God to placate, no divine demon to send Him to such a death. The gates swing outward to all God's children now. When the prodigal comes to himself, and the Father's love breaks in on him, and he turns around and goes home, the at-onement is complete. The power is not in the blood, but in the love. When we look for healing in the material blood we are waterlogged with the symbol. How sadly the Christian ages have overstimulated a supposed efficacy in the blood in an effort to get out of it a meaning and a merit which was never there. The crucifixion of Christ gives awful emphasis to a cosmic fact. The divine love atones and makes moral distinctions clear, and becomes boundless in its power the moment a sinner flies to it for refuge and rest and service.

CHAPTER XV.

PROGRESSIVE INTERPRETATIONS.

The Right Mental Perspective.

We see no reason why the same principles of interpretation should not apply to the records of a divine revelation as are applied to any piece of Oriental writing. The thing to be aimed at, with any ancient document, is a continuous understanding of it. If the message is a thing of life, usually it is shunted out of a dead language into a new one, and from one language to another. Its method, style of thought, images, figures, rhetoric, with the coloring which it has received from the outward intellectual conditions of its production, are carried over, to a degree, into new language expressions. An understanding of facts like these is an understanding of the writing. It is always human. The grammar and the dictionary are always necessary helps to get at the meaning of any document; but certain classes of writings do not reveal all their meaning in that way. Esop's Fables say one thing and mean another.

They are very untrue to fact, but very true to life. It would be absurd to force them to mean what they say. The reader usually has no difficulty with these rich, wholesome sayings. Why does "Don Quixote" live through the generations? The narrative, on the face of it, ought to be buried for its arrant nonsense. Is it a fool fighting windmills? That puts the method of the book in front of its meaning. The serious business of "Don Quixote" is to incorporate some living lessons of its age. It is a satire on mediæval extravagances. It laughs to scorn a bombastic chivalry. There are good reasons in the book why we can not possibly have derision for its jangled intellect. Is Dante's "Inferno" a trip to perdition and back? Is it a disgusting piece of realism? The world refuses to let it die, notwithstanding a lack of relish for its gruesome images, because in the dramatic narrative are noble lessons and an austere morality.

In the same way myths, parables, allegories, fables, visions, dreams may have in them imperishable values. It is often no more than a child's work to distinguish the substance of a writing from its form. The form may be felicitous or not-it is the substance which gives it per

manence. Kipling says the magic of literature is in the words, and not in the man. He ought to know; but, indeed, words go together by no trick. They may have a wizardry of their own, but if they are not the voices of a life-if they convey no flame of thought, no glow of affection-they become a hollow, noisy mouthing. A piece of literature is not an assemblage of words fitly chosen. It is not anything material. The form may be overdrawn, and yet justified if it grips vividly the idea.

No one knows who wrote "The Arabian Nights." The author long ago received recognition of his genius, and that is sufficient. He was not a recluse or a sleepy head. The book is still a classic, of its kind, even among Western peoples. Children are entranced by the wonders of these stories. Grown folks are charmed by the odorous air of Araby which blows through its pages. Its dreamy images have brought into intellectual unity the legends and folk-lore of a thousand years of the history of a corrupt and indolent people. When we wish to feel a Simon-pure Moslem pulse, we read the Thousand and One Nights rather than formal history.

Who wrote the Book of Genesis? Inasmuch

as nobody knows, the reader ought to be released from any bondage to the letter of it and feel free to ask the blunt question, "What does Genesis mean?" No document so old as that could have been preserved so long unless it had a message for the life of man. Is it the record of the rather swift business of shaping the earth in six work days? Is it Adam made out of a pinch of dust? Is it Eve made out of Adam's rib? Is it the snake standing on end? Is it a text-book in geology? It is well known to scholarship that Genesis, grammatically interpreted, will not stand any scientific test. Those who put it to such a test have not yet learned to read an Oriental document. When they split hairs between the west and northwest sides, and then decide to let the whole of it go the way of "Homer's Legends," what will they do with that in Genesis which makes it live through the centuries? God, creation, moral government, human responsibility— the sabbatic day? If they let these go they will go mad! Genesis means God, creation, moral government, human responsibility-the institution of the Sabbath. These make it the heaviest weighted document in print. And when we consider the adaptation of a document to people in