in any way, and not even a class by himself, either in nature or in character. The stories of his miraculous birth and wonderworking powers are discredited as pious fictions, poetic legends born of the exuberant oriental imagination. It is true that certain passages represent that he regarded himself as the longlooked-for Messiah, declared that he had power on earth to forgive sins, and that hereafter from the heavens he would judge the world; but the critics impeach these records, while others add that, even were the records authentic and genuine, his notions were extravagant delusions.

It is true, also, that certain passages make it appear that his followers believed he had risen from the dead, but supposing the passages trustworthy as to that belief, all the witnesses to the resurrection-the disciples, the women, the five hundred, and Paul only imagined that they saw him. Likewise the accounts of the transfiguration, the various epiphanies, and the ascension are treated by these critics as legendary.

When the destructive critics are done scissoring the New Testament and disparaging its accounts they offer us so much of a Christ as is left.

This diminished Christ we for many reasons peremptorily decline to accept, the nearest and most obvious reason, which we here emphasize, being the method by which they have produced and constructed their Christ. There is nowhere any admissible proof of such a Christ as theirs. We submit that they have no documentary warrant whatever for the sort of Jesus they present. They themselves have rent asunder, impeached, and discredited the records on the authority of certain patch worked fragments of which they ask us to accept their Jesus, an alter Christus. If the New Testament is not believable for what in its integrity it plainly teaches, then surely it is not to be quoted by bits in support of something different from what in its wholeness it affirms. The New Testament as explicitly declares that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Ghost as that he was born at all; furnishes as strong a certainty that he performed miracles as that he did anything; presents as indubitable testimony that he made atonement for the sins of the world, rose from the tomb, and ascended into heaven as that he was condemned in Pilate's court and put to death by crucifixion. The records that are accepted as proof of the natural facts, which these critics concede in the history of Jesus Christ, are equally good

in support of the miraculous facts which their anti-supernatural presuppositions led them arbitrarily to reject. If those records are not trustworthy and adequate for our divine Christ, they are worthless for their merely human Jesus. And we repeat there is nowhere any warrant for the imaginary personage, whom they would impose upon us as a substitute for the supernatural, sinless, miracle-working, Forgiver, Saviour, and Lord of men. That personage they have constructed, as the German evolved his giraffe, out of their own independent, original, subjective imaginings. These dreamers may invent whatever fiction they please, but the point we press is that their notions are unsubstantiated, and not entitled to acceptance or respect from mankind. The unmutilated Bible still seems to us more trustworthy than the ingenious but baseless scheme which they have composed out of preferred fragments of it. They have not shown so much as one reason why we should not forever continue to adhere to a whole divine Christ presented and certified by the Bible as a whole.

2. A rationalistic philosophy also seeks to lower the level of Christian doctrine and change the nature of Christianity. It is seen at work in such subtle, insidious, and beguiling attacks on the supernatural basis of Christian faith as Pfleider's Philosophy and Development of Religion, and such attempts to eliminate supernatural elements as William Mackintosh's Natural History of the Christian Religion. Of similar tendency in parts seems McGiffert's Apostolic Age. Now evangelical Christians do not fear reason. Rather do we insist upon respect for its just authority. We claim for it a right and a duty to sit in judgment on the Bible and on Jesus Christ himself, in which judgment man is bound to exercise all his intellectual, moral, and spiritual faculties. We absolutely refuse to believe anything that is unreasonable. But, with a heart consenting to righteousness, human reason is a guide toward God, who is the eternal Reason. We rejoice that in a certain way and measure the understanding discovers and declares God. What we deny is that mankind have only such knowledge of God as the unaided natural faculties have attained. What we assert is that a knowledge transcending reason's reach has been given by a divine revelation supernaturally made to a selected and prepared people in trust for mankind, and yet more clearly and fully by that Life in which "the Word was made flesh, and

dwelt among us, full of grace and truth," the record of both being contained in a volume of Holy Scripture, divinely inspired and miraculously attested. Furthermore we affirm that nothing can be more reasonable than that the loving Father of spirits should reveal himself and his will to his spiritual children in supernaturally inspired communications. And we stoutly maintain that thoroughgoing evangelical Christianity is infinitely more rational than the theories of the rationalistic philosophers, many of whom are amazingly irrational. The utter futility of mere philosophy in the human reason's utmost achievement was confessed by George Henry Lewes, by no means an attorney for Christianity, who declared that philosophy has always failed to solve the capital problems of human existence; while a far greater Englishman, a keen, powerful, and profound thinker, who fearlessly investigated up and down through the vastness of problems, firmamental and abysmal, with the lightning flash of genius for a search-light, framed his great sum-total of conviction thus:

I say the acknowledgment of God in Christ,
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee
All questions in the earth and out of it,
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise.

