the traditional dogmatism of their churches. He has not proceeded far, but he has made a good beginning. Especially his critical results are sound and good, of a piece with the established science of the time. As criticism goes, they are not radical. They are conservative. Prof. Briggs is an extremely cautious critic. He holds on to the old positions as long as he can. When he gives up the traditional idea of a Bible book, it is because it can no longer be maintained. The authenticity of the Fourth Gospel is the stronghold of New Testament conservatism; and Prof. Briggs still holds to this, though it has been abandoned by a great many critics of the highest rank, and is held by others in a severely qualified form.

Prof. Briggs's theology is at once more and less conservative than his criticism. For the most part, it is much more traditional; but it has aspects and phases that are extremely personal, as we shall see when we come to consider his theological opinions. First that which is critical, and afterward that which is theological. What I wish to do is to consider first his criticism and then his theology from the Unitarian standpoint, lest we should be in too much haste to cry, "He has become as one of us."

There is nothing in Prof. Briggs's inaugural address which he had not expressed before as clearly in his book entitled "Whither?" and elsewhere, but in the address he passed from the abstract to the concrete in a few instances that brought his - meaning home to the brethren in a striking manner. He distinguished three great foundations of divine authority, the Bible, the Church, and the Reason. He has since assured us that he did not mean to coordinate these, -to elevate the Reason into equality with the Bible. Now, from the Unitarian's standpoint, the three are not coordinate, because the Reason is so infinitely superior to the other two. The Bible and the Church are two great historic forms of Reason,-nothing more. To say the Bible and the Church and the Reason is like saying Hard Coal and Soft Coal and the Sun. All the hard coal and soft coal, all their warmth and light, come from the bosom of the sun; and so all the truth and good of the Bible and the Church come from the intellectual and moral Reason of mankind.

But it is not strange that many Presbyterians think that Prof. Briggs's naming Reason with the Bible as a source of divine authority was an abominable thing. He is nearer the Westminster Confession than his critics in this particular; for, as the proposed changes amply prove, that Confession has not been sufficiently irrational for the Presbyterian mind. This has regarded Revelation as a method of attaining to religious truth without reason or in spite of reason. Its favorite dictum has been that, "the more absurd and incredible any divine mystery is, the more honor we do to God in believing it, and so much greater is the victory of faith."

Some thirty years ago a champion whose "Eclipse of Faith" was hailed by all the orthodox with tumult of acclaim addressed the sceptic thus: "You can never say that the Bible has not given you every advantage; for never was there a book which has more irritated the pride and prejudices of mankind, which has presented greater obstacles to its reception morally and intellectually: so that it is among the most unaccountable things, not that it should be rejected by some, but that it should be accepted by any." Prof. Briggs may still have far to go before he reaches the conclusion that Reason and Conscience are the only sources of religious knowledge, the Church and the Bible only their historic forms; but he is nearer this than to the contempt of Reason which till recently has been the habitual attitude of the orthodox world.

What gave his doctrine of Reason as, with the Bible and the Church, a source of revelation its sharpest point was his naming our Unitarian Martineau as one who had found God by Reason, and by that alone. He quotes admiringly from Martineau's "Seat of Authority in Religion." His opponent, Dr. Morris, also quotes from it, but not admiringly, this being his quotation: "The blight of birth-sin with its involuntary perdition; the scheme of expiatory redemption with its vicarious salvation; the incarnation, with its low postulates of God and man, and its unworkable doctrine of two natures in one person; the official transmission of grace through material elements in the keeping of a consecrated corporation; the second coming of Christ to summon the dead and part the sheep from the goats at

the general judgment;-all are the growth of a mythical literature, or Messianic dreams, or Pharisaic theology, or sacramental superstition, or popular apotheosis." It certainly is asking a good deal of Presbyterianism to ask it to believe that the scholar who brings this tremendous accusation against the entire scheme of orthodox theology is a successful seeker after God. No other passage in the inaugural address seems to have galled so much. No other marks so clearly the divergence of Prof. Briggs's applied theology from the traditional opinions of his Church.

