the earth. The church has always acted over again this divine life in the world.

Yet if the life of Jesus had only this value, and if the work of the minister and priest were only to react and reproduce this life, we should not be saved in our sincerest moments from profound despair. What help is it to a man in misery just to know that one man found peace that passeth understanding? What help is it to a man in sin just to know that one man never yielded to temptation? If there were nothing more than that, life would be torture. It would be just as if I were sinking into the depths of the sea, and, while I gasped and struggled, heard above me sweet voices chanting in solemn music and in ancient words"in saecula saeculorum”—that years and years ago one man passed triumphantly through these waters. As a matter of fact, the Hamlets and Othellos and Lears in real life are not to be found as a rule in the boxes or the orchestra circle. They are outside in the night and the darkness, in the tenement and the broken home. The people in the theatre, however Aristotelian may be their motives, are simply spectators. Now in some such capacity many people attend the churches, to see a great, divine drama. And if such is the chief end in the worship of God, then of course the drama should be given the best staging and the best cast. But the church must be more than an Oberammergau for the presentation of a Passion Play. Such a service will attract the tourist, but not the sinner. The church will never save the lost, if the service, however noble and splendid, is only a dramatic reproduction of an historical episode. It must be more than that. The life of Christ has more than an historical value. His spirit transcends time and space. And this I feel to be the source of inexpressible riches in the life of Christ. The spirit that was in Jesus must be in every man if his kingdom is to come on earth. And our joy is found in the sight of this eternal spirit forever moving in the hearts of men. The spirit that was in Jesus was manifest in the Apostolic Age, in the days of Augustine, in the century of Saint Francis, in the glory of the Reformers. He has never left us nor forsaken us. He has appealed through different centuries to different men,-to the Platonist

in the first century, to the Pragmatist in the twentieth,-to the Oriental and Occidental, to the Roman and the Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond, and free. This mystic spirit, triumphant over time and space, into whose communion we all desire more and more to come, I call the transcendent value in the life of Christ.

Since, then, these two values are true of Jesus, I conclude that they are also true of God. For we have agreed that the perfect man Christ Jesus shall be the measure of all things, even of God who is all in all. Therefore we feel the doctrine to be true. For it has been submitted to the test of life, even the excellency of the abundant life as found in Jesus.

If this doctrine has passed the bar of truth, may I now submit it to the second requirement, "Does it work?" This doctrine of God is, I think, peculiarly adapted to our time, because a strong, sincere feeling among our younger men welcomes the pragmatic description of the world. Such a doctrine as I have given squares with pragmatism. For through this vision of God we see a world still in the making, a world where the good and evil, the holy and the unholy, the light and darkness, struggle for dominion. Such a description appeals to the brave man, and he welcomes with joy the thought that in this world God is laboring to bring the good into complete and perfect triumph. He hears his footsteps behind the curtains of sweet light, and rejoices in the struggle because he knows the Lord his God will fight for him. He receives with reverence the belief that God immanent in the world is also transcendent; that his purpose is from everlasting to everlasting, and that he will bring this universe into his peace. This conception of God is therefore peculiarly adapted to that intellectual mood we call Pragmatism.

Moreover it possesses another value in adaptability: it opens the mystic approach to God. The man who lives in a world in which God is at once the eternal spirit, in whom we live and move and have our being, and the infinite purpose, to whose fulfilment the whole creation steadily advances, lives in a world where the highways to God's presence are open and unobstructed. No irresistible grace opens those highways only to the elect; no dogmas nor holy church dooms to eternal hell the multitude of

