amount of $25 a year. The best plan for all endowments would be to add a special increment fund whose income is not to be spent but used for the perpetual enlargement of the principal.

When we remember that in Oxford, University College was founded ten centuries ago by Alfred the Great in 872, and endowed in 1249, and that other colleges there were founded five or six centuries ago-Baliol in 1263, Merton in 1264, Exeter in 1314, Oriel in 1326, Queen's in 1340, New College in 1379; that in Cambridge, St. Peter's College was founded 1257, Clare in 1326, Pembroke in 1347, Gonville and Caius in 1348, Trinity Hall in 1350, Corpus Christi in 1352; that three of the Scottish universities were founded more than four centuries ago-St. Andrew's in 1411, Glasgow in 1451, and Aberdeen in 1494-and that even such young universities as Harvard and Yale have endowments some two centuries old; when we take a long range view of educational equipment-some such method as the above might commend itself to our youthful schools, especially at this time of educational financiering. The practical difficulties in compounding the increment fund could be readily removed by skillful financiers. The temporary surrender of a small part of the income, in order to secure a much larger and increasing future return, is a line of strategy which should be acceptable to the trustees of the funds, to the professor who receives the income, and to the generous donors of endowments.

John Bigham.

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

DR. CHARLES K. TRUE used to say to his students at Wesleyan University, "Plan for a long fight with the devil." President Edward Thomson is reported as saying to his young men at Delaware, exhorting them to heroic Christian devotion and self-sacrifice, "Die, the first good chance you get."

EVEN Goldwin Smith admits and asserts that the ethical beauty of the gospels is unapproachable; that their miracles are miracles of mercy, not of destruction; that the miracles confirm the Gospel and the Gospel confirms the miracles; that the figure of Christ is worthy of the halo of miracle; and that if there is a Supreme Being, and if he is anywhere manifest in human history, it is here, in Jesus Christ of Nazareth.

A CAREFUL American observer who has spent months abroad, studying city mission werk and social Christianity, writes: English Methodism is more wide-awake than we are on this subject of city evangelization. The brainiest and best men are longing for the mission appointments. The city missionaries are counted the favored ones. Heaven grant the tide may soon turn that way in our own land."

C. B. UPTON, a Jew, the Professor of Philosophy in Manchester New College, Oxford, who was appointed Hibbert Lecturer not many years ago, shows his close rapport with Christian thought in certain words which he has written concerning Christ, and which serve to indicate that he is not far from the kingdom:

Jesus is the man in whose profound religious experience we have the purest and deepest realization of that precious consciousness of personal intimacy with the Infinite and Eternal One, which is implicitly present as a divine possibility in every rational and moral creature. . . . It was clear to the early Church that it was no mere finite man who rose above all personal self-seeking, and really loved his fellow-beings with quite infinite affection; that it was no mere finite man who even when his dearest earthly friends forsook him, could still say he was not alone, for the Father was with him. This sublime personality so towered above the average thought of his time, that it seemed to many to fall altogether out of the human category. Jesus was felt to be somehow sui generis; the question accordingly

arose as to how his relation to God and to men was to be conceived. Was he to be regarded as a being intermediate between God and man? Or, on the other hand, was he the historical manifestation of the Eternal Divine Logos, and so cosubstantial with God himself? . . . The Trinitarian doctrine has done one all-important service, namely, it has kept before the minds of men the vital truth that God was essentially present and active in the mind and heart of Jesus.

It is urged by some that the assumed decline in Church membership or in Church attendance even does not indicate a decline in Christianity, but that Church life is changing the form of its expression. Dr. Briggs, in the North American Review, evidently takes this position. He says: "There can be little doubt that a large number of men absent themselves from Church attendance because they dislike the popular orthodoxy, which seems to them antiquated, unscientific, and untrue. Many refuse to unite with religious organizations which are dominated by an orthodoxy representing the theories of scholastic theology. Many remain apart from the Churches because they are unwilling to be responsible in any way for their official orthodoxy. Many, born and trained in Presbyterian families, refuse to remain in an organization which is responsible for the hard doctrines set forth in the Westminster Confession. Many Methodists refuse to be compromised by Wesley's doctrines and Wesley's rules of life. Many refuse to remain Baptists because of what is involved in close communion. Many refuse to be Episcopalians because they resent the doctrines and practices of sacerdotalism. And so we could find, more or less in all religious communions, a dissatisfaction with dogmas-sometimes superficial, giving a plausible excuse for absence, sometimes profound, inciting active hostility to the Church. If all of these dissatisfied ones are to be regarded as hostile or indifferent to Christianity, then it is evident that an army of Christians have practically separated themselves from the Church in our time, and we must say that in this respect Christianity has declined. If, on the other hand, we think that these dissatisfied and disgruntled ones are yet Christians, and that they are maintaining their faith in Christ in opposition to an unreasonable Church, that they are exerting an important influence in the transformation of the dogmas of the Church, then we may say that this is an evidence that Christianity is in a state of transition, that it is on the move away from an untenable position of exaggerated dogma to a truer and stronger position, in which dogma will be

