personal God to us. And thus through the human experiences of conscience and the emotions the living God comes to be apprehended by us and we enter into communion with him.

But during this process of man's consciousness a problem has arisen which he must now solve. He has learned that a conflict exists between the demands of the two parts of his being. He has made the experience which Paul describes in the seventh chapter of his letter to the Romans: "I delight in the law of God after the inward man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind." He has learned clearly and distinctly that nature, including one half his own life, has no morals. He finds that the ways of the physical world are by no means ways of righteousness. It seems that the former are wholly indifferent to the latter and at times even opposed. And the great problem is for him to harmonize the two sets of laws in his life. For we learn just as clearly and distinctly that we cannot find inner peace until such harmony be wrought. The higher laws of life, the laws which conscience sanctions, force themselves upon us and demand that they be kept. But then again, if these be kept, we frequently are made to suffer the penalties following upon the neglect of the laws that lead to physical and material success. For the laws of righteousness again and again call for denial and chastisement of self. The kind and considerate man again and again loses pleasures which he might gain and keep if he cared less for the spiritual and more for the material. Christ on the cross may well have remembered that "all the kingdoms of the world" were once promised to him. But they were promised on conditions which he choose not to accept. As man passes through the troubled waters of this experience it is no wonder if he gives way to the cry of despair: "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!" Yet the very fact that he does so cry out, in the belief that deliverance may yet come, takes place because of the presence of his religious faculty which originally prompted him to enter into sympathy with

the universe. It will not now allow him to rest satisfied with the bare consciousness of the duality of his nature; it bids him seek an explanation which shall also be a deliverance. Led by this religious sense, the answer man has received after much groping is the firm conviction that both the physical process and the spiritual process in man's life are parts of a larger world process; that the physical world and the spiritual world are but expressions of a deeper nature of things; that there is a unity which includes both spheres of his life; that back of both physics and ethics, matter and spirit, there is the living God; and that if man could only find him and know him the problem of man's duality would be solved and his salvation from internal strife would ensue. It is true, this answer is at first only a guess; and at no time in man's experience is it demonstrable. Yet the only explanation of life's mystery, the best working theory of life itself, is to be found in this simple answer of philosophic faith.

In this answer of faith the human spirit finds satisfaction and rest. The answer reaches back to a fundamental, allincluding source, whence the soul may receive strength. All the truly religious men whom the world has ever known were fully persuaded of the truth of this answer; fully convinced that above the duality of seen and unseen, instinct and freedom of will, soul and body, life here and life beyond, was the Everlasting God, to whom all these things were subject. And so they trusted him; believing that it was his property to provide that eternal justice should be done; that in the end each individual would receive the exact reward due to his merits; that the Father would make everything right—if not in this world, then indeed in some world yet unknown to mortals. This is the faith that cried out in Marcus Aurelius, "Nothing can happen to me which is not best for thee, O Universe;" that spake through St. Paul, "All things work together for good to them that love God;" which was voiced still more beautifully by Jesus Christ in the words, "Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, . . . shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?" Whosoever at

tains to this faith leaves behind him the anxious cares and perplexities of life. Henceforth he knows the true worth of things; for he sees them in the light of the eternal. It teaches him to call the God of all men Father, and makes him feel that there is justice at the center of things, since he can tell his cares to One at his right hand by whom all cares are remembered and are removed in due season. It teaches him the true worth of the human soul; of rectitude, of purity, of mercy, and of sacrifice. It teaches him the ultimate worthlessness of external possessions or honors and of anxious care for the preservation of life. It teaches him that, in spite of struggle and pain, obedience to the laws of conscience will crown life with happiness and peace; but that neglect of these, in spite of seeming advantages and transient pleasures, can never bring lasting joy or satisfaction. In the light of this faith he holds righteousness dear and wickedness cheap. More and more as this conviction becomes strong within him he realizes in his life the contentment of the soul to whom the Spirit of God hath revealed himself. More and more as he lives out this conviction in the daily walks of life he comes to know the strength of God which is always manifest in his children. And more and more as he quietly resigns himself to the loving care of the Father he reechoes in his heart the words of Heb. iv, 3: "We who have believed do enter into rest."

