we have lost the Christian conception of the personality of God, we have, first of all, lost all possibility of true worship on the part of man or prayer to God. Man can never worship an abstraction. We cannot, without stultifying every principle of moral intelligence, address mere "power" or "force," or the inscrutable impersonal energy of the universe, as "Our Father who art in heaven." We can never say of the vague, non-moral " Principle of the universe," that it is gracious and merciful, and wills in holy love. But these are the very attributes of a good personal being.

When we have lost the idea of personality from our conception of God, we have, in the second place, destroyed the only basis for affirming his moral character. The universe consists of personal and impersonal beings. All existences are one or the other. Only a person can be a moral being. An impersonal being is incapable of moral character. God himself, if he be not a personal, that is, a self-conscious and free Being, is incapable of moral character. Personality is the power of conduct freely and rationally ordered, whether in the ruling of the universe or the regulating of a life. And if God be not a person within the human meaning of that word, then he is as incapable of moral character or action as is the sap which we sometimes describe as the life of the tree, or the sun, occasionally called the ruler of the planetary system.

With the loss of the idea of the personality of God, we have, in the third place, left ourselves and the universe the prey of pessimism and despair. If the power at the heart of the universe be a Personal Spirit who in holy love is ordering all, then we can trust that he will guide the moral universe on towards its final goal in goodness and eternal blessedness. But the very words "guidance," "purpose," "plan," have no significance except as applied to a self-conscious and free being. Impersonal beings do none of these things. Our hope that the universe is progressively realizing a moral consummation, glorious beyond present imagination when reached, is based upon an act of moral trust in the presence of Holy Will at the heart of things. Otherwise, pessimism and despair are sure to result. Such has always been the historic result when faith in eternal Good Will at the core of the universe has been surrendered.

With the going of faith in the personality of God, there goes, in the fourth place, all reasonable expectation for the personal immortality of man. Immortality is the reality of the continued existence of the self-conscious person after death, unchanged and unharmed

by the dissolution of the physical organism by death. Banish from our conception of God the idea of his trustworthiness, goodness, and love, all attributes of a personal being, - and we are afloat in the universe without certainty of anything, except as conscious personal beings ourselves; we are of all creatures most miserable, because we are orphans in the world without any personal Father of our spirits.

If, therefore, we are necessitated, in order to have an ethical Deity and an ethical universe, to conceive of God as an Ethical Personality, then the form of cosmical philosophy which will best and most rationally explain man's personal and religious consciousness and experience may well receive the name of Ethical Theism. "If we are to maintain a spiritual, and more particularly an ethical view of the universe, we must be in earnest with the conception of personality." (Prof. James Seth.)

The closing paragraphs of this paper will have to do with the "Necessity," or at least the great usefulness, of the study of philosophy to the preacher of the Gospel.

The early Greek fathers especially regarded philosophy as a forerunner and handmaid of Christianity for the Greek and Roman world, as truly as the Old Testament prophets and John the Baptist were for the Jewish world. And the great progress of philosophy, begun in the eighteenth century under Emmanuel Kent and continued through the nineteenth century to the present time, with the science of the mind of man growing out of it, is no less a handmaid of the Christianity of our time. "Philosophy is an honest effort to find out the plan and method of God in order that man may think and work in harmony with it, and it finds the same principle which Christ declared to be the sum of the law revealed in the mind of man, and that the moral welfare of every human being depends upon his obedience thereto. Psychology has discovered God's plan as it is expressed in the human mind, and all efforts at "soul-saving " must conform to that plan on pain of mingling injury with whatever good they do. Does this mean that every preacher must be a student of philosophy as well as Scripture? By no means; any more than every man who sails a ship must be an astronomer or a mathematician. He may not know how the mathematician constructs a table of logarithms, but he must know how to use such a table. No less necessary is an understanding of the laws of the human mind to one who is to be a safe leader of his fellow men." (Professor

Hayes, in "New Wine Skins.") And a thorough discipline in philosophy enables the preacher to distinguish "the fit from the unfit in methods, and also in many cases the false from the true in doctrines." All forms of unbelief which have fascination for the people, and which work more or less havoc with character and spiritual life, when they have had time to produce their natural fruits, will be found, when traced to their roots, to be growing upon some partial and one-sided view of God which logically destroys his personal, and therefore his ethical, character. And men are in the long run as to character the reflex of what they think of God. Every "ism" of whatever name and pretension, and every system asking for adherents, must first be tested by its fundamental conception of God. And when we come to the real question, the supreme test of every system, what is its idea of God?— we are asking not only the fundamental philosophical question concerning it, but the one by which its moral influence and result upon character will be determined. It often requires a generation for the legitimate moral fruits of a religious system to ripen and appear. But come they will in due time. And when they do come forth it will be found that they obey the primal law of the universe, "Let everything produce after its kind." And when the preacher has got once and forever, as a result of intelligent study of philosophy, clear conceptions concerning [the ethical elements which must inhere in any being if he is to have the possibility of moral character, even in God if he is to be an Ethical Being, then he has the test by which he can at once send any system, newly launched on the world, and applying for popular favor, to its "own place"; and he can foretell as well what will be the moral fruitage, so far as the system is received, when it has ripened. The moral test, what sort of beings in character does a system make—is the final test. But this touchstone

can be generally applied only after considerable reaches of time.

