the individual, independent of the Church and its sacraments. 'Without a ministry possessing Christ's authority,' says Mr. Vernon Staley in his Catholic Religion, 'there can be no certainty that we possess valid sacraments, conveying the grace which they express; and if there is uncertainty about the sacraments, there is uncertainty as to union with Christ.' As though John xiv.-xvii. had never been given us, with its message of personal and individual illumination and guidance by the Holy Spirit! If 'union with Christ' did depend upon the 'valid ministry' thus defined, if the lapse of the apostolic succession through the episcopate would necessitate, as Mr. Staley says later it would, 'a second appointment directly by our Lord, and of a second day of Pentecost with a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit,' then no police supervision would be too jealous, no disposition of mind and heart too intolerant. The urgency of the need would be an adequate justification. But could a greater wrong be done to Truth, and to the Spirit of Truth, than thus to confine its operation to the narrow channel of a particular line of ministers? Let there be accepted a true doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and there will no longer remain the fear lest Truth may be unable to maintain itself without the aid of intolerance and persecution. 'You cannot,' says Phillips Brooks,' make the unit to be a unit by the external unity of one hard shell. If the fruit which you try to enclose is alive, it will burst your shell to pieces as it grows.'

III. There is a Truth which has nothing to do with doctrine, but has for its essence reverence for man, his rights and responsibilities. An adequate and accurate statement of religious truth is of untold value; but what about the realization of the nature of man as a being endowed with reason and free-will, and whose opinions and conduct are only possessed of value in so far as they are free? By all means, let the 'duty of the institution to be something' be respected, but with caution lest these demands cover so wide a field as to paralyse individuality and stultify free-will. The tragedy of ecclesiasticism is not only that it has been intolerant, but intolerant in the field where

intolerance is peculiarly vicious, and in the portion of that field occupied rather by definitions than realities, by matters of interpretation and inference rather than by fundamental truths. When William Penn drew up the Constitution of New Jersey in 1676 he wrote: 'No men nor number of men on earth have power or authority to rule over men's consciences in religious matters.' From the bitter contradiction of Christian intolerance the Quaker was saved by his doctrine of the 'inward light'; and although Mr. Haynes talks somewhat wildly when he says that 'the Nazarene carpenter would hardly have understood the ideas of any Christian sect after the fourth century but the Quakers,' they are to be honoured for having consistently made religion a strictly individual matter, refusing to use pressure of any kind even when politically supreme.

Lastly, intolerance is pervaded by the egotism of personal infallibility: it cannot exist in company with genuine lowliness of mind. No true saint desires to climb on to the judgement seat of Christ; no healthy disciple claims for his body of opinion exclusive validity; and the champion of orthodoxy-be he Wesleyan, Dissenter, Anglican, or unattached-who acts upon the assumption that the cause of God stands or falls with the acceptance of his interpretation of Scripture, is showing himself to be the disciple of Tertullian rather than of Christ, and is acting in accordance with the worst precedents of the Middle Ages. 'Lay so much stress,' says Mr. Wesley, 'on opinions, that all your own, if it be possible, may agree with truth and reason; but have a care of anger, dislike, or contempt towards those whose opinions differ from yours. Condemn no man for not thinking as you think: let every man use his own judgement, since every man must give account of himself unto God.' We have tried to show how Catholicism has fallen short of the Spirit of Christ through its fruitless attempt to achieve the imperial ideal in the sphere of religion. Mr. Wesley's words remind us that the 'unity of the Spirit' is not more likely to take the form of the conversion of all systems of thought to any one existing system than the

submission of all the Churches to one Church. The only 'unity of the Spirit' worth hoping for and praying for is that which is imparted from within by the Spirit Himself; and when that is achieved organizations and dogmas will fall into their own place, and for the first time the strenuous partisan will realize that truth has been fairly equally divided between him and those against whom he fought with such fiery zeal. In short, to quote Bishop Brooks once more, the 'hope of tolerance lies in the advancing spirituality of man.' Here, as often, the blind prophet of Edinburgh saw the truth with undistracted gaze when he sang:

Gather us in, Thou Love that fillest all;
Gather our rival faiths within Thy fold;

Rend each man's temple's veil and bid it fall,
That we may know that Thou hast been of old;
Gather us in.

