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God, which is eternal life, has been hitherto impossible. Now the "veil spread over all nations," and "the face of the covering cast over all people," of which Isaiah writes (ch. xxv), is being removed. And we are already in the dawn of that happy day when men shall say, "Lo, this is our God, we have waited for Him, and He will save us : this is the Lord; we will be glad and rejoice in His salvation."

We do not blind ourselves to the fact that there are signs in the heavens of great political and social upheavals. We are no such prophets of smooth things as to forget that "the things which can be shaken" in all existing institutions of Church or State will be shaken, until their falsity is revealed and they are transformed or removed. The false idols which men have been rearing in the place of God and Christ-even in His own courts cannot be thrown down without great commotion. The world-Babylons of government and trade which have been built up on the denial of His law of righteousness and love must bring great ruin in their fall and darken the skies with the smoke of their burning. Such storms must precede the clear shining of the morning without clouds.

But that morning will soon dawn. "The night is far spent, the day is at hand."

REVOLUTION IN THEOLOGY.

In an address recently delivered in this city, we heard President Patton declare that the Church was on the brink of a threatened revolution, and that she must now gird

herself for one of the most important contests for the faith in which she has ever engaged. He spoke particularly of the onslaught made by the New Theology upon the integrity of the Bible as the revealed Word of God, and affirmed that surrender here would ultimately leave us no standard of faith but the Christian consciousness, and that the end of all this downward tendency in religion was simple naturalism. He urged us to nerve ourselves for the fight, which may be even a "thirty years' war."

On the other hand, Dr. Lyman Abbott, in a recent sermon, has defined the lines upon which the New Theology challenges the old. The following synopsis of his discourse is taken from a report in the Philadelphia Ledger :

In his discourse this morning, Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott spoke of the "New Theology," of which he is one of the most conspicuous teachers. The invariable difference, Dr. Abbott said, between the true and the false reformer, was that the false destroyed the objects of his attack and gave nothing in their place, while the true reformer did not tear down until he could give something better in the place of what was left behind--he was an evolutionist, not a destructionist. Differentiating the new theology from the old, Dr. Abbott said the old theology teaches that God is a Supreme Sovereign, and the new teaches the same. "To the fullest extent does the new theology recognize God's sovereignty," he said, "but it is a sovereignty of love." The new theology's idea of Christ, he said, is unlike that of the Unitarians, who recognize him as a perfect man, and that of the orthodox, who think him God and man combined in a strange union. The new theologians believe that he was God in man, and right there, it seems to a layman, is the vital tenet of the new theology. "We hold that God and man are of one essence; that their difference is one of quantity and quality only. God is in

finite, man finite; He is pure, man is impure; but in essence they are alike." Dr. Abbott illustrated what he meant by comparing man to a drop of water which had become polluted; but, polluted and insignificant as it is, it is one in essence with all the clouds that span the heavens. "It is still water; and when purified is fit to take its place in the cloud above it." The new theologians believe in a progressive incarnation in the human race; in other words, that as God was in Christ, He may come to be in all, uplifting mankind until they come to be like Him in purity. Like the orthodox, they believe in a solidarity of the human race, but in a solidarity of virtue as of sinfulness. If all derive sin from Adam, they all receive virtue from Christ. Replying to the accusation that the new theologians did not regard the Bible with reverence, Dr. Abbott said that their reverence for the Book was not less, though different, than that of the orthodox. They believed that God spake to the Apostles, but they also believed that He speaks now to those who will hear. One does not need the commandments to tell him it is wrong to steal. He has the sure witness of the Spirit for that, and this witness the new theologians recognize as higher authority than Bible or Church. It is the sure word of God, while Bible and Church are but interpreters of it. In many respects his views suggested those of Dr. Briggs, set forth in his discourse on the reason, and like him he referred to the Friends as keeping alive a belief which other denominations are now borrowing, that God's Spirit still speaks to men.

There is no doubt that the impending conflict between conservatism and progress cannot be averted. Each party to this conflict has something yet to learn. The trouble is that, in the dust and smoke which strife always engenders, the full-orbed truth is obscured from each contestant. The vital point in this controversy concerns the nature of

the Bible. On the one hand there are those who take such extravagant views of its inspiration as to defeat the very end for which the Bible is given-to be our guide into all truth. This class make an idol of the book and accord to it a reverence which is due only to the Spirit who inspired it and who still speaks to men. They virtually look upon the book as the abiding representative of Christ in the Church to the neglect of the Spirit who gave it. If they wish to know His mind, they so give themselves up to collating texts and prying into their hidden meaning as to deaden themselves to the voice of God speaking within them, without which not even the texts can be understood. And yet the other class are in equal danger of depreciating the book as the treasure-house of those words which God has been speaking by the mouth of holy prophets since the world began. Their danger lies in so magnifying the human element in the Scriptures as to lose the thread of the divine plan running through the whole.

We have said before, and we again repeat that this controversy would never have arisen had there been preserved in the Church a right view of that article of faith upon which her whole structure is built-the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. The traditionalists and conservatives have so stripped this doctrine of all its hopeful and redemptive features for the race as to make it to be a boon only to a select class, and an unutterable curse and horror to all the rest. They have thus lost the thread of this hope toward God which runs through the Bible and makes it a priceless boon to mankind. But holding firmly to the plenary inspiration of its text, they have built up special dogmas from special texts apart from the spirit of the

whole, until their faith has taken shape in distorted forms by reason of the darkness which comes from the obscuration of this hope, and which its full light would at once have corrected or dissipated. It is in this way that the dreadful dogma of eternal torment has so long hindered men, even in the Church, from the right knowledge of God. Election and preterition have been fought for by those who viewed themselves as the chosen defenders of the crown rights of Jehovah, and who yet, because of their ignorance of this "hope toward God," were blinded to the true meaning of all Scripture. They failed to see that the chosen seed are elected as a seed of blessing to all the race, and that "the Church of the first-born which are enrolled in heaven" implies that there are to be later-born sons in the great family of Him from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.

But, also, on the other side, our modern progressives would be holding a truer view of inspiration and of the structure of the Bible, if they had a better view of the plan that runs through the whole. Some of their extreme men have even asserted that there is no doctrine of a future life in the Old Testament. And yet this was the very thing for which the risen Jesus reproached His disciples as "fools and blind," that they had not discovered how "Thus it is written, and thus it behoved the Christ to suffer, and to rise from the dead the third day." He opened their understanding that they might perceive that this was the very hope the prophets had testified to concerning Himself. These old Scriptures are freighted with the burden of a great hope for all mankind of which our most optimistic teachers do not yet discern the full meaning, be

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