not hesitate to pronounce it the first of helps to the understanding of the Greek Testament. We may well take pride it as a product of American scholarship, and we anticipate with satisfaction the stimulus it will give to New Testament study. Above all we are thankful for the good hope that it will promote true Christian unity, strengthen the defenses of the faith, and advance the kingdom of Christ, and that thus through it the word of the Lord shall run and be glorified.*

Some readers of the Review who are earnest students of the Greek Testament, and yet remote from centers of learning, may be glad to consult the following brief and practical list of critical helps for this study. Westcott and Hort's edition of the Greek Testament (Vol. I coutaining the text, and Vol. II embracing an Introduction on textual criticism, and an appendix, Harper or Macmillan). Gardiner's or Robinson's Greek Harmony of the Gospels. The former is published by Draper, of Andover, and has the clearest arrangement. The latter, revised by Professor Riddle in 1885, is somewhat cheaper and very excellent. Thayer's Lexicon. Winer's New Testament Grammar. Thayer's edition published by Draper, Andover, is the best for American students. The next grammar to be bought should be Buttmann's Grammar of the New Testament, translated by Thayer (Draper, Andover); the next, T. S. Green's Grammar and Critical Notes (Bagster). A Greek concordance should come next. Hudson's is cheap and highly recommended by some, but it seems to me to involve more waste of time than economy of money. The Englishman's Greek Concordance (Bagster) is best for those who do not read Greek readily, but Bruder's (Leipsic), giving the immediate connection in Greek, is incomparably the best for others. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament. The edition of Van Ess (Leipsic) is good and contains the Old Testament Apocrypha. Tischendorf's edition is the best and more expensive. Unfortunately the only concordance of the Septuagint (that of Trommius) is too rare and expensive for most ministers' libraries. Trench's New Testament Synonyms (Macmillan). Cremer's Biblico-theological Lexicon of the New Testament Greek. Translation of the second German edition by the Clarks, Edinburgh. Also an appendix with additions from the fourth German. The German editions are much cheaper, fuller, and more conveniently arranged. Terry's Hermeneutics (Phillips & Hunt) will prove a very helpful guide to correct methods of interpretation. The Bible dictionaries and cyclopedias, and lives of Christ and Paul, are too well known to require enumeration. Commentaries need an article or book for treatment, but Meyer, Ellicott, Morison, Lightfoot, and Beet are worthy of special mention.

ART. VI. — SOME CAUSES OF THE WANT OF SUCCESS OF THE PULPIT.

THE gracious challenge of a prophet to rebellious Israel to come and reason with the Lord, with assurance that they should be delivered from their sins--and the complaint of another one, that while abundant provisions were made for their healing, "the hurt of the daughter of my people" was not "recovered," are still the burden of complaint among those who seek to call men to repentance and salvation.

A very high place is justly assigned to the preaching of the Gospel among the agencies ordained for saving men. The pulpit has ever been the Church's chief agency for spiritual awakening and persuasion, and for Christian edification. The history of the Church agrees with this view of the subject. The pulpit is, and ever has been, recognized as the first among ordained agencies for the propagation and the conservation of the Gospel.

Respecting the pulpit of the present time-that is, the evangelical Protestant pulpit-two preliminary remarks may be made, each qualifying the other:

First. It is only the simple truth to acknowledge both. its general fidelity and its ability.

Second. That there is a great, and therefore a lamentable failure on its part to measure up to the full possibilities of the required work, and to answer to its demands.

To a certain extent the ministry is doing a good work, for which it should be commended; but it is equally evident that it is coming very short of its possibilities, and that there is lack where there should be abundance. And this deficiency is the more to be deprecated because of the preciousness of the interests that are made to suffer, and which can be secured by no other means. Our own times have also their own special infelicities, which require the first and most careful consideration. It is confessed by all that the house of God is much less attractive to the unconverted than formerlythat fewer of that class are now found at its services-and so, to the same extent, the message of the pulpit fails to reach those who especially need to hear it, and those, too, to

whom it was first of all sent. This lack of unconverted persons in our congregations is practically, but perhaps unconsciously, recognized by the preachers themselves, and they accordingly, as a rule, shape their ministrations to the spiritual conditions and requirements of believers-converted persons.

That this is not as it should be all will grant; and especially should all Methodist ministers cry out against it, for they are taught to adapt their preaching primarily to the unsaved. Of the four principal rules respecting the "Matter and Manner of Preaching" given in the Methodist Discipline, the first three of them refer evidently to preaching to those who have not accepted the Gospel. They are (1.) To convince of sin; (2.) To offer Christ; (3.) To invite. The practical purpose of these three things is to awaken in the consciences of the unconverted a sense of sin and guilt and danger, and then to such awakened ones to offer Christ as a sacrifice for sin, through whom sinners may be saved. And to this simple exposition of the truth must be added earnest appeals to persuade sinners to be saved by Christ. After these, in the order of sequence (if not of importance), comes the fourth direction, which with many preachers is almost the first and the last, "to build up."

