Let us take a hasty glance at some of the chief results which have been reached. In the first place, the position and character of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament have been much changed. The uses and applications which can be made of them have been more strictly defined as a result of a clearer knowledge of their nature. Each book belongs to a certain period of human history; it was produced under certain social and religious conditions; it had a special aim and purpose lying behind its origin, all of which can be more or less clearly ascertained by patient study of its contents.

These books are literature, and show the literary character which belongs to all products of the human pen. They are historical, poetical, or prophetic, as the case may be, and as a consequence the very designation furnishes a key to their interpretation, and establishes in our minds an expectation of what can there be found, and how it is to be received and appropriated. A law of value and proportion at once appears, and a real pertinency and application is demanded in all appeals to them, and the integrity of a man's judgment is not confused and embarrassed by random and haphazard applications. The Bible thus becomes a rich and beautiful picture of the past, with far perspectives stretching into the remote distance, here and there dim recesses where the soul's desire or the soul's agony is poured out in unearthly and mysterious beauty, and over and through it all is the atmosphere of a divine purpose and a divine presence which fills the student with the sure conviction that that purpose and that presence are not absent in his own experience, and in the life which he and thousands of others are struggling to understand to-day.

Whatever may be said for or against the critical school, it cannot be denied that the Bible is the key to its position, the basis from which it starts, and that the Bible is a more living book today than it has been since the eager, hungry souls of men clung to it and studied it in the stormy days of the sixteenth century.

Another contribution of the critical method has been the establishment of a new science or department of theological study, namely, Biblical Theology. The name, as a separate branch of theological science, to many even to whom the ordinary branches of this science are perfectly familiar, is almost unknown. It represents, however, a real thing, and it has its origin in that careful and microscopic examination to which the different portions of Scripture were subjected. All theological systems have claimed to be Biblical, and so long as they appealed to the Scrip

tures their claim was acknowledged, or at least not disputed, except by their opponents. The assumption was that a definite system of doctrine lay embedded in the Scripture, that its origin and purpose were doctrinal, and that all the parts stood in harmonious and scientific relation to each other. The moment the various books were investigated, it became apparent that different points of view existed, and that the spirit of each book was affected, not by logical theories, but by spiritual experience and personal conviction.

The subject can only be referred to here, but it is one of the positive results of the critical movement which has proved of the greatest and most permanent value, and is destined to exert wide and most beneficial influences on the future study of theology. Little is known of it in this country, comparatively speaking, and all that is known has been drawn from the Germans.

In the wide and well-known field of dogmatics, the influence of the critical movement has been most pronounced and effective.

It is true that the deepest influence exercised directly upon the field of theology in this century sprang from Schleiermacher, and to the power of his great genius, more than to that of any other man, is due the vast changes in theological thought which mark this century as the turning-point from the past to a new and wonderful future, whose outlines are but dimly unfolding themselves. He delivered theology from its barren scholasticism and ineffective logic, and grounded it upon the experience of the living spirit having its basis in man's consciousness of God. Yet, notwithstanding the labors of Schleiermacher, the purely critical movement was destined, from the results attained in the field of exegesis and of history, to revolutionize theology. And there is no inherent reason why theology should not advance beyond the doctrinal platforms of the sixteenth century, or at least, grasping anew the great principle of the Reformation, develop the spiritual life from the basis of men's added experience and knowledge.

The sixteenth century, starting from the basis of the new free life of the soul in God, presented and emphasized just those truths which the age needed, and in just such relations and proportions as the times called for and the necessities of the spiritual life of the age suggested and permitted. Great and fundamental truths were misunderstood, misused, and even abused, and some of the deepest importance to our own age were either comparatively neglected or played a subordinate part.

It is no disparagement of the great men of the sixteenth cen

tury to say they could not span the whole heaven of truth, or formulate systems of thought and modes of conceiving God's relations to the race which would be suitable for men of a different age and with different needs. Each generation must do its own thinking, and realize for itself the relations that exist between it and God, and stand firm by the conviction that, as He was guiding and directing the men of the past, so He is still guid ing the race in its search for light and peace.

Beneath the tenacity with which men cling to the strict letter of the logical definitions of the past often lies an incipient unbelief and a latent atheism which needs to be fully exposed before a man can attain the solid ground of personal faith. In ages of calm and tranquillity men think they can live on formulas, but in ages of change and revolution their life must find its source and centre in God, or they become blind obstructionists of the divine purpose.

