department or the public works-that is, the Church interferes in such matters only with great principles applicable to all human conduct. The Gospel, in fact, shows a certain contempt of material things: to lay not up treasures upon earth, to take no thought for food or drink or raiment, but to seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, are what it enjoins; and over and above, so to speak, the cheap coats and lower rents "shall be added." "The kingdom of God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost."*

In his exegesis of Phil. iv, 8, 9 (to think on whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, of good report), as commanding the investigation of social problems, Mr. Morse will hardly be followed. The result of following him here would be strange indeed! Fancy the religious effect upon the hearers of a minister's urging the single-tax on land to farmers, or preaching to Republicans that a protective tariff is robbery, or commending it as a source of prosperity to men persuaded that freedom of exchange is a blessing! And fancy the religious effect upon the preachers of giving themselves to these themes the deadening of spirituality that would result from occupying with purely temporal affairs the thought of the one class of men now concerned wholly with sacred things! Conceive, too, the jarring opinions that would be put forth, all with the same semblance of authority, as from the "oracles of God," to employ Mr. Morse's phrase! The politicians, children of this world, wiser in their generation than the children of light, cannot yet decide what principles to advocate touching such matters, even on the low ground of expediency. The questions that

* Since this article was placed in the editor's hands the Presbyterian and Reformed Review (for January) has published, under the title "Christianity and Social Problems," the last article from the lamented Professor Aiken, of Princeton Seminary. Among other things Professor Aiken said:

"Recognizing the permanent and ineffaceable distinction between moral evil and natural evil, Christianity cannot wage its warfare against all those things which enter into the social agitations of our time (and of past ages as well)-inequality, poverty, care. . . . It accepts social inequalities, as well as physical and intellectual inequalities, as certainties while the earth lasts, and as having unquestionably been in the past tributary to civilization and progress; so with poverty and sorrow, conflict and suffering. Yet if its view of these forbids it to have any such quarrel with them as it has with moral evil, it does not pass them by on the other side. It has ministrations to them that are all its own. It gives cups of cold water in Christ's name, which infuses a blessing into the draught. It teaches men, by bearing other's burdens, to fulfill the law of Christ. Its sincere and sympathetic grief carries a peculiar balm to hearts that are sad and sore. But with all this, and beyond all this, it looks to the reformation of souls."

Mr. Morse wishes the pulpit to decide are questions of politics, not of religion. The agency he invokes for the decision is one whose eighteen centuries of gospel preaching, according to his own account (which we by no means confirm), has yet left it "impossible to distinguish, by any thing unique or exceptional in their methods, the Christian from the pagan;" yet he expects it now to reform the world by preaching free coinage or the gold standard, free trade or protection, eight-hour laws, etc.!

What, then, is the ground of hope in the new line of effort? This impatience of worldly conditions is well rebuked in a passage from a letter of Flaubert's:

No great genius ever came to a conclusion, and no great book, because humanity itself never reaches a conclusion. . . . For this reason the phrase so much in vogue, the social problem, is profoundly distasteful to me. The day it is solved will be the last of the planet. Life is an eternal problem, and history also, and every thing.

Mr. Morse says much of St. Paul's warning believers "to think, to be students, investigators of all questions of individual and social interest," and of "the sociological doctrines of Jesus." But the apostle's injunction to "think on " things truc, honest, just, pure, lovely, cannot be pressed so far. Of sociological doctrines, in the modern sense, Jesus taught us, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: . . . the kingdom of God is within you." Apparently, to Jesus temporal conditions were indifferent. He ate with publicans and sinners, and, stranger still, with the rich. His temporal works of mercy seem to have been wrought all for spiritual ends, else, indeed, they should have been universal. Every thing with him was spiritual. If he forbade robbery it was for the sake, not of the robbed, but of the robber. Thus it is that the list of mortal sins is not such as the modern "practical" man might compose, for example, murder, theft, etc., but something very different-not a list of acts, even, but of states-pride, envy, anger, etc. Nothing further from the habit of Jesus can be imagined than neglect of the concerns of the soul for interest in questions of the currency, taxation, rent, hours of work. These are Cæsar's things, not God's.

EDITORIAL NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

OPINION.

IN HIS CRITICISM OF THE THEISTIC HYPOTHESIS Herbert Spencer animadverts against the anthropomorphitic element as an obstacle to a right apprehension of the problem, and as justifying the extreme of agnosticism to which his chopped logic conducts him. He holds that the Deity is inscrutable, and that the fact of his existence is beyond all possible human demonstration-the infinite can never be brought even to the borders of the finite. Hence, any conception of God from a human view-point must be a human conception, originating in the human mind, developed according to the processes of human intellection, and culminating always in limitations and colorings that give it only the value of a human sentiment, without authority, sacredness, or divinity. Such, in his judgment, is the origin, character, and worth of the Christian belief in a personal God. The philosophic theory of agnosticism is defective in that it is one-sided and partial, parading ignorance from one view-point without allowing the possibility of knowledge from another view-point. Mr. Spencer heralds a half truth, which is more mischievous than a pagan error or a knowable falsehood. The school of which he is a representative is not blind to the fact that if God's personality and rulership are objects of human apprehension, it is because the human faculties are endowed with power or instinct to rise to the level of such a problem; otherwise God is utterly unknowable. Mr. Spencer himself can affirm that God is unknowable only from the view-point he assails. For his philosophy there is no other view-point than anthropomorphism. Why, then, does he object to it in theology? If knowable at all, God is primarily knowable by the only means within our reach—that is, the human faculties. Agnosticism removes God from the arena of human thought, and blights with imbecility the only organs of knowledge with which man is piloting his way from one world to another. Against such a theory we array the startling conclusion, that if it strike down knowledge at the highest point it altogether extinguishes the knowing-sense, and leaves man in total ignorance of all things. If we cannot know God we cannot know any thing. If he is incognoscible by virtue of his distance or of human limitations, it is not certain that any thing is within the range of human knowledge. The word knowledge degenerates into a fad or poses as a mystery. We confront this theory by the anthropomorphic revelations of the Deity in the divine word by which his existence, attributes, and purposes are fully apprehended by minds devoutly affected by higher knowledge. Monotheism, incarnation, Messiahship, the Bible-these are apprehended from the anthropological view-point, and would find no lodgment in human thought in any other

form or by any other method. Absolutely in essence God is unknowable -this is Christian agnosticism; but in existence, character, and redemptive plan he is knowable through human agency, and may be apprehended correctly, satisfactorily, sufficiently.

