mand of one of my ships." It was good for Dewey to have such a friend as Chichester. A London paper of the time told us that one day the German fleet and that of the United States were drawn up in parallel lines, with decks cleared for action and guns grinning grimly at each other, the situation tense with excitement. Seeing the dangerous state of affairs, Chichester, with calmness, tact and sailor-like good-humor, slowly moved his ships down between the two unfriendly lines, thus creating a diversion which relieved the tension, broke the spell, and averted evil possibilities. One other public token of his friendship the British commander gave. It was on the first of May that the Spanish fleet was destroyed, but it was not until August 13, that our troops occupied the city of Manila. Then United States soldiers landed under cover of the guns of our ships, marched along the shore, drove the Spanish forces out of the city, raised the American flag over the town, and took permanent possession. That was on Saturday. The next day being the Lord's day, all the fleets in the harbor lay at anchor, and nothing happened. But on Monday morning, about ten o'clock, the commander of the British squadron lifted anchor on his flagship, moved up abreast of the Olympia, the American flagship, ran the Stars and Stripes to his own masthead, and fired a salute of twenty-one guns in honor of the flag we love. Like the fluttering wings of a dove, the smoke of British guns went up from the long throbbing tubes to kiss with friendly lips the Stars and Stripes rippling out along the quivering air from the English masthead. America can never forget Rear Admiral Sir Edward Chichester, "the man who 'stood by' at Manila." Her rejoicing in what his action meant will last so long as the two great Anglo-Saxon nations clasp hands in a common purpose to pacify and keep in order, to civilize and Christianize this turbulent, tumultuous and passionate world-which, God grant, may be until the end of time. Nothing is more important to mankind than an abiding friendship between Great Britain and the United States. To promote this, let your church and ours and all churches regard as their religious duty. And cursed be the man, on our side of the Atlantic or the other, or anywhere among the five nations England rules upon the seven seas, who shall seek to promote misunderstanding, distrust, jealousy, or strife between these two mighty nations, yours and ours, to whom God has committed this huge North American Continent, and in large measure also the control of the destinies of the whole human race, for John Hay brought the two great English-speaking nations together on such terms as to make them the arbiters of the world's fate.

THE ARENA

WHAT IS A SPIRIT?

WHAT is a Spirit? What is the Supreme Being like? These are questions whose answers lie beyond the pale of inductive science. This is true, because inductive science is based upon observation and experiment; and God has never been observed by the senses.

The Bible announces a scientific fact when it says, "No man hath seen God at any time." It is also scientific in its statement which says, "The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them because they are spiritually discerned." The problem of Spirit is wholly outside the province of inductive science, for Spirit cannot be observed by the sense of sight, hearing, smelling, tasting, or feeling. However, Spirit is known to us through deductive science. Reasoning from certain known powers, causes, and laws, we logically conclude a Supreme Being exists. We also form certain judgments and opinions as to the nature and powers of that Being. While the Supreme Being is not known directly through the physical senses, he is recognized by the moral consciousness. The Supreme Being is discerned by the conscience, spiritually, but not physically. But the conscience is not a second mind which knows and thinks. It might be called, more properly, the moral instinct. It responds to the moral authority of the Supreme Being as he impels us to do right, or restrains us from the wrong. Conscience acts very much as the magnetic needle. The magnet attracts one point, but repels the other. Its operation is automatic and involuntary. Conscience is the point of contact between the finite and the Infinite.

What can we know about the Supreme Spirit? The Bible announces that God is eternal. This is also a truth of deductive science. The effort of the mind to retrace the existence of a being, which had no beginning, simply bewilders the mind. We can think of our own existence as continuing on without end, but the past forever overwhelms us. Our thoughts easily go back to the days of childhood. Imagination carries us back to the Christian era. We can look back to the beginning of earthly life. We peer backward beyond the planet-period and into the star-period of the world. The imagination sees the solar system but a cloud of glowing gases spread out in space. It was in the long ago. But we go backward still. Then Arcturus was an ancient sun, and Halcyone a patriarch of space. But in those far off ages of the past the Supreme Spirit was in the zenith of his power. Though the present order of the universe had a beginning; though ten score thousand cycles of ten score million years have passed away, yet that Spirit was before all beginnings, eternal. The eternity of God bewilders the mind, just as does the boundlessness of space. Journey outward to the moon. Leap to shining Jupiter. Swing outward to distant Neptune, which glows 18 thousand million miles away. But the pilgrimage has hardly begun. Many stars twinkle seemingly just