Prof. Briggs's address was an argument, not against, but for, the divine authority of the Bible; and he indicated certain "barriers" to the belief in this authority. Around these barriers the battle has been waged with great noise and shouting. It has been contended that Prof. Briggs's objections to the "barriers" are the real "barriers"; that the divine authority of the Bible perishes with the admissions that he makes and the charges that he brings. His first barrier is Bibliolatry. Now, there has been a great deal said before about Bibliolatry, but it has been said by Unitarians and others whom the orthodox have considered infidels. It is a new thing for a Presbyterian to talk of Bibliolatry,—not absolutely new, for Prof. H. B. Smith had something to say about it that was very good. Prof. Briggs does not enlarge upon it. He only mentions some of its grosser forms, which attribute magical properties to the Bible and its material parts. These are the least of Bibliolatry. These are passing away, but worse remain: the arbitrary separation of the Bible literature from all other, as differing from it not in degree only, but in kind; the quoting of isolated texts as final in whatever connection they appear; the apologetic treatment of everything that is obviously objectionable, whether as doctrine or as fact.

Prof. Briggs's second "barrier" is the dogma of verbal inspiration. Without this, no divine authority, say Drs. Hodge and Warfield and their kind. But they will not pretend that our English version is verbally inspired. In the manuscripts on which its New Testament part is based there are more than 150,000 variations, the most of them unimportant, but many of them far from being so. But the original documents, we

are assured, were verbally inspired. That is a pure assumption in the interest of a foregone conclusion. It is necessary to a certain theory of revelation, which in its turn is necessary to a certain system of theology. There is no such theory in the Bible. There could not be, for no part of the Bible is consciously related to all the rest. No one writer had the aggregation which we call the Bible in his mind. No real scholar, no man of ordinary common sense, will think that Prof. Briggs has overstated the objections to verbal inspiration or the danger of insisting on it as necessary to the authority of the Bible.

The third "barrier" to the divine authority which Prof. Briggs claims for the Bible is authenticity; i.e., the insistence that we must know who wrote a book to know that it is inspired. If this is so, then our certain knowledge that the Bible is inspired is limited to a very little part of it. The persuasion that it is so has made many critics cling to the authenticity of the doubtful books with all the energy of despair. Prof. Briggs is very moderate in his statement when he says that "it is certain that Moses did not write the Pentateuch or Job; Ezra did not write Chronicles, Ezra, or Nehemiah; Jeremiah did not write the Kings or Lamentations; David did not write the Psalter, but only a few of the Psalms; Solomon did not write the Song of Songs or Ecclesiastes, and only a portion of the Proverbs." It is equally certain that Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, or Peter the Second Epistle of Peter, or Daniel the book of Daniel.

But the uncertainties are as fatal to a revelation of authenticities as the negative certainties. And what scholarship worthy of the name will pretend that we are certain who wrote Samuel and Kings and Ruth and Esther, and Matthew and Mark and Luke and John and Acts and Ephesians and the Pastoral Epistles, or Second Thessalonians, or the Epistles of John or Jude or the Apocalypse? No one is certain of these things, except the grossly ignorant and those whose wish is father to their thought. But can we have a Bible of infallible inspiration if we are thus uncertain who wrote the greater part of it? Prof. Briggs's opponents insist that we cannot, and their infallible Bible is already gone. Prof. Briggs insists that we can. This is the difference par excellence

between him and his opponents. And I am bound to say that, from our Unitarian standpoint, it appears that they are right and he is wrong. They are using words with simple, obvious meanings, and he is

not.

We must have external evidence for a special supernatural revelation. Such revelation cannot be predicated of an anonymous literature unless there is a Church supernaturally qualified to indorse it. This is the Roman Catholic claim, which has not an atom of support in logic or in history. Prof. Briggs's infallible Bible is not the infallible Bible of his opponents. Theirs is the entire book: his is the doctrine of faith and the rule of practice it contains.

But the doctrine of faith in the Bible is a variable doctrine. It is one thing in the prophets and another in Job. It is one thing in the Old Testament and another in the New. It is one thing in Paul and another thing in James. And the rule of practice varies quite as much. Does Prof. Briggs believe, because the Bible says so, that poor men should drown their misery in wine, and that it is better not to marry if you can live the ascetic life? No: he believes that so much of the Bible is inspired for us as appeals to our reason and intelligence, so much, no more. But this is the Unitarian, rationalist position. And it is very difficult, if not quite impossible, to see how, with such ideas, Prof. Briggs could make the "Declaration" that he made in taking his new chair of Biblical Theology: "I believe the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be [not merely to contain] the word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice"; nor is it any easier to see how, with the criticisms of the Westminster Confession contained in his "Whither?" he could "solemnly and sincerely receive and adopt the Westminster Confession as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures." I am not ignorant of my friend Newton's teaching "How creeds should be read." It is that we should read anything out of them we please and anything into them we please, and believe as much of the modicum remaining as we like. But I cannot think that this is to receive them "solemnly and sincerely." If this had been the way of history, it might have been much better for

