One might hope that the Catholic Church will soon, in all its length and breadth, in its pope, cardinals, and bishops, define itself as a prominent Catholic priest has just defined himself in newspaper and pamphlet in our East. The great significance in his statement, "Why He is a Catholic," lies in that generosity of statement which makes his reasons do duty as well for the Episcopalian or the Lutheran or Presbyterian or Methodist. Among other remarks come these: "Men join the Catholic Church from the most diverse reasons. One class is drawn to her by her beauty, attracted by the sweetness of her music and the eloquence of her ritual. Some, like Overbeck, paint themselves into Catholicity or build themselves into her spiritual temple, like Pugin. St. Peter's at Rome has made many converts." Such words surrender all the old claims of that Church to be the special agent of God and Christ upon earth; for architecture and painting and sweet music exist in the Protestant faith, and must possess there their power to kindle religion's flame. The best sacred music in England is said to be heard in the Episcopal Cathedral of Chester, while the architecture of York Cathedral must possess a wonderful charm over the poetic and devotional spirit. If Overbeck painted himself into the Church through his study of the "Entry of Christ into Jerusalem" and the "Descent from the Cross," such a study would possess the same power in any religion which holds Christ to be divine. The elegant and scholarly Father Elliott has neglected to point out how, if music and architecture can make a man a Christian, they must make him into a Catholic Christian. He says all these beautiful roads lead to Rome, but the only truth in the conception must be found in the remark that they all lead to piety. "The heavens declare the glory of God," and lead many an Overbeck and Pugin to worship; but the heavens never so declare beauty as to express a preference for the Catholic or Protestant articles of faith. Music, architecture, and painting can never be beautiful enough to determine how many right angles are contained in a triangle, nor beautiful enough to tell a mind whether to select a Catholic or a Protestant creed. The letter of Father Elliott is wonderfully lacking in those sharp distinctions which abounded in the times of Calvin and

the Inquisition, and is correspondingly full of that truth which is coming to the living generations. In the effort to define Romanism Father Elliott has fallen a victim to his age, and has defined all sincere piety. The true has displaced the accidental.

It is easy to stand in the present and conceive of a coming unity and brotherhood of Christians as resulting from a free and universal study of the true. Such a study cannot be destructive of any one of the great ideas of Christianity. The notion of God cannot be overthrown, and Christ in all that is essential in religion lies wholly within the historic period. The ideas around these two names-such as faith, righteousness, mediation, repentance, forgiveness, charity, and hope-are the perpetual truths of all the years of man upon earth. These forms are as fixed for the Christian as the water, the sky, and the grass are perpetual for the painter; and, as the painters in Italy, France, Germany, England, and America are all drawing nearer to each other because they are all looking at the same nature, which has no caprice, but only an everlasting beauty, thus the hosts of Christian thinkers and worshippers will only march toward each other, while with great sincerity and intelligence they march under the words "Whatsoever things are true."

Not a perfect unity will come; for to see all truth face to face would be to see God. But such a harmony would come as would make the empire of religion reach out like the kingdom of literature and art, wide and varied, but at all points beautiful and full of peace.

The tumult and sorrows of our race have resulted chiefly from the partisans in politics and religion,-minds not open to the universe, but closed, and thus doomed to littleness and its cruelty. To live for truth is to walk upon a great shore where the Christ and all the greatest ones have left their indelible foot-prints. To live for the true is only another name for a living for the highest good, the widest love, and the deepest happiness. God himself is the origin and Creator of the true.

Chicago.

DAVID SWING.

"They are never alone who are accompanied with noble thoughts."

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH ON

TRIAL.

The Episcopal Church of America should not forget that, while she has been trying Rev. Howard MacQueary before an ecclesiastical court, she herself has been on trial before a larger court, -a court which is nothing less than the judgment of the thinking people of the whole nation.

This court of an enlightened public opinion has been trying her on several distinct indictments. Granting that her creeds and standards required her to take cognizance of Mr. MacQueary's heresy, -to try him for it, and, finding him guilty, to convict and depose him,-what right has she, in this enlightened and free age of ours, to have any such creeds and standards? What right has she to have creeds or standards which a large portion of her best ministers and members only partly believe, and believe less and less as they grow more intelligent? What right has she to have creeds which practically put a premium upon dishonesty by turning out of her communion persons who are honest enough to say frankly that they no longer believe dogmas which the world has outgrown, while she retains and rewards with her honors and emoluments men just as heretical in their real convictions, who profess to believe when they do not, who subscribe to required articles of faith with "mental reservations," those things which in business and politics and everywhere else except in religion men call by the plain names "deception" and "falsehood"? What right has any Christian

Church to have creeds or standards that drive out from its ministry any good men who love God and Christ and their fellows, and who want to spend their lives in doing good?

