distinction is, nevertheless, very commonly drawn between foc as the person and daípov as the power or influence of the person; so that even in Homer daíuwv is not quite on a par with tóc. In post-Homeric Greek this connotation of inferiority in daíuwv becomes more definite, till, from being regarded as links between the divine and the human, the daiμoves come to share the deficiencies of humanity, and to be attached often to individuals or to families, sometimes as good genii, but much more frequently as bad. The descending scale-inferiority, deterioration, evil mixed with good, evil more frequent than good-finds its lowest depth in sacred literature, where daíuwv (except in four places in the New Testament) has been entirely supplanted by dauóviov, and has become, both in the one form and in the other, almost without exception evil spirit, and in the New Testament most generally evil spirit possessing men. It is not easy

to be satisfied with the idea that Paul steps aside from this almost invariable sacred usage, justified as it is by parallels in profane Greek, and identifies dauóvia and Osoì in such a way that "partakers with the ' lemons" simply means "guests of the [non-existent] gods;" especially when we pay regard, to the context as considered above.

3. My contention that the dauóvia of the passage are real beings and evil spirits is supported by Paul's angelology and demonology in its relation to the Jewish views of the time. Without tarring Paul with the brush of rabbinical or apocalyptic extravagance, we may fairly admit that he was to some extent a man of his day and nation in his conceptions of the spirit-world, especially as many of his phrases on this subject are very dark and mysterious without the side-light thrown upon them by this principle of interpretation. The other notable passage to which Dr. Beyschlag refers-1 Cor. viii. 5, "For though there be so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth, as there are gods many, and lords many' --appears to me to lose its point if we do not recognize therein Paul's acceptance of the Jewish belief in what Ritschl described as "a class of angels neither definitely good nor definitely bad, who could stand in relative opposition to God." The world was held to be, in some degree at any rate, in the hands of these angels (the "watchers," as the highest of them are called over and over again in the Book of Henoch) as media of God's government; and that they were called gods and lords is suggested by such Old Testament passages as Ps. lxxxii. 1, "Jehovah judges amidst the gods" (where the LXX. and Peshittỏ translate by "angels"); Deut. x. 17, "The Lord your God is God of the gods, and Lord of the lords; and Ps. cxxxvi. 2, 3, "O give thanks unto the God of the gods. . . O give thanks unto the Lord of the lords; " passages passages which are illustrated by Clement of Alexandria's citation from the Apocalypse of Zephaniah, "And the spirit took me up and bore me up to the fifth heaven, and I beheld angels called lords (kupíove)." The "relative opposition to God," of which Ritschl speaks, rested in a certain independence in the discharge 1 Compare on this subject Everling, Die Paulinische Angelologie und Dümonologie.

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of their functions, so that, in some cases, their service was an imperfect representation of God, in other cases an actual misrepresentation of Him, and consequently a veiling rather than a revealing of Him. Thus the transmission of the imperfect and transitory dispensation of the Law is, in Gal. iii. 19, attributed by Paul to angels; and the perplexing passage (Col. ii. 15) where Christ is said to have "stripped off from Himself the principalities and the powers, and made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in [His cross]" (or, as it may be otherwise worded, "exhibited them in their real nature, leading them in His triumphal train "), may possibly find its elucidation in the idea that these apxai and ovora had hidden His personal activity, and even attracted worship to themselves (compare the "worshipping of angels," three verses later). Such an idea makes it easier to understand the passages where it is said that "in the name of Jesus every knee shall bow of things in the heavens" (Phil. ii. 10), and that the Father has "made Him sit at His right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion" (Eph. i. 20, 21). Thus the relative independence or opposition becomes at last entire subordination. Consistent with all this is Paul's view that Christ's redemption is requisite for things in heaven as well as things on the earth (Col. i. 20; compare the "thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers" of ver. 16), and that angels will be judged at last (1 Cor. vi. 3); as wel his implication that the angels watching over Christian worship are subje to temptation (1 Cor. xi. 10), and that the "angels" helping to constitut the "world" to which the apostles were "made a spectacle," were, like the "men," a gazing multitude of mixed quality (1 Cor. iv. 9). Last of all, through the misuse of their independence, some had come into an opposition no longer relative, but absolute, and into functions positively pernicious. These may be compared with the "angels that sinned" (2 Pet. ii. 4), the "angels that kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation" (Jude 6), and Paul's "spiritual powers of wickedness in the heavenly places," "the principalities, the powers, the worldrulers of this darkness" (Eph. vi. 12), with which the Christian had to wrestle. These, and not "flesh and blood," were the great hostile reality in the Christian warfare. The "heavenly places," the places above the earth, the realms of the air, were the places of their habitation, and over them reigned "the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that now worketh in the sons of disobedience." Now, these places were, in the Jewish view, just the regions inhabited by the daóva; and "the prince of the power of the air," their ruler, was Satan. (Cf. Matt. ix. 34, "He casteth out the demons by the prince of the demons; " Matt. xii. 24, "Beelzebub, the prince of the demons; " Matt. xii. 26, " If Satan cast out Satan;" Luke x. 18, "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven;" John xii. 31, "Now shall the prince of this world be cast out;" cf. Paul's "the god of this age," 2 Cor. iv. 4. And for the air as the habitation of Satan and the demons, compare Testament of the XII. Patriarchs, Levi, c. 3,