men's bodies and their souls. The former would not have been racked and burned, and the latter would not have been wasted in the endeavor to believe incredible things. The very essence of a creed is its demand for literal conformity. Hence the moral damage of the creeds, both long and short. They have invited boundless ingenuity of interpretation and have been the occasion of much insincerity. We have one of three words in the preamble to the constitution of our National Unitarian Conference, and some say it means one thing and some say it means another. So they have appended an article to say what it does mean and what it doesn't, and now there is some difference of opinion as to the meaning of that. It is dreadful work which the Committee on Revision has done on the Westminster Confession. It is like a new tariff law, which takes off a little here and puts on a little there. All the babies are to be let in free hereafter, which will make all the mature and venerable Presbyterian sinners wish that they had died in infancy. But the doctrine of Biblical inspiration is made much narrower than it was before, so as to shut out such broad views as those of Prof. Briggs. This will make the price of theological sincerity higher than ever. It will cost some ministers their pulpits and some professors their uncomfortable chairs.

Prof. Briggs finds a fourth "barrier" to the authority of Scripture in the doctrine of its inerrancy; i.e., its freedom from any kind of error. He does not particularize, because, if he began, he would not know where to stop. No one pretends that we have an inerrant English Bible. Every scholar knows that it must be different in many thousand particulars from the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. But that, if we had the original documents, they would be inerrant, is again a pure assumption. There is nothing in the history of the Canon that justifies it in the least degree. There is much in the Bible as it stands that is erroneous, and which is so deeply implicated in its structure that, if the original documents could be found to-morrow, it would be no better off. Take, for example, the 1,083 references in the New Testament to the Old. More than 1,000 of them are not to the Old Testament Hebrew, but to the Septuagint Greek translation of it which was

made, we are assured by competent authority, by "men who had forgotten their Hebrew and never learned Greek." But the way in which the New Testament writers use the Old for argument and antitype is even more damaging to their inerrancy than the translation which they use. Wonderful is the fatuity of men who claim inerrancy for a book that has these traits and many others of a similar character. Nowhere is Prof. Briggs more clearly safe within the limits of a conservative criticism than in his doctrine of the Bible's errancy. He might have made his statement twenty times as strong and still have been within these limits.

Prof. Briggs's fifth and sixth "barriers" are those which the revised Confession proposes to make stronger than ever,-miracles and minute prediction. His treatment of the former is the least satisfactory part of his critical work. It subjects the miracles to the stress of his speculative theology. It accepts them as facts, but denies that they are violations of the laws of nature or are intended as such by their recorders. Here we must think that his opponents are more sound than he. Nothing is gained by the endeavor to force from the Bible a confession of our personal opinions or modern speculations. The Bible miracles are meant for violations of natural law. But that is no reason why we should accept them as such. There is no sufficient evidence to commend them to our belief. Prof. Briggs's treatment of prophecy stands over against his treatment of miracles as almost entirely sound and just. With some absurdity about God's "recalling his messages of woe," there is a general acceptance of the teachings of Prof. Kuenen, whose "Prophets and Prophecy in Israel" is the best of all the books that have been written on that matter. The moral earnestness and increasing spirituality of the prophets were a very real prophecy of the New Testament Christianity; and this Prof. Briggs has failed to show, the limitations of his time, perhaps, preventing him.

Thus, in the critical part of his discourse, Prof. Briggs appears not as one who has already attained to the best things of the Higher Criticism, but as one who is diligently following after them. If he is ever rash, it is in allowing too much to the tra

ditional view, or in his rationalistic explanation of miracles, or in his declaration that the errant, unauthentic Bible is the infallible word of God. This general statement, viewed in the light of his particular criticism, impresses us as mere logomachy. The words mean one thing and appear to mean another. They appear to mean that the Bible has some special and peculiar inspiration. They actually mean that so much of it is infallible as appeals irresistibly to our reason and conscience. But to say that is to set up ourselves as infallible judges of the truth, and be every man of us a pope. That so much is inspired which thus irresistibly appeals to us we might willingly allow, taking it for an axiom that whatever is inspiring is inspired. But this is true of all books, not of the Bible only. Prof. Briggs, after he has demolished the various "barriers," goes on to use the Bible as differing, not only in degree, but in kind, from all other books; and he fails to justify his course in doing this. Between the former and the latter parts of his address a great gulf is fixed, which somehow he crosses easily. But we cannot see how ; and he springs no arch, nor swings any pendent floor, by which we may follow him.

