Rejecting thus all satisfaction, substitutional theories, he adds:

"The more humane ideas of a Reconciliation or a Redemption at least the latter of them-leave it undetermined from whom it is, precisely, that humanity beholds itself delivered by this ransom. It could not well be God, but must rather be the order of natural law, which has connected sin with our finiteness, and condemnation with our sin. Now we know that we are redeemed neither from physical evils nor from the possibility of sin. The only thing left therefore as the practically effective result of redemption is the content of a faith revealed and proffered to us, which redeems us from the distress and wretchedness of Creation, in so far as it teaches us to regard all evil as only a divine trial; teaches us, however, to regard the whole of the earthly life, not to be sure as insignificant, nor yet as an irrevocable finality, but as a state of preparation, for the errors of which there is in the divine grace a redemption which we are not in the least able speculatively to define." (Ibid pp. 151-2).

Here thus we have two of the greatest intuitional philosophers of the century, Martineau and Lotze, whom as against the materialism of the age are safe, according to Mr. Cook, and who certainly have as keen an eye to the right use of axiomatic truth and the science of nature and of ethics as Mr. Cook, who however concur in the decided opinion that the earthly life of man is not "an irrevocable finality."

But some one may say, "The sinner's mind and life are a very complex state of war within and without, the incident forces retributively assailing the soul from every point." This is partly true. The sinner is like the troubled sea. If he has calm, it cannot last. He is athwart the course of things under God, and cannot be let alone. He can never have time enough to establish permanence of evil in the universe before some (to use an admirable expression we once heard Mr. Cook employ) before some "Divine conspiracy of events" will break in upon his state of mind and make new combinations of thought and feeling. This is the history in brief of every sinner ever saved. But the idea that the sinner's state of mind and life is very complex is not true. Sin

is a narrowing influence. Its presence is proof of the subordination of the wide variety of mental and moral activities to the inferior, belittling and uncomplex disposition to wrong. Sin fetters the soul's freedom, dims the consciousness of the soul's manysidedness, and boycotts the superior activities by cutting off both the sources of their inspiration and patronage. But sin does not, cannot obliterate freedom, or cut sheer off the manysidedness of the spirit's possibilities.. In this certain fact, with the universal law of the Divine aggressiveness through its own established methods of multiplying relations of the good to the universe of things, we are firmly grounded in the rational and Biblical faith of ultimate universal righteousness.

The sinners, who are imagined as attaining permanence of evil life, are creatures born of an unscientific philosophy of humanity, not men of flesh and blood. No man who has had experience of a direct and confidential relation with the worst. classes of society, would for a moment assert that he had ever found a human being actually in a state of sanity and moral accountability, who would answer to Mr. Cook's ideal sinner.

The writer spent seven years in a position of exceptional opportunity and necessity for becoming acquainted with, and for special study of, the worst elements of our cities. He made an extended visitation to penal and reformatory institutions, and a comprehensive study of the literature of reforms and charities and crime, and he left his position with stronger convictions and more definite and certain knowledge, that a Just God and Good, in a universe of conservative law and development, had not made any soul of all these hunted classes so that it could pass beyond the reach of the influence of improved environments and the social, reformatory and educational agencies first or last sure to assail it. And he learned another thing—that the great toilers of today among the lost and criminal classes are, from whatever denomination of Christians they hail, men and women of the profoundest confidence and hope in the measures and labors and Gospel of reform, that are making our age the very herald of deliverance from permanent evil.

We insist that there is no valid scientific interpretation of Scripture, or of law, natural or ethical, to justify Mr. Cook's conclusions, or that can check the ethical revolt of the mind. against his conclusions a revolt his own mind betrays in fact when he says: "Why God creates a soul, foreknowing it will be lost, is a mystery." Here his own heart falters, and he does not as a Christian claim herein to "exchange eyes with God," since here God's eyes are veiled, and his own cast down in a vacant, painful stare.

