in thought things which have coalesced in strong and sacred feelings, there is nothing more certain than that the distinction must be recognised if evangelical Christians are to maintain their intellectual integrity, and preach the gospel in a world which is intellectually free. We are bound to Christ, and would see all men so bound; but we must leave it to Christ to establish His ascendency over men in His own way-by the power of what He is and of what He has done-and not seek to secure it beforehand by the imposition of chains of our forging.

It is one of the most urgent needs of the Church at the present moment to have both these truths recognised in their full extent. There can be no Christianity to maintain if the evangelical truth is not asserted that Christ must have in the faith of men no less or lower place than He has had from the beginning, or than He Himself, as we have seen, deliberately assumed; but there can be no hope of appealing to the world in which we live to give Christ such a place in its faith if we identily doing so with the acceptance beforehand of the inherited theology or Christology of the Church. This is not said with any indifference to theology or Christology, with any feeling that Christ and His place in the world, and especially in the relations of God and man, are not worth thinking about. On the contrary, there is nothing which is so much worth thinking about, nor so certain to stimulate thought if only thought is left free. Nor is it said on the other hand with any indifference to the place of Christ: that is assumed to be indisputable from the outset. The problem is to find a way of securing the two things: unreserved recognition of the place which Christ has always held in evangelical faith, and entire intellectual freedom in thinking out what this implies. There is no necessary inconsistency in the combination; it has been realised in every orig

inal Christian thinker, and the true teachers of the Church are one prolonged illustration of it. Not only great theologians, but great evangelists like Zinzendorf and Wesley have explicitly recognised it. To refer to the former. He was, says his biographer, indifferent to many things to which the theologians of his time attached supreme importance; for he believed that all who love the Saviour meet in a spiritual unity raised. infinitely above the barriers erected between the different Churches by differences of rite and tradition; and even by their errors. 'Although,' he wrote, 'I am and mean to remain a member of the evangelical (i.e. the Lutheran) Church, nevertheless I do not bind Christ and His truth to any sect; whoever believes that he is saved by the grace of the Lord Jesus by living faith, that is to say, whoever seeks and finds in Christ wisdom, righteousness, sanctification and redemption, is my brother; and for what remains, I regard it as an unprofitable task, or as rather injurious than profitable, to examine what his opinions are, or what his exegesis. In this sense,' he goes on, 'I admit that it makes no difference to me that a man is heterodox-but in this sense only.' Similar passages might be multiplied from Wesley. In his Journal, under date May 18, 1788, he says: 'I subjoined (to his sermon on "Now abideth faith, hope, love; these three") a short account of Methodism, particularly insisting on the circumstances-There is no other religious society under heaven which requires nothing of men in order to their admission into it but a desire to save their souls. Look all around you, you cannot be admitted into the Church (i.e. the Church of England), or society of the Presbyterians, Anabaptists, Quakers, or any others, unless you hold the same opin

1 F. Bovet, Le Comte de Zinzendorf, 146. The passage quoted is from a letter of Zinzendorf, dated June 20, 1729.

ions with them, and adhere to the same mode of worship. The Methodists alone do not insist on your holding this or that opinion; but they think and let think.' No one will suspect Wesley of indifference to the place which Christ must have in Christian faith, but he was as clear as Zinzendorf that this place was one thing, and that the theological explanations of it or deductions from it were another. It is this distinction between soundness in faith a genuinely Christian attitude of the soul to Christ, in virtue of which Christ determines the spiritual life throughout-and soundness in doctrine-the acceptance of some established intellectual construction of faith, on which emphasis needs to be laid. Soundness in faith is that on which Christianity and the Church depend for their very being; but the construction of Christian doctrine is one of the tasks at which Christian intelligence must freely labour, respecting, no doubt, but never bound by, the efforts or attainments of the past.

This, it may be said, is generally admitted, and in one sense this is true. It is admitted by individuals. The vast majority of the members of the evangelical churches occupy practically the position described. They are loyal to Christ: their attitude to Him is essentially the New Testament attitude; they acknowledge that in their spiritual life it is His to determine everything, and that they are infinitely and for ever His debtors. But to a large extent, and to an extent which increases as the mind realises its independence in other regions, and cherishes ideals of what science and freedom mean, they have lost interest in the traditional theology. It is not that they actively disapprove of it or dissent from it, but they do not think of it. It is not their own, and they have a dim or a clear conviction that anything of this kind, if it is to have interest or value for them, must be their own. It must be their own faith which inspires it, the action of

their own minds which is embodied in it. It cannot be simply lifted, as an inheritance, or submitted to, as a law; it must be the free and spontaneous product of an intelligence energised by faith in Christ. Individual Christians understand this, and that is why they sometimes seem so indifferent to doctrine. Preachers understand it, and try to present to their hearers not doctrines about Christ, but Christ Himself-not doctrines about Christ, for doctrine always challenges scepticism, and scepticism the more searching in proportion as its claim to authority is high, but Christ Himself, the sight of whom is the supreme appeal and motive to faith. But though individual Christians, and not only those who listen to the gospel but those who preach it, are conscious of this distinction and accept its consequences, the Churches can hardly be said to have done so. They are Christian organisations, yet they seem to be based on doctrinal statements which most of their members have realised are not the actual or the proper basis of Christian life; and they not only find it difficult to conceive any other basis, but seem to suspect those who speak of another of striking at the very heart of the faith. This want of accord between the intellectual attitude of the Churches acting collectively, and that of their individual members, is the cause not only of much discomfort and misunderstanding within, but of much scandal and reproach without. It seriously discredits the Church in the eyes of the world to which it wishes to appeal, and it is urgent to ask whether there is any remedy for it.

The responsibilities of a society, it must be frankly admitted, are other than those of its individual members. It is inevitably more conservative than they; it has to guard in some sense what the labours of the past have won, and not allow the historical inheritance to be repudiated or cast away by the juvenile petulance of those

who know neither what it means nor what it has cost. Christian thought has been at work for centuries on the object and the experiences of Christian faith, and it would be more than strange if all its toil had been in vain. There is a just and proper jealousy of an attitude to the past which virtually denies to it the presence and the providence of God, and assumes that where it is concerned we have everything to teach and nothing to learn. This is not at all the attitude which we advocate when we urge that the intelligence of the Church in the present must be allowed free play. It is the denial of this freedom which more than anything else makes men unjust to the past. Nothing creates a stronger prejudice against a creed, especially if it is of any high degree of elaboration, than the necessity of signing it as a condition of membership or of ministry in the Church. The main fact about it in those circumstances-that which weighs most upon the mind-is that it is imposed as a law upon faith; and the feelings which this infallibly engenders are those of resentment and suspicion. It is not paradoxical, but the simple truth, to say that the influence of documents like the Westminster Confession, for example, or even the Thirty-Nine Articles, in the Churches which require their office-bearers to sign them, would not only be more legitimate but indefinitely greater if subscription were abolished. Men would then apply themselves freely to these historical expositions of Christianity with minds willing to be helped, not in a suspicious temper, or in the attitude of self-defence; they would value them more highly and learn far more from them; they would not be tempted to strain them into meaning what they were not intended to mean, so as to make subscription less of a burden to conscience. To say this is not to accuse the mind of childishness; it is only to recognise facts which every day's experience confirms.