superficial and partial glimpses of Him who is both the First and the Last. Inadequate conception is misconception. The true Christ is belittled by too little scrutiny and by too short views.

In what other manner than by enlarging our conceptions shall we return answer to the criticisms of an unscriptural and faithless intellectualism? Shall we apologize for our faith, minimize the supernatural element in our Scriptures, meekly repudiate the miraculous features in them and question the fact of their inspiration? Shall we withdraw, one by one, at the dictation of supercilious unbelief, the peculiar characteristics of our Christ until we declare Him to be no more than a man, with no history earlier than Bethlehem, with no relation to God beyond that of all other men, and, in consequence, with no help in Him for the souls of men, except perhaps the touch of an impotent sympathy and the stimulus of a good example? There has been too much already of such pusillanimity. Such demands are merely trumpet calls to rouse us to discover and assert the grandeur of Him whom we serve, to trace His goings forth from everlasting to everlasting,and to recognize that in the hollow of His hand lie alike the stellar and the historic constellations! Expand the horizon to the utmost; the Christ still will overlap it. With a view of Christ which regards only His earthly relations, the heart that truly loves that benign brother finds difficulty in justifying itself before the intellect for the divine reverence paid Him, and before the moral sense for the obedience rendered to His precepts as the highest authority. This apparent discrepancy vanishes in a true conception of His moral dignity as the manifest God. This deeper study abandons no vantage ground, and leaves the old entrenchments only to enclose new area.

An enlarged conception of Christ is demanded, too, by prevalent theological unrest. Theology to-day is distracted, contradictory, uncertain of itself, through lack of a universally accepted centre. It is in the condition of the various departments of human learning before the application of the Novum Organon to the vast fields of nature; or, of the confused and conflicting astronomical theories before the simplifying revelation of the Copernican system. Theological systems are plenty enough,

but they are based upon the decrees, upon the covenants, upon the attributes, upon sin, upon the Incarnate Christ. They view the manifold plan of redemption from the circumference, and study the divine purpose in its individual applications rather than in its origin and end. The solar system is simple, viewed from the sun. Ascending high enough, we find all, even seemingly contradictory truths springing, like the oak's divergent boughs, from a common root in the hidden God manifest in the Logos, who assumes human nature in Jesus.

A theology based wholly upon the universal and eternal Logos, besides giving this much needed unity, will be neither provincial nor ephemeral, but world-wide and enduring. From John's view-point of the Logos as God increasingly manifesting Himself, there needs to be a restatement of religious essentials in terms of modern thought, experience, and life.

In this age of specialism, many will deprecate as too ambitious such an effort to grasp in one comprehensive view the mutual relations of God and man from eternity to eternity. Yet this is just what all are daily doing, each after his kind. Every one has his own philosophy of life, crude or refined as the case may be. The difficulty with very many who nominally find this guide of their lives in Christianity is that they take too few of its factors into the account. Even of Christian theologians, few have any Christ earlier than the creation. While of ordinary believers, fewer still ever think of Him as more ancient than the manger at Bethlehem. Naturally enough, unbelievers take the Christian's Christ at His disciples' valuation. Hence the pressing need of some adequate presentation of what the larger Christ, the true Christ, actually is.

Such a statement would exhibit, as the basis of all that should follow, the fundamental relations of the Logos to the universe itself as the process of revelation to God as absolute Deity to the universe as a creation; it would show the antemundane relations of the Logos to humanity, and thus find the true starting point for the study of the problems of sin and salvation; it would consider the relations of the Logos to man as his creator, and his sustainer, and the one shaping his national movements and religious life with a view to entering as the Christ

of God, in due time, into personal union with him, his divine Brother, Redeemer, and Judge; it would deal with the relations of this now historic Christ, the Son, to the Holy Spirit, and thus treat of His transforming work in and for those who believe on His name, realizing the Kingdom of God upon earth; it would discuss the relations of Christ to the spirits of just men made perfect, in their eternal felicities and activities, in which they glorify God and enjoy Him forever, showing how humanity— individualized and grown into the image of God-returns to His bosom, the eternal purpose of God accomplished.

