inspired author, expecting to find trustworthy guidance and reflected inspiration; remembering, however, that, though inspired by the Spirit, he is but an inspired man, knit to his age and race and condition. The revelation, therefore, will have a twofold character: it will be divine and human, the one conditioning the other; not an imperfection, but rather the only kind of revelation that could serve our needs, for the line of revelation from God to man must run through the human heart. If it takes color and form on the way, it is no less divine and trustworthy.

But without a theory, we are reading the Bible with fuller faith than ever before. The more light we bring to it from nature and study and experience, the clearer its truths stand out; in such light it is becoming its own evidence, and no more needs an apologetic theory than a candle needs an argument for illumination. We are not even careful to dispute about this or that seeming inaccuracy; instead, we are confident that here is a book that keeps ahead of all thought, and constantly furnishes new light and fresh inspiration to mankind.

These illustrations might be increased till they comprehended the entire range of Christian doctrines. And when we had gone through them all, we would find, on review, one feature attaching to them severally and collectively, namely, that each one has a permanent essence and a shifting form; the essence unquestioned, the form always under debate. To see and make this distinction is in itself of utmost value; it is enough to save one to

the Faith. But a thoughtful mind will go farther, and ask, How happens it that Christianity has this twofold feature of a permanent essence and a shifting form? The answer will take him into that world of thought recently opened, the main feature of which is the law of development or evolution. Into this world the Faith must go. The timid may linger on the threshold, but the time has come to enter in and set the Faith face to face with this principle that now colors and dominates all thought. Once in, the atmosphere is found friendly. It is not something to be quelled, but an ally to be pressed into service. What it does for every other department of thought it may do for the Faith,open another door between the mystery of the external order and the human reason. It not only thus finds itself in friendly relations with other realms of thought and knowledge, a state that the mind imperatively demands, being made to seek a harmony of all truth, but it is now able to understand and vindicate itself. When it contemplates itself as under development, it has the key of its interpretation; it can account for its changes; it can defend its history; it can separate its substance from its forms; it can go free and unburdened of past forms which were never of its essence; it can once more take its place at the head of the sciences, and demand the loyalty of all, not because it recognizes their method, but because it alone offers a solution of the method, and is the solvent of all sciences. Recognizing this principle, we can read the Old Testament, and need no other explanation or

apology than it affords. The sayings of the Christ no longer wear a simply personal or half-explicable meaning, a somewhat wiser Oriental ethic, but become principles and revelations of eternal truth. The mustard-seed, the leaven, the seed cast into the ground, and the earth bringing forth fruit of herself, these parables not only fall in with the principle, but attest Christ's absolute knowledge of it. It accords with that prime feature of revelation before referred to, as of and not from God; a coming of God into the world by a process parallel with human development, and the source of it.

It is not meant, however, that Christianity is to take its place under any school of scientists or philosophers, using their data and binding itself to their conclusions. Evolution is not to be identified with any school of thought or department of knowledge; it is a principle pertaining to the order of the world. Christianity has its own data and phenomena, and they are not to be classed in any other category.

It will be noticed that the reception of new truth has been spoken of in two ways that are apparently contradictory: one as quick and as by instant revelation; the other gradual, a growth or development. They are not inconsistent, but represent the two methods of revelation: the twofold nature of truth as having a divine source and element and a human ground and element, and the twofold nature of man as spirit and mind. These methods play into each other. One prepares the way for the other. One is slow, and keeps pace with the gradual advance of society and a like development of

the individual. The other is quick, is allied to the mysterious action of the Spirit, which knows not time nor space, and accords with the loftiest action of our nature. I gain knowledge slowly; I gain the meaning of knowledge instantly; it is a revelation of the Spirit that acts when knowledge has done its work. There were ages of civil and ethical training, of progress and lapse and recovery and growth, but the meaning of it flashed upon the consciousness of the world in a day. And so a man thinks, studies, undergoes life, gropes now in dark ways, or stands still, in despair of truth; but finding this intolerable, presses on, and at last, in some better moment, some hour of spiritual yearning or tender sympathy or bitter need, the heavens open to his willing eyes, and in one swift glance he sees the meaning of all he has known, and feels the breath of the descending Spirit. Now he knows, indeed. Now there is meaning in the world and in life. The sense of vanity that invariably clouds existence and oppresses thought, when not so illumined, passes away. Now he begins to live to some purpose. Death is swallowed up in life. The material is merged in the spiritual. The eternal order takes the place of this shadowy and elusive order of nature that once held him, and he tastes the satisfactions of the Spirit.