The standards of the Episcopal Church are the so-called Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Thirty-nine Articles. When were these different standards formed?

The Nicene Creed was formed fifteen hundred years ago, in the fourth century,— a very dark and superstitious time.

The so-called Apostles' Creed was completed eleven hundred years ago, in the eighth century, -a still darker time.

The Thirty-nine Articles were composed three hundred years and more ago, in the

sixteenth century,- -a time vastly less enlightened than our own.

Now, what right has any church to have creeds, formed in such ages, and to make them standards for to-day, thus compelling men to keep their minds dwarfed to the measure of the knowledge and thought of those old times instead of growing and advancing with the new truth that God is forever giving the world?

Nay, what right has a church to have fixed creeds, formed in any age, and imposed upon the ages following? Can any age be sure that it has all the truth there is, or ever shall be? Is not truth so precious and divine a thing that men's minds should be forever open to receive it?

If it is a sin to enslave men's bodies, is it not quite as great a sin to enslave their minds, as fixed creeds have always done in the past, and are so terribly enslaving millions of minds to-day? We repeat, while the Episcopal Church of America has been trying Rev. Howard MacQueary, the thinking people of this country have been trying the Episcopal Church; and these questions indicate some of the very weighty and serious indictments on which they find her guilty.

J. T. S.

THE PATRIARCH JOB AND THE MODERN RAILROAD.

An enthusiastic Hebrew scholar, who, we hope, will excuse us for calling him the most original crank we have yet met with, has published a volume of over three hundred pages to prove that the book of Job contains a full account of our modern railroad system, not even omitting the financial reorganization so fashionable in these latter days. We believe that he is unable to find any allusion to Mr. Jay Gould or the Interstate Commerce Law in that ancient document. But little else is omitted, according to this ingenious commentator.

As might be supposed, the author, in order fully to support his theory, has been compelled to furnish a new rendering of the parts of the book of Job which he uses. But that is a minor matter; and he is equal to the occasion, and gives a new translation of the passages in chapters xl. and xli. which relate to the behemoth and leviathan. We copy from the Scientific American

some of the passages on which the author bases his entertaining theory:

The account begins chapter xl. verse 15: "Behold now one with great heat, ... he will consume fodder as well as cattle do," which is a pretty fair description of a steam-engine. A little further on, verse 17, it says, 66 His tail will set upright like a cedar." This, the author concludes, refers to the smoke-stack. In verse 18 we find, "His hollow bones are tubes of brass, his solid bones are bars of iron," which is a very good embodiment of modern engineering practice. In verse 21, which the special translation renders, "He will rest beneath light shelters and within a covering of fibrous reeds and clay," the author finds an allusion to non-conducting covering for boilers and steam pipes. Going on to the next chapter, we find verse 6 thus rendered: "Companies will feast upon him; they will share him among speculators," which it is needless to say fits the case of modern railroad companies and speculators exactly. This is one of the extraordinary parallels of the work. It is, perhaps, equalled by verse 2 of the same chapter, where the hook (ring) in the monster's nose is construed as an allusion to the piston rings of a locomotive, and where the jaw bored through with a thorn supplies an allusion to the piston head bored through with its piston rod. The bad effects of an engineer allowing his water to run down is given in the same chapter, verse 26: "From dryness rendering him furious, he will not have power to withhold, the curved vault being caused to break up, and also the armor." This, of course, means that the engineer must watch his water-gauges, or there will be an explosion.

For a portion of verse 23, chapter xl., and for verse 24 immediately following, the author furnishes the following translation: "Behold he will absorb a river, and will not fret;... he will gather it up in his fountains by means of traps and with a perforated nozzle.” Our author in this finds described the action of a pump with its valves (traps), and the perforated suctionpipe with a screen at its end to exclude solid particles. Even the coupling together of a train of cars is found in verse 1 of the next chapter: "Thou wilt extend leviathan with a hook, or with a snare which thou wilt cause his tongue to press down." The tongue, our author believes, is the representative of the coupling-link, and the hollow drawhead and pin is the "snare." The caulking of the seams of the boiler is found in verse 15 of this chapter: "His strength depends on courses of shields closed up tightly with a seal." Our author finds nothing clearer than that the "shields" are boiler plates, and the "seal" the caulkingiron. He reserves, however, the possibility that the steam-riveter is the sealing mechanism.

The author has, strangely enough, overlooked a biblical passage of, perhaps, even earlier date, which, if his theory is correct, undoubtedly contains a distinct reference to the incompatibility of stray cattle and limited express-trains. In Genesis, chapter xv. verse 17, we read, "And it came to pass that when the sun went down and it was dark, behold a smoking furnace and a burning lamp that passed between the pieces" (of slaughtered cattle). The description is complete even to the locomotive head-light.