where Beliar is called "the spirit of the air;" Ascensio Isaiae, vii. and x., where the prince of this world and the demons, Sammael and his powers, dwell in the firmament, i.e. the air. And it is very much to the point to notice that, when Paul cries out, 2 Cor. vi. 15, 16, "What concord hath Christ with Beliar?" he follows it up with, "What agreement hath a temple of God with idols?" and is referring apparently, as in 1 Cor. x., to the impure cultus of idol-worship, as prompted and fostered by demonic power.)

When all this evidence has been accorded its due weight, it will be hard to avoid the feeling that Paul shared the belief of his time, at any rate to this extent-that, if the gods of the heathen were not themselves demons, demonic influence was potent in the background of idolatry; and it will take a stronger argument than that derived from Paul's non-use of dauóvia elsewhere, to prove that evil spirits were not in his thought in 1 Cor. x. as the abettors of the pollution and excess which stamped the feasts in honour of the idols.

THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT.

THE PRELIMINARIES OF DOGMATIC THEOLOGY.

II. THE FACULTIES BY WHICH RELIGIOUS TRUTH IS APPREHENDED. BY REV. W. S. SWAYNE, M.A.

It is a very common assumption that whereas the sciences fall under the scope of reason, religious truth is to be apprehended only by faith. It is, moreover, very generally felt, though not perhaps so openly expressed, that whereas reason is certain in its procedure and results, the methods of faith are in the highest degree precarious and uncertain, so that when, as not unfrequently is the case, controversy arises between faith and reason, there can be no question on which side the truth is to be found.

Such a position really implies a complete misapprehension of the province of both reason and faith, and of the faculties by which religious truth is apprehended. Reason is as necessary to the apprehension of religious, as of any other form of truth. But spiritual truth is not and could not be apprehended by reason only. In this respect spiritual truth does not stand alone. It is true of all forms of truth that they can only be grasped when the exercise of reason has been preceded by an act of observation. This becomes immediately obvious when the true nature of reason is considered. Reason is that faculty which draws inferences, either deductively from general principles or inductively from a mass of observed facts. It is the faculty which is dealt with in formal treatises on logic under the title of "The Science or Art of Reasoning." But antecedent to the process of reason must be the process of observation. It is very justly remarked by Mill that it is not the province of logic, but

rather the duty of intellectual education, to teach what to observe and how to observe.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate the importance to reason of the preliminary act of observation. The men who in every age have contributed most largely to the advance of truth have not been so much correct reasoners as close and accurate observers. A trained faculty of observation is at least as important, therefore, to the inquirer as a logical mind. It is this faculty which supplies the facts with which reason afterwards deals, ascending from facts to principles, and again descending from principles to facts. Apart from such a trained faculty of observation, reason is condemned to tread a weary and unproductive round.

