absolute enslavement of conscience and will, resulting from an overpowering manifestation of the destructive agency of the evil one, through the channel of human personality.

THE TESTIMONY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT TO THE BIBLE. BY JOHN DE WITT (The Presbyterian and Reformed Review).—Both the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches hold and teach that the Bible embodies a supernatural revelation. But the Protestant holds that this revelation is given directly to mankind; the Roman Catholic, that it is given to the Church for mankind,—the Church authenticates it to man by her testimony, and interprets it for man by her celestial wisdom. Out of this difference in their respective doctrines of the rule of faith emerges a profound difference in the religious life of the two great divisions of Western Christendom. Ask an intelligent Roman Catholic the ground of his conviction that the truths of the Bible are the Word of God, and he will reply, "It is because the Church authenticates these teachings by her testimony." Ask the Protestant Christian why he has this conviction, and he will tell you that the Bible is its own witness to him; that since he has become a Christian it reveals itself as truth to his heart and conscience. And if, going further back, he shall explain this new experience, he will tell you that, in the last analysis, it is the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit.

The proposition this writer expounds and defends is that the Holy Spirit, the indwelling God, working in and with the Scriptures on the heart and life of the Christian, testifies to the individual Christian that the Bible is the Word of God. There is an à priori probability, and a strong presumption, that God will accompany a revelation of His will with evidence sufficient to make its acceptance obligatory; and that, to the person who does accept it, He will increase the evidence to a degree that will constitute it a Divine certification. In Scripture, the statements which assure the disciple of the new verification of the Word are closely associated with the Holy Spirit, the indwelling God. He is represented in them as a Teacher, a Witness, a Comforter, a Guide, who, in all His work in the disciple, will confirm the disciple both in his acceptance of the truth, and in his assurance of his own blessed relation to it. Such statements are the assurance of Jesus that when He shall have gone away, God as the Witness to His own revelation will not have gone. God the Holy Spirit will, to the disciple's spirit, bear spiritual and convincing testimony to the revealed truth and will of God.

But what does the Bible mean by the expression, "the Spirit witnessing with our spirits"? In testifying to the truth, the Infinite and Divine Spirit comes into immediate contact with the finite and human spirit; the two beings are in direct communion, the one testifying, the other persuaded and assured by the testimony. But we know absolutely nothing of the methods by which one spirit influences another, without the employment of the senses. We may not think that the Spirit testifies to the Bible by communicating to the Christian a proposition such as "The Bible is the Word of God." Men have, indeed, claimed that they received from God supernatural audible or visible communications; but this is not the Protestant doctrine of the testimony of the Spirit.

The inward witness is not the mere emerging into consciousness of the feeling and assurance that the Bible is the Word of God. This view has been held. The Holy Spirit, working in an ineffable manner upon our hearts, directly and without means, causes that without hesitation we assent to the truths of the Bible; the Spirit thus produces an assurance above all human judgment, an assurance utterly unrelated to human reasoning, and needing for its maintenance no further arguments and testimonies.

John Owen, in criticizing this theory, says, "This hath not the proper nature of a testimony. A Divine work it may be, a Divine testimony it is not."

The teaching of Scripture and of the Church is that the testimony of the Holy Spirit to the Bible is the saving work of the Spirit in individual men, in association with the Bible itself. The Holy Spirit, when applying the benefits of Christ's redemption, saving men from the dominion of sin, works by and with the Word of God; and produces a supernatural experience not only congruous to the Word, but inexplicable and impossible unless the Bible be God's Word. The Holy Spirit, the indwelling God, by and with the Word, creates an experience conformed to the Word, and so, honouring and confirming it, testifies that it is the Word of God. The testimony of the Spirit to the Bible is the testimony of the distinctively Christian experience to Christianity.

Then the greatest duty of the Church is to seek by prayer and every means in its possession the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This is the profoundest need of our time, as indeed of all time.

The testimony of the Spirit, revealed in Christian experience, is no test of the canonicity of Bible books, nor of the inspiration of books. It is the Bible's truth and supreme authority that is authenticated. The question needing consideration, since the indwelling Spirit produces the distinctively Christian experience, is this-Has Christian experience a place among the evidences of Christianity? The apologetic value of the testimony of the Spirit to the Christian himself is absolute. For the testimony of the Spirit is a work. It is the transformation of probable knowledge into real knowledge by experiment or experience. The Christian himself, in his life of prayer, of lofty spiritual aspiration, of purity, etc., is the most convincing evidence of Christianity that the Church can offer to the world to-day.

THE INERTNESS OF SOCIETY. By Professor MATTHIAS H. RICHARDS, D.D. (The Lutheran Quarterly).—A common property of inanimate objects is their inertness: they are possessed of no initiative energy. In the drama of existence all the parts they play are passive ones. The seeming force they have at times is but the logical consequence of their having no force. The law of gravitation is but the creative energy continued, and nothing at all like the volition of a sentient being. Spirit alone has initiative energy.

