the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire from heaven, the changing of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, and Jonah in the whale's belly. If He knew that these were fables, why did He lend Himself to their furtherance? If he did not know, how could He offer Himself as an inerrant guide in matters of truth? An examination of the miracles of Jesus would lead to similar conclusions. The most, if not all, of these miracles have been accounted for upon common principles of natural law; yet there is no denying that He encouraged the popular tendency to regard them as weird and unearthly, nay, further, that He rashly ventured His Messianic claims upon their supernaturalness. It is needless to extend these illustrations. As we have already said, it is not a pleasant task to point out the faults of Jesus. We have not taken out a brief to prove His imperfection. "Conservative men should hesitate before they force the critics in self-defence to make a catalogue" of the defects in His life and character.

WHAT ARE THE CONCLUSIONS?

(1) There is no solid basis for the doctrine of an absolutely perfect Christ. As the inerrant Scriptures disappeared before the clear light of scholarship, so does the kindred fable of the immaculate Christ vanish under similar conditions like a fog-bank before the rising sun.

(2) If it be alleged that the imperfections ascribed to the character of Jesus are due to His biographers or to fallible copyists, we answer we have to deal with Christ as we have Him. As to an original Christ, flawless and without guile, the suggestion is merely hypothetical. No living man has ever seen Him. There is no portrait of Him in existence. All current accounts of Him, scriptural and otherwise, agree with the foregoing representation of Him.

(3) If it be alleged that the original Christ must be received by faith, on the assumption that God would not reveal Himself in an imperfect Christ, we answer again that faith has no place in a judicial investigation; and all such a priori considerations are foreign to the scientific method. When it was claimed in the former controversy that the original autograph of the Scriptures was inerrant, for the reason that inspiration is a divine breathing

and God could not breathe a lie, the fallacy of such reasoning was instantly apparent. And by the same token, perfection cannot on similar a priori grounds be ascribed to Jesus as the Incarnate Word of God.

(4) While disavowing the divine perfection of Jesus we are prepared to insist that all the essentials of such perfection were in Him. He was not God, but contained Him. He was not truth, but contained it. He was not the Incarnate Word, but contained it. His character was to perfection as quartz is to gold. The open question is purely quantitative, whether (so to speak) the quartz contains the gold in paying quantities or not.

(5) The admixture of imperfection in the character of Jesus is what should be expected in the nature of the case. Though begotten by the Holy Ghost He was born of a woman and must needs inherit her human frailty. In like manner the errors of Scripture were traced to the personal infirmities of those holy men who wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The parallel is exact. The co-operation of the divine with the human never yet resulted in an indefective product. The faults of the Incarnate Word are, therefore, after the precise analogy of those in the Written Word of God.

(6) We have no occasion nor necessity for an immaculate Christ. Every purpose is answered by the imposing figure of One who, while pre-eminent in wisdom and goodness, shared the infirmities of His fellow-men. We gain nothing by conjuring up an impossible and unbelievable Avatar. What we want is a work ing basis and we find it in the doctrine of the historical Christ, the Christ who is set forth in the errant Scriptures and the equally errant lives of Christian people, that is the errant Christ. If, in arriving at this result, we seem to have lost some of our traditional beliefs, we find abundant compensation in the sense of having followed a reasonable course of argument to its inevitable conclusions. The fearless seeker after truth must not shrink from the consequences of his temerity. And it must ever be remembered that nothing in the universe is to be valued with truth. This is the pearl of great price. Thrice happy is he who parts with everything that he may buy it.

