distinction. For if love of the highest kind is to exist—and love implies fellowship-then it can alone exist between persons of the same nature, and human experience testifies "that fellowship has the most perfect conditions where three are so conjoined that each knows that in loving contemplation of another he has the unqualified sympathy of a third." But whether we impute to human analogies more or less force, this much remains true, that those churches which have cherished the Trinitarian doctrine. have been the ones best adapted to cope with practical difficulties of life. The candid mind of Horace Bushnell went from the Sabellian doctrine of the Trinity as solely a method of Divine revelation almost, if not quite, to the Nicene point of view, and closed his discussion with an essay on The Christian Trinity a Practical Truth. Its practical value has been demonstrated in holding the church from Pantheism which Bushnell did not wholly avoid-on the one hand, and Tritheism on the other.

Far from exhaustive is this brief application in a summary way of the pragmatic method to some of the elements of Christian doctrine. It points, however, we trust, to a far more extended and systematic application, already made in part without explicit statement as to a specific method in works on Christian apologetics and systematic theology. The objection made to any such attempt is that it cannot be final. But the response must ever be, that here, at all events, we have the only test of truth under any circumstances, and that while formal doubt is always possible, unless evidence of further data are forthcoming or reason for other conclusions be shown, the run has been long enough and the examination fair enough to warrant practical trust, and declare further trial out of court.

LEARNING AND LOVING

RICHARD BURTON

*July 21, 1921.

THIS IS a day of days in Learning's book,
For here and now we coarser things forsook!
We dedicate an hour of dream and prayer,
While messages from out the upper air
Teach us the truth: that life means learning well
To live: all human strife's a parable

Of man's upclimbing toward that ultimate height
Where Peace and Joy and Knowing choose a site
That shall o'ertop all darks of trail and tree,
And, playmates in the sun, eternally
Bring vision to the nations far and free.

Learning to grow, a tortuous task, in sooth;
The warped and twisted to be taught the truth
The good Greeks gave us many an age ago:
The golden mean: not more nor less, but so
And such that symmetry at last shall yield
The foison lost in the untended field.

Learning to understand: Ah, God, the loss,
The pain, the crucifixion on the cross
Of Calvary, wherever men go by,

Nor see each other clearly, eye to eye,

And heart to heart! What holocausts of flame
Have riven spirit from flesh; what sights of shame
Affronted the Most High; Learning must aim
To grow, and know; and then, Ah, yes, to love!
All wistful souls have learned the name thereof.

Learning to love! This is the sign and sum
Of all endeavor, in all years to come.
Such learning, as shall make us pupils meek
Of Him who bade us turn the other check;
Such loving, that we lack the heart to hate
Even the hateful, but do pray their fate
May gentler be: Such learning that, the hood
Which scholars wear shall symbol brotherhood:
Last lesson, loftiest, loveliest of them all
(Here be it lived, O Hall!):

That being wise is only being good.

Thou, California, lead the states in this

God-given dream, nor balk at any bars!

Flanked by the hills, by Nature's fruitage kissed,

Lapped by the sea and loved by all the stars!
Lead on, learning to love, loving to learn!

All lesser idols spurn:

Until in fulness of the coming days,

Thine outward beauty and thy inward, praise

The handiwork of God's appointed ways!

*Read at the dedicatory exercises of the George Finley Bovard Administration Building of the University of Southern California.

THE SONG DIVINE

JAMES MAIN DIXON

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

IF HISTORY repeats itself, according to the oft-repeated adage it is because humanity finds the same deep problems to be solved at certain epochs. At the critical period of the late war, when the nation was preparing to enter the desperate conflict, many worthy citizens refused to have anything to do with slaughter in any form. To them the warfare on human beings for any cause whatever was a sinful and atrocious act, which can bring only guilt and shame on the participator. The analysis of self, with a view to discover what deeds are harmful to the personality and what deeds will give strength and happiness, often turns the thinker into a monk or a pacifist. Is truth in conduct to be finally settled and adjusted by introspective methods? Or is there an element in conduct which in times of crisis, and in the larger questions of life, bows to the inscrutable popular conscience and the will of God? Such is the atmosphere of the Old Testament, where the man never leaves himself at the mercy of personal analysis. His "guilt" is not a mere unpleasant taint which will make the rest of his life unhappy; it is in essence disloyalty to the will of Deity.