Seriously, such a burlesque of Scriptural criticism and interpretation is only worth notice from its very absurdity, and as an illustration of the vagaries of the human mind when its reasoning powers are led captive by a dominant idea. We have heard of commentators who have found definite allusions to the events of American history in the Bible; but to put into the mouth of the worthy patriarch, Job, a complete description of a modern locomotive is a flight of fancy higher than anything heretofore brought forward.-Popular Science News.

HEBER NEWTON ON BIBLE
PREDICTION.

The foregoing article on "Job and the Modern Railroad" exposes very well the foolishness of a kind of Biblical interpretation that is more abundant than most of our readers are probably aware of. Hardly a week passes in which there does not come to our desk some book or pamphlet or sermon or extended article, setting forth the marvellous predictions of the Bible,-many of them predictions, as is claimed, of events transpiring in our times, or about to transpire soon.

Nor is all this strange. The prevailing orthodox view of the Bible produces such interpretation as inevitably as swamps produce ague. To get rid of it, more is necessary than a general increase of intelligence among the people. For, alas! men may be very intelligent about everything else and as superstitious as a fourteenth-century monk about everything religious. The reason is, men are forbidden to think and investigate freely in religious matters. Religion is sacred ground: here, instead of reasoning as everywhere else, one must simply "believe." To doubt is wicked; to accept is

holy. The theory of Bible infallibility closes the mind's eyes. This theory once accepted, the inquiry of men becomes, not, What is truth? but, What says the Book? All errors in the Book are hidden or transformed into perfections. The ignorant and mistaken utterance of an unknown man living a thousand years before Christ, in a dark and credulous age, is more authoritative than the verdict of a score of Newtons, Humboldts, and Darwins. For, "Did not God know?" say triumphantly these Bibleworshipping infallibilists. So, then, if God says that the first woman was made out of Adam's rib, of course she was so made; and, if anywhere obscure sayings are to be found about the future, of course the thing for us to do is to cudgel our brains until we can discover very great and profound meanings in them. Thus we have much of the best mental energy of Christendom wasted and worse than wasted, century after cen

tury, in pulling and pushing and stretching and twisting the supposed predictions of Old Testament and New, to make them fit the history of the past and divulge what is yet to be.

We have never seen the folly and harm of all this kind of thing better set forth than by Dr. Heber Newton in his excellent little book on "The Wrong and Right Uses of the Bible." In the third chapter of that work he says:

It is a wrong use of the Bible to go to it, as the heathen went to their oracles, for divination of the future.

The pagan oracles were the shrines of a Power sought for the forecasting of events. The inspiration of an oracle was proven by the success of its predictions. In the same way men have turned to the Bible as a sort of sacred weather bureau, a book which, if we could only interpret its mystic utterances, would tell us what things were going to happen upon the earth. I remember an eloquent Irish divine who came to this country on a great mission a number of years ago. His first sermon was on Ezekiel's vision by the Chebar. He said that this was the age of science, and that such a marvel as science could not have escaped the vision of the prophets. This mystic creature which the prophet saw, with wheels, whose appearance was like burning coals of fire, which turned not as it went, and so on, was-the locomotive! This folly was only more undisguised than the mass of the lucubrations called "Prophetic Studies."

Let any political crisis occur, and some sage will write a book showing how Daniel

The

This mad and maddening use of what, rightly read, are noble and instructive books, grows out of a misunderstanding of what were the functions of Hebrew prophecy. . . . Hebrew prophecy never was the synonym for prediction. It meant forth-telling. prophets were "men of the spirit," whose pure nature mirrored the supreme laws of earth, the moral laws; whose intuitions made application of those laws to the policies of state-craft, and enabled them to divine the issues of the stirring events amid which they lived. Their glory is that they saw above the brute force of great empires the might of right, and dared to vision its triumph, and that history has verified their moral insight. But they chiefly spake, as the author of the Revelation declares of his prophecy, "of things which must shortly come to pass" upon the earth. Their horizon bounded a very nigh future, -the approach of Syrian, Assyrian, Egyptian invaders, the overthrow of Jerusalem, etc.

In these predictions they were often mistaken,-nearly as often in error as in the right. We seldom hear of these unfulfilled prophecies, but they are in your Bibles.

I believe I know of no one passage of the prophets which can be certainly said to point to any event beyond the near future of the writer. Only in so far as they spoke of the ideal forces, of ethical victories, did they launch out upon the far future.

