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Messiah of the fleshly type (what Jesus designates savouring the things that be of men), yet would we know such a Messiah no more.'

Two books on the Doctrine of the Holy Spirit have reached us from America together. One is entitled The Spirit of God in Biblical Literature. It is written by Professor Irving Wood of Smith College. The title of the other is The Holy Spirit Then and Now. Its author is Professor E. H. Johnson of the Crozer Theological Seminary. Both books belong to what Professor Wood calls the modern scientific study of the doctrine. Professor Wood's own volume was mentioned last month. Let us look at Professor Johnson's now.

Professor Johnson calls the second chapter of his book, laconically, 'He or It?' Let us look at that chapter. The question of 'He or It' is supposed to be a very puzzling question in the doctrine of the Spirit. It is puzzling to that method of biblical study which follows the old rule of comparing Scripture with Scripture. But that rule is obsolete. The same words may have one meaning in one Scripture and another meaning in another. The modern rule is to compare Scripture with Scripture within the same author's writings. It may be presumed that St. John uses the word Spirit with the same meaning in his Epistles and in his Gospel. But it is not to be presumed that he uses the word in the same sense as Isaiah uses it. If the modern theory of the development of doctrine is true, or, in other words, if there is a science of Biblical Theology, the presumption is that he does not.

Now by the old rule the question 'He or It' has almost always, and sometimes passionately, been answered He. By the new rule, by the science of Biblical Theology, the question, says Professor Johnson, is not whether we may call the Holy Spirit it, but whether we may call it he.

Professor Johnson proceeds by his rule. He

begins with the Old Testament. He finds that in the Old Testament the Spirit of God is the life of God, His vital energy, His innermost self. It is therefore at the farthest possible remove from being a distinct person. As the spirit of a man is the man, so the Spirit of God is God. 'Who,' says Isaiah, 'hath directed the Spirit of Jehovah, or being his counsellor hath taught him?' (4013). 'Whither,' asks the Psalmist, 'shall I go from thy Spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence?' (1397).

Then Professor Johnson gathers together all the references of the Old Testament to the Spirit, and finds that they may be easily remembered as an effluence, an affluence, or an influence. The Spirit of God in the Old Testament is represented as the energy of God flowing forth from Him, or flowing upon things and persons, or flowing into persons. Efflux, afflux, influx-the words are unfamiliar, but they are expressive and complete.

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Take the first mention of the word Spirit in our Bible. The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters' (Gn 12). It is an effluence and an affluence. It flows from God, it flows upon the waters. As we pass to the Prophets we find that the prevailing aspect of the Spirit is its affluence. It comes upon Balaam (Nu 242), upon frenzied Saul (1S 1923. 24), upon Elisha in double portion. (2 K 29-15), even upon the Messiah (Is 421 611) in that anointing which Jesus claimed as His (Lk 417f.). In all this usage the prophet is rather an instrument than an agent. The Spirit controls his faculties rather than elevates his functions. The conception has not yet travelled very far from the ecstatic frenzy of the pythia.

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holy Spirit within him?' (6311). Daniel is recognized in the courts of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar as one 'in whom is the spirit of the holy gods' (48 511).|

When we pass to the New Testament we find a change. The Spirit of God is no longer exclusively impersonal. The Holy Spirit becomes He. But not at once. This is the fact which Professor Johnson wishes most to insist upon, that up to a certain point the Spirit of God in the New Testament is the same as the Spirit of God in the Old Testament. That is to say, it is simply God Himself in energy; it is simply the energy of God flowing from Himself, either upon men or things, or into men. The point of change is the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel.

The first mention of the Holy Spirit as a person, as the Third Person in the Trinity, says Professor Johnson, is in the fourteenth chapter of St. John's Gospel at the sixteenth verse. It is a new revelation, wholly new and wonderful, however quietly Christ may have uttered it, however gently John may record it. And it has had far-reaching results. One result, alas! is infinite confusion in innumerable books which treat of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. But that is no fault of the revelation. It is the fault of the writers of our popular theology, who will not take the trouble to understand before they write.

The writers of our popular theology, says Professor Johnson, having once discovered the Holy Spirit, discover Him everywhere. They find Him in the Old Testament, where He is not to be found. They find Him in the Synoptic Gospels, and He is not to be found there either.

They find Him, they find Him in His full personal and trinitarian meaning, in the narratives of the birth of Christ. In the Annunciation the angel says to Mary, 'The holy Spirit shall come upon thee,' whereupon our popular theology has not only discovered the Holy Spirit, but has also

discovered that the Third Person in the Trinity is in some sense the father of the Second. Yet the language is expressly impersonal. For the words 'the holy Spirit shall come upon thee' are immediately repeated and explained in the parallel phrase, 'the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.' The absence of the article before 'holy Spirit' and before 'power' might at least have arrested the attention. But, says Professor Johnson, it is much more to the purpose to recognize that up to this point the Holy Spirit has never been introduced as a person; and to give the words a personal meaning now is to contradict every sound rule of Scripture interpretation.