It would, however, be a grievous mistake to suppose that

in stripping away the vain traditions that have gathered about Christ we have parted with Christ Himself. Is a tree destroyed by wise pruning? Did we lose the Scriptures when we proved them to be full of inaccuracies? Were they not rather the more endeared to us? So, now that we perceive Christ in His true character, we love and revere Him a thousand-fold more than ever. If any of His people are devoted to Him, we more. A judicious attachment is ever more loyal than a whimsical and ill-grounded infatuation. Our Christ, stripped of the gaudy tinsel with which superstition had decked Him, remains to us the wisest of teachers, the most kindly of philanthropists, the most infallible of guides, the most perfect flower of humanity, and the best Incarnation of Deity that is possible to our fallen race. "That mightiest heart that ever beat, stirred by the Spirit of God, how it wrought in His bosom."* We accept Him as Redeemer and Friend. We recognize His unspeakable goodness in giving Himself for us. None shall exceed us in devotion to Him; none shall sing more loudly or joyously in His honor. He is the foundation of our faith and the corner-top-stone of our life and character. "He remains the highest model of religion within the reach of our thought and no perfect piety is possible without His presence in the heart." + "Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceasing; His story will call forth tears without end, His suffering will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus." +

Theodore Parker.

f David Strauss.

Ernest Renan.

AUGUSTE COMTE AND POSITIVISM.

[Read at the monthly meeting of the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, May, 1893.]

BY DAVID H. GREER, D.D., OF NEW YORK.

THERE is perhaps no man of eminence in modern times

concerning whom there is such diversity of opinion as Auguste Comte. While a few ardent admirers are inclined to give him almost unbounded homage and to regard him as the greatest, or one of the greatest thinkers living or dead, there are others who speak of him as having been crazed with some constitutional disorder or "maniacal disease," and who treat him with a slight bordering upon pity or contempt. Each of these appraisements is partial and one-sided, although it is not difficult to see how each of them should have been made or how the second should be the more common of the two.

Comte's career had two sides to it or rather two stages in it— that of the philosophic thinker and that of the religious reformer. It is in connection with this latter office that those eccentricities appear which have made him obnoxious to such a large number of persons, and yet with that mistaken estimate of his services. which is not uncommon to men who are endowed with great capacity and afflicted with great conceit, it is those very eccentricities which he himself has emphasized as the most important features of his life-work and thrust the most conspicuously upon the public notice. It is not surprising, therefore, that men are inclined to forget the great genius of Comte the philosopher, in remembering the colossal vanity of Comte the high-priest of Humanity. And yet despite these drawbacks he is, as Dr. Martineau remarks, "a large and potent factor in modern speculation and thought. A few vigorous minds have been moulded by him to an extent unknown perhaps even to themselves, and many more owe no slight obligation to the pregnant hints scat

tered throughout his writings. His main attempt to destroy the antithesis between the physical and the moral sciences, and draw them out in one continuous series, by ranging man and his life among natural objects, has established itself as a characteristic of our time, and exhibits more signs of vigor than the older forms of anthropological and social doctrine. If the most marked intellectual tendency of the age be to advance the lines of every science into a domain hitherto distinct to press physical conception into chemistry, chemical into physiology, physiological into morals and politics, and by the energy of the inductive law to shoulder metaphysics and theology over the brink of the world altogether, it is largely due to the action direct and indirect of the positive philosophy of Comte."

My purpose in this paper is to examine the leading and distinctive features of that philosophy, to study, in other words, at its fountain head that tendency toward positivism which is so strong and prevalent in our modern thought.

But what is positivism? Before undertaking to examine the law or philosophy of a thing, it is important to know precisely what the thing is whose method of activity we are about to examine. What then is positivism? How are we to define it? How has Comte defined it? The term is ambiguous; it does not easily and of itself suggest the notion for which it was intended. to stand.

The knowledge of phenomena, Comte tells us-that is positive knowledge, and that alone is positive. Every other kind of knowledge is negative, that is, there is nothing in it, it has no basis in fact-in the strict sense of the word it is not knowledge at all, and, therefore, should be laid aside as fictitious and unreal; and all those sciences, ethical and ethnic, social, religious, and civic, which have been built upon it, should also be laid aside. We know nothing but phenomena in their relations of succession and co-existence, and no proper synthesis can be constructed by us except upon an analysis that is exclusively phenomenological. All this may be true, but all this, I submit, is not contained in or suggested by the word positive. Whether or not we can properly know anything but phenomena is the crux of the contention. Comte and his school may be right and their opponents wrong,