Gather us in we worship only Thee;

In various names we stretch a common hand;

In diverse forms a common soul we see;

In many ships we seek one spirit land;
Gather us in.

Each sees one colour of Thy rainbow light;
Each looks upon one tint and calls it heaven;
Thou art the fullness of our partial sight;
We are not perfect till we find the seven;
Gather us in.

W. FIDDIAN MOULTON.

THE TABERNACLE: IDEAL OR

ACTUAL?

The Tabernacle: Its History and Structure. By the Rev. W. SHAW CALDECOTT, Member of the Royal Asiatic Society. With a Preface by the Rev. A. H. Sayce, D.D., LL.D. (The Religious Tract Society. 1904.)

THE

'HE debt we owe to modern Old Testament scholarship is so great, the results of it are so wealthy an enrichment of our conceptions, that there is some danger lest we should allow its fascination to obscure for us the fact that not all its findings are as yet final, and that the evidence it offers is still to some extent sub judice. None of the schools of Old Testament learning are infallible, not even the youngest. To imagine that even in this age of scholarship we have heard the last word on Old Testament criticism would be to arrive at a premature finality, and to shut the door against all further research. 'Old things are not therefore true, O brother man, nor yet the new.'

One curious result of the new learning has been a distinct and strong tendency to disbelieve in the actuality of the tabernacle, and to regard it as a conception which had its origin after the building of the first temple. According to this view, it is simply the Jerusalem temple projected backwards, ideally, into the time of the wilderness journeyings. The temple did not arise out of the history of an earlier tabernacle. The reverse was the order of things. Just as Ezekiel is held to have projected his ideal temple forward into the Messianic age, so a post-exilic writer projects his ideal tabernacle backward to the golden age of Moses. It is not that the temple follows the arrangements of an earlier tabernacle; it is that the tabernacle idea had its origin in the actual temple, and not before. Earlier than the temple there was not so much as a tradition of a tabernacle. The tabernacle owes its form, not to a tradition even, but merely to a religious postulate.

In post-exilic times it was held that things must have been so ordered if they were to harmonize with the much later but absolutely authoritative theories. Thus a delicate symbolical idea comes to be transformed into tangible history. This, in almost their own words, is the teaching of Kautzsch and of some others. The tabernacle is the description of a sublime idea.

What has been the origin of a position so novel and so startling? What is there to support it? The strongest, though possibly not the earliest, consideration in support of it is the observation that the story of the tabernacle is found almost, if not quite, exclusively in the document technically known as P, a document which is confessedly of exilic or post-exilic origin. The earlier document or documents, known as J E, and also the document D (our Deuteronomy) are almost, if not quite, ignorant of the tabernacle, or at all events are silent about it. It is possible that there may be some little begging of the question here. It may conceivably have been argued, This and that passage mention the tabernacle, therefore this and that passage must belong to the later document and not to the earlier. That is a form of argument which, unfortunately, has been a little too confidently relied upon at times. It is a weakness of both the extreme critics on the one hand, and of the rigid traditionalists on the other, that they have not always shown a judicial appreciation of the laws of evidence. Moreover, it is a fact acknowledged by the critics themselves, that even the earlier documents, if they do not know of a tabernacle, do know of a 'tent of meeting.' Exod. xxxiii. 7-11 is admitted to belong to the earlier document, J E, and is not denied to be a part of the ancient tradition. Still further, as we shall presently see, the altar which Samuel built in Ramah (1 Sam. vii. 17), so far back as his time, was almost certainly built in an enclosure, still existing, which precisely corresponds in area to the measurements of the tabernacle enclosure-measurements which, on the hypothesis of the critics, were not defined till four centuries or more after Samuel's time. But let that pass. It is conceded for the

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