the damned; no one book contains the only revelation of the infinite spirit; no one institution, however ancient its reverberating service, and however gorgeous its imposing sacerdotalism, can absolutely govern that approach. This approach is open to all who hear and obey the spirit, which from the beginning has spoken in the hearts of men. This approach is an historic highway in Protestantism, and especially to those Protestant societies who laid the foundations of these American colonies. For here, especially in the northern colonies, as Burke said in his great oration, was observed "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." Now Protestantism, and especially that which has been called most dissident, is a protest against the obstructed approach to God. No worship of graven images and no idolatry of the mass, no bishop and no priest, no king and no pope, no infallible book, shall stand between man and God. Protestantism in its purity stands for the open door. And Protestantism has been most vital and Puritanism most vigorous when this free, unobstructed, mystic approach to God has been so open and so clear to those who walked therein that God was very near to them. The nearness of God! This is the source of Jonathan Edwards's power, the right door into a true appreciation of that great soul. This is the light which shines on every page in the journal of John Woolman. Both men felt supremely that God was nigh to them. To the Puritan in New England, the sovereignty of God was over all, in all, and through all. To the Quaker in Pennsylvania the indwelling of God, the inner light, made irresistible appeal. Whether they felt that Holy Presence through the sovereign will or the inward voice, they were alike in the essential fact of nearness to God. Both were mystics; both fashioned for their souls a road whereon only the spirit was their guide. Over their lives, over Protestantism at its best, over Puritan and Pilgrim, Baptist and Methodist, Quaker and Moravian, Huguenot and Presbyterian,— over all that "dissidence of dissent and that Protestantism of the Protestant religion" which established the American colonies, may rightly be inscribed what Cotton Mather in the Magnalia said of Thomas Shepard, "a trembling walk with God."

This capacity has been the genius of our land and, our relig

ion. This spirit is our rich endowment and our truest inheritance. And it has not vanished from our people. There is alive in the rising generation a great desire to journey on this mystic path to God, to know the reality of his presence, to win the Holy City and to find the Holy Grail. To this spirit in our youth, the thought of God I have attempted to set forth is peculiarly attractive, because it enables theology to give spacious utterance to an increasing desire and an inherited genius. The doctrine, then, passes successfully before that question, "Will it work?" It will work, and enter into the reward of its labor, because it is adapted to pragmatism, which is the intellectual mood of our generation, and to mysticism, which is the genius of our Protestantism.

With deference I submit this attempt to define the ideal which hovers above the spiritual longing of our day. Under the guidance of this idealism we may confidently confront the materialism of our country. This is our peculiar problem. This is the character of the battle in our corner of the field. And this indicates that however different may be the incidents of this long struggle, yet the essentials in the religions of the present and the past and the future are the same, because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Only the symbols of that spirit change from century to century. For we wrestle with protean powers, and to the evils of the time we oppose a religion whose spirit is eternal and whose refuge is the everlasting God.

THE PASTOR AND TEACHER IN NEW ENGLAND

VERGIL V. PHELPS

BILLINGS, MONTANA

The necessity of moral and religious training in the education of children and the significance of education in matters of religion have in our day become the subject of much discussion. It may be profitable, therefore, to examine a unique institution of early New England by which religion was linked to education, and religious education was given a high place in the life of the churches. It is remarkable that this institution seems never to have received the attention of a single book, pamphlet, or magazine article.

In early New England a fully organized church had as officers a pastor, a teacher, and at least one ruling elder, and one deacon.1 The deacon was the treasurer, and the ruling elder the trustee and censor of morals. The pastor was the administrative head of the church, who was expected to inspire its life and activities; the teacher was the educational and doctrinal leader. This office of teacher was undoubtedly the distinctive feature of the New England system. The teacher was exclusively a church officer, and had no more connection with any school than the pastor or deacon; he was as unlike a schoolmaster as a modern theological professor is unlike a teacher in our public schools.2 As far as it is possible to make a comparison, the teacher may be described as a kind of theological professor whose sphere of work was exclusively a church.3

1 The polity also called for the office of deaconess, which never existed in America, although there are several instances of it in Puritan England.

2 The teacher taught the church-members, while the schoolmaster taught the children of the town. The former dealt exclusively with religion, the latter was concerned with religion only as religion was then linked to education.

3 If a theological professor were the regular minister of a church, conducted a lecture (or mid-week religious service), and were responsible for the religious principles of his congregation, we should have the counterpart of the teacher. Something like this is sometimes found to-day among the Quakers. In a few instances, a schoolmaster acted as substitute for a pastor or teacher, or even was