The value of this inertness of material things, in our dealings with external and inanimate matter, is exceedingly great. They stay where we put them, they move as we impart motion to them, they halt as we block up their pathway. Inertness is, in its relation to our wants and wishes, a force, a power, and is rightly named vis inertia.

There is in human society an attribute that stands palpably over against this inertness of nature, as its counterpart, endowed with corresponding functions of office, working out the same good purpose and beneficent end for mankind. It is the bond that unites the generations, ensures the stability of the race, promotes the onward march of the ages; gives good hope, while it threatens formidable obstacles, to reform and all betterment. It is the constitutional quality. The inertness of human society is no exact equivalent, in its operativeness, of the inertness of matter; for human society is a spiritual, a psychic unity, not a mere physical one. The subject-matter being thus a different one, the operation of this creative energy will be to produce a varying product, while yet essentially the same. And we cannot overlook the fact that man shares, by gift, the power of initiating energy. Thus he overcomes, modifies, accelerates, reinforces, by individual action, this inertness of the great unit of

society of which he is a part. He is both active and passive; and the resultant is the combination of his inertness and his energy.

In these days men are praised overmuch for that which is new, for initiating energy rather than for conserving or maintaining it. Valuable as modern additions to human knowledge may have been, must we not subtract from their actual worth the momentum which society has lost because of this application of initiative energy in the new direction? We have gained most certainly, but not without considerable cost. All energies are very leaky. All machinery will wear out as well as rust out. If you supersede it by new, you have lost only its residue of service, and not its original value. Something of this sort is true also as to the momentum of human society. The energy of beliefs, the vitality of institutions, slows down, unless reinforced, into superstition and unmeaningness. That same energy which is required to reinforce might be used to give new direction, and the actual loss would be only the unexpended part of the social momentum.

After making all allowances, and noting all manner of conditions, it remains that what we call our civilization is an inheritance of the past, far more largely than the original invention of the present. We owe much more of what we are to the momentum due to the inertness of society than we do to the initiative energies which combat it, and to which we are so prone to give all the honour and the glory. This is true on the material side of our civilization, but on other sides also. Our present comfortable attitude in the mitigation of fierce passions, in refined feelings, in more accurate thought, in clearer spiritual vision, is a superstructure that rose slowly upon the foundations of the past. Had not human society kept steadily and inertly onward, instead of breaking off and making interminably new beginnings, we should not have attained to any of these things. Society's inertness is the condition of its entrance into the inheritance so richly left it; and this very inertness is the source of its momentum, its stability, its progress. Even when men pass new laws and make new constitutions, they keep on living a long while under the old ones. We acknowledge the force of habit in the individual, and national institutions are simply concurrent individual habits made all the more forceful because it requires greater energy to do and to be different from others than to mind and to do the same things.

Social inertness, however, will grow less as educated intelligence is more generally diffused throughout a people. It will be confined to fewer things and more essential matters, and in these it will grow stronger and stronger, as it should. It will be reinforced by the initiative energy of an individual persuasion arrived at by an independent investigation which has confirmed the old truth; and there is no greater force than this. But outside of these essential truths thus held with more intense persistence there will be tolerance, greater desire for personal freedom, less shock at finding others differing with us or from us. Intelligence is cosmopolitan, and expectant of differences; it realizes in its own more finely developed being that this is natural. Unless it runs into puny sentimentalism, it does not offer itself as a convert to the views of others, but it is willing to believe that others may be in earnest also, and respects them for it.

COMMON ERRORS AS TO THE RELATIONS OF SCIENCE AND FAITH. By GEORGE MACLOSKIE (The Presbyterian and Reformed Review).-In view of the relative independence of the testimony for religious and scientific doctrines, all that should be expected is a general harmony; and to press for excessive conformity is dangerous. In fact, no Bound method of homologizing the Bible and natural science has been discovered; nor was it ever possible in the formative stages of science to effect their harmony. We

must carefully keep our interpretations of Scripture untainted by our scientific ideals, and we must keep our science clear of theological glosses.

Neither reason nor Holy Scripture gives us any warranty for restraining scientific researches or speculations; and any attempt to restrain them proves our ignorance of the laws of investigation, and is a usurpation of the rights of human thought. Men have used wrong methods, and arrived at valuable results. Scientific inquirers claim the right to go wrong, to use wrong methods, if these appear the best, and not to be challenged as for a moral delinquency. The investigator may be astray in his views of nature, may be biassed in his mode of drawing inferences, may be ignorant of the religious tendency of his opinions. But his erroneous assumptions may be a necessary step in his progress, and we must let him follow out his own plans.

The right to investigate and to speculate carries with it the right to publish the speculations at any stage, and however crude. It rarely happens that one man can see all the bearings of the facts or theories on which his mind is occupied ; and a single investigator rarely completes a subject of his research. It is by the publication of his ideas that others are able to confirm or confute him. The constant appeal to verifications is characteristic of scientific theory. What is called the higher criticism in literature is weak in this respect, at least as to its positive side of emendations, and distributing fragments to hypothetical authors. Out of several possible theories about the origin of a book, the tests for determining which is the right view are rarely available; and the scientific method is to regard hypotheses as only hypothetical until we can verify them by tangible evidence.

