that indicate divinity, and so authority, in the Scriptures.

(b.) Such a Bible would not meet our want as a book of religion, for religion proposes nothing less than a rebinding of the soul to God. It seeks to establish again relations that have been sundered by sin. Now, in order to this, there must be a laying hold of both God and man. And nothing can be a book of religion which is not divine as well as human. To be a conduit of the divine life into humanity it must be joined to God as well as man.

(c.) Such a book would be out of harmony with the system of religion which it purports to reveal. Christ is divine; religion is divine. To this a merely human book would not be an adequate witness.

b. The mechanical theory. This is the theory of verbal dictation. The sacred writers were pens moved by the divine Spirit, and so held. to the writing a merely instrumental relation. They are in no sense authors sources from which these writings proceeded - but merely

amanuenses.

(a.) This theory leaves the human phenomena of the Bible entirely unaccounted for. The Bible is the most intensely and broadly human of any book ever written. It contains every legitimate evidence of human authorship, and this fact is one of the chief elements of its value. Because we see reflected in this mirror not only the perfect image of God-his infallible wisdom, his irresistible will, and his unchanging love-but also the mind and the heart, the trials and the triumphs, of individual men, the Bible comes home to us not merely as an influence from without, but as a power that intrenches itself in our very nature.

"But," it is asked, "is any thing too hard for God? Could he not produce these human phenomena, as they are called? Could not the Holy Spirit write in the style of Isaiah, or David, or John, or Paul?" We answer, There is no physical if there be no moral obstacle. God has the power to make me believe that I come into warm and inspiring contact with the individuality of Paul, and that I read his own voluntary giving out of his experience even when this is not at all the case, if he be not morally incapable of such a proceeding. So men once asked, "Could not God have made the rocks with all their stratifications and petrifications? Why bring in second causes and indefinite time into your infidel cosmogony when God could have produced the whole in one moment by the word of his mouth?" Who does not see that these two questions are similar, and that either one of them strikes at the very foundations of faith?

(b.) This theory takes from the Bible one main element of its value. Much of the zest with which I read it depends upon my sense of personal contact with its human authors; hence if this is a delusion, I have a sense not only of disappointment but of injury. I flee from this splendid temple, with its awful deity and consuming fire, because I find here no officiating priest of like passions with myself.

(c.) This theory gives us a Bible unsuited to human want. In this respect it is like the theory already considered, though at the opposite extreme. The former rears a ladder from the earth, but its top does not reach the heavens; this lets down a ladder from the skies, but its foot does not rest FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXIX.—43

upon the earth. In neither case is there a communication established between earth and heaven.

(d.) And, finally, it may be helpful to note that this theory is in its nature Calvinistic. It is an application of the Augustinian theory of religion to the matter of the Bible. c. The Dynamic theory. According to this, the writer is dealt with not as a forceless instrument, but as a living agent; not as a thing, but as a He is not stripped of his essential prerogatives and reduced to the lowest level of being, but continues in the full exercise of his human faculties; while God so while God so joins himself to him, so pervades him with his Spirit, that the writing is of human and divine origin.

man.

(a.) This theory is in harmony with the facts. One class of these facts are human phenomena, another class are divine phenomena. As, therefore, there are both humanity and divinity in the product, there must be both in the producer.

(b.) It is in harmony with the great truths of
religion-a divine-human Christ, and a per-
sonal experience in which the divine life
and the human blend in sweet and blessed
unity.

(c.) This fits the Bible to be a book of religion.
It is related to man, and also to God.
(d.) But it is in its nature a mystery. And so
is Christ, so is religion, so are all divine-
human phenomena.

ART. VI.-SCHOEBERLEIN ON THE RESURRECTION

BODY.*

THE Church dare not ignore the momentous questions which are being raised by modern materialism. She must seriously prepare to meet them frankly and squarely in the face, for they involve the very foundations of faith and of morals. Of course, the Church has nothing to do with mere empirical physics; but it is her very imperative duty to watch over the ontological inferences which are offered as resulting therefrom, and to test these inferences by the central principles that underlie the whole Word of God. The errors of materialism cannot be refuted by a bald, one-sided Christian spiritualism, with its unconciliated antitheses between God and creation, spirit and nature. We can rise to clearness of vision only by admitting the modicum of truth that is contained in materialism, and by therewith supplementing the deficiencies of our traditional spiritualism. That is, we must come to the standpoint of an ideal realism, which holds the middle path between a materialistic deification of nature, on the one hand, and a spiritualistic contempt of it, on the other; and which finds in a higher sphere the real unity-bond between God and the world, and between spirit and nature. Now, precisely this is the stand-point of the Holy Scriptures; and for the task of complementing our too bald spiritualism, the Scriptures afford abundant help. To this task we here humbly undertake to contribute our mite. We premise only that in every position we shall take, our conscious purpose will be, not to speculate without authority, but simply to educe into fuller expression that which appears to us as clearly involved in the Word of inspiration itself.

When God created the world he created it as heaven

Ludwig Schoeberlein, Doctor of Philosophy and of Theology, and Professor of Theology in Göttingen, is one of the most highly esteemed evangelical theologians of Germany. He is not merely a learned professor, but also a practical worker in the pulpit and in the government of the Church. He is the author of several theological works, practical and liturgical as well as theoretical. Very important among these is Die Geheimnisse des Glaubens, Heidelberg, 1872. The article here presented is a reproduction of the substance of one of the divisions of this work.

It

and earth; that is, as a higher and lower world, the latter developing its forces under the constant animating influence of the former. First, he created the general substance-matter. Matter is not a dead mass; it is a vital synthesis of forces. In it lies the germ, the potence, of all creatural objects and beings. Over the bosom of primitive matter hovered, as generating principle, the Spirit of God. By in breathing into matter the creative ideas of God, the Spirit called forth all individual existences. And as divine love proceeded to fuller and deeper expression, in the same degree there arose creatures of higher and higher endowment. In the inorganic world we find matter and potency undistinguishable. Crystals, for example, are formed simply by the immediate action of the Spirit. is only in the plant that force rises to some sort of individuality. Here there is a vital unity which attracts to itself homogeneous elements, and thus gives to itself an outer form. Such force is life; and such form, an organism. At the next higher stage force becomes animal life. Here the central life has sensation, and is able to bring its organism into different relations to the outer world. Such life, or force, we call soul; such a sensitive, movable, soul-subservient organism, is a body. Body and soul are for each other. The material organism would not become a body if the life in it did not become a soul; and, conversely, the life could not become a soul, except by the help of a homogeneous organism. But at this stage the soul is as yet bound up within the limits of the body; it is simply the unity of the body. Its activity is directed solely to the conservation of the animal; and all animal understanding and volition, so far as they exist, serve the same end. Whatever higher powers may seem to be called forth under human training are but simple reflexes of what does not belong to animal life. per se.

The solidarity of body and soul is not to be taken as implying that the one is the product of the other. The body does not generate the soul, nor does the soul aggregate around itself the body. The body is formed, by the Spirit, of the primitive matter of creation. Souls are produced by the same Spirit by direct creation. But they are created only on the basis of the material element; hence they are not made and then put into matter, but they are called forth as a higher poten