Frederick W. Hass

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

"WE bid you carry away from our great synod as the watchword of our battle for the time to come-Missions, Missions, MISSIONS."-Bishops' Address to General Convention of Protestant Episcopal Church.

WRITING about Temperament in Theology, Brierley says truly that the development of the so-called scientific spirit does not fully eliminate the variations in theology arising from personal bent and temperament. He cites in evidence of this the later developments of the Ritschlian school, and notes that that school is now beginning to discover that Ritschl's quarrel with German Pietism was the result of a primal repugnance, instinctive rather than rational, and that this subjective feeling has seriously limited his view in some important directions; and that one of the most distinguished of his followers, Harnack, has, in a recent German review, expressed this feeling with much plainness. We may add that while some of Ritschl's general positions face in the same direction as our Methodist faith, there is difficulty amounting, it now seems, to practical impossibility when the effort is made to adjust his theology with our doctrines in detail; and similar difficulty is experienced in trying to reconcile Ritschl's teachings with certain explicit statements of truth in the New Testament, notably with the positive teachings of John and Paul. For example, Ritschl, like Kuyper, teaches that "the proper object of justification is the Christian Society as a collective whole, and not the individual as such;" whereas individualism is the doctrine of the New Testament, a doctrine which has its culmination in John's gospel. The Ritschlian theology, with all its illumination and breadth of vision, has a difficult and tedious task before it in any attempt to reconcile its principles with the existing systems; and, while it may modify them in some features, its most sanguine supporters can hardly hope that it will ever supplant those systems.

REV. WILLIAM IRVIN, of New York, writing in the Princeton Theological Review on "Success in the Ministry," holds that ministerial success is the sure outcome, the inseparable sequel, of a genuine ministry. He says:

The ministry has this advantage over other callings, that to deserve success is really to achieve it. The world's judgment affords no just criterion. Even the minister's self-measurement may be largely at fault. He may lack utterance like Moses, or courage and ambition like Jeremiah, or faith like Thomas, or steadfastness like Peter. He may be almost overmastered by a keen sense of his own insufficiency. He may still be withstood by indifference like Gamaliel's, or misconstruction like that of Festus, or mockery like that of the men of Athens. He may often be tempted to cry out, "I have labored in vain!" Yet none the less is his message "the power of God unto salvation." It is a veritable and solid success, by whatever test it may be judged a failure. And none the less, too, is the weak man who utters it "mighty through God." The earthen vessel is decked with a heavenly splendor. His Master sees to it that he is made sufficient for the ministration of the new covenant. The herald of salvation has the hosts of God at his back. God takes his part-and if God be for him, who can be against him? Let a man be quickened and called by the Spirit, and trained and commissioned by the Church; let him be equipped with sacred knowledge and endowed with heavenly gifts; let him come to men in the fullness of the blessing of the Gospel of Christ; let him be established in truth and resolute in duty; let him thrill with human sympathies and glow with heavenly love; let him hold his Master with one hand and clasp sinners with the other; let him speak the word and minister at the altar; let him rule the church and mold the household; let him win the young, guide the mature, and support the aged; let him cheer the dying and console the mourner; let him contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints, and be in himself its best proof and its brightest illustration, and whether he be a genius or a plodder, brilliant or dull, far-famed or little known, a stammerer or a Chrysostom, the life he lives will be illustrious, fruitful, memorable-blessed of men, admired by angels, owned by Christ, written deep in human hearts, and graven for evermore in the book of God's remembrance as linked with a veritable, splendid, and immortal

success.

A VETERAN STATESMAN'S HOPES FOR ENGLAND.

ONE of Britain's best-known and most-privileged statesmen, whose personal recollection covers more than sixty years of England's life, records in a recent volume many significant judgments upon things past and things present. There are few finer sights than an old man, who, although he knows fully the evil in the world and how difficult is the victory of the good, yet keeps through all his years a firm faith in human progress, saying to his faltering brethren, "If this hour seem dark in some ways, at