Mr. Cook often speaks of this life being "a brief gleam between two eternitics a past and a future eternity." Yet he considers this gleam long enough, and fraught with consequences enough in a soul, to yield a result of evil equal to the interminable reach of the future eternity. As the "brief gleam" of human life, like a faint but swiftly moving meteor, plunges into the sea of the darkness of death, we are asked to believe that, at the moment of the plunge, a vast number of God's own children become permanently hardened against all the impinging forces of the Infinite Goodness-that a brief gleam of time has been enough to enable a soul to pull down the curtains for all eternity against the steadfast shining of the face of God, the Father.

We do not, we cannot, exaggerate this amazing and unscientific attitude of the theological mind in the past, much more in the present. Mr. Cook is right in contrasting life now with eternity past and future as a brief gleam. In the presence of science to-day, we learn that the entire known history of humanity has not covered time enough to make a comma in the history of organic life on the globe. Much more then is the life of one man minimized in space of time when set over against eternity and the Infinite. And in this formal contrast it is not possible to over-belittle man and his present life with even all the profound significance of his moral freedom.

"Behold the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance."

But we also read:

"Thou hast made him but a little lower than the angels (or God) (or a god)". Universalism with an emphasis and distinctness excelled by no other theology and philosophy of man, sets forth this moral ability, and defends it against all ideas which, would make God over-ride it. The protest of Universalism, in common with the augmenting revolt of the moral sense and reason of the age, is against the belittling by the old or the new theology of eternity and the Eternal as moral and time factors in the problem of destiny, and against the corresponding omnipotizing by either old or new theology of the sinner-making him equal to the permanent resistance of the combined beneficent influences of the universe of God. The man to-day who accepts law as one in time and eternity, and who can eloquently set forth the working of that law in earth in improving individuals, society, nations, a law, the very nature of which is its aggressiveness and persistence in turning all powers to its service of beneficence,the man who thus accepts law as a unit in earth and in the unseen Holy of Holies, and then heralds as an eternal reality the existence of a wall of permanent sin around a vast section of the moral universe, within which all laws of God have ceased forever to be operative for any good-such a man ought not to be advertising himself as strictly keeping company with the sciences of ethics and of nature, or as marching in the van of the army of progress.

Richmond Fisk, D.D.

ARTICLE X.

Farrar's History of Interpretation.1

The best introduction to the study of any science is its history. To know what has been achieved in a department of knowledge is the indispensable condition of further achieve

1 History of Interpretation. Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford in the year 1885 ou the Foundation of the late Rev. John Bampton. By Frederick W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S. New York. E. P. Dutton & Co. 1386.

ment in the same. To know where and how men have erred in seeing facts or failed in reasoning about them is the best safeguard against similar failures and errors. If the whole truth about any group of facts or phenomena could be apprehended at the first glance, there would be no history of any science. But just because this is impossible and every science is, in the nature of things, progressive, the history of human inquiry is, if not a history of errors, then, at least, a history of inadequate and faulty apprehensions of the truth.

The claim for Interpretation that it is a science may, in all sincerity, be fairly made. That every one who speaks or writes does so with the intention of conveying intelligible ideas; that there are certain general principles of intelligence by which one mind may understand another speaking or writing; that there is one right way of explaining obscurities and difficulties in language, and that this right method is capable of being set forth in rules or laws-these are facts. which have no less secure a foundation than the integrity of the human mind. Interpretation as such, or General Interpretation can hardly be said to have a history. Its principles lie in the structure of language and in the nature of mind, and are apprehended at a glance. Disputes about the meaning of passages in Homer or Plato do not generally arise out of differences of opinion as to methods or principles of interpretation, but out of conflicting judgments on matters of grammar and philology. But Biblical Interpretation, which is a branch of General Interpretation, has a history, and a very long one, partly, it is true, because by the increase of knowl edge new light has been thrown upon the Bible and new interpretations hence made necessary, but chiefly because, through the whole course of its historical development, it has not been a science at all in the proper acceptation of the word, that is, has not been controlled by a scientific interest. and pursued in a scientific spirit. When Biblical Interpretation shall have become truly a science, it will furnish but scanty materials for further history.

The first question, then, which the historian of Biblical