The enemies as well as the friends of religion are sometimes inclined to regard every novel scientific doctrine as necessarily atheistical. Some hail the new dogma as a weapon of destruction; others denounce it as perilous; and both parties appeal to each other for confirmation of the opinion that the new dogma and the old faith cannot coexist. A very foolish and sinful practice is that of taking flings at the departments of science that are subjects of popular suspicion. A learned professor recently assailed geology on the heavy charge that within the last century the geologists have changed their views two hundred times. But the fact of many changes redounds to the credit of science, if these changes, though limping and often stumbling, are on the whole progressive. A living science is always undergoing change, just as the living body is in a continual flux; by many tentative efforts after light and truth, often with steps backwards, the research goes into new fields. A perfect science, no longer changing, is dead-useful, perhaps, to guide Chinese artisans in its applications, but unworthy of further research.

If any man can prove that evolution is false, he will find a ready hearing in scientific circles. But the trend of testimony goes strongly in the opposite direction; and men are rendering a poor service to religion who attempt to get up an issue between it and evolution. Worthy men, too, often prejudice youth against Christianity by making its defence rest on their misapprehensions; and many arguments offered to shield theology from new scientific theories will, when examined, be found to be the revival of the exploded theories of Cuvier and his followers.

It is wrong to denounce scientific work because of the infidelity of some of its disciples. Science is not God's way of saving men from sin, and it welcomes to its realm believers and unbelievers. The error of the "evil tendency" objection would merit a long discussion. Men brand unwelcome doctrines as having an evil tendency when they see no direct answer to them. We cannot satisfactorily estimate tendencies. If the evidence is sufficient, we may receive the doctrine, and leave the tendency to take care of itself.

It is sometimes an error to condemn a book because you do not accept its conclu-sions. If it shows honest research, it may be valuable and deserving of honour, though the author failed in the last stage.

A mischievous error bears on the relation of Divine providence to physical causation. Able men have supposed that the less science you find in things, the more Divinity belongs to them. Some have seemed to think that Providence is less providential, and miracles less miraculous, if natural causation enters in any degree. We cannot explain how the Divine Being operates upon nature.

It is a mistake to assume that the conflict between science and faith is only mischievous. Christianity owes to science the overthrow of superstitions, and greatly improved conceptions of the works of God, also new confirmations of Scripture, and refutations of once dominant idolatries.

CURRENT GERMAN THOUGHT.

THE PATRIARCHS OF ISRAEL HISTORICAL. By Dr. O. ZöcKLER, Greifswald (Bew. d. Glaubens, 1894, February).-H. Schultz leaves it undecided to what extent the name and life of Abraham are historically trustworthy (Old Testament Theology). ProfessorJ. Meinhold of Bonn, in a recent pamphlet (Wider den Kleinglauben), rejects such half measures, asserting that "for an historical sketch of the beginnings of Israel's history and religion, the patriarchal times and what we are told of them fall altogether aside;" that "the patriarchs are nothing but ideal figures, their relation to Yahveh is simply a reflection of the fellowship between Yahveh and His people in the best age-about B. c. 800;" that "Abraham the father of the faithful, Israel the striver with God, etc., are really the children of Israel's phantasy under the influence of the prophetic spirit;" in short, that the historical worth of the patriarchal history has no religious importance, and that it is a sign of little faith to think so. He says, "It is out of place to draw a picture of the development of Israel's early history, taken mainly from a source which, even according to Delitzsch, belongs to about B.C. 900-800, and so a thousand years distant from the things related. (According to Gen. xiv., Abram must be placed about B.C. 2270-2250.) What should we say of an historian who took as the basis of a description of Charlemagne's days a narrative of the present century, without knowing or using any sources of those days? It is still more out of place to take the historical course from a mosaic of the most diverse and contradictory works, and present this as a history of the kingdom of God, as Köhler does (Lehrb. d. bibl. Gesch.)."

1. These sentences contain some things that are incorrect in fact, and some that are one-sided and misleading, e.g. the assertion of an interval of more than a thousand years between the time of Abraham and that of the oldest Pentateuch-source (B.c. 2250-900 or 800). To put back Abraham to the twenty-third century B.C. is tocontradict all indications of time in Genesis and the following books. The same is true of the assertion that nearly a thousand years may have passed between Abraham and the Exodus, which is put just after Rameses II., and therefore into the second half of the fourteenth century B.C. (cf. Exod. xii. 40 with Gen. xxv. 7; xxxv. 28; xlvi. 28; 1. 28, ff.). And Gen. xiv. contains nothing, rightly considered, obliging us to put back Abraham's date several centuries beyond the usually received time. That Chedorlaomer is a genuine Elamite compound (Kudur and lagamar), that a royal race of Kudurides reigned in Elam, that one of these may be placed about B.C. 2250, are