3. Modern culture, as it styles itself, applies its æsthetic intellectualism to the improvement of our long-accepted Christianity by elimination and reduction. A typical example is Matthew Arnold's dainty scheme for gentilizing current Christianity by removing such parts thereof as were obnoxious to his hyper-fastidious taste, the parts being those which are held dearest and most indispensable by evangelical faith. These culture-critics. proceed to operate with polished and gleaming instruments upon the body of Christian doctrine for the excision of objectionable portions. The parts which we think vital they call vulgar, and their plan is to cleanse and beautify by evisceration. In the body of evangelical doctrine, as in the body of man, the bloodred vital organs are not elegant and ornamental. To a squeam

ish, effeminate, and unspiritual æstheticism their appearance may be as offensive as their nature and functions are inscruta ble. So the prudish polite critic thinks it necessary to refine the body by removing them and casting them away. delicate sensibilities experience a feeling of relief. really has on his hands after the evisceration is

Then his But what he only a caput

mortuum, certain to become presently more offensive as a whole than were any of the mysterious and miraculous vital parts which he has extirpated. Such is the sure result of reform by disemboweling and devitalization.

4. From the low level of physical science a remorseless doctrine of natural evolution extends its theories from the physical up to the intellectual and moral realms, and claims to explain all things from the nether side, denying in its extreme teaching that there is anything in heaven or earth not dreamed of in its purely naturalistic philosophy. It says that nothing has come down from heaven; everything has crawled up from the slime. This beastly theory, like a huge gorilla, stretches up its grisly arms to drag down all mankind, body and soul, into mere sublimated animalism, not even excepting that Being whom the ripest intelligence and purest virtue of the ages adore as Saviour and Lord. It treats Christ as it treats everybody else, as a natural evolution from below. Human nature simply unfolded somewhat farther in him than in others, and he too like the rest is but a highly developed brute. Natural science dictates to philosophy, and philosophy so tutored undertakes to lay down the law to theology and religion. We are being instructed from some quarters that we must ask the naturalist what we may believe about our Lord and our Bible. And if we ask these naturalists we do not get permission, as sane and sensible beings, to so much as repeat the Lord's prayer. They bring us face to face with the question whether we shall quit praying because the mere physicist finds no warrant for it. They reduce Christianity to the level of other religions, and all to the plane of no religion, pure superstition from which the enlightenment of a scientific age, they think, should quickly deliver us.

To say that this doctrine of unbroken evolution merely shows a new and worthier method of divine operation, by regular rather than by irregular means, by constant progression rather than by leaps, cataclysms, and abrupt innovations, from one allinclusive beginning instead of several successive origins-this does not satisfy the Christian demand. For we have to ask where, on this theory, is any clear evidence of the Divine at all, and particularly where is any sure message or word of God? This knowledge of God which Christians believe themselves to have has come into the world through a supernatural revelation to ancient Israel, and through the Holy One of Israel, our

Saviour. The naturalistic doctrine referred to requires us to throw away all this. And then where are any oracles of God and what do we know from him or about him? The miracles of the Old Testament and of the New gave men glimpses of the power divine which is behind nature and works through it, certifying to them the God who makes and moves all things. The divine One also spoke to men. In these ways Israel knew of him. But when the doctrine of a purely natural evolution shuts those glimpses up, what certain knowledge of God does it give us to replace what we have lost? Science, no more than philosophy, possesses the key to the phenomena of man's religious nature, and neither of them can explain, on its own level, the Christianity whose forces play so mighty and magnificent a part in the history and progress of mankind.

Evangelical scholarship must resist with all its might and with confidence of victory these efforts of destructive biblical criticism and philosophic rationalism and cultured astheticism and scientific naturalism to drag down the Christ of God from the manifest miraculousness which made doubting Thomas cry, "My Lord and my God!" and from the place he held when martyr Stephen lifted his dying eyes to heaven and saw him at the right hand of God.

The most inconsequential, errant, and, in fact, preposterous books are those which revise the Scriptures and reduce the Christ and reconstrue the Christian history in conformity with pure naturalism, and then assume that the essentials of Christianity can be retained after the supernatural and superhuman have been eliminated from it. The disparagers of Christ have not manufactured any supposititious Jesus who could possibly be so ignorant and so self-deceived as they are when they imagine that they and their ilk can repudiate revelation, miracles, the specially inspired Bible, and the divine Christ, yet still continue to enjoy the Christian inheritance and breathe the Christian air. Such men seem to us to say, "Take away the candle, but we will keep the flame." They abolish the sun out of their sky, and all that remains to them is life by starlight, with which alone they must find their way and do their work and raise their crops in a chilled and darkened world. Professor James Iverach, of Aberdeen, says:

In certain circles it is the fashion to make Christianity a mere phase of natural religion. Lecturers, both Gifford and Hibbert, seem to like the practice, for it