perplexed than they, until he finds his God and Father in the heavens! In response, then, to deep constitutional needs man asks to know the secret at the heart of the universe. How is he to conceive of it?-how must he behave towards it?-what is its name?" Professor Armitage contends that it is the Preacher rather than the professional theologian who makes our theology; and he tries to show that it has always been so, and in the nature of the case must be so. The professional theologian, seeking a science and philosophy of religion and dealing in definitions of terms and in logically systematized thought, has often lost the clues of reality and built unsubstantial fabrics in which no human being could make a home. In land after land-in India, in Greece, in Germanyphilosophy and theology have been asphyxiated in the thin air in which they have lost touch with the rich full-blooded realities of human experience. "But, in the meantime," says Professor Armitage, "we have the Preacher, and the preacher is pre-eminently a man rooted in the race and in its experience. He is a son of man speaking to the sons of men in the language of their needs and sufferings and desires. He is no preacher if he is not bone of their bone and flesh of their flesh, rejoicing with them that do rejoice and weeping with them that weep. And neither is he a preacher until he brings Heaven's answer to earth's cry, and Heaven's medicine to earth's pain. But how is he in each new age to do this? The pain of his age may grow out of new-felt needs. The times, perhaps, are out of joint with all the current conceptions of life, with its social and economic theories, with its ethical standards and ideals. There is a deep sense of their inadequacy and even falseness, and a longing for light and higher guidance. And what does it all at bottom mean but that men long for the light and guidance which there is for them in a truer knowledge of the great Power that has fashioned all things? They dimly feel that it is through that knowledge, and through that alone, that they can come to true knowledge of themselves and of the life in which they are plunged. It is for the preacher at such grave times to fill the office of theologian and proclaim to troubled men the name of the Lord. Thus did the prophet-preachers of Judah and Israel discharge their great task, and, as we review their age, we see that through them God carried forward His great purpose of self-revelation in human history. The sins and needs of Israel forced the preacher more closely upon God, until God yielded to him the answer to the people's need. It is thus that the Old Testament shows us Moses in the hour of Israel's apostacy. The prophet is at the end of his resources save as these are replenished in a new and larger sight of God. And therefore, going apart from the people, he urges in supplication his pressing need: "Show me, I beseech Thee, Thy glory." And in spiritual wrestling, to which as preacher the sin and peril of his people have driven him, he wins the vision. Sanctifying himself for their sakes, the eyes of his spirit are opened and the glory of the Goodness of the Lord passes before him. It is as the minister of the Covenant to the people, as their spiritual servant and mediator, that he constrains Heaven and that the Kingdom of Truth suffers violence at his hands.

And as we read the story of his proclamation to Israel we recognize that another great forward step has been taken. In age after age, and land after land, it has been at the preacher's word that these forward steps in the world's spiritual progress have been taken, that-in other words— it has been the preacher who has proved the progressive and constructive theologian. How conspicuously would this seem to be the case in our own religious history. Was it not as a preacher that Jesus delivered to the world his great transforming declarations about God? It was for men's sakes that he spoke: he "had compassion on the multitude." He saw them "as sheep not having a shepherd, and he began to teach them many things." His word addressed itself to the needs and sins of men; it was drawn forth by them, and received its shape and significance from them. As we follow the story we see that that significance was only dimly realized whilst yet Jesus was in their midst. Its immense content was still unexplored, and in the centuries immediately following his death we see the things of Christ gradually brought to the apprehension of his disciples. But it is the preacher still who is the theologian, precisely because it is the preacher who is forced by the needs of men to discover the supply for these needs which Jesus had brought. Paul, the untiring missionary, is the great constructor of the new theology, though other apostolic hands are also engaged. And still through all the formative years of the first four centuries the Christian thinker is the Christian preacher. The great Fathers of the Church, whether Greek or Latin, are ministers of this word to their harried flocks, preaching it often up to the very threshold of the blood-stained arena. And there is the same story to tell if we follow the 'course of the Church on to the great times of later theological reconstruction, whether in the sixteenth century or in the Evangelical Revival at the close of the eighteenth. Ever it is the preacher rather than the student recluse and philosopher who has welcomed the fuller light and heralded the larger truth. . . . It is the preacher's happiness to dwell among realities. He is at home in the Bible as he is at home among the vivid experiences of spiritual religion. He does not seek to discover its essence and reality in some rationale of it all. He knows that a rationale of life is but a thin ghost of the reality, a single aspect of it, which may have great interest in itself but which needs to be set alongside other and wholly different aspects of it. Of the most central things in religion the pure philosopher can make nothing. He stumbles, as I have already said, at all the big words-Person, Life, Liberty, and the rest. Leave him to himself and he will analyze them out of existence! For they are all opaque to thought, they all involve antinomies of the Reason. The thinker as such, the man, that is, who aims at consistent logical procedure, is paralyzed in the field of Religion. He can construct nothing. The materials are not in his hands, and they never can come into them. But the preacher's method is wholly other. He believes in man as having proceeded from the hand of God, and he accepts each man's experience as that man knows it. Not that he does not see man's sin, man's error, and man's folly; but beneath these he