as far off. We span the mighty void to 61 Cygni-65 trillion, 700 billion miles away. Its light reaches us in fifty-two months. We touch at the Pleiades-18 quadrillion, 96 trillion miles distant. Its light comes down to us after a voyage of 700 years. But away on the bosom of black immensity glows a film of light. It is the nebula of Andromeda, whose gentle beams fall upon the earth after seventy thousand years. But other stars twinkle in the far depths beyond, and, though we reach the very frontier of the material universe, still, emptiness in its immensity stretches away in a black-forever. Space is without boundary, just as God is without beginning and both are incomprehensible to us.

The Bible says "God is a Spirit." How shall we form any conception of what a spirit is like? God might inform us. Christ said, “A spirit hath not flesh and bones." We therefore think of a specter or body composed of substance, not material, but immaterial, as light and electricity. What is the form of the Supreme Spirit? When we think of God as being without form, it is confusing. But we think of electricity, formless, but powerful. We think of gravitation, formiess, but tireless. God, then, may be thought of as being without form, and still possessing power and wisdom. We sometimes think of God as a huge man, but then we are unable to see how he can be omnipresent in the universe. But we easily conceive that shapeless electricity and gravitation fill the universe, and are everywhere powerful. Likewise the shapeless Spirit fills the universe. We may also conceive that light, electricity, and gravitation are simply modes of his power by which he rules the material kingdom. When we think of God as being like a huge man, we cannot see how he could fashion the microscopic creatures of the world. They are too minute for our fingers to handle, or our unaided eyes to see. But let us think of God the Spirit, not with hands or feet, eyes or brain, but with every portion of his omnipresent, shapeless substance endowed with every energy of the eye, ear, and touch, together with all power, wisdom, and skill in their perfection. Thus it becomes possible for us to understand how God might work and rule, even in the microscopic kingdom of the world. God is invisible to our eyes. This however is no bar to the reality of his existence. Force, which moves the locomotive; electricity, which pulsates around the world; and gravitation, which holds the worlds in its grasp, all are invisible to us, yet they are real.

Mendota, Ill.

GEORGE H. BENNETT.

MASTER, NOT SERVANT, OF WORDS

THE effective use of good English must forever occupy a foremost place in the equipment of the gospel ministry. When the prescribed studies of the seminary curriculum have faded out of consciousness the masterful marshaling of words will be found to hold an increasingly important place. Always difficult, composition is often made needlessly irksome by the lack of proper method. It is with the hope of being helpful to the young minister just starting in his work that I would relate my own experience in overcoming what seems to be a common

obstacle in the ready use of the English language. At the outset of my ministry I wrote out my sermons, endeavoring, of course, to be at my best each week. Having selected theme and text, and having fixed upon the general plan of the discourse, it was always more like play than work to dash down a mass of more or less pertinent material-truths, sentiments and illustrations. The next step was to give adequate form and expression to the loosely held thought; the gold must be separated from the dross and cast into beautiful shapes. Here came the tug of war. I had a prodigious respect for words-well-ordered, sonorous words. I felt that if only I could stand before the audience clad in a complete armor of resistless words victory was assured. The itch of having something down on paper, of making a beginning as quickly as possible, was upon me, and with what a thrill of joy I hailed a happy phrase or strong sentence. Sometimes three or four or even a dozen sentences would favor me by their timely advent-so far so good; now for the next, and the next, but— alack-a-day! The next sentence would not always choose to come; no amount of coaxing, pleading, commanding would induce it to reveal its identity; and the goal of the finished sermon was so distant! Then, to gain momentum, like a boy backing away from a streamlet across which he wishes to jump, I would read over what I had read, and, this not doing the business, I would sit down quite disheartened over the cruel tyranny of words that would not do my bidding. At such a moment the temptation would arise to make free with and profit by the sweat of some other man's brow-always with proper quotation marks or an introductory phrase and this would serve to bring the goal a little nearer to my longing heart. The trouble was that I got the cart before the horse, sought for words before the idea was clear; was overawed, bewitched, by words; the result being a clash and jumble in my work, an attempt to do two things at once: formulate my ideas and at the same time express them in the best form possible to me. It was like trying to set the table with appetizing dishes before the food was half cooked. Mine was the very dregs and drag of literary drudgery.

