2. The inability of the human to grasp the whole meaning of the divine is not a humiliation but a necessity and a discipline.

3. To insist upon the literal and exhaustive explanation of spirit

ual mysteries is one of the most deceitful impulses of intellectual vanity.

4. Every attempt to bring spiritual mysteries within purely intellectual apprehension is to encroach upon the function of the heart as the best interpreter of God.

5. Obedience to the divine will is the primary condition of knowing all that is knowable of the divine doctrine.

Within the range of these principles I have escaped the frets and disappointments inseparable from fruitless ambitions, and in that degree have been enabled to bring undivided attention to bear in legitimate directions. They have, too, if I may continue to be personal, had a useful effect upon all my endeavors after what is called definite religious teaching. I have lived to know that we can be as definite in declaring a mystery as in stating a fact.

The soul may be a long time in coming to the apprehension of that possibility. The mystery is itself a fact. We have to walk under the sky, not over it. We have to worship God, not to understand him. The honest teacher will never be ashamed to say, I do not know." He must often say so, and at these points, marked against trespass, he and his students will unite in common prayer, and temptation may be resisted by fasting. We cannot be as definite in the statement or even in the apprehension of spiritual truth-the truth which is without form-as in the statement of scientific facts, for reasons which lie within the facts themselves. Science concerns itself with phenomena, with the measurable, the ascertainable, the concrete, and when it gets to the limit of phenomena it stops, lest it should stumble upon a religion. With what does religion concern itself? With God and sin and motive, with redemption, forgiveness, character, destiny. Science can make all the words it wants for the telling of its wondrous tale; but religion is always short of words, and so is driven into exclamations and impetuosities which literalists easily mistake for cant. It cries out, Who can find out the Almighty unto perfection? Who

hath directed the Spirit of the Lord, or being his counselor hath taught him? Oh the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! Whether in the body or out of the body, the spiritual man is often quite uncertain, and as for the things he hears in the higher placesthe subdued thunders, the thrilling whispers, the weird beating of unseen wings, the inscriptions in half-lightning and in half-gloom-he says, such communings and visions are not for words, they are for the heart's mute wonder. In religion there are few things we can fitly tell. Religion can sometimes do little more than hint at its own secret. We can measure the altar, but not the prayer. We can tell all about the Roman gallows, but language is hushed and awed before the Christian cross. The crucifixion is Roman; the Atonement is divine. We know it and receive it and trust it expressly in its character as a mystery. It must not be supposed that because it is a mystery we do not know it. Forgetting that a doctrine may be received as a mystery, we confuse all the higher truths and put them in a false relation. It is a high attainment of knowledge

to know that some things cannot be known. It is just at that point that the divine faculty for which the best name is Faith begins its unique work in the soul. Faith does no commerce in the small market of explanations. Faith has infinite ventures on the seas and continents of mystery. It is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen. Thus we stand in a great mystery. Sin and Atonement, Law and Forgiveness, Holiness and Destiny, are mysteries.

We hold them in Christian faith: all

we know about them we learned from a Book which has taken such hold of our highest nature that we have come to regard it reverently as

THE WORD OF GOD.

V.

THE WORD TAUGHT.

T is supposed that Science is definite and that

I vague in its
IT

Religion is vague in its dogmas. This supposed

difference has sometimes been the occasion of a taunt against the Christian faith in particular. It is said with no little truth that the heterodoxy of one day is the orthodoxy of another. Yet this need not be any reproach. The fact would be the more remarkable if its application could be strictly limited to religion, whereas it applies equally to the whole line of civilization, and may therefore be only a fact because it is first a principle. We may not be dealing with an accident; we may be face to face with a law, and with a law so universal and so urgent as to be the very soul of civilization. If it is true of religion doubt it) that the het

(and I am not prepared to

erodoxy of yesterday is the orthodoxy of to-day, it

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