At all times men have been moved by a variety of impulses. Some have been influenced by the appeal of fear, others of courage; some follow the fashion and drift with the crowd, others are brave to think for themselves; some are stirred by suggestions and realize needs of which hitherto they had not been conscious. Many of these appeals are determined by considerations of sex, age, temperament, education. We cannot deny that the passive virtues are still admired by the church in preference to the more active virtues, and that the strain of femininity is far too conspicuous to permit of an all-round message from the pulpit. Notice how many elements constitute Christian experience. The various processes of conviction of sin, conversion to holiness, growth in grace, are not experienced alike by every individual. This fact is illustrated by the divers types of testimony in the New Testament. They all appeal to the profession of purity as well as to the practice of piety; but all equally agree in recognizing the central place of Jesus Christ. It was not to be expected that the Jew of Palestine, the Hellenistic Jew, the proselyte, the cultured pagan, the unlettered Gentile would regard the sublime figure of the Christ in the same way. So we have the ethical type represented by the Synoptic Gospels and the Epistle of James; the intellectual type by the Epistle to the He brews; the evangelical type by the writings of Paul; the mystical type by John. And yet none of these types were exclusive. The apostles of Jesus did not venture to adopt any sumptuary legislation, but allowed each people to decide details of religious procedure according to their several necessities, but always in terms of a spirit of loyalty to the one and only Saviour. The question of age is an important factor in religious influences. The period of childhood, with its mystic beginnings, is followed by the plastic and impressionable days of boyhood and girlhood, which lead into the most trying years, from twelve to twenty-five, when the soul is endeavoring to find itself and relate itself to the ideals of life. The decisions which are made at this time are decisive, and many have then been safely anchored in Jesus. While this is par excellence the harvest time for conversions, we cannot limit or regulate the goings of the Holy Spirit. If an emo

tional appeal may succeed with the adolescents, a distinctly rational appeal may win the middle-aged, who are so absorbed in getting and spending as to imperil the fortunes of their religious life. Then, again, old age is phlegmatic; it suffers from fears and is in danger of disloyalty, like Joab, who in his youth followed David, in spite of perils and privations, but turned aside after Adonijah, though he turned not after Absalom, the rebel and conspirator (1 Kings 2. 28). Education is not merely a preparation for life, but an attempt to emancipate the soul from the tyrannical pressure of mere authority, so that it may live a larger and deeper life. The educative process begins at the cradle, but it never ceases. The minister of Christ has certainly a great opportunity in this day. Let him enter the pulpit with the conviction that he has a message from the Lord for the tired and weary who sit in the pews; let him also visit in the homes and be the friend of the people; and because of his better understanding and clearer insight into human lives he will be enabled to be sympathetic with the sufferer, patient with the prodigal, considerate toward the perplexed, kind to the tempted, earnest with the erring, helpful to both saint and sinner. He will then realize that under all circumstances he must take heed unto himself and to all the flock over which the Holy Spirit hath made him an overseer, to feed the church of the Lord, which he purchased with his own blood.

Oscar L. Joseph

ART. VI.-A MODERN PASTOR'S WORK

It is true of every generation that its period is one of change, and the speakers of each generation have used the expression, "Ours is a period of transition," until it is incurably trite. When one's mode of thinking has become evolutionary, all experience enters a state of flux and any moment of time seems a transitional one; but there are different rates of acceleration, so some generations can say emphatically, "Ours is a rapidly changing era." This generation can make that statement in truth.