Another benefit of the study of philosophy to the preacher is that it enables him to get clear vision of the eternal moral order of the universe, the moral unity of the personal universe. I am not asking that the preacher preach philosophy. I am only pleading that a comprehensive ethical philosophy underlie the presentations of the spiritual truths of the Gospel; that all the facts of the Gospel as an historic movement be held in rational solution in such a philosophy, if this is possible. A philosophy of God and the world like that which we have denominated Ethical Theism takes away

from the preaching of the gospel that look of arbitrariness it is often made to wear. A right ethical philosophy, for example, enables us to see clearly that the retributions of God are all natural, being the result upon character and moral welfare of disobedience of the moral laws and relations implied in the moral order of the personal part of the universe. It shows us that the essential problem of the redemption of the world is to get man to conform willingly with his right ethical relations to God and man; that the right, that is, the eternally righteous relation for a dependent moral being like man, towards God on whom he is dependent, is the filial relation, and that the entire manifestation of God in Christ was to secure this ethical harmony between God and man, a harmony greatly disturbed by sin; that this work of bringing God and man together was accomplished by the Incarnation of God in Christ- by the totality of his manifestion of God, culminating in his death of self-sacrifice on the cross, for self-sacrifice is always the language of love; and that the work and sacrifice of our blessed Lord was the highest example and consummation of the law of vicarious sacrifice running everywhere through the universe; that the redempton of the Gospel is not a "plan" or "scheme" devised in time to remedy the results of sin unexpectedly to God appearing in the world of man, but is, rather, in accordance with the eternal moral order of the universe, in that, in the "Man Christ Jesus "we are shown a human personality like ourselves, perfectly dependent upon the Father as are we, yet really living in moral and spiritual perfectness of relation with God, Man, and the World. In other words, the Gospel is in accordance with, and a revelation of, the eternal moral order of the universe, and not an arbitrary remedy provided for an unlooked-for break, or revolt, in the same universe. Furthermore, it seems to me that the men who have taken most profound hold of the religious mind and consciousness of our age, and are holding it, — to mention no living preachers, are the men who have spoken from a deep ethical philosophy of God and Man, begining with Robertson of Brighton, in the old world, and running on through Bushnell, Beecher, and Brooks, in the new world. And the growing power of some living preachers is found in the fact that they have first deeply grounded themselves in the ethical verities of the moral universe. Their effectiveness as spiritual helpers for our age is in their appeal to the moral consciousness inherent in the soul of man in all the ages.

Another advantage of the study of philosophy to the preacher, aiding his effectiveness, and the last I shall mention, is that it enables him to see clearly and broadly the end for which he works. The highest good of an ethical being, in a universe of eternal moral order, consists in harmony with God and the constitution of the universe. This must be the supreme good of a moral being like man. He is part of the cosmos physical and spiritual. And his well-being must consist essentially in his harmony with the system of which he is a part, and with the eternal Wisdom and Love embodying themselves in it. If we ask what is salvation for a being morally constituted as is man, the answer must be, salvation is found in moral harmony with God as revealed in the perfected humanity of Jesus Christ, the Ideal Human Being actualized in our world. Salvation is complete self-realization after the moral image and likeness of Jesus Christ. It is manhood completed after the type of manhood revealed in Jesus. No other type of normal manhood is possible according to the Divine idea of manhood revealed in him. The personal God in holy love has produced in men free spirits by that very fact capable of being charactered in goodness like his own, and the whole historic movement of God in the world, culminating in the visible personalizing of himself in the person of Christ, is that he may bring mankind into moral harmony, and therefore into moral likeness and fellowship with himself, and perfect them in moral goodness, the end for which they were made. Whether this is possible in every individual case, in a universe of personal, and therefore of free moral beings, we do not know. We can only work and hope for an age in the history of the moral universe when "God shall be all, and in all." For all noble souls must long for a final harmony of the moral universe in God.

THE RIGHTFUL CLAIMS OF THE CHURCHES UPON THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARIES.1

REV. WILLIAM H. BARTLETT, CHICAGO, ILL.

In the discussion of such a theme the time presses too urgently for me to pay tribute to the seminaries, their great past, and the noble men who have in all the years made them what they were. The measure of my own indebtedness to my Docta Mater will reach beyond the stars. That instructor lives forever who,

1 Page 22.