I have called our religion the working theory of our lives. The church ought to help make the theory work. Would to God that we all kept this simple idea of our church work before us; that we did not forget it so often, and try to make the church do something else!

The work of a liberal church, therefore, is to intensify positive faith. I do not care how simple it is, if only it is faith. Such a church has a mission only according as it does this. There is room for no other kind of a liberal church. Whatever may have been in the past, there is no room for polemical churches warring on others' faith. Men will soon tire of that sort of thing. Neither is this the way that liberal religion can be advanced any longer. Earnestness dies out of such churches. They become mere curiosity shops or debating societies. It may be as cheap work, indeed, to preach liberalism to the liberals, as it ever was to preach doctrinal sermons to the orthodox.

Much less is there any room for any more indifferent churches. If any church stands, where, as people come out, they wonder whether there is any God or any goodness; where hope and trust fade from their hearts; if there is any preaching which leaves a man uncertain whether it makes any difference here or hereafter how he lives; if any one went in under temptation and did not come out strengthened against it, the sooner that church goes down and that preaching stops, the better for men's moral health, not to speak of religion.

But if a liberal church is going to give faith, hope, love; to make weak men strong, and strong men charitable, I believe every devout orthodox soul in the land would join with Amen to the prayer that we have such liberal churches.

You see it is not the point, that we have the best and simplest working theory in the world, or that we persuade every one else to agree with it. The point is, that we make

We have spent too much

it work better than anything else. time boasting about it. What costs is to keep up the fire and the steam that grind out its results. Indeed, a poor working theory, clumsy and ugly, which notwithstanding

was made to do work, would be better, and would survive longer, than however excellent a plan which did less work.

Who that knows anything of the old-fashioned New England homes, of the genuine piety, the anxious prayers, the self-sacrifice, the unflinching truthfulness, the scrupulous conscientiousness,-who that has ever known the power of such training can doubt that, with all their mistakes of austerity or bigotry, such homes did the real work of training men and women who should make the world better to live in. History can never go back and repeat their peculiar type of belief. Where the genuine old type still survives, it is already passing into formalism and cant on the one hand, and into freethought and wider life on the other; but no new type of religion, however purer and simpler than theirs, shall bear such fruitage in virtue, save as the old positiveness of moral conviction, the old reverence and earnestness, and the old power of work shall infuse it with life.

Indeed, whatever we learn, whatever discoveries or reforms come, however the general level of human happiness and welfare may rise, there is no sign yet that the time will come while men live that true and noble living shall not be costly. Perhaps, indeed, as faith takes on simpler and truer forms, the more work it shall demand of its believers.

Our friend Mr. Savage published, some time since, a thoughtful, plain, and useful book, in which every one agreed, called Christianity the Science of Manhood. It is the aim towards which all good men of every sect and religion are uniting their efforts. All our various working theories are approximations towards it. I have faith to believe that every honest experiment even, guided by that thought, shall bring mankind so much the nearer to the fuller and freer religion of the future, of which, because Jesus had vision, we call it still by his name.

CHARLES F. DOLE.

"BIBLICAL CRITICISM": A REPLY.

At the risk of engrossing an amount of space in this Review quite out of proportion with the importance of my book, The Bible of To-Day, I have asked permission to reply to an article in the December number entitled "Biblical Criticism," which was a review of my book by the Rev. Dr. Morison. For an author to make any reply to his critics is not common in America, while in England it is an every-day occurrence. And to the most of my own critics I should not care to make an answer. Of the criticisms to which my attention has been called, the more favorable have sinned against the truth, from over-kindness, quite as often as the others. A few have been quite unmistakable specimens of what Coleridge so aptly called "orthodox lying for God." The most have been obedient to Sydney Smith's suggestion that one should review a book before reading it, "so that he may not be prejudiced." The immorality of the times, of which we hear so much, reaches its acme in the book notices of the secular and religious journals. But Dr. Morison's review was not one of the average sort. That it was a careful, conscientious piece of work, it would be superfluous for me to say. But never has "the foolishness of preaching" been brought home to me so closely as by this review. I have said to myself, If one, not only just, but generous to a fault, can so misconceive the entire method and spirit of my book, what is the use of preaching sermons or of writing lectures? And what may I expect from readers who are neither generous nor just? Dr. Morison says that I write "clearly and intelligently "; and yet if I believed with Talleyrand that "the use of language is to conceal our thoughts," I could not have succeeded in befogging him much more completely.