The first "eye-opener" came to me while listening to an extemporaneous address by a warm-hearted, eloquent brother-minister, who was evidently full of his subject. How stiff and cold and angular appeared my written words compared to his winged message that seemed to go straight to every heart. I began to lose faith in the magical charm of the Phrase as a work of art, dimly seeing that what is said is more important than the "how." The next eye-opener came while observing an artist friend engaged upon a new oil painting. He busied himself first of all with the motif and composition of the picture, posed his model, arranged the drapery, and last of all stretched the fresh canvas, placed it on an easel and took up palette and brush, working rapidly and easily. Like a flash it came to me, Why not follow the same order in your work? First complete your mental preparation, then reach for pen and paper. At once I put the new plan into practice and with the happiest results. The mind was left free to follow its own bent, in meditation fancy free, unhurried and unhampered, and then having fully exploited the theme in hand,

being still master, it turned to words and said, "Servants, do my bidding and clothe these thoughts in fitting garb."

To be sure the old tyranny of the Phrase still occasionally persists in posing as a substitute for ideas, but the inevitable jumble is too painful to be long endured. The more complete the mental picture the easier the work of composition; the greater the inner glow and fullness of vision the more delightful the task of finding the fitting word. Sentences come thick and fast at the command of an over-charged mind. Theme and language are separate and distinct things: the theme belongs to the realm of mental and spiritual values, language, including style and vocabulary, is a medium of expression, and it is evident that the most effective and beautiful result is gained when both theme and language have received adequate attention. It is evident that composition must become easy and delightful when these two things have been acquired-skill in gathering material and great knowledge of language. If we have somewhat to say and make words vividly conscious thereof, then what freshness, spontaneity, raciness, vigor, naturalness, urgency and glow of life are the result! Fluency of utterance is best attained not by the clever outpouring of remembered words but by the irrepressible impact of a heart all on fire with conviction. And so with that precious nectar of elect genius, heaven-winged eloquence. This is never attained by imbedding in otherwise tame sentences such distinguished and brilliant words as "majestic," "sublimity," "celestial," "golden sheen," etc., but by cultivating the higher moods of an awakened spirit. If every sermon should be a mental picture gallery, how desirable that those pictures should first be thought out before being clothed in fitting language.

Harvey, Ill.

J. F. FLINT.

"WHEN JESUS COMES"

Dr. Wallace's article on this subject-published in the SeptemberOctober number of the REVIEW is so luminous, scholarly and candid, and so clearly gives to the subject its proper place and proportional value, that one is at once disarmed of all spirit of captious criticism and controversy. But there is one point that has always perplexed us, and upon which we would like more light. Dr. Wallace says: "The expectation of the New Testament is that of a personal, and, moreover, of a speedy coming of Christ." Now, if all that is said by the Christ and by his apostles in reference to his speedy coming again must be interpreted in harmony with its postponement for about two millenniums-and this is the simple truth-why cannot we expect that other millenniums, yea, many of them, may intervene before his second advent? And does not this thought, in connection with the advancement of science, the interest taken in social improvement, and the general betterment of human conditions, tend to take from this doctrine any special pressure of motive for renewed consecration and more earnest service? Must not we look for these motives elsewhere, and are they not many and powerful? When pastor in Biddeford, Me., in the seventies, a carefully written pamphlet