This has been abundantly exemplified by the history of the arts and the sciences. It was the fundamental error of the ancient Greek physical philosophers, that they did not humble themselves to observe nature, but began by forming fanciful hypotheses. One would assume that the primal element was fire; another, water; another, air. The arguments which were based upon such hypotheses, however in themselves reasonable, naturally and inevitably led to nothing-to nothing, at any rate, of any account to the human race. The same fault vitiated the speculation of the few thinkers who gave their attention to natural philosophy during the Middle Ages. The devotion, the intellectual subtilty they displayed deserved success; they did not, however, achieve it, because their feet were not based on the firm ground of careful and accurate observation.

The publication of the Novum Organum by our own Francis Bacon was the inauguration of a new and more hopeful epoch. "Go back to Nature," he said; "study her, accumulate facts; do not form baseless hypotheses, but patiently proceed from facts to principles." Man, however great his intellectual supremacy, cannot force his own ideas upon Nature; he is, after all, only naturæ minister et interpres, Nature can be only conquered by obeying her.

At the very outset of the Novum Organum, Bacon, however, recognizes that there are other facts which are worthy of the observation of intelligent beings besides those of the material universe. Man is able to contemplate himself, to observe the mental, moral, and spiritual processes of his own nature. Whatever is, is a fact. The religious beliefs and spiritual aspirations of man's nature are as much facts as the motions of the planets or the growth and structure of a living organism. Thus Bacon begins his magnum opus with the statement, "Homo, naturæ minister et interpres, tantum facit et intelligit quantum de naturæ ordine re vel mente observaverit ; nec amplius scit, aut potest."

It has been too often forgotten, especially by the aggressively antiChristian school of scientists, that man is quite as much justified in observing the processes of his own nature (mente) as the processes of the external world (re), and that it is as unscientific wilfully to ignore the persistent religious faith and aspiration of mankind as it was for

the ecclesiastical authorities of the period to ignore the discoveries of Galileo.

Something more, however, is needed than merely to observe; the really scientific man is he who has a trained faculty of observation, who knows what to observe, and how. Apples had fallen to the ground for countless centuries, until this everyday occurrence caught the eye and arrested the attention of Isaac Newton. Steam had lifted the kettle-lid from the days when man began to be a cooking animal, but it needed a James Watt to deduce the principle of the steam-engine. Other eyes besides those of Columbus saw the eastward-drifting seaweed, but to Columbus the flotsam of the ocean was vocal, while to others it was speechless. Century after century the myriad tribes of earthworms had been fulfilling their wonderful place in the economy of this wonderful world, until the thoughtful eye of Darwin fell on them, and revealed their dignity and importance to the unobservant multitude. So it has ever been. The deductive and constructive reason waits upon the trained power of observation, and is powerless without it.

If we turn from science to art, we find the same principle equally true. The tendency has ever been observable in art to depart from nature and to follow the style or even the peculiarities of some one master mind. All great movements in art have been based upon a return to nature. Ruskin has taught us the importance in art of the shepherd-boy Giotto, who dared to shake himself free from the trammels of an artificial style, and paint what he saw. The whole history of art testifies, not merely to the importance of imagination, manual dexterity, or reason, but to the prior necessity of the trained power of observation. The artist teaches us what to see. He catches, as it were, a smile on the fair face of nature which we should not otherwise have observed, but which we see to be true enough to nature when it is once pointed out to us. So also that master of portrait-painting, Professor Herkomer, is never weary of pointing out that portrait-painting is not merely taking a likeness, or picture-making; it is interpretative. The portrait-painter is not merely naturæ minister, but also interpres, and all great portraits are a veritable revelation, not only to the world, but sometimes even to the subjects of them. The great artist differs from his lesser brethren, not merely because he has a more perfect control of the technique of his art than others, not merely because he has a higher and more perfect sense of beauty, but chiefly because he sees more than other men. Nature delivers up her secrets to him, as in another way she does to the scientific observer.

Men seem to differ from one another quite as much in the power of observation as in the reasoning faculty. Kingsley has taught us this in the parable of "eyes and no eyes." Still more do those whose power of observation is trained differ from those whose observing powers have never been guided and stimulated. The student of architecture passes through a great cathedral, and as his eye falls upon pillar and arch and