reads, still unobliterated, the lines upon which his nature has been laid and detects the lineaments of the Father's face. Looking upon man, the preacher sees as in a glass the glory of the Lord, and he proclaims the glory that he sees. He does not cease to be a student of books, because his proper study is seen to be man. He more truly understands his book than before. For books, rightly seen, are men, and the man who comes to the world's great library with his eye ever fixed on human life brings the true key with him. Theology can never be safely studied apart from the active service of men, and schools of theologians that are not at the same time schools of prophets stand in danger of deadly heresy. But if the theologian is a preacher he will not present God as being the conclusion to which Reason conducts so much as being the Companion and the Saviour upon whom man in his need lays hold. He will courageously set Him forth in all the concrete forms which are relative to man's necessities. The man of pure thought has little help to give the preacher here, as he has little criticism to pass. F. H. Bradley, in his Appearance and Reality, finely teaches that a religious man, who is walking humbly with Ais God but who would fain further strengthen his religious assurance by turning to philosophical studies, would make a mistake. For whatever value such studies may have, they have no such value as that. Harnack is not saying a very different word when, in speaking about a true knowledge of Jesus, he says: 'Let the plain man continue to read his New Testament as he has read it, for, in the long run, the critic can read it no otherwise.' And Professor F. Loofs, of Halle, in speaking about the attempts of early Greek theologians to build up a system of accurate Christian Knowledge, says: 'Knowledge is indeed associated with faith. There is an intellectual element in faith which can, to some extent, be treated by itself, and yet there is always a danger in such abstractions: for the knowledge which is implied in Christian faith is not a knowledge about the subject of faith, but is rather the certitude of faith itself, and so it is a religious or spiritual knowledge not safely to be separated from the religious and spiritual life.'" If our readers wish to find a fresh and intense preacher-theologian who lives, not in the cloister, but amid the quivering realities of actual human life let them read at once Professor Olin A. Curtis's living volume, The Christian Faith, the most noteworthy and significant book of the year.