There is an article in the Contemporary Review for February on 'The Bankruptcy of Higher Criticism.' It is written by Dr. Emil Reich, traveller and man of letters. The object of the article is to give an account of the religion of the Masais, a negro tribe of German East Africa. Dr. Reich does not himself know the Masais. He is indebted for his knowledge of their religion

a German officer, whom he calls Captain Merker, who has recently published an 'elaborate monograph' on the Masais. But Dr. Reich does not entitle his article the Religion of the Masais. He calls it the Bankruptcy of Higher Criticism.

What has this negro tribe of German East Africa got to do with the Higher Criticism of the Bible? The article is nearly done before we discover that. But the discovery is worth waiting for.

The title of the article and the first few pages of it, although both a trifle rhetorical, are full of promise. Hitherto,' says Dr. Emil Reich, the school of Higher Criticism has met with no really serious opponents.' A really serious opponent seems to have come at last. He is a root-andbranch reformer, and his words are strong. How comes it, he asks, that the world does not see the incongruity of allowing itself to be lectured upon ancient history, upon the origin of religions, and

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What is the reason? The reason he gives is that 'the works of the higher critics abound in erudition, and to refute them by exposing the nullity of their evidence all along the line would entail an amount of barren labour which serious thinkers scarcely care to undertake.' Dr. Reich is assured of the complete wrong-headedness of the whole method of Higher Criticism.' He is sure that its wrong-headedness 'cannot fail to be manifest to anybody who bases his judgments upon the true essence of the matter in dispute, and not upon mere externals.' But he does not say what the true essence is. As a serious thinker he has no time to waste in refuting the higher critics. He passes on to tell us about the religion of the Masais. And just as he passes to that, which is the proper subject of his paper, he shows us that his acquaintance with the higher critics is not intimate enough to keep him from confounding Professor Sanday of Oxford with Professor Sandys the Public Orator of Cambridge.

And as his knowledge of the critics is, so is his knowledge of their criticism. The only criticism that he has heard of is that which reads the Old Testament off the clay tablets of Babylonia. It is the criticism of Professor Friedrich Delitzsch that is Higher Criticism to him. And the reason why the Higher Criticism has become bankrupt is that among the Masais have been found legends of the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the Ten Commandments, so like the Old Testament stories, that if you say the Hebrews borrowed them from the Babylonians, you may just as reasonably say

that they borrowed them from this negro tribe in German East Africa.

The Higher Criticism will have to wait until Dr. Emil Reich has time to answer it. Meanwhile, what he tells us of Captain Merker's discoveries among the Masais is well worth attending to. Captain Merker is an ideal discoverer. He has spent eight years among the Masais, in the neighbourhood of Mt. Kilimanjaro. He had scarcely settled there when he became aware of remarkable coincidences between many of the native traditions and those which we find in Genesis. But he was not thrown off his guard. He did not greedily pursue the natives with questions. He waited patiently until he won their confidence and they came to him of their own freewill. And when they came, and he could now ask them questions, he was scrupulous not to suggest or bias the answers, he was careful not once to refer to the Old Testament.

What are the Masai traditions? There is a tradition of the Creation. In the beginning the earth was a waste and barren wilderness in which there dwelt a dragon alone. God came down from Heaven and fought with the dragon. The spot where the struggle took place was afterwards known as Paradise. Then God created all things. -sun, moon, stars, plants, beasts, and, last of all, two human beings. The man was called Maitumbe, and the woman Naitergorob. The man was sent down from Heaven. The woman sprang from the bosom of the earth.

There is also the tradition of a Fall. God placed Maitumbe and Naitergorob in Paradise, and gave them permission to eat of every tree of the garden except one. He often came down to see them, using a ladder which He had set up between earth and heaven. One day He could not find them. They had eaten of the forbidden fruit, and were crouching among the bushes. The man blamed the woman, and the woman blamed the serpent. God's wrath was kindled

against them, and He drove them forth from Paradise.

The Masais have also their story of the Flood. They have their Noah, whose name is Tumbainot. Tumbainot builds an ark in which he saves himself, his two wives, and his six sons. When the waters are subsiding he sends forth a dove. Four rainbows are the sign which tells the Masai Noah that the wrath of God for the iniquity of man has been appeased.

But the most remarkable parallel between the religion of the Masais and the Pentateuch is that of the Ten Commandments. The Masai story of the delivery of the decalogue, says Dr. Emil Reich, might have been translated almost literally from the Bible. The mountain is there with its peals of thunder and its raging storm. Out of the midst of a cloud the voice of God is heard proclaiming His commandments. And this is the first commandment: 'There is one God alone, who hath sent me unto you. Heretofore ye have called him the Forgiver (E majan), or the Almighty

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Land Tenure in Fiji.

BY LORIMER FISON, HON. MEMBER OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE.