May it not, then, be asked whether there is not good cause to suspect that because of the failure to deal with the primary Christian doctrines-sin, atonement, and repentance-our preaching fails to minister to the felt wants of souls who are unconsciously hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and that, therefore, they neglect the house of God? And besides this, since the Christian life is a continuous conviction of sin and a life-long repentance, at every point of which there is need of Christ in all his saving offices, the same preaching that best suits the case of the unsaved is often the best adapted for Christian nurture and edification.

It is not assumed that the failures spoken of are either universal in extent or complete in their degree, and yet it is obvious that they exist, and, therefore, they are to be deprecated. Nor can it be denied that the extent to which they prevail is far from being inconsiderable. Both the ability and the sincerity of the ministry of our times are readily and cheerfully conceded; nor is it to be charged that, to any great extent, it is harmed by speculative departures from the truth; and yet

there is a general confession that the preaching of the Gospel is failing, to a lamentable extent, to accomplish its saving purpose among men. To find out some of the causes of this failure, and so to suggest a remedy, is the purpose to which our further thoughts and discussions are to be directed.

Among these causes may be named as one, and an important one, the prevalent failure to clearly set forth and to earnestly emphasize the distinctively evangelical doctrines of the Gospel.

What these are presumed to be has been already indicated. Among them must be included, and as a kind of keystone to the arch, the doctrine of sin as a fact in man's spiritual being and in his life, causing his separation from God, and involving him in a condition of spiritual death, and bringing him into condemnation with God; and so exposing him to eternal perdition. This, too, prepares the way for the doctrine of Christ and his salvation; his sacrificial death as a sin-offering; it also calls for repentance and prayer in the name of Christ, and for the exercise of saving faith. All of these things quite certainly enter into the composition of the sermons that we hear, but they do not sufficiently constitute the burden of the lessons and warnings of the pulpit. It is not that our preachers have ceased to hold to these doctrines, though there may be cause to suspect that they are often held somewhat loosely and apprehended only indefinitely, and perhaps they are taught with "bated breath" and damaging qualifications. And here it may not be out of place to notice that, in order to effectually eliminate any given doctrine from a system of theology, it is not necessary to openly antagonize it-to simply fail to declare it is enough. Only by positive statements and assertions, with conclusive proofs, explicitly declared and earnestly reiterated, can the truths of the Gospel be made to keep their place in the popular belief, so that they shall operate as spiritual forces among men. Any article of faith that may be withdrawn from public notice by the silence of the pulpit respecting it will, in not a very long time, disappear from the popular thought and cease to be practically effective. By this process the doctrine of predestination, which was once made so distinctively promi nent, has very largely disappeared from most of the nominally Calvinistic pulpits of the present day, and from the minds of

the people; and it is the opposite of impossible that similar changes in respect to other doctrines have occurred in another class of pulpits.

This obscuration of certain forms of religious thought and doctrinal conceptions, with its deadening influence upon the sensibilities, usually occurs along well ascertained lines; and as the doctrine concerning SIN lies at the foundation of the theology of the Gospel, so this decadence of faith commonly first manifests itself at that point. The word SIN is one of those best known in all the popular vocabulary, and it may be added, without fear of successful contradiction, that it is among the least adequately understood. Sin, in the common conception, is simply a wrong action; and men are accounted sinners in proportion to the number and atrocity of such actions committed by them; and the test of sin is usually the consensus of public opinion. But the scriptural idea of sin, while it covers all these, reaches down into man's spiritual nature, so recognizing sin as a property of the soul-the spiritual self. To this conception of the case the quickened conscience of the spiritually awakened sinner instinctively responds. The psalmist, when confronted with a specifical act of wrong-doing, being reproved both by the voice of the prophet and the light of the Holy Spirit, dwelt but for a moment upon his one great overt crime, but in his deep penitence of soul he thought only of the sin in which his mother conceived him-now revealed in a concrete form; the connatural iniquity of his soul. Paul, in his Epistle to the Romans, detects and designates "the law of sin in his members" as something more original and constant than any form of outward actions-a "body of death" from which only divine power, through Christ's death, could bring deliverance. The guilt of original sin is a doctrinal conception that has been coeval and co-extensive with the Christian consciousness. As an article of faith, it is in the largest sense catholic and orthodox. It is embodied in the confessions and rituals and institutions of the three great divisions of the Church-the Roman, the Greek, and the Protestantand it has been openly and formally rejected only in company with the other great and central truths of the Gospel. It was emphasized by Luther and his coadjutors, and was firmly imbedded in all their creeds and confessions; and upon this, as