still less has it been practised. When we compare the standard of devotion to the common good which Christ demands with the attitude toward the pursuit and enjoyment of wealth which has been adopted by conventional religious circles, one does feel tempted to say it is a mistake to say that Christianity has failed, because it has never been tried. But it is better not to say that. That is, after all, really a foolish and superficial thing to say. If Christianity had not been tried in the past, it is not very likely that it will get a better trial now.

It seems to me that such remarks do gross injustice to the past history of the Christian church-its martyrs, its heroes, its confessors, and the masses of quiet religious-minded people who have really striven to realize Christ's ideal of unselfish devotion to the good of their fellows-none the less so that many of them may have intellectually believed some things which were really inconsistent with that ideal. Ideals are none the less true even though on any great and wide social scale they have never been fully realized. Such realization of the Christian ideal as there has been in the past is none the less the noblest chapter of human history because at its best it has been imperfect, marred by the intellectual limitations as well as the moral infirmities of human beings. The best Christians in all ages have largely risen above the intellectual mistakes of their theoretical creeds. Many of those who have put forward theories of God's dealings with men which seem to involve the most unworthy and inadequate conceptions of Him have in their lives shown how completely they have understood the central Christian doctrine that God is love. Let us recognize that our better intellectual apprehension of what Christianity is only increases our obligation to tread in their footsteps. Never let us imagine for one moment that our freedom from the mistakes and misapprehensions of the past is going to make Christianity an easier and less exacting religion than it was to those who first heard.

the words: "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for strait is the way and narrow is the gate that leadeth unto life." Only then the straitness of the gate and the narrowness of the way are for us due to the needs and necessities of our fellow men and the self-denial and self-sacrifice that is necessarily involved in serving them.

GREAT GAINS FROM THE NEW VIEW1

For one thing, it is no small matter that we can now feel reasonably certain of what the New Testament is, and what it is meant to teach us. In old days enquiry was forbidden. The book was simply thrust upon Christian men, and a merit was made of their accepting everything in it without doubt or question. Such a demand was always felt to be unjust, and in this age, when everything else is subjected to the freest enquiry, it was becoming more and more dangerous. Criticism,

whatever else it has done, has enabled us to get behind legends and conjectures and lay hold of facts. The facts may seem poorer than the imaginations, but at any rate they are facts. We know at last what our religion is based on; faith has found a real starting-point.

But again, the effort to reach the facts has not impoverished the New Testament, or the religion to which it witnesses. To be sure we are now obliged to recognize the human limitations of the book. We can see that doctrines which were once supposed to embody the absolute truth were mixed up with much that was transient and mistaken. But all enquiry has served to deepen our reverence for the book as an expression of religion. We have been made to realize that the writers were seeking to define, in terms however inadequate, things which they intensely felt, and which, in their inmost meaning, must stand forever. Because it thus takes us so close to the

1 By E. F. Scott, professor in Union Theological Seminary, New York. The New Testament Today. p. 87-92. Copyright (1921), The Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission of the publishers.

realities of religion the New Testament has more to give us than if it was an infallible guide to doctrine. We enter by means of it into communion with great seekers after God. Our very sense that they could only half express themselves arouses us to a personal effort of faith and sympathy, so that we may reach through the letter to the living conviction that was in their minds. The modern enquiry has indeed made us more than ever doubtful of the traditional forms of Christianity, from which, in any case, the age had broken away. But it has brought us a far clearer insight into their inner significance. We feel again, as men felt in the primitive age, that what Christ gave was not a creed or a system but a regenerating spirit.

...

Above all, the figure of Jesus Himself stands out all the more grandly as the mists of theological speculation are blown away from Him, and we come to discern Him as He really sojourned on earth. It is not too much to say that by recovering for us the historic life of Jesus criticism has brought Christianity back to the true source of its power. The creeds, whatever may have been their value formerly, have broken down, but Jesus as we know Him in His life, and all the more as the life is freed from accretions of legend, still commands the world's reverence and devotion. The theology of the future, it is not rash to prophesy, will start from the interpretation of Jesus as a man in history.

Finally, the modern enquiry has made it possible for us to think of Christianity as a living revelation. According to the old view the mind of the Spirit was communicated once for all in the New Testament, so that henceforth the church had no other duty than to guard the deposit of truth. This assumption, more than anything else, has weighed like a burden on Christianity. Ever and again great enterprises for human welfare have been arrested, because the New Testament said nothing of them, or seemed to discountenance them. Advances in

knowledge have been condemned because they lay beyond the horizon of New Testament thought. It is one of the ironies of history that the names of the great pioneers and liberators have always been used, in a later age, as watch-words of reaction; and this perversion has never been so manifest as in the case of the New Testament. It owed its very existence to an impulse of progress. As they encountered ever new conditions the missionaries sought to bring their Gospel into harmony with them. The aid of Greek speculation was called in to interpret the work of Jesus to the Gentiles; the demands He had laid down were applied in new directions to meet the difficulties which could not present themselves in Galilee or Jerusalem. No forward movement has ever been so bold and rapid as that which transformed a little Jewish sect into the church of a great empire, made up of diverse races which had been nurtured in heathenism. It is surely illogical to acclaim the New Testament writers as the men who understood Christianity best, and in the same breath to denounce the very principles they worked on. . . . The modern enquiry has rendered the church a vital service by impressing on it that the faith which cramps itself within a fixed tradition is not the faith of the New Testament. Christianity, as we know it from the earliest records, kept pace with the movement of life. It was at once the truth proclaimed by Jesus and the truth which unfolded itself through the operation of His living spirit. More than once in the course of its history our religion has been saved by a return to the New Testainent, and this, we may dare to anticipate, will happen again. The ancient book, which seemed to bind us to an outworn past, has become our charter of liberty. We are loyal to it most when we answer its call to go forward, and to re-fashion its teaching by the larger light of this new time.