Thus any fit setting forth of Christ must carry a surveyor s chain clear across the continent of revelation, and faithfully report the measurements found. Whether the results square with the authorized charts of any previous theological system one need not pause to inquire. One's sole concern would be with the revelation of God a revelation material in the creation, personal in man and in Christ, providential in the processes of history, and articulate in the Bible-confident that all these must harmonize, since, there being one God, His sign manual will be the same wherever written. But this revelation can be intelligently received only by considering in one view the end and the beginning, together with the method of moral administration by which that end is being reached. It is only in some such way as this that we shall vitalize theology as a science, and at the same time win a hearing from that large number of sincere and thoughtful men who now find no attraction in evangelical Christianity.

This suggests a further need of a more comprehensive statement of Christian truth, that it may include all who have the Christian spirit. When one finds himself growing into a fuller understanding of God's revelation and in sympathy with a corresponding interpretation of the doctrines of theology, there is no need that he should cut himself adrift from the old moorings and swing out into the current of external dissent. It were at once wiser and more helpful to go further and seek an outlook from which the old is comprehended in the new. Sincerity is to be presumed in the exponents of each; a nexus of truth, therefore, must encircle both; whoever finds it will enrich both

these hemispheres of belief. This will be done, not by minimizing their differences but by rising to an altitude overlooking both and uniting them no longer as rivals, but as parallel walls of one arch of which this wider view is the keystone. There should be such an exposition of the substance of Christian belief as shall give common ground to the man surrounded all his life by Christian influences which determine his understanding of Christian truth, and to the man without religious surroundings whose development began with intellectual culture. There are many such men among us; men thoughtful in mind and moral in life, who lose the help and comfort of an evangelical faith, and whose influence tells against rather than for the progress of Christ's visible kingdom. Shall we not for their sakes exhibit the largeness of the Christian's faith, the breadth of its arena, and the eternity of its reach? Their thought needs to be turned from the little and the temporary, from the jots and tittles of formularies, to the weightier matters of God and His everyday relations to man, by a modern phrasing, in terms of current thought and activities, of the positive side of our belief in its larger forms.

As a speculative necessity under modern conditions, as an unfolding of the meaning of the universe, as a justification of the sublime doctrines of Christianity, as the solvent of doubt, as the interpretation of history, as a unifying principle in theology, as the broad basis of religious fellowship, the age needs to attain unto a larger conception of Christ.

PROTESTANTISM IN NORTH AMERICA.

[Contributed to CHRISTIAN THOUGHT.]

BY WM. HENRY ROBERTS, D.D., LL.D.,

American Secretary of the Alliance of the Reformed Churches and Stated Clerk and Vice-Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in the United States of America.

HAT God is in history is evidenced to every generation by the sequence and results of events. The providence of God, made manifest in the control of the destinies of nations, is either destructive or constructive, yet in both directions is always used for the vindication of His justice and the maintenance of His truth. Attention is very naturally drawn at this time to the discovery 400 years ago of the American continent by Columbus. Near the time of this discovery, the guiding Divine Mind gave origin in Europe to those energies of thought which produced the Reformation, and thus set in motion the religious and political force which is called Protestantism. There is, of course, much which could be written about the triumphant march of Protestantism throughout the world since its origin, until today it occupies the foremost place among the forces which have made, and are, the life of modern civilization. England, at the time of Columbus, was confined within the limits of South Britain, and the number of English-speaking persons was about 6,000,000. Europe was almost entirely submissive to Rome. To-day the English speech is on the lips of 110,000,000 of the same race, two of the chief Protestant powers, Great Britain and the United States of America, control the destinies of nearly one-third of the population of the globe; and in Europe, Protestant Germany is easily first in military strength and intellectual power.

The main principles of Protestantism are four in number: (1) The absolute supremacy of the grace of God in salvation; (2) the absolute supremacy of the Bible as the infallible rule of faith and practice; (3) the right of private judgment in matters of religion,