cause they depreciate the very Scriptures which are the treasure-house of this hope.

Hence they need also a truer discernment of the divine plan and purpose which runs through the Bible and binds it all together, and which would dignify their views of its inspiration. We are sure that all which this class of interpreters have been seeking in a doctrine of God that would bring Him into closer sympathy and union with man, and in a doctrine of man that shall fill him with larger hope for himself and for his race can be found in these Scriptures, not by bringing them down to a lower level, but by entering into their true meaning with this key in hand, that God has provided to redeem the race from death because this present life is not long enough in which to carry out toward it all His purposes of grace, and that the mode of this redemption is to perfect a chosen seed as the channel of blessing to all the rest. The doctrine of resurrection when fully understood will be found broad enough to give room for all that science has to teach concerning the struggle of the fittest to survive, and all that biology has to teach concerning the origin and perpetuation of life, and all that psychology has to teach of the constitution of the soul, and all that theosophy has to teach about the harvest law of character and the re-embodiment of human souls according to deeds done, and room also for all the mysteries of reward and punishment, of heaven and hell. No other one concept in Christian theology is just now so much needed to adjust all its controversies, to reconcile it with science, to harmonize it with the universal religious thought of the race, and to equip it for victory as a right conception of its fundamental doctrine of the resurrection of the

dead. And until this right conception is reached, the crisis in theology must grow more intense, the controversies. more bitter, and the revolution more radical, until the wood, hay, and stubble which men have been so long building into the temple of God shall have been shaken out of the structure and burnt up in His consuming fire.

THE DECAY OF FAITH.

In the November number of the Arena, Mr. E. A. Ross writes of the prevalent tendency of thought and of society in Europe toward the loss of all hope in a future existence, except the hope of a "Nirvana," in which individual being and self-consciousness are forever submerged.

Some of our readers have been wondering why we have allowed ourselves in recent studies to be led into what seems to them to be strange paths. It has been because we have discerned that the new and most dangerous forms of scepticism upon such vital points as the being of God and a future life for man must be met along those paths. This will appear, we think, from the article above referred to, from which we give an extract.

But science, not content with tracing institutions, has been analyzing personality. We see now that there can never again be such an orgie of the Ego as that led by Fichte and Hegel. The doctrines of transmission and inheritance have attacked the independence of the individual. Science finds no ego, self, or will that can maintain itself against the past. Heredity rules our lives like that supreme primeval necessity that stood above the Olympian gods. "It is the last of the fates," says Wilde, "and

the most terrible. It is the only one of the gods whose real name we know." It is the "divinity that shapes our ends" and hurls down the deities of freedom and choice. Science dissolves the personality into temperaments and susceptibilities, predispositions and transmitted taints, atavisms and reversions, It finds the soul, not a spiritual unit, but a treacherous compound of strange contradictions and warring tendencies, with traces of spent passion and vestiges of ancient sins, with echoes of forgotten deeds and survivals of vanished habits. We are "possessed," not by demons, but by the dead. These are in Ibsen's drama the real ghosts which throng our lives and haunt our footsteps, remorseless as the furies. We are followed by the shades of our ancestors, who visit us, not with midnight squeak and gibber, but in the broad noonday, speaking with our speech and doing with our deed. We are bound to a destiny fixed before birth, and choice is the greatest of illusions. The world is, indeed, a stage, and life is but a hollow ceremony, spontaneous enough to the eye, but wherein the actors recite speeches and follow stage directions written for them long before they were born. Thus science grinds color for our modern Rembrandts.

The final blow to the old notion of the ego is given by the doctrine of multiple individuality. Science tells of the conscious and the sub-conscious, of the higher nerve centres and the lower, of the double cerebrum and the wayward ganglia. It hints at the many voiceless beings that live out in our body their joy and pain, and scarce give sign, dwelling in the sub-centres, with whom, it may be, often lies the initiative when the conscious centre thinks itself free. This I is, no doubt, a hierarchy or commonwealth of psychical units that at death dissolves and sinks below the threshold of consciousness.

The main points in this surrender of faith and hope are : 1. We are the victims of an overruling principle of heredity against which we have no power to contend.

2. We have no individual existence-no proper egobut every man is a bundle of dispositions and reversions transmitted to him from his ancestors.

3. The future life resolves itself into a continuation of individual traits which find subsequent expression in the persons of descendants.

4. Man's being is not a unit, but an assemblage of beings of various orders and degrees and around various sub-centres of consciousness and activity. Whatever holds them in unity is dissolved by death.

Against all this we have asserted certain things as true both to Scripture and to Science :

1. We acknowledge the principle of heredity, and that by it the human race is bound together in one organism. But we find that this organism contains within itself a power of redemption and of perfection by means of a perfected and fructifying seed. Choice members of the race reach a higher grade of life and impart it to others, until a chosen seed reach the goal of divine and immortal manhood and communicate to others power to become the sons of God.

2. There is a divine nature in every man at the centre of his inmost being which gives him true and permanent individuality. As God from the beginning has been expressing Himself in creation, so this divine image in man expresses itself in outward personality. It may and must, according to the universal law of development, take on successive forms before the perfect likeness of this image is attained. But these successive forms are bound together by one thread of individuality, and the final personality must unify and treasure up all that is worth saving in the series.

3. The law of transmission from father to son does doubtless prevail in this region of outward personality. These traits are more or less preserved and may finally disappear. The divine principle of action here is that stated in the Second Commandment. Evil traits go down to the third and fourth generation: good dispositions are handed over unto thousands of generations-that is, they are perpetual and enter finally into that perfected manhood which is to be the eternal dwelling-place of God. But the mistake of skeptics is in confounding these transient forms of being which come and go before our eyes with the permanent man who, behind these, is being trained for immortality. These objections, drawn from what Science teaches of human nature, are only valid in an outer region of that nature, and do not touch the question as to whether or not it is not divine at its centre and, therefore, immortal.

4. Man's being is doubtless a microcosm of the whole kingdom of life. All lower orders of creation are represented in the human body. Embryology teaches this. Nor is there any objection to the idea that the vanished lives of the imperfect dead are so incorporated in the structure of the living as to be preserved there for future recovery and embodiment. The law seems to be that each advancing type of life must bear the burden of those who have gone before it is in this way that the whole creation waits for the manifestation of the sons of God. Scripture teaches and science has nothing to disprove it—that a class of men have already reached the plane of eternal life. Their office must be, like that of their Head and prototype, to succor and redeem their brethren. Their spiritual presence in the hearts and bodies of men who are