the Church. It would not have been confined to a single manifestation. The Word would not then have stood alone among its results. In the freer scope opened to it by the New Platonism, it interposed many other hypostases between rò "Ev and the human mind. The Gnosticism of the second century furnishes ample evidence of its natural working.

What recommends this theory of a Divine Logos to some minds, is the readier conception which it seems to furnish of a personal God, and the more intimate bond of union which it is thought to establish between God and man. But there is nothing in the simple doctrine of the Divine Unity to necessitate the offensive consequences that have been drawn from it-to make God a solitary, distant Power, or to exclude the human soul from the loving warmth of his fatherly embrace. Space and time are conditions of being which we cannot predicate of God. As it is impossible to conceive of a time when He was not, or of any limit to his omnipresence, so it is equally impossible to conceive of Him as inactive. An inert Spirit is a contradiction in terms. But if active, He must have employed that activity in realizing the thoughts of an infinite Wisdom and Love-in giving birth everywhere and unceasingly to endless forms and conditions of existence. I cannot think of Him in repose. My only idea of his being is that of beneficent activity. An universe must therefore have always coexisted with a God. The two ideas are to me inseparable. Not as though the universe existed through any inherent force of its own. It has its being in God. It is an effect eternally issuing from the essential activity of God. We make creation subsequent to the Creator, because in

the order of thought the effect must come after its cause. This view of the relation of the universe to its Divine Cause relieves us from the necessity of supposing that the Infinite Spirit existed through a whole eternity in lonely, unshared grandeur and blessedness. To the Supreme Being there can be no distinction of past and present and future. They lie before Him as one vast and present conception, wrought out in a continuous evolution of corresponding phenomena, and furnishing an exhaustless source of benevolent interest and affection. The system of the universe, so far as we can trace it, is a continuous development-the orders of creatures as they successively come into existence, continually approaching nearer to God in fulness of being, in richness of faculty, in capacity of enjoyment, in intelligence, affection, will and moral feeling. Wherein, then, lies the philosophical necessity for an archetypal man existing from all eternity to solace the loneliness of God, when the same end is more effectually accomplished by his omnipresent grasp and anticipated fruition of the great ideal of humanity as it unfolds itself through the eternity to come, growing more and more into the likeness of Christ, as an object of ineffable sympathy and complacent regard? God acts out his own eternal thought in the utterances, the aspirations and endeavours of those who are conscious of his presence, and strive after a future of more perfect communion with Him. This is the revelation which God makes of Himself to our human world. This is the true incarnation of the Son of God--the progressive working out of that ideal of humanity which was from the beginning with the Father of man. This is the fundamental idea lying deep

in the nature of man, brought out and vivified by the influence of pure religion-the sense of the right, the just, and the true, and the striving after something higher and nobler than our actual state--which secures the unity of our race through all its changes of outward condition and amidst the ceaseless growth of its intellectual acquisitions, which raises it step by step out of animalism into spirituality, which links it with the everlasting God, and gives it the earnest of an immortal heritage in Him. So God comes into our world and reconciles it with Himself. Out of this deep-seated idea springs the word of prayer and trust and hope, which, sometimes obscurer, sometimes more distinct, sometimes darkened with human passion, sometimes bright with the flame of heavenly love, goes up into the listening ear of the omnipresent Father, and, however strange the accents in which it is uttered, makes itself everywhere and always understood by that spiritual sympathy which penetrates into devout hearts through all the barriers of speech and nationality and age. To comprehend and interpret this universal language of religion is the highest function of a true theologian. It is, in fact, to understand our humanity itself; for religion is a reflection of the noblest aspect of our humanity. God comes and dwells in our humanity when it is earnestly turned towards Him in the spirit of Christ. To be fully conscious of this presence of God, to understand our filial relation towards him, and to give ourselves up with childlike docility to the leadings of his Spirit, is the most perfect conception that we can form on earth of a divine revelation. Every mental change implied in that solemn word, Salvation, is involved in this spiritual state, and

springs out of it by a sort of organic growth-contrition, penitence, atonement, sanctification, final peace.

If these views of the religious nature of man, of its relation to God, and of the Bible which records its deepest experiences and its sublimest utterances, are just, they suggest the two main directions which the public teaching of our churches and the preparatory studies of our colleges ought henceforth to take. First and before all things, as the indispensable foundation of everything else, an earnest cultivation of the spirit of Christ, as the highest expression of the soul in its intercourse with God, as a true incarnation of the Divine in the human; and this, not only from Scripture, not only from the pregnant revelations of its working in the brief fragmentary notices of the Gospels and in the testimony of apostolic experience, but also, and in some respects even more, from the present facts of a living Christianity, and the secret witness of our own souls in their struggles to rise into light and come into the presence of God. Here is a side of our being which has never yet been explored as it deserves in the spirit of a philosophy which is at once reverential and free. Here is a field of the richest psychology opened before us,-to search into the roots of the religious trusts and aspirations of man; to investigate under their religious aspects the ideas of moral obligation and responsibility; to ascertain the grounds of faith and determine the conditions of spiritual insight beyond the phenomenal; and to embrace in a comprehensive survey the moral, religious, and spiritual progress of mankind. Secondly, the application of this spirit of Christ to the interpretation of the religious history and literature which

prepared and announced its advent, and for the clear separation, by the unfailing test which it supplies, of the divine and the human elements which are so largely commingled in them. Here, also, is a field out of which the rich products which it is capable of yielding have never yet been fully reaped. Here is a fertile soil which has remained comparatively barren, in consequence of the old-fashioned husbandry to which it has been subjected. The improved implements of philology and criticism, which have produced such copious harvests in other fields, are kept away from this, as if there were something impious in their use. We know not what great and unsuspected truths may yet break forth from God's word, when once it is handled honestly. There is a history and a literature shut up in the Bible, the true worth of which has never yet been appreciated, the surpassing beauty of which has never yet been relished, because never yet has it been brought into fair and open contact with humanity; because the full warmth and glow of the mind, needful to ripen its latent seeds of truth and beauty, has never yet been allowed to fall on it--pure taste, natural sympathies, an unperverted moral sense, and an unstrained application of the critical test of the false and the true.

These larger views of religion and the Bible, if consistently carried out, must be as productive of rich practical results, as they simplify the course and widen the intellectual horizon of the student. What complaints do we hear on all sides of the inefficiency of the public services of the church! How often is the sermon referred to as an insufferable infliction, which people submit to merely as a conventional necessity! And