know, have hardly been noted heretofore, and deserve more than passing attention. Dr. Whiting's years are such, and his mental and spiritual quality is so fine, that he is himself both a source and a writer of history.

In the midst of the things which concern most closely the life of the Seminary, our readers are urged not to overlook the valuable article by Professor Blaisdell on Biblical Study in Collegiate Instruction. The author is professor of Biblical literature in Beloit College, and brings to his topic, both by heredity and training, a clearness of insight and a precision of statement that will repay careful reading. Mr. Clark treats a live topic in an interesting way, and presents truth that deserves pondering.

The power of exorcising evil spirits has certainly departed from the Schools of the Prophets. If anybody doubts it let him consult pages 231 and 233 of the May RECORD and he will be convinced. The editor believes he did his best, and the printer is sure he did, and yet somehow the powers that reign in the black abysses of printers' ink got hold of the types and marvellously mingled and muddled the reviews of Shaw's "Pauline Epistles and Robinson's "Doctrine of Holiness." If at this late time the accurate and still confused reader will transpose the second and third paragraphs from the bottom of page 233 to a place just precedent to the second paragraph from the bottom of page 231 he will find matters righted.

The RECORD does not plan going into the dissected map and puzzle picture business. It has only humble apologies to offer to readers, authors, and publishers, and has just breath enough left to pant execrations upon the guilty unknown cause, - its exorcisms having failed.

IS A CONSTRUCTIVE THEOLOGY POSSIBLE?

I. The name of Religion has ever been associated with the search for Truth. Our entire experience rests, of course, upon the knowledge of reality, upon the apprehension of facts with which we are all in common related. Each color to which we all give the same name, each fact of any kind whose place and importance we all recognize, is for us a reality which we have grasped. Our conception of it is a truth by which we live. But religion arises when man thinks he has seen the fundamental facts of his moral being and the relations of his endless life. There is in him nature which feeds on something other than the fairest beauties of the landscape, other than the most thrilling melodies of music. For example, he finds himself both possessed by and possessing the sense of duty. On one side this seems to fill him. with the sense of mere subjection, as if submission to a dread tribunal were the final fact; and there have been wild spirits who resented this as slavery, and who claimed for man the indefeasible right to be his own God. And yet the answer to these reckless rivals of Milton's supreme rebel against the majesty of God is, that this subjection of man to God is not slavery just because it works through the sense of duty. Rather is it the most sublime form of freedom. He who sees and feels absolute duty has in his vision and in his heart legislated for the universe as well as for himself. His soul has touched and tasted the very nature of the Absolute.

Again, man has from the beginning believed in an ultimate explanation of things. The history of philosophy, of theology, of science, is the history of his brave, undaunted determination to know with the open eye of reason what that kind of being is in whom all at last is rooted. And religion is ever the form of conduct into which he has cast his latest and best thought of God. There have been waverings among the philosophers. There have been those from time to time who deemed themselves delivered

from the bondage of religious thought whose falsehoods had been exposed, or of religious customs whose futility had been experienced. But these are phases of the struggle itself, and witnesses therefore of the native yearning of man for that knowledge which is true and for that practice which has in it the virtue of eternity. For man feels and knows that he was made for God. He affirms and explores and pursues his kinship with the Absolute. Hence it is that no real religion has ever really lived except through the belief of its adherents that they knew the best and most that could be known. The supreme doctrines of every religion are always doctrines of the Supreme; and in their assured possession its practices rest.

In Christianity this assurance has had firmer and clearer ground than anywhere else, and has produced a history in human nature incomparably beyond that of all other religions. To open the New Testament anywhere is to find one's self face to face with varied and numerous expressions which have in common some phase or symbol, some glimpse or experience of the Absolute, the eternal, the infinite. It is very sparing of adjectives; but it is filled from end to end with names for relations in which God stands toward man and man toward God. Truth and light, life and death, sin and grace, love and repentance, peace and fear, mercy and wrath, blood and pity, power and faith, righteousness and ungodliness, holiness and misery, these and many more are never, in the New Testament, either mere abstractions or mere adjectives. They name those relations and their accompanying emotions, in which man and God meet. In these words you always see two faces gazing upon each other, one human and one divine. In them man, the child of time and sense, is found in conscious, living contact with God, eternal, immortal, invisible.

