will be a catholic creed. Finally, it should express those truths which the Spirit has taught us for the needs of these days: life as a stewardship as well as a probation; the meaning of brotherhood in life for those who say "Our Father" in prayer; the character of the church as an instrument of the kingdom of God, and its missionary calling at home and abroad.

女

Frank Rall

ART. VI.-ROBERT BROWNING'S CHRISTMAS REVERIE A STUDY OF "CHRISTMAS EVE"

PROFESSOR JAMES, in his Varieties of Religious Experience, gives account of the following case:

Question: What does religion mean to you? Answer: It means nothing; and it seems, so far as I can observe, useless to others. . . Praying, singing of hymns, and sermonizing are pernicious. I teetotally disbelieve in God.

Professor James remarks that if we are looking for a broken and a contrite spirit, we shall get little comfort out of this brother. And that would seem to be true enough. But what such a bovine. fellow thinks about religion-or anything else for that matteris of small concern to anyone save himself. The same may be said of the pert fellow represented at present most glaringly by that noisy Philistine Hubbard, alias the Yellow Fra. No one expects a man born blind to appreciate the miracle of the dawn. There are such things as human limitations and also such things as specific limitations in certain human instances, and when we meet them we should not be disconcerted by them. When, however, we overtake such a man as Robert Browning, a full-orbed soul, richly endowed by nature intellectually, with an unusual blending of the metaphysical and the practical, combining in his intellect both the analytic and synthetic powers; one with a vast knowledge and an accurate scholarship as well as high power as a thinker; one who had the courage to look all the facts of life squarely in the face and rejoiced in grappling with all the hard problems of life; one who sought out the mysteries of the "dark hemisphere" with as much delight as a boy takes in disentangling enigmas; one who made it his business to know what life had meant to men of varied types, of different centuries, and widely separated civilizations-when we meet such a man it behooves us to know what he thinks about anything, and especially about that deep eternal thing we call religion. This ought to be all the more the case with us so far as Browning is concerned, for he was a religious genius of the first rank. He has been called "the man

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of God to our peculiar age." It would not be possible to set forth in a single paper all that Browning had to say about religion. No more would it be possible to give any just idea of his utterances concerning Christianity. It is possible, and that is the purpose of this article, to set forth what he had to say about Christianity in one of his poems, "Christmas Eve." As our title indicates, "Christmas Eve," is a Christmas reverie. As all of us have frequently done at such times, Browning, one Christmastide, turned over in his mind what Christianity means to the world life. We might say that the real subject of this poem, to put it in the most prosaic form, is, What shall I think about Christianity? The poem, so far as its thought substance is concerned, is just that; though it is also more than that, for it is one of the great poems of the English language. To refresh our memories, let us run through the story of the poem.

The poem is the record of a reverie, but the reverie is objectified and dramatized. The hero of the poem, whom we shall call Browning, to save tiresome circumlocutions, one Christmas eve, surprised by a sudden, violent burst of rain, took shelter in the lath-and-plaster entry of a bare, dirty, ill-smelling Christian chapel. He had no thought of entering the sacred place, his only desire being shelter from the storm. But he cannot be indifferent to the people crowding past him to "their special clover." With his matchless realism he enables us to see with his eyes the eager worshipers hurrying to their Christmas Eve service. There is the fat woman with her flapping umbrella a wreck of whalebones:

flitted past

Prompt in the wake of her, up pattered

On broken clogs the many-tattered
Little old-faced peaking sister-turned-mother
Of the sickly babe she tried to smother
Somehow up, with its spotted face.

Close on her heels, the dingy satins
Of a female something

With lips as much too white, as a streak

Lay far too red on each hollow cheek;

And it seemed that the very door hinge pitied

All that was left of a woman once,

Holding at least its tongue for the nonce.

Then there was the "pig-of-lead-like" stupidity of the preacher rolling out the fog of his dingy mind. Such a Christmas message: Death at unawares might duck them all deeper than the grave in hell's grim drench! These people are disciples of Christ, the Christ of the open fields, of the birds, and the babes, and the Father's love. They have met on the eve of the day set apart to perpetuate his memory, and they have met in his name, yet the preacher's message brings no disclosure of the goodness of God, of the joy of life, of the Eternal Love suffusing all things, of the possibilities and improvabilities of the soul, of the glory that shall come to the soul when at last it shall see God face to face. The poet has come to know God through nature. There he has seen his power and glory, and beholding his power has felt his love, too; for man, God's creature, has capacity for love, and shall not God, his creator?

The poet has come to believe in God as Love, and he has also come to believe that this God, who has created man free for praise and life, will give him what he needs: not simply a few years here upon earth, but eternity, the blessed fellowship, and the beatific vision. His faith is a vast, glorious, free thing. Therefore he cannot stand the suffocating theology of the Mount Zion Chapel preacher. So he throws himself out of the stuffy fold into the open. There the poet finds breathing room and uplift. He has been drenched in hell; now he is swept into heaven. The storm is still raging, but receding. The sky is stormswept and lightflooded by turns, when

Lo, what think you? suddenly

The rain and the wind ceased, and the sky

Received at once the full fruition

Of the moon's consummate apparition.

The black cloud barricade was riven,

Ruined beneath her feet, and driven

Deep in the West; while bare and breathless,
North and South and East lay ready

For a glorious thing that, dauntless, deathless,
Sprang across them and stood steady.