If we would get at the root of the system of Land Tenure in Fiji, we must first of all ascertain the structure of society there, and the more closely we examine it the more complicated does it appear to be. Our difficulty is increased by the fact that custom is not uniform throughout the Group; and it is impossible within our present limits of space to do more than to examine one particular field. Since it has been authoritatively asserted that the land is 'vested in the ruling chiefs, under a feudal system which has existed from time immemorial,' it may be well to select a neighbourhood where the power of the chiefs had reached its highest pitch before the Group was annexed to the British Empire. That place is Bau (Mbau), where the great chief Thakombau used to reign. It had in its neigh

bourhood a number of affiliated koro, or villages, more or less closely connected with it, and it was recognized as their koro turanga levu = great chief town. In them, as well as in Bau itself, we find chiefs of various degrees, full-born commoners— who are called the taukei ni vanua (=owners of the land); and in addition to them, men who have but an imperfect status in the koro, or even none at all.

Looking at one of these affiliated koro, we find it to be divided into 'quarters,' of which there may be more or fewer than four, and each of them belongs to a part of the community called a mata-qali, a word which fortunately tells its own history. Literally, mata means 'eye' or 'face.' Hence mata-ni-singa, 'the eye of day' = the sun.

Its secondary meaning is an 'eyeful,' so to speake.g. a mata-i-valu, 'a band of warriors,' a mata-veitathini, a band of brothers.' Qalia means 'to twist together,' as a sailor twists yarns by rolling them together under the palm of his hand on his knee. Mata-qali therefore means a band of men who are twisted together; and the twist is a common descent.

A mata-qali is composed of a mata-vei-tathini, or band of brothers, from each of whom may be descended a minor division, called a yavusa, and each yavusa may be divided into a number of vuvale, consisting of brothers, with their families, who inhabit either the same house or adjoining houses. That is to say, roughly speaking, a number of vuvale make up a yavusa, a number of yavusa make up a mata-qali, and a number of mata-qali make up a koro. The people of a koro are theoretically of common descent, though they are not always actually so; and the koro may be compared to a cable: the mata-qali are the ropes which are twisted together to form it, the yavusa are the strands of the rope, the vuvale are the yarns of the strand, and the individuals are the fibres of the yarn.

If we examine a rope, we may see here and there fibres which do not seem to be of quite the same material as the rest. They seem to have got into the rope by accident. These will serve to represent certain individuals who are born into a mata-qali, but are not full-born members of it. And, in addition to these, there are a number of people attached to it who are not 'twisted in' with the mata-qali at all, but who nevertheless belong to it. Our 'cable' simile fails us here, unless we take these unfortunates to be represented by the frayedout fibres, which belong to neither yarn nor strand, and yet are held hard and fast. Their status will be investigated farther on.

They

They

These divisions are not unchangeable. run into one another, and it is not always easy at first sight to distinguish one from another. Thus, we may hear a mata-qali spoken of as if it were a yavusa, and even find its distinctive title with the contraction vusa prefixed to it. But this may be easily explained. From an original vuvale, or mata-vei-tathini (band of brothers) several yavusa may descend, each of which may branch out into smaller yavusa, and so expand into a mata-qali.

This process of expansion is clearly shown in the register of the Israelite families given in the

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26th chapter of the Book of Numbers. In the first place, the sons of Jacob are the mata-veitathini or vuvale. With their children they form the Vusa Ra Yisrael. Each of them becomes the Head of a Household, and his descendants are his yavusa. Among the vei-tathini is Joseph, who branches out into two yavusa-Manasseh and Ephraim. Each of these again becomes a tribe, or mata-qali, and even a cluster of mata-qalis. Thus the sons of Manasseh's grandson, Gilead, who founded yavusa, were no fewer than six, not counting Zelophehad, whose daughters were married to their father's brothers' sons in order to keep the tribal lands intact.

In Fiji many of the original yavusa have grown into mata-qali, some of which are scattered widely among the islands. Their common origin is known by their having the same Kalou Vu (godancestor), which gives them the privilege of cursing one another without offence. According to the Fijian reckoning, Joseph would have been the Kalou Vu of all the Ephraimites, as well as of all the Manasseh yavusa on both sides of Jordan. Beyond him, again, would be Jacob, as the Kalou Vu of all the tribes of Israel; while still farther back-unless he had utterly faded out of the tradition of the elders-would be Abraham, as the Kalou Vu, not of the Israelites only, but of the Edomites also, and other nations. It will be seen that the foregoing explanations have a direct bearing upon the subject of Land Tenure, as well as upon the entire social fabric.

The Lands.-The koro has its own lands, distinct from those of other koro. These are of three kinds :-(1) the Yavu, or Town-lot; (2) the Qele (ngg-ele), or Arable Land; (3) the Veikau, Forest or Waste, as our own forefathers used to call it. We must note here that the koro may have several affiliated koro, inhabited by men of kindred stock; but we may continue to speak of one koro only for the sake of convenience, examining the lands in their given order.

1. The Yavu. Each mata-qali has its own yavu, which is the quarter of the town allotted to it. This may be subdivided into smaller yavu, and these again into yavu smaller still, each Household having its own. The Household may be composed of several families, the Heads of which are brothers, own or tribal, according to the Fijian system of relationship, which is that known as the

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