In the preface of my book, I have confessed my indebtedness to Kuenen, and my admiration of his studies is impressed on many subsequent pages; but I must protest against the assumption made by Dr. Morison and others,

that he can be fairly judged from my exposition of his arguments and his results. I should wish that I had never written these lectures if I thought that any number of my readers would imagine that my touch-and-go treatment of the Old Testament can give them any adequate idea of the massive strength of Kuenen's work, its thoroughness, its solidity, its calmness, its common-sense. And I should be especially sorry if any who might study Kuenen for themselves should be deterred by an unfavorable impression gathered from my pages. Let them go directly to him, and not only to his Religion of Israel, but also to his Prophets and Prophecy in Israel, and they will see that he is as superior to my friendly exposition as he is triumphant over the assaults of his most adverse critics in the Unitarian Review or anywhere. Moreover, I should be making Kuenen a very shabby return for all that he has done for me, if, however unwittingly, I made him responsible for all of my results. For many of these I am indebted, not to him, but to Davidson and Oort and Ewald and other critics. Kuenen ignores entirely the existence of an older Elohist of the prophetic stamp assimilated with the eighth-century Yahwehist fragment of the Pentateuch. And here, as in many other particulars, I have diverged from him and followed other

masters.

There are three ways, says Dr. Morison, of coming to the Bible for the purpose of critical investigation. I. "We may take it for granted that the text of the Bible in every part, as we now have it, is substantially what it was at its origin, -the word of God,- so that any criticism or inquiry in regard to the genuineness or authenticity of any part is forbidden." This is not Dr. Morison's position any more than it is mine. His own position is his number III.: —

We may come to the Bible as we would come to any other extraordinary collection of writings, entirely free to examine them as they are,each one by itself, and all of them in their relation to each other. We hold ourselves free to look into their claims, their external history, their internal marks of genuineness or authenticity, and to judge of the truths or the errors which they contain. We are bound by no a priori limitations on our liberty of thought or investigation, but are free to exercise

our faculties on every question that may come up in regard to time, contents, authorship, and interpretation. We claim no right to confine all possible experiences of the human soul within the limits which our thoughts have traversed, and to exclude as unreal and untrue everything that transcends those limits.

This is Dr. Morison's position. He thinks it is not mine. But if I understand my own position, it is exactly mine; so exactly that if I should give a dozen hours to making a more exact statement of my own position, I have no faith that I could do it. And, moreover, I contend that there is nothing in my book, from the first word to the last, inconsistent with this position.

What Dr. Morison conceives to be my position is best stated in his own words:

II. We may go to it [the Bible] as a remarkable collection of writings which have had an extraordinary influence in the world. But we must reduce everything in them to the range of our ordinary human experience. All that lies beyond that, in the realm of what we are pleased to term supernatural or miraculous, must be cut off as utterly incredible. Books glowing with what purports to be light from heaven, and weighed down with messages of the most solemn import, professing to come directly from God, must be shorn of everything that goes to make up their most striking characteristic. The a priori denial of the possibility of a revelation from God to man, or of what we may consider as a miraculous interposition or attestation, narrows down the field of inquiry by excluding at the outset that which, more than anything else, makes the Bible what it purports to be,-the record of revelations from God to man. Before we come to it, we prejudge the whole case in this important particular. This is the position taken in The Bible of To-Day.

To this assertion, Dr. Morison returns again and again. Indeed, the first half of his article is almost entirely engrossed with it. Page 653: “At Philadelphia Mr. Chadwick said of the New Criticism of the Old Testament: Its leading principle is that we are not to assume the supernatural origin or contents of this collection of books.' But he does assume that such an origin or contents would be impossible." In fact, I assume nothing of the sort. For proof that I do, Dr. Morison quotes from pages 78-79, and again from page 152. Let him look at these pages again, and he will see that what he quotes as an assumption is an inference, a con