It is this question of blood-guiltiness which lies at the heart of the Bhagavad-Gita, or Song Divine, the pearl of the great Indian epic, the Mahabharata. Written in the old Sanscrit, in a metre very much resembling the sixteensyllable line of Locksley Hall, it has been for seventeen centuries the spiritual nourishment of the Hindu people; and by at least four schools of thought has been recognized

as an authoritative Scripture. The best-known translation into English is the Song Celestial of Sir Edwin Arnold; but the English text which I will use to quote from is Professor Caleb's Song Divine. The Song combines three outstanding excellencies; intellectual seriousness; ethical nobility, and religious fervor.

With the early centuries of the Christian era, the faith of the great "Light of Asia," Gotama Buddha, which at one time, under King Asoka at Patna, had been the dominating religion of the Indian peninsula, was on the wane; and the older polytheism of the Aryan race was reasserting itself. While the unworldly counsels of the Buddha exercised an extraordinary influence on the religious-minded who sought after inward peace, yet racial and other instincts were left unsatisfied. Buddhism is essentially pacifist, and its appeal is more powerful to the devout woman. And in the sphere of the higher thought, the whole problem of creation and a divine personality, the meaning of the universe, it was particularly in its early teaching, unsatisfying and negative. The thinkers who have left for us the splendid speculation of the Upanishads struck chords that summoned to thought struggle. These two streams of religious activity met, in the reversion to Aryan race consciousness which preceded the Mohammedan invasions, and was intensified later by the new Semitic faith. Devout Hindu teachers had to reconcile the more reflective and metaphysical religion of the philosophic seekers after God, with the warmer devotion of the seekers after inward peace, to whom Buddhism had appealed. And poetry was the vehicle that they chose.

In the long epic of the Mahabharata many things beside a struggle between warring factions are discussed. There is theology as in the works of Hooker and Jeremy Taylor; philosophy as in Hobbes and Locke; law as in Blackstone's Commentaries; The particular time and

place which the Gita, as it is usually called, occupies in the story is when the two warring factions meet on the historic plain near Delhi, where so many decisive battles have been fought. Arjuna, one of the five Pandava brothers who have been unjustly deprived of their inheritance by court intrigues, is in his chariot, and awaits the final summons to battle. Marshalled in front are the serried ranks of the enemy, among them his old preceptor and many relatives and friends. This adds pathos, the deepest kind of pathos, to the whole situation, and he is well nigh paralysed. He discusses the matter at length with his charioteer, who is none other than the divine Krishna in human form. Deity has come down to earth to help and to advise; a "present help in time of trouble."

"No doubt," remarks Dr. MacNicol, in his admirable treatise, Indian Theism, the fifth chapter of which is devoted to the Gita, "the religious power of the Bhagavadgita and its continuous influence over men's hearts in India to this day is to be explained mainly by the fact that, while it rests upon the Upanishads and accepts their teaching of a God who is the life and the indwelling glory of the universe, at the same time it passes beyond that cold conclusion to reveal him at the same time as a Savior, near to men's need, and responding in his grace to the cry of their faith. Krishna, the charioteer of Arjuna, and the spokesman of the poem, is the remote One, so very hard to find but now come near and manifesting himself. At the call of human need he is born from age to age. To those who are devout and worship him with love he gives the attainment of the knowledge by which they come to him.

The poem is throughout suffused with a glow of emotion which, united with the ancient and profound conception of the divine immanence of all things has enabled it to appeal with power during so many centuries at once to the heart and the reason of India."

The point at issue in the mind of Arjuna is essentially the same in Hamlet's. Shakespeare's hero has to handle the problem of an evil kinsman who has murdered his