use, as well as for family reading and the service in church. Some of our clergy would do a good work in preparing such an edition for the use of the public. If this want were supplied, it would remove some scruples which prudent parents have in allowing their children to range at freedom through the grandest repository of religious truth which has been vouchsafed to the world. With an expurgated Bible forming part of the English course, we should, by our history and literature, be placed in the happy situation that our teachers could not help imparting to our children all the essentials of the Christian religion. When we are in such fortunate possession of the kernel, why should we quarrel so much about the husk?

There are two aspects in which the pulpit as an institution may be regarded. It may be looked upon as the medium of communicating to the nation a divine message from Heaven. This is its theological aspect, which has hitherto been regarded as its chief one, if not the only aspect which it had to show. Hence there have arisen dogmatic systems without number, each man or each group of kindred spirits necessarily conceiving their imperfect interpretation of the sacred documents to be the only legitimate interpretation of them. The confusion

of dogmatic systems was worse confounded by the fact that the writings which formed the source of dogmatic teaching were covered with the débris of ages. Each party was left to its own conjectures - about the authorship of the several books, the circumstances in which they were written, and the actual objects which the writers had in view. And in the prevailing darkness of ignorance on these points, it was but natural that men should grope about, and often come into violent collision as each followed the guidance of his supposed internal illumination.

The other aspect of the pulpit, and the only one with which I am now particularly concerned, is that in which it shows itself as the twin agent of the State in inculcating the highest form of national morality. It is needless to refer to the idea of a by-gone time that morality is at best the handmaid, sometimes the jealous rival of religion. In all circles of thought, as distinguished from mere mechanical traditionary faith, the highest moral development is owned to be the great end of religion. The old anthropomorphic conception of the Deity, that He was a kind of feudal lord who demanded as His due a certain form of religious service, is seen to be as derogatory to the Supreme

Majesty as it has proved to be misleading to men. The rationale of all religion is not the offering of any other form of service or sacrifice to the Divine than the sublime sacrifice of the human spirit in moulding it after the image of its Maker. It is this high and noble characteristic of the Christian religion which is more and more being brought to light in the results of the higher criticism. The theologians, guided by the light of modern criticism, are seeing better than once they did the far-reaching and sublime meaning of the sacred writings. They are better disposed than ever they were before to see eye to eye with the statesman, and join with him in ameliorating the conditions of life, by sending the light of truth and healing into the dark places of surrounding society, rather than vainly trying to peer beneath the horizon of man's earthly destiny. For it is only a horizon after all that bounds the present from the eternal future; and the steersman who guides his craft aright above the imaginary bounding line, will need no new art of navigation when he dips out of earthly view.

With the pulpit, as with so many other old institutions, we are at the parting of the ways; and the urgent question is, Will the clergy take the path of rigid adherence to the past and its ideas, and

land their institution in merited ruin; or will the wiser of them succeed in adapting it to the conditions of the new time, and thereby restore its power? There are two perils of the pulpit which its friends will do well to guard against. The first of these perils is in connection with the Church's creed. What is to be the Church's ideal of a creed? Formerly its ideal of a creed was the most elaborately articulated system of doctrine which logical ingenuity could screw out of the canonical books. So long as the sermon in its three-headed or more numerously headed form is the pièce de résistance of the Sunday service, so long will a rigid, though by no means an infallible, logic be the moulder of the creed. But with the growing interest in the other portions of the service, with a truer appreciation of the sacred writings in their various portions of history, poetry, and lofty speculation, lighted up as they now are in a way that brings us more in contact with the spirit of that society which gave them birth; and with our deepening reverence for the Christian ethic as the one solvent of all our difficulties, we are rapidly preparing ourselves to accept a totally different ideal of a creed. The controversies of the future will be grouped around the question, What are the beliefs which are essential for the most

complete development of man? In other words, What are the cardinal ideas of Ethics? It is not for me in this chapter to enter upon such a discussion. All I desire to do is to point out to Churchmen, although many know it well already, that if they would preserve their Church as one of the institutions of the future, they will be wise to concentrate their studies more and more upon that group of questions, seeking whatever light they can get upon them from the history and literature of the Jews, as well as of other nations. And the character of their pulpit ministrations will be determined accordingly. There will be less exposition of traditionary theology, and greater insistance on all those beliefs and agencies that co-operate in the spiritual progress of mankind. Nor need fear be entertained that any thing vital in the old theology will suffer thereby. In the Church as elsewhere it will be found that the interests of genuine conservatism are safest in the hands of those who do not seek vainly to stifle growth, but do their best to promote it, because they know it to be the law of a God-governed universe. Only by such purification and simplification of its creed will the Church become a lever to raise the masses to a higher spiritual life.

The other peril of the pulpit is one which has its