prise of Missions; and shall modestly attempt a Philosophy of History, dealing with the "Theocracy" rather than the "Kingdom." The annals, both of ancient Israel and of the modern Church, record mingled success and failure. Whether it be the one or the other cannot depend on any chance or accident. There is no fatalism in history. Our instincts tell us that success must be the consequence and crown of conformity to the pattern shewed us in the mount; and failure, the result of departure from the divine standard. Some golden calf which some Aaron may have cast, out of unhallowed offerings; some carved altar, which some idolatrous Ahaz may have set up in place of the unhewn altar of the divine simplicity that is in Christ-in a word, some displacing of the pure and perfect type of doctrine and method, prescribed in the Word of God, may account for the withholding of blessing, and for defeat and disaster in our missionary work.

We have need, perhaps, to begin again, and lay anew the basis of missionary enterprise; or, if we find the former foundation firm and sound, we may need at least to see whether, on that foundation, we have been building gold, silver, precious stones; or wood, hay, stubble. Possibly, into the structure of our mission work some errors have been built, which are serious if not radical. To get God's own conception of missions informed and infixed in our minds, our hearts and our prac

tical methods, might lead to the partial and even total revolution of our present mission work.

Feeling the solemnity of this trust, as the incumbent of this lectureship, for my own sake and that of my readers, and for the sake of a cause wider and broader than all, I have given myself, Bible in hand, to a careful, prayerful study of this theme, seeking to be rid of all bias, either of prejudice or prepossession, and to be led into all truth. And, as the studies which, for more than a year before the delivery of these lectures, were largely limited to this one subject, have rent the veil from much that was hitherto hidden or at best obscure to my own mind, it will not be strange if some things which found utterance in the lecture-course may strike other minds as new, and even as untrue. The lecturer ventures to ask the confidence of his indulgent readers and, on their part also, patient study of the principles laid down. Let there be applied to them, not the test of human authority or opinion merely; but the touchstone of the Word of God, and of His manifest working in the History of Missions.

Human tradition is a dangerous ally of the Bible, for, too often, it "makes void the Word of God." At first only a vassal, it becomes a consort, and finally a sovereign, usurping all authority. And, as Luther found it necessary to question even the venerable traditions of the elders, and separate the infallible Scriptures from all the chaff

and alloy of mere human teaching, it behoves us to pray for grace to go back to the very beginning, and inquire of the Master himself what are the eternal and immutable principles of mission work.

ARTHUR T. PIERSON.

2320 SPRUCE STREET, PHILADELPHIA,

October, 1891.

I.

THE DIVINE THOUGHT OF MISSIONS.

HEN, on the 15th of May, 1618, after more than twenty years of patient experiment, Johann Kepler completed his discovery of the so-called "Harmonic Laws," or the relations of the planets; when the secret doors, that had waited six thousand years for a key, were at last unlocked by the theory of an elliptical orbit, the great astronomer of Magstatt, no longer able to contain his rapture, cried, "O Almighty God, I think Thy thoughts after Thee!"

What the "Legislator of the Heavens" did, in the department of astronomy, we seek to do in the department of missions-think God's thought after God. The words "idea" and "theory" are, to some linguists, sacred, because of a possible derivation of the one from the Latin, deus, and of the other from the Greek, Oeos; and of a possible design by those words to express conceptions as they lie in the mind of God. If such be the real roots, the word idea (in deo) would mean a thought first conceived in God, and then expressed to men -a theory would be a sacred image, pattern, or plan of God. The ancient Platonists used the

word idea, of an eternal immutable and immaterial form or model of an object, an archetype, a pattern.* In this sense, ideas were the pattern according to which the Deity fashioned the phenomenal or ectypal world.t

An idea, therefore, properly implies a perfection of image. If we can, at the outset, get before us the divine conception of missions, what a startingpoint will that be, and to what an advanced goal might we hope to reach, if, true to our startingpoint, we keep on our course without deviation!

The four Gospel narratives have, at the close of each-as has also the Acts of the Apostles, that "Fifth Gospel," at its beginning,-certain words of our Lord which are evidently meant for the guidance of His disciples, in all time to come, as to their great mission and commission. Each of these accounts contains something, different from the others, yet essential to the full and complete expression of our Lord's will and our duty. As, in a composite photograph, various facial forms and features blend, combining individual peculiarities in one collective result, so, if we may project, as upon one sensitive plate, these five forms of the Great Commission; and, instead of looking at them separately, behold them all, blent in one composite view, we may at one glance see the mutual relations of these various words of instruction and get the grand total.

* Worcester's Dictionary.

Sir Wm. Hamilton.