it now has to do, and the world is now the opposing power. The questions of the day are such as arise when men have begun to reflect upon Christianity. The germs of philosophic speculation have begun to develop. Inquiries have arisen regarding the person of Christ. Existing doubt has reference not to the possibility of a free and direct Gospel, but to the facts, or the explanation of the facts, of the Gospel that has actually been proclaimed. Christians have lived long enough as Christians to come into the region of deep ethical inquiries. The practical question is not now whether the Gospel is to be preached, but rather how the Gospel is to be lived out in human conduct, what its fundamental principles are, what it requires, and how it is to be fulfilled.

These are questions of the new age. Indeed, they are questions of the present day; for the age that was begun on the day of Pentecost, and cleared of its mixture with another age when Jerusalem fell, is the age in which we are living. When John wrote his Gospel and his first epistle, our own era had fairly begun, and that conflict with the world which Christianity is still waging had been opened. Is not this one reason why the fourth Gospel has taken so strong a hold upon the hearts of preachers? Beyond a doubt it is the favorite part of Scripture for the preacher's use, and partly because it was given by the Holy Spirit to the age in which we live, and deals with divine things in a realm as far removed from Judaism and its questions as our own. The epistle has yet to win its way to similar appreciation; but in due time it will stand beside the Gospel in the estimation of the Church.

It must be added that as the range of thought, so the writer's mood, is of the new age. The writer himself appears as one who has long been living in another world than that of Jewish controversy. From those strifes he has long been at leisure, and the new questions have laid their hold upon his heart. The Epistle to the Hebrews labored to bring its readers to a certain attitude of free faith before

God; but the writer of this epistle has been living for years in that very attitude; he has taken advantage of it to learn God and his will, and to grow into fellowship with him; he has pondered the truth that he learned there, and become able to express to his brethren the inmost substance of divine revelation. Paul and the writer to the Hebrews were compelled by stress of warfare to spend much strength in maintaining that men may enter boldly into the holiest by the blood of Jesus. John, set free from that form of strife, entered boldly into the holiest, and dwelt there before the Lord. Paul had been there before him, but John was there more calmly and more at leisure. He abode there in the secret place of the Most High, and gazed his fill upon the glory of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Thus, to meet the characteristic questions of the new age, John brings out from the characteristic Christian experience the most profoundly characteristic of all Christian truth. The early controversies ended, and the field cleared for the long spiritual strife, he utters the final words of inspiration, the highest truth that ever was spoken by the Holy Spirit through the mind of a man.

The Epistle to the Hebrews argues that the crown of divine revelation has come; the First Epistle of John shows what the crown of revelation is, as to its spiritual glory. The one epistle declares that God hath now at length spoken to us by his Son; the other epistle takes that for granted, and proceeds to tell what it is that the Son has said to us. The one says: "God hath spoken;" the other, "This then is the message that we have heard of him." And the message. that John recites is rich with the greatest of truth. He tells what God is in the very substance of his being. He sets forth God's supreme qualities as imitable by man. He proclaims the true principle of imitation, whereby man is to become what he ought to be, and reach the fullness of blessing. He thus gives us the clear, compact expression of the fundamental truths regarding God, and the strong, searching utterance of the ruling, practical

truths for the life of man; he shows us these ruling truths concerning ourselves, grounded in the fundamental truths concerning God; and he shows us all this as the truth that Christ revealed. This surely is the summit. To what higher point could revelation advance?

Yet to give this rank to John is by no means to disparage Paul. John was privileged to outlive Paul. Thirty years that Paul spent with the Lord above John spent on the earth, where the record of what the Lord made known to him could be left to the Church. Those years belonged to a new period, for which Paul's labors had prepared the way; and it would be strange, indeed, if they had brought nothing new and higher to the open mind of the beloved disciple. Yet Paul saw the glory of Christ as clearly as did John, and so did Peter, and so did the writer to the Hebrews. Between these and John there is no conflict and no contrast. Indeed, there is evidence earlier than John's Gospel and epistle, that inspired thought was already moving toward the point which it was given to John to reach. In views of the person of Christ we can trace in the earlier apostles distinct progress toward what John at length made plainest. The Prologue to John's Gospel, which is one of the loftiest passages, if not the very loftiest, in all the Scripture, has no full parallel anywhere. The opening verses of John's own epistle come nearest, perhaps, to furnishing one. Yet, in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Colossians, one of his later letters, there is a passage in which essentially the same high view of Christ is reached, and which is scarcely less worthy than John's own epistle to be cited as parallel to the matchless Prologue; and the opening verses of the Epistle to the Hebrews give utterance again to the same thoughts, in a strain scarcely lower than the loftiest. The course of Paul's writing goes to show that if he had lived and written on, he would have dwelt more and more upon the high spiritual aspects of truth which his later epistles present, and exactly thus would he have advanced in the way in which it was permitted John

to go. When we call John's Gospel and epistle the true crown of revelation, we do not disparage any earlier apostle's work. We only say that it was given to John to live on after the others had departed, to see the new light that suited a new age, and to convey to the Church the latest words that the revealing Spirit would provide for the Christian Scriptures.

From what has been said it seems plain that a preacher of the Gospel has not mastered in full the substance of his message, and a laborer for Christ has not obtained command of his instruments of work until he has familiarized himself with the writings of both the periods of apostolic life. It is not enough to study John alone, and it will not do to confine one's study to Paul and the other writers of the earlier period. Nor is it enough to study Paul, and then John, and then Paul again, but all upon one level, as if one were turning from page to page of the same continuous book. The parts of the New Testament must needs be distinguished one from the other; the dates must be allowed for, and the significance of the great dividing event must never be left out of sight. We must study Paul as the great apostle of the first period, and John as the great revealer of the second. The present study of two representative documents of the apostolic age will have accomplished its purpose if it has rendered possible to any one a clearer and more intelligent reading of the New Testament.

ARTICLE II.

IGNATIUS LOYOLA.

BY REV. J. R. HENDERSON.

DURING the first part of the sixteenth century the papal authority received a great shock. Radical changes in Church and State threatened the overthrow of the Romish Church. The current of popular thought and action was with the leaders of the Reformation, and for a whole generation Protestantism carried every thing before it. It is important and interesting to inquire, what stemmed this current and brought about a counter movement favorable to the papacy.

For many hundred years the religious orders had been the chief support and defense of the Holy See. Gregory the Seventh, by the aid of the Benedictines, contended successfully against the Franconian kings and against the secular clergy. Innocent the Third crushed the Albigensian sectaries by the aid of the Dominicans and Franciscans. And when, in the sixteenth century, the Church of Rome was exposed to greater dangers than had ever before threatened it, a new religious order arose for its protection, more zealous and better organized than any which then existed.

From the very beginning of the Reformation the Jesuit Order hung upon its heels like a shadow. We do not wonder that Catholic historians recognize a special providence in the fact that at the time when Luther planted the "poison-tree of heresy" in Germany, there arose in Spain, in the person of Ignatius Loyola, one who prepared a neverfailing antidote.

In 1521 France and Spain were engaged in a war to decide which country should control the province of