BOOK NOTICES

RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE

The Westminster Confession of Faith and the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England: The Legal, Moral, and Religious Aspects of Subscription to them. By JAMES DONALDSON, M.A., LL.D., Principal of the University of Saint Andrews. 8vo. pp. 168. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green & Co. Price, $1.20. net. This is a remarkable book. Its author is a layman, though deeply interested in theological studies, as witness his Critical History of Christian Literature and Doctrine from the Death of the Apostles to the Nicene Council, his edition of the Ante-Nicene Fathers (with Roberts), and other works. This book is called out by the decision of the legal lords of the Upper House of the English Parliament in the summer of 1904 to the effect that the union between the Free Church of Scotland and the United Presbyterian Church in 1900 was illegal and of no effect so far as it involved carrying over into the new church (the United Free Church of Scotland) the properties and trust funds of the Free Church, which properties and trust funds belonged to that portion of the Free Church which refused to go into the union. The larger Free Church had left the doctrines which peculiarly distinguished the Free Church from 1843 on, notably the doctrine of Unconditional Decrees, which was fundamental in their Confession; and in joining the United Presbyterian Church they had also repudiated another principle on which their church stood-the duty of the civil government to support and establish the church, according to chapter xxiii, section 3, of the Confession. They had therefore legally ceased to be the Free Church, for the continuity of the church consists in its doctrines, which being abandoned the church no longer exists. Its properties and funds revert in that case to those of their ministers and members who remain faithful to the Confession and refuse to make the new departure. This in brief is the argument of the law lords of the English Parliament, who astonished the world in 1904 by the famous decree which turned over the rich and ample endowments and buildings of the majority Free Church to the twenty or thirty ministers of the Wee Frees. Some looked upon the decree as the midsummer madness of the year at any rate, it could not have astonished the majority of Christians more. The whole effect of Donaldson's book is to reduce to absurdity the decision of the law lords. But he does it in an original way, in a way which must make many in the Majority Free (United) Church gasp. It reminds one of Bishop Reginald Pecock's book, Repressor of Overmuch Blaming of the Clergy (about 1449), which defended the church of his time against Lollard attacks, but in a way so original, free, and rationalistic that poor Pecock was condemned to either retract his errors or be burned. No such fate awaits Donaldson, even if he were a clergyman, but he leaves Pecock far in the shade. A part of Donaldson's book is devoted to showing that the chapters in the Westminster Confession on

God, Jesus Christ, the Trinity, and Creation (in which the Confession is in substantial agreement with the creeds of the church universal) are unintelligible and therefore cannot be believed by anyone. No one knows what Substance is, what Person is, what Existence is, what God is, what Creation out of nothing is (which is an absurdity, says Donaldson)— therefore no one can believe any of these doctrines. He gives a long discussion here, but the upshot of it is, we cannot understand any of these things, therefore it is absurd to say that we believe them, and it is wrong to ask us to believe them. If we logically carry out Donaldson's principles it would destroy all science and all knowledge. The men who made the creeds knew that no man can understand God to perfection, but they knew we can have a relative and derived knowledge, and that knowledge -over against errors-they tried to express in the creeds. Donaldson then goes into a discussion of Christ. The idea of his Virgin Birth he scouts as also absurd. He invents here a lot of imaginary difficulties which we have not space to consider. No Unitarian or skeptic could argue with more cold and critical aloofness from the realities of the Christian religion concerning the person of Christ than this principal of a Presbyterian school, to whose founders and restorers all the beliefs which their late descendant dismisses with superior disdain, as absurd and of no consequence, were the life of their life. His imputing the triumph of so-called orthodoxy to the decree of Theodosius is on a level with his general depreciation of the deeper sides of Christianity. Externally emperors' decrees had an influence, of course. But emperors decreed for Arianism as well, and often secular forces were much stronger for it. No; the final triumph of the true doctrine of the person of Christ cannot be explained by an imperial edict. All the deeper forces and doctrines of Christianity, and all the profounder and finer feelings of Christian men, were working for it. Donaldson says that the orthodox men of the fourth century made two mistakes. The first was the taking it for granted that religion was a matter of the intellect, not of the heart. They made no such mistake. Religion is a matter of the intellect first and foremost. We cannot love until we know. There must be first an object apprehended as worthy of love. Of course, religion does not rest there, even if "life eternal is to know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." It takes in the affections as well. And one reason for the triumph of the doctrine of the true divinity of Christ was the fact that it and it alone satisfies the heart. In Athanasius's mind it was connected with the Divine Fatherhood, and made that real and vital in human experience. Besides, the mind of man, as God made it, is bound to ask questions as to the Creator. Arius had his intellectual conception. Would it overrun the church? Even some Unitarians acknowledge that the triumph of Arianism would have been an unspeakable calamity. But to defeat it the truth had to be intellectually conceived, stated, and defended. The second mistake of the fcurth-century Athanasians was "to introduce a notion of the word God which made the distance between God and man infinite and impassable." The very contrary was the truth. It was the