tion that those views of Christianity which had made their holder a zealous Anglo-Catholic meant that he could not be a Christian outside the Roman communion. "I am a Catholic by virtue of my believing in a God."

It must be owned, therefore, that churchly views of Christianity ripened, in one of the most logical and sincere minds of the century, into Roman Catholic belief. And to admit this is to grant the possibility, at any rate, that Newman was right, and that to find the authority and the gracious help of Christianity in the life and action of an earthly organization is (if one do not blindly or willfully abandon consistency) to bow to Rome. We do not intimate that the High Church conception of Christianity is that of the Anglo-Catholic Newman. We do not care to call in question the opinion expressed by Bishop Wilberforce in the "Quarterly Review," that Newman "appears never to have occupied a thoroughly real Church of England position. He was at first, by education and private judgment, a Calvinistic Puritan; he became dissatisfied with the coldness and barrenness of this theory, and set about finding a new position for himself, and in so doing he skipped over true sound English churchmanship into a course of feeling and thought allied with and leading on to Rome." The correctness of this statement chiefly concerns those who belong to the Anglican communion; all Christians have an interest in the proof Newman's career furnishes that the view of the church which he held and powerfully inculcated finds its only consistent expression in Roman Catholicism.

It does not lie within our purpose to discuss this view of the church in its relation to Christianity. We desire only to quote some words from one of Newman's Catholic books as illustrating its outcome:

"In the midst of our difficulties, I have one ground of hope, just one stay, but as I think, a sufficient one, which serves one in the stead of all other argument whatever, which hardens one against criticism, which supports me if I begin to despond, and to which I ever come round when the question of the possible and the expedient is brought into discussion. It is the decision of the Holy See; St. Peter has spoken, it is he who has enjoined that which seems to us so unpromising. He has spoken and has a claim on us to trust him. He is no recluse, no solitary student, no dreamer about the past, no doter upon the dead and gone, no projector of the visionary. He for eighteen hundred years has lived in the world; he has seen all fortunes, he has encountered all adversaries, he has shaped himself for all emergencies. If ever there was a power on earth who had an eye for the times, who has confined himself to the practicable, and has been happy in his anticipations, whose words have been facts, and whose commands prophesies, such is he in the history of ages, who sits from generation to generation in the Chair of the Apostles, as the Vicar of Christ and the Doctor of his Church." A doctrine of the church which makes an able man in the nineteenth century,

reared in a great Protestant university, willing to talk like that is not likely to prevail, unless Christianity be the foe of common sense.

The deep mental craving which underlay Cardinal Newman's churchmanship and ultimately led him to Rome was the craving for religious certainty. He saw that the human soul needs to be established in absolute conviction in order rightly to live. The Christian faith is not normal unless the intellect is fully convinced. It should be strong enough to make a man willing to surrender his life for the things of which it brings information, but a man will not die for anything of whose existence he is not certain. The Christian, then, must have certainty, and where can he find it? Not in the Bible, said Newman, for he cannot be sure that he interprets the Bible aright. "Experience proves surely that the Bible does not answer a purpose for which it was never intended. It may be accidentally the means of the conversion of individuals; but a book, after all, cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of man, and in this day it begins to testify as regards its own structure and contents, to the power of that universal solvent which is so successfully acting upon religious establishments."

Where, then, may the Christian find certainty? God, says Newman, has made provision for this want of his nature, by planting his church in the world and endowing it, when speaking by its constituted authorities and upon the themes and within the limits assigned to it, with infallibility. The Christian may listen to its assertions respecting divine things with the same confidence with which he would hear the words of Christ were the Master to appear again and teach in his presence.

We hold, of course, with all Protestants, that God has not taken this way of satisfying the soul's desire for certainty. We believe that the claim of infallibility for his Church, whether it speak through Council or Pope, is a monstrous assumption, unsupported by the words or deeds of the Founder of Christianity, and shown over and over to be false by the errors of councils and of popes. But we believe that beneath this claim lies a most important truth, namely, that the certainty which the soul craves must come from a living source. It cannot be given by the study of a book eighteen centuries old, uniquely divine though that book be. The Bible's divineness cannot be proved to those who have no faith in the truths which it conveys. Plainly, then, it cannot be, however and wherever composed, the one source of Christian certainty. Here Cardinal Newman was right. The Scriptures cannot do a work not theirs. He was wrong, and in our view it was the deep error of his thinking, in disbelieving that the source of certainty is the Spirit of God speaking in the soul and assuring it that the act of faith in which it seeks deliverance from sin reaches and finds response from a personal Redeemer. He seems to have thought too meanly of the soul to believe that it could be the organ of such a divine testimony. He appears to have believed the reason so inveterately prone to falsehood that even when the heart

had been renewed, it could not safely be employed with divine truth lest it corrupt it and make it unnutritious. So he turned for that certainty which he knew he must have to the church, and ultimately to the Pope.

We could trace, were there time, the influence of this undue depreciation of human nature upon Cardinal Newman's theology, in making it defective in its recognition of that part of Christianity which belongs to the present life, and of those aspects of the divine character which are especially winning and lovely. But we gladly pass on to a closing thought, one which we can only suggest, that it is a great lesson for Englishspeaking Protestants, that a man of such rare gifts and high aim and true piety should go from them under stress of strong conviction into the Roman Catholic Church, find spiritual peace there, and show there unsullied manhood and undiminished powers. What does this mean but that the life of Christ animates this great branch of his church notwithstanding its errors? And may not the error of doctrine, as we regard it, which has shown itself congenial to the defect in this great mind have as its complement some truth neglected by Protestantism especially fitted to nourish his soul? And may we not see in the career of one who has won the reverence of his countrymen by his sincere life in both communions a sign that the day is swiftly coming when there shall be one flock as there is one Shepherd ?

