pline, one may see more clearly the bearing of certain facts on his Messianic history. If he loved the open air and its joyous freedom of life; if he had his later home near the Sea of Tiberias, where the climate was "well nigh a perpetual spring," and the land "flowed with milk and honey;" if he confined the most of his ministry to a small territory beautifully diversified by hill and plain, and, within this narrow area, varied almost daily the scene of his labors; if he observed the law of concentration as to time and place and people; if he steadily narrowed down the issues between himself and his countrymen to the single issue of his divine and eternal Sonship; and if, furthermore, he ended his career just when he reached the fullness of physical development and before the exhaustion of toil and trial had set in; it cannot be doubted that these were constitutive elements in a plan involving an extraordinary co-ordination of intellectual, moral, social, physical life in his Messianic work. Had we been told beforehand that body possessed such a latent capacity for alliance and sympathy with mind, so that

"Sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood and felt along the heart,"

not only stood related to moral sensibility but cultivated and enhanced its action in the holiest of possible activities, it would have taxed our power of belief. But in Christ the wonder is historically verified, and, as such, has an immense practical value, since every principle of goodness and every sentiment that ennobles the struggles of our nature to reach a higher plane of being, not only has its strength re-enforced but its victory over animalism of every sort assured.

Toward the close of Christ's ministry we see the extent to which he carried this physical discipline in preparing him to meet the sorrow and gloom of his last hours. During the journey through Perea, in his visit to Bethany and the raising of Lazarus from the grave, afterward in the return to Perea, then in the entry into Jerusalem, and the incidents following, we behold him manifesting an unusual degree of sensibility. Tears fall from his eyes, the heart is overfull, and his voice breaks with grief. Men are more hostile than ever to him and his mission. They press him with vexatious questions; snares are spread every-where to entangle him; he has been outlawed;

and from all quarters trials and temptations rush upon him; and, meantime, his emotional nature is wrought on intensely. Physiological science teaches us that volitional attention exhausts the mind rapidly, and it teaches further that depressing emotions impair the secretions. Throughout his ministry, Christ has shown how he could withstand the constant demand on his will; and now, in his last days, what are the aspects of the emotional Christ? Probably the most convincing proof of his physical discipline may be found in the phenomena of emotion in this severe conflict. Emotional life in poet, artist, orator, tends to weaken the capacity for endurance. Emotional life in the physician requires that the feelings be sheathed and the nerves drilled to the lancet and the knife. Emotional life in the philanthropist seems to weaken sympathy for individuals, and, in some cases, men eminent for devotion to humanity on a grand scale of effort have been lacking in domestic feeling. But in the existence of Christ sympathy needed no self-defense. Familiarity with suffering did not deaden sensibility. The dyer's hand was not subdued to what it worked in. Hence the conclusion that his emotional life was not specific to any department of his work, but generic to his humanity as such; and, accordingly, that it was the man-not the worker, the healer, the philanthropist-who was the typical disciplinarian of the body, and raised it, as never before nor since, into copartnership with the soul. Viewed in this light, the earthly body of Christ is not merely in training to undergo the sufferings in the Garden and on the Cross. True, every thing points most prophetically to an ultimate present result, to a divine climax in which all this experience shall justify itself in the order of providence. At the same time it has a further bearing. It indicates a vital connection with a prospective scheme of corporeal development, and is the foretokening of Christ's "spiritual body;" the same body and yet a very different body, its identity consisting in the fact that it has been wrought into the texture of his Messianic character and glory.

Materialism, in one shape or another, is now the battle-ground between faith and science. Not a few scientific thinkers are far more anxious to demonstrate our resemblance to the ape than our likeness to the Son of Mary, and of all the logical abuses of the day the utter perversion of analogy is intellectu

ally the most harmful and spiritually the most debasing. If the doctrine of the human body, as taught by Christ and elaborated by St. Paul, were to enter into our civilization as a controlling and sanctifying influence, what a stride toward the millennium we should make by this victory over animalism! The doctrine lies imbedded in the words, "That was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual." 1 Cor. xv, 46. Even the fallen human body, the ground cursed, thorns and thistles in its way, death awaiting it—even this body brought more out of Eden than it left behind, for it, too, brought out the promise of Christ. The "afterward" has already come in part, and it is only waiting God's time to come in full. If, indeed, we must go forward to the forty days between the Lord's resurrection and ascension to behold the nature and glory of his "spiritual body," yet, nevertheless, we have a most helpful and precious lesson in the fact that the body of his humiliation was spiritualized so far as to become a perfect coadjutor with his spirit in the Messianic work. Is it not the most practical of lessons to us, and especially valuable in these days? Soul is cultivated and ennobled here and now, to be a future soul; why not body? If the one is in Christ's school, why not the other? The future is nascent in the present, and, assuredly, we shall be protected against this threatened epidemic of materialism if we believe and feel that the resurrection body is partly idealized to the conceptive imagination in our existing corporeal structure—a tabernacle foreshadowing a temple.