The aim of theology is to bring man into living communion with God, or at least express the conscious results of this fellowship. To bring before the mind the real nature of the task, and trace the means adopted for its fulfillment in the past, has been the work of historical theology, and historical theology is a child of the critical movement. It has been not destructive merely or chiefly. It is reconstructive. It aims to set forth the value and worth of theology, and it began with the beginning. Across the pages of the Bible were written many cherished systems, many devout theories; theology after theology, crossing and recrossing, covered all its lines. Passages were so buried under a mass of interpretations of an arbitrary character that none knew what the true meaning was. The critics began to erase these various writings, and to try to discover what was originally written on this sacred palimpsest. Steadily and patiently they pursued their task, and now we know more of the theology of the apostles than has been known in centuries. The various systems, in their long succession from the Alexandrians of the third century to the Tractarians of the nineteenth, pass before the eye of the critic, and make whatever contribution they have, valuable or otherwise, towards the great problem of man's life, and the thoughts and feelings that unite him with God.

In the field of church history proper, the critic has been busy as in no other department of theological science except exegesis, and in the field of church history we are able to see more clearly the value of scientific principles, and the great results achieved by

their application. From what has been already said on another page, it will be only necessary to draw attention to the fact that now it is a science. Mere learning and knowledge of facts are no more the sole qualifications of an historian than a knowledge of the current phenomena of nature constitutes a physicist. Behind all phenomena lie principles, and only when these principles are known, arranged, and applied can we say we have a science of the subject. There is such a science of church history to-day, and it is the noblest fruit of the critical movement of the nineteenth century. To quote from a recent writer on the subject: "We may hear, if we will, the solemn tramp of the science of history marching slowly, but marching always to conquest. . . . In front of it, as in front of the physical sciences, is chaos; behind it is order.” 1 The critical movement stands in historic relations to the sixteenth century. It is the offspring of the German Protestant spirit.

...

Germany is Protestant, has been so for more than three hundred years, and will remain so. The critical spirit represents the higher intellectual attitude of Protestantism. Our Christian sympathies should not blind us to facts, or lead our judgment into foolish paths. Nothing can stand against the demands of the Christian intelligence and the Christian reason. They who look

for a reconciliation of Romanism and Protestantism, of Ecclesiasticism and Criticism, are dreaming idle dreams, having no knowledge of the principles upon which these opposing parties stand, and the eternal antagonism that exists between them.

As the Reformation in the sixteenth century in the end carried the Teutonic nations with it, so will the critical movement of the nineteenth century carry the higher intellectual life of Protestantism with it, because it is moving in the path of right reason and of science.

NEW HAVEN, CONN.

Stewart Means.

1 Edwin Hatch, The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, pp. 23, 24.

THE CHALLENGE OF LIFE.

"And all as we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner, — to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o'good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know, I feel it i' my own inside as it must be so.". Silas Marner.

woe.

TOURISTS who have visited Brussels will recall the Musée Wiertz, and the impressions made upon them by the paintings of that eccentric genius. His mind, bitterly cynical to a morbid degree, wrought in the region of the grotesquely horrible, and would seem to have dwelt almost entirely upon war and wickedness and Like exaggeration and one-sidedness characterize the views of life prevalent in the pessimist philosophy. This somewhat pretentious school of the prophets has its Elijah in the gloomy Schopenhauer. It has also its Elisha, milder, more conciliatory, and more immediately successful, who none the less wears the elder's mantle, having fallen heir to his spirit. Just half a century after the publication of the great work of Schopenhauer appeared his successor, the ex-artillery officer, Eduard von Hartmann, who at the age of twenty-two began, and four years after, in 1868, published, "The Philosophy of the Unconscious," a work which, in striking contrast with the fortunes of its predecessor, very shortly ran through many editions.

Hartmann's is to-day perhaps the most popular philosophy in Germany. He claims to be something more than a mere disciple of Schopenhauer, whose system he has indeed, in important particulars, modified. He repudiates the subjective idealism wherein Schopenhauer followed Kant. In the eighth chapter of his Second Book he clearly argues for the position which Kantians are wont to ridicule, but which would seem not without support from common sense, namely, that Space and Time are both objective forms of existence and subjective forms of thought. Schopenhauer's ultimate principle was Will alone. Hartmann with Will unites the Idea in his absolute world-principle, the Unconscious. Design he finds everywhere, and is pronounced regarding teleology, introducing an ingenious mathematical demonstration of the certainty of purpose in the arrangements of nature. Instinct he finds to be "purposive action without consciousness of the purpose." He argues against the Cartesian theory of instinct, which made it purely mechanical. With Hartmann, instinct is conscious