The general progress of events moves with many speeds. It crawls, it runs, it leaps. Geological progress crawled while the trees were growing on the land now called Pennsylvania and while the ice cap was forming which bent low the huge trunks and buried them with clay and sand, forming potential coal strata. Likewise the reduction of the wood to anthracite was a crawling process. It was a slow road to the knowledge of the expansive power of steam, but when Fulton finally harnessed that power, and the pick was struck through into the coal strata, mechanical progress vaulted high and free. The history of religious teaching shows the same types of progress. Things moved slowly from Abraham's death to the deliverance under Moses, and from Sinai to the preaching of Jesus, but things leaped when touched by the hands of Abraham and Moses and Jesus. Events crept from the time of Paul to the time of the great awakening which centered in Florence; and again from that period to the time when the voices of Wesley, Knox, and Fox were heard; but they leaped suddenly and far under the inspirations of Paul, Luther and Calvin, Wesley and his confreres. Events have patiently projected themselves in religious history since the great English awakening, taking form in the rise and work of the denominations, but we are living in a day when, under the impulse of certain insuppressible ideas, a mighty leap is being made in religious teaching and inspiration. History will record that the early twentieth century was a time of excessively rapid transition in religious thought and work. This rate of transition vitally affects the pastor's work

and shows those men who to-day are plodding with their eyes shut to be untrue to their times.

Any summary of the evidences of a rapidly changing era must be artificial, and yet to bring argument to paper within set space such artificialities are necessary. The marks of the rapid transition of our day in religious thought and its effect upon the religious teacher are the challenge, no longer to be ignored, of the constructive criticism of Holy Scriptures; the resultant simplification of basal theological conceptions, the reëstablishment of ethics as the one path to an actual experience of the presence of God in his world, the realignment of denominational holdings, and the change of base of the testimony of the indwelling of God from word to work. One reader will say, "I perceive nothing startlingly transitional in these conditions." Another will say, "Here lie profound dangers to the Christian system." Let both types ask, Do these phases really present a clearer and broader vision of the truth than has yet been held by the Christian church at large? The challenge of the constructive criticism of the Holy Scriptures is being heard, heeded, and feared as never before. Thousands of hearers are listening to it in quiet awe. The church can no longer ignore it. It is becoming the profound conviction of our ablest and most conscientious religious teachers and preachers that the challenge must be accepted if the Scriptures are again to be generally and understandingly read. A high authority states, "The Scriptures were never so much studied and so little read as now." It begins to appear that until the Scriptures are rid of the burdens of verbal inspiration, and of the belief that they are a magazine of proof texts only, they will not come into general reading; and they must come again into general reading.

When we remember how many artificial religious cults have been born and have thrived for a time under the verbal inspiration and proof-text theories, and how those cults have disgusted even moderately thinking people with the Christian religion, it is clear that the type of Scripture study that allows the rise of such cults is seriously at fault. When it is evident that our strong young people, on returning from higher educational institutions, quietly ignore as baseless and utterly unacceptable many of the

Christian evidences born of these two views of Holy Writ, we who are interested in the universal domination of the Christian religion realize that the constructively criticized Scriptures must be given into the hands of these conscientious, educated young Christian people. Is this argument about a man of straw? Not at all. We would be utterly surprised to know what a percentage of the church membership of to-day rests under the hands of the Protestant pope, verbal inspiration; and, again, we would be surprised to discover how many thousands of our people would draw a long breath the moment the pulpits would dare base their expressions on the constructively criticized Scriptures only.

Together with this demand for a criticized Scripture comes another. The Christian church has lost faith in intricate artificial theological structures or systems, and the church that would cominand the attention of to-day must present a greatly simplified and broadened theology. Interest is waning in the minute and drawn-out debates about the many phases of the nature of God and of how he would do things; of the numerous ways in which Jesus labored to harmonize men with God; of the overloaded theories of the nature of the human soul and its passing through falls and uplifts by means of types of sacrifices, substitutions, and purchasings. If any reader questions the desire of to-day to throw off this incubus of superstitious theological structure, let him acquaint himself with such an artificial arrangement as Millennial Dawn and then sit down with fifty clear-minded, educated young Americans and propose it to them as a working religious basis. Before he can present a third of the scheme he will discover that his hearers would prefer just natural decent living to the adoption of such a mass of theological artificiality. Do we say Millennial Dawn is extreme? It is well based on the proof-text theory of Holy Scripture, and the tendency to just such extremes may be found in many strong denominational theologies. The truth to-day demands the simplification of religious dogma. Our generation will listen to the presentation of God as Father Almighty, but waxes instantly impatient when an attempt is made to present him in any other phase. It feels that this conception takes such precedence over all other conceptions of God as to make