...

transformed and given its normal place and position." One cannot, however, but feel the broad distance between such views and some passages of the Holy Scriptures: "And they continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers. . . . And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house," etc. "Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching." The meeting place of God's people was called the "assembly," and all the indications of the New Testament are that the congregating of God's people for worship was an evidence of union and communion with God. It is therefore clear that there can be no decline in Church attendance that does not involve a decline in Christian life and Christian power.

The charge that this nonattendance upon Christian Churches is a revolt from the preaching of orthodoxy is easily answered by a reference to the fact that there is no manifest tendency to increased attendance on the services of those who are designated as liberal Christians. The Universalist and Unitarian Churches, according to the theory set forth by Dr. Briggs, should be crowded and should grow with great rapidity. But investigation will show that such is not the case. The large congregations and the attendance on general religious services will be found more widely prevalent in the orthodox Churches than elsewhere. The contention of Dr. Briggs, that the lack of attendance on the public worship in our Churches is an evidence that Christianity is in a state of transition from a "position of exaggerated dogma to a truer and stronger position," is not sustained by the facts of history. The attempt to show that absence of Church attendance in Germany and throughout Europe is a kind of ideal toward which we are tending is in contradiction to the consciousness of Christendom.

WORDS FROM MARTINEAU.

IN the October number of The Atlantic Monthly are ten letters from James Martineau selected from a correspondence which went on for thirty years between him and an American friend whom he never met, whom having not seen he loved. All the letters breathe the noble seriousness of one of the largest, loftiest, and serenest minds of our time. A few portions, deal

ing with matters of special interest, sacred or secular, are worth repeating here.

An early letter, dated 1862, when this nation was in the dire agony of a supreme ordeal, gives Martineau's explanation of English opinion at that time concerning our national crisis. The European friends of the United States were anxious that the spirit of our struggle be made noble by keeping its highest ideas uppermost and foremost. To Martineau's mind the abolition views of Wendell Phillips seemed to supply our contest with an object the most awakening and inciting to righteous men. But he, with many other Englishmen, doubted, at that time, our ability to make an end of slavery by war. They thought they foresaw the failure of our armed endeavor to restore the Union and to free the slaves. And this faithless fear made Martineau write in the second year of the war:

Depend upon it, it is this scruple, and not any indifference or (as Cassius Clay says) "hypocrisy" on the slavery question, that has prevented Englishmen from treating this war as if emancipation were at issue. At the outset, so long as the rights of the original quarrel were the uppermost consideration, the universal feeling here was against the South. But soon, to the practical English mind, the possibilities of the case became the chief element of judgment; and the task of reversing the revolution and reconstituting the Union being deemed (rightly or wrongly) too gigantic for the resources of any state or any army, the conclusion was drawn that a result apparently inevitable at last were better accepted with as little expenditure of suffering as possible. This matter-of-fact way of thinking into which our people fall is often very provoking, especially to those who are in all the heat and enthusiasm of a great strife. But it has not a grain of ill will in it, or anything but sorrow for suffering which it fancies unavailing.

The suffering which our English cousins thought would be unavailing, availed to restore the Union and to liberate the bondmen. There was indeed much needless and unavailing suffering, but numerous Confederate soldiers affirm that the main responsibility for unavailing suffering rested with the Confederate government, which continued the war for a year after General Lee, seeing their cause to be hopeless, had wisely advised his government to end the bloody and desperate struggle by making peace. That the politicians should feel differently from the soldiers about prolong. ing the war is not surprising. The men at the front, stormed at with shot and shell on the firing line, were likely to have views about useless and hopeless fighting differing somewhat from those of the men who were sitting safe and snug in an executive mansion or a government office in Richmond. This