gold or iron or brass. He appeals to the highest motives men can grasp, and cites the noblest law he knows. This law is a law outside themselves; it is the infinite law. It is the Power who makes for Righteousness. . . . The American people believe profoundly in a life larger than the life of things. Men have a profound certainty, which nothing shakes, that there is a God who somehow knows what is good for them better than they know for themselves. The immense majority of people is glad to be reminded and assured of this ideal life and of Him who directs it to-day.

Baron Kentaro Kaneko, of Japan, speaking for his country in reference to the present conflict with Russia, writes:

The outcome of this war remains uncertain, but some things have been made clear that were not well understood before. Our Red Cross Society's work, with its tender and unremitting care for wounded soldiers, Russian as well as Japanese, has been all that could have been looked for from the highest type of a Christian people. The Japanese are considered a heathen nation, but they are doing the work of Christians, irrespective of sect or creed, without discrimination between friend or foe, and this has brought our people into closer and more friendly relations with foreigners living among us. As is well known, by the text of our constitution every Japanese subject has perfect freedom of religious belief and action, a privilege denied to the subjects of Holy Russia, which assumes to stand so much higher than Japan in the plane of religion and civilization. This freedom, of course, has given unusual opportunity for the work of Christian missions, and though it cannot be denied that this work has sometimes been intrusted to inadequate agencies, yet the general purity of intention is undoubted, and the success of the endeavor has been very marked. In the present critical position of Japan the opportunity for Christian teaching has been greatly enhanced. In times of distress and anxiety we all know how one true, friendly word will speak louder to the heart than a thousand of the ordinary commonplaces of good will. The man who says, "Take courage, I stand with you, I recognize the justice of your cause," has a claim upon us forever after. We are ready to listen to his advice and to accept his instruction. We all know that the grand thing in seeking to lift others to a higher level is, first, to understand them and to sympathize with them. It is in behalf of civilization against arrogant militarism, then, that we are fighting, as England fought in the early years of the last century. Imagine for a moment what the results would have been had she been defeated. All Europe would have come under the power of a military despotism. No European country would have had left to it either political freedom or religious liberty. I may say, if Japan be defeated now, that the spirit and the principles of Anglo-American civilization will be obliterated from a vast portion of the Eastern world. And it may be that centuries will pass before ever again humanity, and the universal brotherhood of Christianity, will dawn over the horizon of the continent of Asia. George Brandes writes with French brilliancy but with an irresponsible errancy and flippancy of "Ernest Renan as a Dramatist." Not far wrong, however, is this characterization: "Renan came from Brittany, was descended from a long line of simple farmers and mariners, and was early educated for the Church. He inherited a healthy but ponderous and ungraceful body, and a keen visionary soul. He felt strongly, lived his inner life intensely, was reserved and retired, outwardly bashful, and ostensibly timid; he cultivated many a fair dream-flower in his soul and soared on

...

When he became

the wings of a Celtic legend-loving imagination. acquainted with German philosophy and criticism, enamored of Herder and enraptured with Hegel, his religious faith soon surrendered its intrenchments. . . . A friend said of Renan, 'He thinks like a man, feels like a woman, and acts like a child.'" This also is somewhere near the facts: "Renan was naturally fitted to see only shadows. Truth, to him, was a butterfly. It could not be hit with blows of a club. To him the coarse syllogisms of logic were like blows of a club. . . . The first of his selected themes for study was the Jews. Armed with the weapons of modern criticism, he faced the spirit of Israel; he, the young Catholic from Brittany, lost himself in the study of the genius that came to meet him from ancient Palestine. This Israelitish genius, with its peculiar virility and the fire of its religious enthusiasm, struck him with admiration, and he stretched all the tentacles of his being to seize and comprehend it. Europe owes less to the Greeks than to the Israelites. Europe's festivals to-day are Jewish, not Greek; its God is Jewish, not Greek; the Book which the civilized world calls 'Holy' is Jewish literature; the ideas of the vast multitudes with regard to duty and faith, the life here and hereafter, came from Syria; Europe's ideals were born at Nazareth. Renan was attracted and overawed by the spirit of Israel. He was startled by the fact that a little tribe of people, consisting first of nomads, then of husbandmen, and of necessity warlike-without navigation, for they were shut off from the sea; without commerce, which was in the hands of other races; without architecture or art, and wholly without science-had accomplished one great achievement, and left one immense result, Religion, or rather two religions which in their essence were but one, for primitive Christianity only reiterated in a more generally intelligible manner what Jewish prophets had said seven hundred and fifty years before. The Israelites had uttered so energetic, so passionate a cry for justice that after the lapse of nearly three thousand years it is still resounding in our ears. This appealed to his idealism, and even the fact that it all lay so far away down the ages was an additional attraction to him. There are historians who only feel at ease when they have firm ground under their feet; they love the perceptible, the palpable. Renan, on the contrary, saw well in the dark, liked to see in the dark, preferred to peer into remote times, and felt with satisfaction their conditions and emotions come to life in his inner perception. Whether it was actually the life of those old times as it was lived then-who can say? But he brought all his powers to bear upon vivifying the thoughts and emotions of a thousand years of that faraway past. . . . To get nearer to Jesus he went to Palestine and filled himself with impressions of the place and countries in which Jesus had lived, thereby obtaining a vivid conception of the surroundings and conditions amid which the religious principles which now rule the civilized world first came into being." Brandes says that Renan's presentation of Jesus is brilliantly conceived and delicately executed-an ivory statuette. But he deprives the first Christian century of the gospel of St. John, and blackens the character of Jesus; in his attempt to modernize that Great Figure he attributes to Him his own favorite qualities, as when he calls