But you say, Do not the Old Testament prophets surely point on to Christ? I answer both No and Yes. Of any mere literal prediction of the events of his life I know none. The many passages that have been made to read like predictions of his miraculous birth, his sale for thirty pieces of silver, and so on, refer to personages and experiences in the time of the writers. Isaiah expressly says this about the Virgin -that is, the young bride-who was to conceive and bear a son. Before he should be able to distinguish right from wrong, the relief of Jehovah to Israel would appear. The passages which seem to our eyes, looking through orthodox spectacles, to have this predictive character, lose it in a more exact translation. . .

This use of the Old Testament has been pushed to absurdity in learned books over which I have patiently toiled. "The Gospel of Leviticus" gave me the Hebrew civic and ecclesiastic legislation mystified into

"sound, evangelical" symbols. "Christ in the Psalms" twisted every heathenish imprecation of the Hebrew hymns into language which could be put upon the lips of the dear Lord, and turned the bitterest curses into sweet and gracious benedictions.

The culmination of this moon-struck exegesis, as far as my knowledge reaches, is in the ancient and fantastic reading of the tradition of the escape of the spies from Jericho, which gave a young and eloquent bishop of our church a favorite sermon, wherein he showed conclusively that the scarlet cord by which Rahab let down her visitors over the city wall was a type of the atoning blood of Christ.

This Chinese puzzle-book of predictions exists nowhere save in the imagination of its readers.

COMMUNION FLOWERS.

Beneath the deep blue strip of sky,
Where city houses, dark and high,
The narrow garden beds enclose,
The scented, white syringa blows,*
A straggling and ungainly tree,
And yet how dear it is to me!

O fair, white clusters, ye recall
Youth's fairest, purest festival!-
A first communion morn in May,
The breezy, bright Ascension Day,
The quiet church that stood alone
'Mid graves by flowers overgrown.
High on the altar's snowy white,
Behind the silver vessels bright,
Stand saintly lilies, roses rare,
And garden flowers, rich and fair.
And softly, hushed with holy fear,
The young communicants draw near,
And tread the chancel's marble floor
They ne'er have trod save once before
(That confirmation morn in spring),
And hear the holy accents ring
Of sacramental words that fill
Their souls with new and trembling thrill.
Then-glancing upward ere we knelt,
And awed, yet happy, humbly felt
The spirit linked in loving bond
With things unseen- I marked beyond
An open window, waving free,
Syringa blossoms on the tree

That spread beneath the dazzling light
Of noon its clusters gold and white,
So softly swayed by gentle air
In harmony with chant and prayer,
With words of faith and love divine
That sanctified the bread and wine,
Whose image blends with all that stirred
Young hearts, in holy quiet heard
By those who took the sacred food
In innocent beatitude.

O frail white blossoms that perfumed
A day by hope and faith illumed,

Ye seemed a fitting token lent

The syringa is the same as the mock orange flower, or Philadelphus Coronarius.

To that first youthful sacrament!
So white, so pure, so richly fraught
With scent that childlike gladness brought,
So typical of life's fair spring!
More than those lilies blossoming
O'er font and altar must ye live
With all that day seemed meant to give

Young souls who gathered round that board
In brotherhood to meet their Lord;
With what the spirit still must keep
Unspoken in some sacred deep,
And memories of friends who died,
Then kneeling with us, side by side,
Who helped to pluck the fragrant flowers,
And homewards bore them, while the hours
With peace and light and joy were blent,
The day of that first sacrament!

Wave on, fair flowers, point the way,
Far back, to that communion day!
Too sadly now your buds unfold
The tale of earnestness grown cold;
Of faith and hope and love, how faint,
And ever mixed with worldly taint;
Of charity's fresh fount that dried!
O thoughts of that Ascension-tide,
Awake in your celestial power,
Recalled by each syringa flower
That, snowy white with heart of gold,
Blooms now before me as of old,
And be no more like odors shed
From flowers laid upon the dead!
But, as through pestilence of yore
Some healthy, perfumed drug men bore,
Whose scent would drive disease away,-
Oh, let the breath of that bright day,
That breath of love and purity,
Bring health of spirit back to me,
And kill the pestilential airs

That sicken souls with dark despairs,

Until the spirit's fell disease

Before that breath from heaven flees,
Divinely through the spirit sent,
The day of that first sacrament.

Philadelphia.

URSULA TANNENFORST.

THE IRONY OF FATE.

The irony of fate is a branding-iron which burns its lessons indelibly into the human consciousness. What a crushing satire upon his insatiable thirst for dominance was Bonaparte's confinement on St. Helena! Over and over God bids men "look here, upon this picture, and on this" its opposite. Thus he neutralizes the mind's poison. From the writhing, deceitful serpent in Eden, attention is directed to the brazen serpent uplifted by a prophet in the wilderness. If men will look at that which scorches them, they shall live.

Who has not seen the haughty beauty, her physical perfections at once a magnet and a barrier, to draw and to repel! And