Hence it is that the pages of the New Testament are saturated with passion. Hence it is also that the great creative, conquering periods in the history of the church have been simply outbursts of this passion. For passion, in the high and noble use of the term, means all that concentration of thought and will, kindled to a fire of feeling, in which a man gives himself wholly away to some overmastering object. And it is the vision of the Absolute in some form above which summons forth the absolute in the

human spirit, deep calling unto deep. The passion which lives in all real religions has been created by the faith and the feeling that the supreme object of man's life has been discovered. There each man faces his final explanation of all things, the final law of his being, the final hope of his heart. When he believes that thoroughly, when its finality has mastered his imagination as well as enlightened his mind, when its finality has drawn out his love in a gaze of constant fascination, for that he will gladly surrender all things, yea, even life itself.

The great periods of church history, the great deeds of Christian faith have been wrought out of that conscious relation with that which is, nay, with Him who is eternal and final. At such times heroic sacrifices have been made, splendid evangelism has been achieved, the great systems of theology have been created. These three, then, sacrifice, evangelism, and systematic thought, are always closely related and even dependent upon one another. But they are only possible when men have gained what has been well called "immutable conviction about absolute truth."

Immutable conviction about absolute truth," - the words have an old world sound, have they not? It is the sore complaint of many of the most thoughtful of our day that these words seem to describe more accurately and vividly the atmosphere of another and an earlier time. Somehow there has spread through the very air we breathe a shimmering uncertainty, a tremulous tone, a passionless spirit. It is true that faith has not died, that great work is still being done, thank God. Missions at home and abroad are carried on at great cost; most earnest and most competent scholarship is busied with all that concerns the discovery of truth, in every realm of reality which we can touch, even with our finger tips. And yet the uncertainty haunts, the coldness chills, the absence of passion condemns us all. It is true that loud and earnest voices are raised in conferences and leagues of protest, where recrimination and defiance of the modern mind are fulminated. But these voices do not yet command that response of a revived conviction which they and we desire. Their purpose we deeply approve, their method we deplore, their authority we sadly fail to discover. Their words come like the explosion

of the toy crackers of our boys, while we are praying for the thunder and the lightning of the heavens.

On the other hand, men of education and of thought all about us are asking for what they call a positive and constructive theology. The native hunger of the soul for that absolute truth, which Plato says is the true food of the soul, finds expression in all kinds of wistful and even weird systems of thought. "Wistful" is the word for the mood of our day. Wistful because within us all the heart that sins and fears also aspires and yearns for the great truth which would give it peace and life; and wistful also because something keeps the mind of our day from seeing and receiving, from using with indomitable conviction, that very truth.

II. Why is it so hard today to find "immutable conviction about absolute truth"?

The answer may no doubt be made as varied as the interests of human life. They all always contribute to the dominant characteristics of the men of every generation, even in a measure to the mood of every day. If it were my duty today to survey them all I would have to deal with those social and ethical conditions which have been created by the growth of modern democracy and by the enormous increase of wealth among the leading races. These two facts have endless moral and religious ramifications. For they, like all blessings, bring with them also new duties; and new duties mean new trials; and new trials, or temptations, especially those which creep on us unawares through achievement and gratification, are most apt to confuse, allure, and overwhelm our unwonted wills. It is the witness of some of the broadest and most sympathetic students of our own day that the modern world in large measure owes to its great wealth and to its unparalleled consciousness of power the weakening of grasp upon the spiritual, the fading of absolute truth from the steady gaze of an ardent Faith. The charioteer whom Plato describes has not succeeded well in his mastery of the steeds, and the passion of the nobler nature for eternal reality is checked by the downward momentum of that which mindeth earthly things. So say many who are not traducers of their kind and whose judgment ought to have calm and careful heed.