In the latter part of his address he gives the outlines of that Biblical theology which he will teach his pupils from his newly constituted chair if he is not turned out of it. He distinguishes his Biblical theology from the systematic theology of the churches and the schools. But is it so very different? It seems not to be in its method, to many of his critics, however different in its results; and it seems to me that they are right. It seems to him that he begins to build his Eiffel Tower from the bottom, from the Bible as a foundation, while they begin to build theirs at the top. They often do that, but his method is not so different from theirs as he would fain believe. The fact is that, as a constructive theologian, Prof. Briggs has much more in common with the speculative dogmaticians whom his soul abhors than as a critic. As a critic, his emancipation from traditional methods has proceeded far; as a constructive theologian, only a little way. He means to use only Bible material in his construction and to follow only Bible plans, but the instinct of systematic theology is in his very bones;

its breath has been his vital air; and it continually asserts itself in the form and method of his work.

With much that is traditional and conventional, there is much that is largely personal. Take the first item of his Biblical theology,—theophanies; i.e., divine manifestations. Evidently, this aspect of the Bible has for him great attraction, while it was that which the Septuagint translators, less superstitious than Prof. Briggs, endeavored diligently to obscure. Nothing else so differentiates Prof. Briggs from Martineau, whom he so much admires, as does his setting of theophanies in the forefront of his Biblical theology. Martineau would set them in the furthest rear, as part of that Apocalyptic Religion" which to his mind is that part of the Bible which is least worthy of our admiration and respect. In what follows concerning the Biblical doctrines of God and man and redemption, we feel continually that our professor, while fondly dreaming that he is seeing things directly as they are in the Bible, is seeing them through the smoke of the Confession, or the fog of systematic theology, or the golden haze of some personal predilection for this or that line of thought. Moreover, he is attempting the impossible,- -to construct a Biblical theology, as if the Bible were a unit, when it is nothing of the kind. The only Biblical theology that is worthy of the name is that which, taking the component parts of it in their chronological order as nearly as may be, draws out the theological significance of one part after another, without any hope of a consistent scheme.

Prof. Briggs's theological use of the Bible is a use which his criticism does not allow. His Higher Criticism, to which his devotion is so great, is but a barren virgin as married to his mind, or it brings forth only the purely formal results of date or authorship, not the spiritual significance of these results. There is nothing in the literary history of the Biblical books that justifies Prof. Briggs's going to them as he does to draw out a system of theology, as if they were the essence of divine authority. They are valuable as showing what men thought in Judea from two to three thousand years ago. So much of this is God's revelation to our souls as approves itself to them as sound and sweet, and as so approving itself, not

because it is between the Bible's covers. There is a kind of atheism in such separation of the Bible from other sacred Scriptures of mankind as Prof. Briggs allows himself. God speaks in that, but in these also, in the measure of their stirring of our minds and their quickening of our hearts.

We must not expect everything at once. The blind man whose eyes were unsealed in the New Testament story at first saw men as trees walking. Prof. Briggs is now in that transitional state. He will see better by and by. In the Italian Renaissance it was everywhere sculpture that was the first to feel the thrill of the new life, but painting was not far behind. So, in our theological new birth, it is everywhere criticism that is the first to feel the thrill of the new life. Prof. Toy, of Cambridge, chief among our scholars, kept his old theology for some time after he had got his new criticism, but at last he let it go. Many have had this order of experience, and Prof. Briggs will furnish no exception to the rule. That principle of correlated growth which obtains so widely in the biological sphere operates in the intellectual and moral world. Many will threaten and oppose, thinking they verily do God service. Let them be true to their convictions. There is no better thing than that. A man can be as noble in his orthodoxy as in his heresy; as courageous, too. But many others, a steadily increasing multitude, will go forward, trusting the Spirit of Truth to lead them by ways they have not known into some deeper knowledge of the love of God and the mystery and grandeur of our human life.

SOME THINGS SCIENCE HAS DONE FOR RELIGION.

There never should be antagonism between religion and science; there cannot be between the higher conception of religion and true science. Whatever errors may be mingled with religion weaken it, tarnish it, obscure its lustre and beauty.

Science is a revelation of truth, classified, demonstrated, and impregnable. Therefore it will stand, though opposed by all the world. Religion is supposed to be truth, though not susceptible of the kind of proof which demonstrates scientific truth. All admit that truth will stand, cannot be over