THE SPIRIT OF SCHISM, SOMETIMES INVOKED BY CHRISTIAN MEN to satisfy a real or supposed grievance, is largely in abeyance, other methods of adjusting differences in ecclesiastical bodies being preferred to those more violent procedures that usually result in discord and secession. This evil was one of those inheritances that all religions, pagan and Jewish, contributed to the Christian age, and seemed indispensable to human liberty and progress. In some of its stages it became a moral disease, as dangerous as it was infectious; breaking out in men of radical convictions and resulting in apostasies and the organization of new Churches. In the division of the early Church into Eastern and Western, and in the various so-called heretical secessions from the Western Church, the evidence of the schismatic tendency is prominent and conclusive. For one hundred years Methodism has felt the blighting touch of the same spirit, but has advanced in its great mission in spite of the obstacles. In one view, the history of Methodism is the history of her schisms; but also a history of triumph in the face of these united oppositions. Holding that episcopal prerogative was too extensive, James O'Kelley, from 1790 to a late period, warred against the system, organizing "The Republican Church," and believing he had inaugurated a religious movement that would eclipse the Church he abandoned. He lived long enough to see the folly of his work, but died without confessing his mistake. In 1830 some protestants against the episcopal system, and who also objected to the refusal of the Church to grant lay delegation, organized the Methodist Protestant Church which, with some enthusiasm, and after a career of sixty years, has attained a position of importance, and, in addition to evangelizing others, is a convenient refuge for those among us who are pleasantly deluded by the waxen cry of "Mutual Rights!" In 1840 Orange Scott, possessed of the antislavery spirit, rebuked the Church for its conservatism on abolitionism, and assisted in founding the Wesleyan Methodist Church; but it suffered disintegration, and has been practically absorbed by the original Church. In 1845 the Southern section of Methodism, grieved at the alleged abolitionism in the North, organized a new Church, which is the dominant religious body in the South, and successful in its sectional aims and methods. In 1860 the Free Methodist Church, was organized on the ground that the Methodist Episcopal Church had departed from the simplicity and spirituality of the fathers; but its founders were expelled members of our Church, and its progress has been in proportion to its novelties. From this outline it appears that the episcopal system, the rights of the laity, slavery, and spirituality have occasioned secessions some of which would not have occurred in an age of toleration and common sense. Wide differences exist to-day in the Church respecting the doctrine of holiness, the eccle

siastical rights of women, the removal of the pastoral time-limit, the political rank of prohibition, and other questions; but schism is not now contemplated in any case as a remedy or method of settlement, even when unity of view is known to be impossible. The fanaticism that drives men from the Church no longer flourishes in Methodist soil; and the radicalism that demands excess of rights and privileges is submissive to the majority that decrees otherwise. Hence, the peace of the Church is assured.

THE MORE THE PAULINE WRITINGS ARE STUDIED the more patent is the fact that the great apostle gave to the Church what may appropriately be called, an ecclesiastical language. It is true that other New Testament writers have contributed some words to the vocabulary of the theologian, as "propitiation," which is properly a Johannine word; but they did not discuss all the themes of the Gospel, and were without occasion to indulge in a phraseology so precise and germane as that which is characteristic of Paul. Even when the other writers employ the same terms as Paul, they write in a style so different, and use them with reference to so many phases of the Christian faith, as to impair that robustness of suggestion which is apparent whenever he handles them. It is not claimed that the apostle was extensive in his vocabulary, though he combined Greek and Hebrew culture; but that, in his mind, certain words were possessed of a specific force, and embodied distinct ideas, separable from the ideas common to paganism and Judaism. Hence, usually, his words have a single meaning, except when used in the metaphorical sense. Because the Pauline vocabulary is narrow and limited, but specific and individual, theology is as possible as mathematics, which rests upon axioms and principles. It is not our purpose to enumerate the great words of Paul nor to explain them; but such words as covenant, justification, sanctification, reconciliation, resurrection, judgment, sin, law, grace, faith, hope, love, heir, race, works, flesh, seed, servant, son, liberty, tribulation, joy, etc., are significant of the originality, richness, and availability of Paul's language in interpreting the mind of the Spirit in the forms of revelation. Divine ideas, including the everlasting mysteries not to be understood, enlarge as they are apprehended in the compact, reflective language of Paul. It may also assist us in understanding Paul, to remember that his use of words is not always etymological or historical, but strictly polemical and theological —that is, he employs words solely in the interest of religion. Whatever word suits his purpose, whether it be forensic, social, pagan, philosophic -of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew origin-he seizes it and gives it a distinct meaning, founded of course upon its primitive or historical sense, but never hesitates to adapt it to the theme or discussion in hand. Hence Paul's words, though easily traceable as to origin, often-possess a derived but perfectly transparent meaning which has passed into the nomenclature of the Christian Church. It is doubtful if, as to the majority of the fundamental words of theology as taken from Paul, they now have their primary meaning, which in some cases is lost; but the derived meaning, like a