trary good pleasure of the Almighty; a decree that has condemned the majority of every generation to eternal misery, and that will continue so to condemn them to the end of time. This is the most frightful doctrine that the intellect of man has ever conceived—even Calvin had the grace to declare it "horrible," while he maintained it to be true. And the real, Simon-pure Calvinism insists that, in the eternal counsels of God, this decree to elect preceded the decree to create; so that God deliberately brought the human race into existence with the express purpose of damning the greater part of it. This doctrine imputes to God a cruelty more fiendish than even a Kaiser and his minions were able to devise; yet as a climax its advocates have the impudence to say that this is all for the "glory" of God! The blasphemy of such a doctrine is even greater than its horror. Where is the loving Father of Jesus, who does not will that one of his little ones shall perish? Ah, says the Calvinist, the "little ones" of Jesus are the "elect" of Paul. But, dear sir, who told you so? Neither Jesus nor Paul, of a certainty.

Election of some to life and of some to death is a doctrine utterly incompatible with the conception of God as Father, and not easy to reconcile even with the idea of God as King. A father must have no favorites among his children; a king should treat all his subjects with impartial justice. True, fathers do have favorite children and kings are often unjust; but that is because men are fallible and peccable. We recognize and condemn such things as shortcomings, failures to realize our highest ideals of even earthly relations; how then do we dare attribute them to God? According to Jesus, man is by nature the child of God and never loses this status, though he may ignore or deny it. However far the country into which he may wander, it is always open to him to return to his Father and be reinstated in home and love. Theology sees in man one who is by nature a child of wrath,

the object of God's abhorrence and vengeance. A few become adopted sons, by the Father's choice, just as, in Roman law, one not a son by blood became one in law by act of the paterfamilias.

If such could be shown to be the teaching of Paul, he could no longer be accepted as a religious teacher of the Christian world. The God of orthodoxy can no more be ours than the German God. The day is long past when such a theology can be believed. We know today that Jesus understood God better than John Calvin did. But it is by no means certain that such theology is contained in Paul's writings, fairly interpreted; he has had fathered upon him many things that he never taught, for which he should not be held responsible. Paul does teach a doctrine of election, not an election to eternal life or death, but an election to service. God has chosen all men to salvation, but he has chosen a certain few to be the special means of making salvation known and available to the rest. In one sense all Israel was so chosen, "because to them were committed the oracles of God." The divine election was not for the salvation of the elect, but for the salvation of men generally. In Abraham, not merely his descendants, but all the nations were to be blessed.

Theology has hitherto been a deductive science like geometry, a system logically perfect, a chain of inferences from a few definitions and axioms. Theology should be an inductive science, like physics or chemistry. Human experience of what God and man are should furnish its fundamental material, from which its first principles should be obtained by induction. Deduction should be limited to inferences properly drawn from these materials. So, for example, a doctrine of divine decrees cannot be deducted from assumed facts about God and his plans, or metaphysical speculations about his mental processes, or from assumptions regarding a divine "nature" of which we know less than nothing; what God has "decreed" must

be learned by patient induction from the facts of nature and history, in which he has given us the only trustworthy revelation of himself. The Bible is of course a most important part of this historical revelation, but it is not the whole.

CHAPTER IX

PAUL THE SPECULATIVE THEOLOGIAN

I

It is in regard to the forgiveness of sins that Jesus and Paul differ most. So little was Jesus a theologian, that in regard to all the "great doctrines"-esteemed so essential by theologians, ancient and modern, that to deny them is to deprive one of right to call himself a Christian-the nominal founder of Christianity either said nothing at all, or so little and so vaguely as to make it impossible to say just what he did mean. Impossible, of course, for any but a theologian. And the theologians by no means agree among themselves as to what he did mean, while agreeing that he meant something. It is sheer fact, with no whit of exaggeration, that if we had for the documents of our religion only the Gospels, nobody could formulate a Scriptural doctrine of the Trinity, Predestination, Original Sin, Atonement or Justification by faith. What most people call "the gospel" is not in the Gospels.

It is to Paul that we must turn for material out of which to formulate these doctrines. He teaches a doctrine of Atonement, in distinction from Jesus, (1) who teaches only the fact that the Atonement is supposed to explain and justify-the fact, namely, that God forgives sins. Jesus teaches nothing formally and systematically, but his ideas

(1) It is no doubt true that theologians, having drawn from extraneous sources a doctrine of vicarious sacrifice and expiation of sin, have read this back into some of the words of Jesus. It is incontrovertible, however, that, had we the words of Jesus only, no doctrine of vicarious atonement would ever have been invented.

are unmistakable. Forgiveness of sins, as he looks at it, is the restoration of the relation of Father and sons which has been interrupted, but not destroyed, by wrong-doing. The Old Testament correctly represents this transaction under several different figures:

Yea, thou wilt cast into the depths of the sea all our sins.— Mi. 7:19.

For thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.-Isa. 38:17.

Thou didst take away the iniquity of thy people,

Didst cover all their sins.-Ps. 85:2.

I have blotted out, as a thick cloud, thy transgressions, And, as a cloud, thy sins.-Isa. 44:22.

In that day a fountain will be opened for the house of David and for the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for sin and for uncleanness.-Zech. 13:1.

For I will forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more.-Jer. 31:34.

As a consequence of the divine forgiveness, we are received into the same intimate and loving relations with our Father as if we had never sinned. Jesus says nothing that implies any power in forgiveness to restore lost innocence, or undo the effects of sin, or annul penalty. The father of the parable could and did restore the wanderer to his place as son in the household, but not all his love could restore the innocence of youth or give back those wasted years or make good the squandered inheritance.

Forgiveness is a personal act; it restores status; it does not directly affect character; it cannot alter the past. Theologians have confused personal relationship, always subject to change, with accomplished facts that are unchangeable. They have not discriminated the unrighteousness of sin from its penalty, and popular theology shows, as might be expected, more confusion of ideas than systematic. Jesus sharply makes these discriminations. He shows us