THE PRESENT TENDENCY IN THEOLOGY.

WHAT is the future of theology? What is its coming task in the progress of Christianity? Is its function henceforth to be as important as in former times? Is its place to be held by real influence or by tradition only? And if by influence, in what respects and for what reasons? Questions like these are often asked by some who believe that theology is a waning science, painfully struggling to hold its place, but certain to lose it, and by others who know that a science which has to do with the rationale of religion can never be without importance, but who do not see clearly the direction it is taking nor the supreme service it is destined to render. The former class of questioners underrate the present and future work of theology, partly from a mistaken notion of its functions, and partly because nearly all theologians and systems of the past have been encumbered with a mass of material foreign to the province and task of theology. The latter class of questioners are not in doubt concerning the prominent place theology must ever hold, but are trying to foresee the changes it will undergo and the principles which will control its further development. We shall not attempt to give a complete answer to these questions, but shall only offer a few observations which may serve to indicate in a general way the coming work of theology and also to suggest the importance of the task which it now has before it.

Concisely, theology is taking shape more and more in relation to the ends of Christianity in the character of man and the kingdom of God. In technical phrase, theology is becoming prevailingly teleological. The final cause of religion, the result it seeks in the person and in society, is to be the decisive consideration in respect to every doctrine of religion and in respect to the rational and spiritual grounds on which all doctrines are found to rest. To say this is to say that theology has to do with the motive power of religion, and that it is therefore concerned and is to be increasingly occupied with the reconstruction of doctrine from the side of motive. What is going forward is not the decay of theology, but the restoration or recovery of theology to the uses of religion. This implies a constructive in place of a defensive development of doctrine. It will always be the duty of the theologian to defend beliefs against attack and objection, to show that the traditional opinions may reasonably be held, to explain how this and that can at the same time be true; but his greater service will be to bring out in complete proportions the truth of religion as motive power in the perfection of character and the realization of the kingdom of God.

Recently, after the examination of a young man for the Presbyterian ministry, a listener remarked that the candidate seemed to know something about Arminianism and Sabellianism and predestination and decrees and substitutionary atonement, but very little about the simple truths of the gospel as adapted to the actual needs of modern life. If it was the fault of the youth rather than of his interrogators that he represented Christianity in so distorted a perspective, the impression made on the listener would signify, not that theology is a worthless study or a mere thing of the past, but that theology should interpret truth in full view of its outcome in life, and should be passing from the relatively easier task of defining the possible modes in which God's revelation in Christ may appear consistent, to the more important and therefore difficult task of translating the fact and truth of religion as motive into the actual and ideal life of humanity. If theology is a doubtful psychology, a mistaken anthropology, and a crude theodicy of arbitrary decree, and can be nothing but a readjustment of such notions to meet objections, it has no future; but if it is the recognition, interpretation, and symmetrical unfolding of those facts and beliefs which appeal to what is highest in man and promise what is the best for the world, it may still claim, with some pride of preeminence, to be the queen of all sciences and philosophies, and with a loving devotion to be the most cherished handmaiden of religion.

For example, the doctrine of the person of Christ may be thought by some to be held more loosely and vaguely than in former times. Instead of the exact distinctions of nature and person, the careful separation of divine and human, the precise function of the Second Person of the Trinity, the identity of the Logos with the Son of Man, there seems to be a very indefinite thought of the nature of Christ, a very qualified belief

in his actual Deity, a disposition to be satisfied with the opinion that in some way He was divinely taught and that He revealed God's love to men. And yet the change is from abstractions to realities. The endeavor is made to know Him as the source of spiritual power, to learn what divineness is as it is embodied in a perfect human character and a sympathizing human heart. The distrust of exact psychological and philosophical theories comes not from a reduced estimation but from an enlarging view of the personality they have attempted to measure. Some of the larger as well as nearer relationships of divine and human have been coming into view. God and his world have been comprehended in their intimacy of life because He is felt as immanent presence and palpitating power in the universe. God and humanity have been found in mutual affinity, and no longer separated by the immeasurable distance interposed by former thought between absolute and finite being. And out of such deeper knowledge come illumination and insight concerning the Person who has brought God nearest to the thought and life of his children. So of the doctrine of atonement through the sufferings of Christ. It is to be understood in the light of the restoration of man to sonship with God, and of the renewed and perfected society which is to constitute the kingdom of God in purified law and custom and life. The decisive question about the sacrifice of Christ is with regard to the objects it was intended to accomplish in human life. Theology, therefore, will not lay so strong emphasis as formerly on the removal of penalty, nor lay stress chiefly on the equivalence of Christ's suffering with the punishment of sin, but will go more directly to the new life of man in harmony with God and to its promise of perfection. It is not necessary to multiply illustrations to show that theology has its task in showing, not the mere credibility, bu the deepest significance of Christianity for the life of man. The inquiry in every instance is in relation to the power of the truth. In its power is found its wisdom. Christ is the wisdom of God to intellectual inquiry largely because He is the power of God to the heart.

When the truth is thus united with the power of doctrine it may seem as if nothing had occurred but a return to primitive Christianity, as if there had been long periods of unfruitful speculation, after which weary and disappointed thought is returning to the simple facts of the gospel as they were originally received. May there not have been, however, the process through which reflective thought always advances? A given magnitude of fact or truth is first recognized and makes the natural impression of its wholeness. Afterwards it is analyzed into its elements and relations, but finally is known again in its totality, yet with more intelligence and appreciation. Thus philosophy says to-day that man is not a bundle of faculties which act independently. It is not true that his intellect perceives, his emotions feel, and his will chooses. The whole man is active in every thought, feeling, and choice. These are