Him the founder of "the great doctrine of lofty scorn." "Now and again," says Brandes, "we receive an uncomfortable impression that Renan himself sat for this picture of Jesus. He loves Jesus just as he loves Marcus Aurelius; but he has an antipathy to religious men of action like Paul and Luther." Renan's ethical principles are fairly set forth by Brandes as follows: "His fundamental idea was that each one's duties and virtues are determined, not by any fixed authoritative moral standards, but by the exigencies and impulses of his own nature. As St. Francis was not bound to be a thinker or an artist, so Raphael was not bound to be a saint nor to live a conventional or moral life. It was Goethe's duty to disregard all considerations, including the moral, for the sake of his literary art, which alone had any claim upon him. In other words, the artist's disregard of the common standards of morality is held to be a higher morality!" The plain fact is that few men have written blasphemies more inexcusable than those of this gross, unctuous Frenchman, Renan.

WE revert to The Bibliotheca Sacra (Oberlin, Ohio) chiefly because of the two articles noticed in our last, Dr. Kuyper's criticism of the biblical criticism of the present day and Mr. Churchman's appeal to the new school of theology. The October number of this stanch periodical, taken as a whole, is one of the strongest issues seen in many a day. Dr. Kuyper does not regard the immense study bestowed on Holy Scripture by modern critics as labor lost, for he says:

On the contrary, I have the firm conviction that in the end, and under God's gracious disposal, even the excesses of the most radical Scripture anatomists will be productive of good. How could it ever be unimportant and to no purpose, as far as principle and reverence allow it, to study the origin of the Holy Scripture in the processes of its entering upon existence; to point out the seams where the pieces of the shining robe have been so beautifully woven together; and in a better way than was ever done before to frame, if not with mathematical certainty at least with conjecture, the circle in whose midst, the author by whom, and the time in which, a book of Scripture originated? So little do I aim at the abandonment of these studies that I would no sooner sanction an official ban upon these vivisectorial excesses and physiological indelicacies with the Corpus Scripturæ than with the corpus humanum. But if, in the circle of the medical sciences, these vivisectorial excesses and physiological violations of common chastity are not prohibited by law, has not the nobler-minded medicus the right, in virtue of the principle itself of his science--that is, in the name of the human character that belongs to it, because it has the home for its objectto protest against these shameful cruelties, and the no less shameful indelicacies, as indecent and unlawful? Or, is it not true that in his bodily appearing man ceases to be worthy of the honor of furnishing an object for a separate science, when, treating the animal cruelly and himself having become bestial, he degrades himself to being little better than a corpus vile? And have we no equal rights, when it concerns the Corpus Scripturæ, to enter our complaints on the ground of the absence of feeling in the vivisectors and the offensive profanities of the Scripture physiologists; not in spite, but in the name, of our science; both because, by their actions, the principle itself of theology is violated, and because a patchwork quilt such as they make the Scripture to be does no longer reward the trouble of scientific investigation.

As to what the Scripture is Dr. Kuyper prefers to take the inspired statement of Scripture itself rather than the uninspired opinion of critics. Thus he says:

I do not ask Rothe or Räbiger what the Scripture claims to be. I ask, rather, the highest interpreter of the Scripture organism itself-to wit, the Christ and his anointed apostolate. If, then, Christ and his apostles declare that the Scripture of the Old Covenant is very really inspired, and that by this inspiration it is of binding authority even to the extent of the individual word; or, to cite a single point in detail, if, with a lifted finger, the Son of God says to me, "Thus and so has Daniel the prophet spoken; my disciples, consider it!" and if I should form a contrary conclusion notwithstanding, then I would deem that I had forfeited the claim to the name of theologian, and I would consider myself to have entered into a flagrant contest with the real principle of my science, since I contradicted the Holy Spirit in the self-conscious declaration of his absolute interpreters.