ART. V.- RECENT CHECKS TO MODERN UNBELIEF.*

PART I.-SCIENTIFIC.

ONE would naturally expect that Science in the hands of fallible men would sometimes make mistakes, and, as a rule, continue changing its position as knowledge grows from more to more. While the physical universe with which it has to do is a fixed quantity, the Science which interprets the universe must, in

* "Some Recent Checks and Reverses Sustained by Modern Unbelief." By Rev. Alexander Mair, D.D. "The Monthly Interpreter” (Edinburgh), Feb., 1885. 45-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. 1.

the hands of finite men, forever remain a variable quantity. Never until Science and the universe correspond to each other like the two sides of an algebraic equation will the point be reached at which Science will be beyond the necessity for retreat or change. This seems reasonable, and, indeed, self-evident. But there are many men belonging to the school of modern unbelief who do not see that the same thing ought to be admitted as likely to hold good in the sphere of theology. Its field, the Bible and the universe viewed as a revelation of God, is also a fixed quantity. But man the theologian, like man the scientist, is finite and fallible. It therefore follows that Theology, like Science, might be expected to make mistakes, and thus need to change its position-now to withdraw and now to advanceuntil it has become a more correct expression of objective truth. Surely it must be obvious to every reasonable mind that it can be no discredit to Theology to do so, if it is no discredit to Science.

Yet nothing is more common on the part of some unbelievers in our common Christianity than indulgence in sarcasm or derision at the expense of Theology because of its many so-called retreats before the advance of Science. We may find these retreats at times forming a favorite and telling theme with writers by no means of the baser sort, especially when they wish to produce a powerful rhetorical effect. As a specimen, we may give the following from Dr. Draper:

The contest respecting the figure of the earth, and the location of heaven and hell, ended adversely to the ecclesiastic. He affirmed that the earth is an extended plane, and that the sky is a firmament, the floor of heaven, through which again and again persons have been seen to ascend, though its globular form is demonstrated beyond any possibility of contradiction by astronomical facts, and by the voyage of Magellan's ship. He then maintained that the earth is the central body of the universe, all others being in subordination to it, and it the grand object of God's regard. Forced from this position, he next affirmed that it is motionless, the sun and the stars actually revolving, as they apparently do, around it. The invention of the telescope proved that here again he was in error. Then he maintained that all the motions of the solar system are regulated by providential intervention; the "Principia" of Newton demonstrated that they are due to irresistible law.*

* Draper, "History of the Conflict between Religion and Science,” p. 360.

And so on, through some more sentences of a similar kind. We find Professor Huxley at times launching out in the same strain, as in the following passage, which the reader will likely recognize :

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.*

Here, it will be observed, the agony is piled up with telling effect, all to the glory of the scientific man, and to the utter discomfiture of the poor "ecclesiastic" and the "orthodox," as if they were the only sinners in the case.

But one may well wonder why it never occurs to shrewd men that, in regard to such points as those mentioned above, it was not so much Theology that was wrong and ought to blush as the Science of the day. These points are matters lying quite outside of the proper field of Theology, and within that of Science. It does not belong to Theology to determine them, and it cannot determine them. It no more belongs to Theology to determine them than it belongs to physical science to determine questions in pure theology, or to mathematics to determine questions in psychology. Theology simply took up the common language of men in reference to such matters, the language of the Science of the age, just because it was Theology and not Science. Accordingly, if theologians have had occasion to retreat from such positions as those referred to, whose blame is it? Certainly, to a large extent, the blame of Science; that defective contemporary Science which the sacred writers or the theologians of the past accepted. It is false Science and not Theology, certainly false Science as much as Theology, that we have to blame for those wrong views in regard to the figure and position of the earth, the nature of the firmament, the motion of the sun and stars, and the like. In regard to these matters, it is Science rather than Theology that has had to beat an ignominious retreat, and has reason to blush because it had not done its work better. It is, indeed, almost a kind of impertinence for Science to blame Theology solely for these mistakes, just as it would be an impertinence in the theologian to blame *Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews," p. 305.