Referring to the inexplicables, the cruces interpretum, found in Holy Scripture, the difficulties before which all theologians stand perplexed, Kuyper says that if he is obliged either to leave those difficulties unsolved and seeming discrepancies unexplained, confessing his ignorance, or, on the other hand, to reject the infallibility of the Scriptures, then, in such a dilemma, he firmly chooses the first, and takes his stand with the simpleminded people of God, and with his whole soul he shrinks back from choosing the second in company with the critics. Further he adds:

To say with Rothe and his followers that there are myths in the Scripture; that the creation narrative is pious fantasy; fantasy likewise the narrative of the fall; that the prophecies are products of a higher-tensioned spiritual life; that the testimonies borne by Christ and his apostles concerning the Old Covenant are devoid of normative power; that the apostolic representation of the truth is equally little normative and binding; that even the image of the Christ which they outline and paint is not fixedly reliable; and then solemnly to declare that the whole Scripture from Gen. i, 1, to Rev. xxii, 21, is their Word of God, is more than I can do; it is too bold for me; it looks wonderfully much like a protestatio actui contraria, which I hear, but of which I have no understanding. Speaking of the Bible as the supernaturally inspired Word of God, and as the only foundation of certainty and comfort, Kuyper says:

A troubled soul, tossed with tempest and not comforted, is filled with anxiety, and thirsts after certainty. In the heart of one who is so apprehended of the Lord, even though he be a plain day-laborer, the sacred things of the Almighty have found a lodging, and therefore in the depths of his soul the powers of hell antagonize those sacred things. Thus a conflict is waged as of giant forces in his breast, and that oppresses him; he sees no way of escape; he faints beneath its tension, except He who is compassionate takes compassion on him, and sets him up upon the Rock of the Word. Only when he stands on that Word does the oil of gladness drip in his soul instead of mourning, and the garments of praise begin to shine forth in place of the spirit of heaviness, and the man breaks forth in singing the praises of Him who has set him free from bonds; also from those oppressing bonds of dependency upon man, who at best is but a creature of dust. For to obtain real peace, an unshakable faith, and a full development of powers, our soul must, in the depth of depths and forsaken

of all men, depend on God Almighty alone. To draw one's being immediately from God's own hand, consciously and continuously, this renders one invincible, enables one to become heroic, and makes us surpass ourselves. This is the secret of the power which forms character, steels the will with energy, and sets man, the citizen, the confessor of Jesus, truly free.

The other article we revert to is the "Appeal to the New School," by Mr. Churchman, an instructor in Princeton University and a layman. Beginning by declaring his sympathy with what is called the New School in theology, he points out its weaknesses and mistakes, and calls it sharply to account for its evil influence. Its greatest faults are its utterly unwarranted contempt for the piety and scholarship of its opponents, the conservatives; and the impression it generally makes of being really antagonistic to any Christianity worthy of the name, because it is continually and vigorously proclaiming its negative views. He calls on the men of this school to give their force to proclaiming their positive convictions. He demands that the loudest note from pulpits, magazines, books, and professional chairs shall be a clear, ringing declaration of the great central and fundamental beliefs of apostolic and evangelical Christianity. He says that seminaries where the atmosphere is coldly critical, negative, and destructive cannot prepare preachers who will go out to the world with a positive message. He thinks Harnack's influence does more to weaken the faith of the orthodox than to attract agnostics toward any sort of Christianity; and that Martineau spent more force in antagonizing the scholarly and evangelical Liddon than in combating men like Huxley and Haeckel, who were hostile to religion of every kind. He tells the New School men that there is a terrible necessity for them to stop harping on "what we have outgrown," to stop curling the lip at the "moss-backs," to stop ridiculing the faith hitherto held by orthodox Churches, and to make themselves conspicuous as bold, whole-hearted, and powerful preachers of the positive Christianity which sent Paul and Peter out to their fight against sin and denial and doubt-to proclaim in ringing tones the supernatural religion, based on Christ's resurrection and authority, which is the only religion that can convince, convert, and regenerate this unregenerate and unbelieving age. "If these men," asks Mr. Churchman, "believe all this, why do they not talk more about it; why do they not keep it always in the foreground?" This supernatural religion finds its center in a supernatural Person, and part of its evidence is in supernatural historic events. No other interpretation can be put on the words of those Scripture writers who knew what Christianity was in its beginning; such a religion is philosophically admissible, and is also rationally demanded by a world like ours. To the claim of the New School that their surrender of various points formerly held is only a retiring to more tenable ground, he answers by saying that even if this be so, nevertheless this apparent retreat has emboldened and drawn forward the enemy, has discouraged many of our soldiers, and has turned some neutrals against us. It has confused and troubled many plain good people, loosened the faith of not a few, turned some young men from entering the ministry. He warns the men of the New School, to which he himself belongs, that, for its own credit and safety as well as