tion is a failure. There are some aspects of the case deserving more attention than they receive. One of these is the high, ideal demand. which Christianity makes upon society, together with the strength of desire it creates and encourages. It would be easy for us to fill out the ideal of a wild Indian's life. With a very small fraction of our resources, we could make the natives of Arabia, Egypt, or Kamchatka, perhaps, perfectly content. Our problem is a more difficult one. An intelligent Zulu recently said to a missionary: "You missionaries trouble us. Before you came our wives got food out of the ground for us and brought us children and cattle. You make us give up our wives, our beer, cattle for our daughters, and want us to spend money for clothes, books, and preachers. Life was easy before. You make it very hard." Men in Christian civilization have enormous and numerous wants. They want the material and social privileges of cities-paved, lighted, policed, and filled with every means of transport; wish to be kept in communication with the rest of the world by telegraphs, newspapers, steamships, and railroads. And, whether in the city or out of it, people want abundance, refinements, luxuries, a relative degree of ease and independence. Our beggars and tramps must fare as well as African or Indian princes.

Furthermore, from all the physical and moral dangers of city life we are required to protect perfectly, not only those who live in the city, but, also, all those who float through it transiently on the free tide of travel. All that goes wrong in this artificial, congested, excited, and heated life is charged up to Christian civilization, and Christian people take it to heart and bear it as a burden on their consciences. If an evil grows up we publish it, describe it, pursue it; and this process of exposing and fighting a noxious growth makes prominent the evil, so that the quiet and unobtrusive good is unnoticed. We count lost womanhood by hundreds and thousands, and forget the millions who have not erred. Our high ideal pursues us and keeps us always saying, "Not as though we had already attained;" and this is decidedly and distinctively Christian. No pagan or Mohammedan community is troubled in this way. You hear nothing in their life about crusades against moral or physical uncleanness; and, by a curious freak of lame logic, maneuvering on the parade ground of an extensive ignorance, some skeptics argue that those peoples sitting contented in moral pollution are free and clean from all "filthiness of the flesh and spirit;" while, on the other hand, the movements we organize for the removal of detected evil in our

Christian communities are made, forsooth, to prove that we are worse than the pagan peoples.

All this is a price our religion requires us to pay. It forbids boasting about the ninety-nine safe in the fold; it sends us out into the night in search of the one lost sheep and fixes our thought and striving upon that search. We need not boast; but we do need to remember that it is partly because our ideal is so high that we fall short of it. It is not any measure of falling short that shall condemn us. It is only resting satisfied and refusing to strive for the better result; it is ceasing to search for the lost sheep, after the manner of lower and unchristian civilizations; it is only a refusal to press toward the mark of our exceptionally high calling, that can bring merited reproach and real failure. So long as the superlative ideal is kept in view and the high calling is pursued, we will be keenly conscious of every evil that disfigures our life and obstructs our social, political, and religious progress; and we will make the evil conspicuous and converge public attention upon it and appeal to moral sentiment and disturb the guilty slumbers of indifference, while we loudly proclaim our resolute and unalterable purpose to war against disgraceful wickedness until it be driven out.

The point we here emphasize is that our self-reproach and the complaints of unfriendly and unfair critics make a part of the penalty we pay for having a high standard. The loss of such complacency as might come to us from favorable comparison with other peoples is another part of our penalty. But it is good for us to endure this kind of penance. We have a great goal to

attain, and we cannot sit down to count in comfort the milestones behind us. We would renounce our ideal, abjure our faith, and cease to press toward the mark if we should ever, as Christian men and women, come to a stop in the sacred endeavor to establish here that kingdom of God under whose scepter and sway his will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. The use of a milestone is for us to prove by passing it that we are moving on and up. It is better for society, as for the individual, to be more alive to what is yet to be done than to yesterday's achievement. Concentrate all thought and zeal on the evils that remain to be uprooted and cast out. They ought to loom large and threatening before our vision, and our souls be so appalled and incensed that the leap and rush and onset of to-morrow's assault upon the fortresses of wickedness shall make our most strenuous past endeavors seem but feeble. Let the heathen rage and unchristian critics imagine

and assert vain things, if God sets his King upon our holy hills; if always, in all our self-reproach and lashings of conscience, we find yet some strength to make a clean throne for our King.

But these things do not constitute the whole penalty. Another part is that, in the conflict with evil, we must forever be at school under the tutorship of experiment and experience, daily finding out and confessing that we have not fully mastered our lesson. How to fight the wickedness, kill it, exterminate the seeds of it; how to keep a new evil from starting up where the old one has been torn out by the roots; how to devise and institute forms of the wholly harmless and helpful that shall supplant and fill the place of things at least partially hurtful; how to find and recover our lost sheep on the dark, wild, dreadful, wolf-infested mountains— this is the problem over which we must study and brood and pray and experiment and fail and try again. It were so easy to let it all go and be heedless and indolent and selfish, were it not for the beautiful and lofty and exacting Christian ideal. It is so hard to be forbidden to let anything go, to be buckled tight to our task and incessantly prodded to press forever toward the high mark set yonder on the holy hills.

Beyond any day that ever dawned before, this is a time for Christian men and women to be observant, studious, solicitousexploring to collect and collate facts, accumulating statistics and digesting them to extract their significance, probing the slums of cities, investigating country regions, as the Evangelical Alliance and other agencies are doing, and watching the gates of immigration to ascertain the location, magnitude, nature, and disposition of the forces of evil; and then, without fastidious shrinking, timidity, or bondage to old methods, to adapt means to ends with ingenuity and sagacity, like that which worldly-wise men show in practical affairs.

The last half century has made a new world-new in its material and mechanical conditions, its intellectual conceptions, attitudes, and methods, its social order and organization-every way different from that which existed fifty years ago. The mill hand, the walking delegate, the vicious, multitudinous, and irreducible immigrant, the anarchist, the sweat shop, and the vast corporation are a few of the new elements which complicate, irritate, and aggravate social, civil, and industrial problems. Human souls and bodies have higher possibilities, but also deeper dangers, than ever before. Past experience affords no wisdom adequate to the moral tasks of today. Christian invention, enterprise, and effort must be upon

the scale of the new conditions of this altered world. The requirement of our Master, that we shall meet and match the new demand, makes us sorely conscious that we have not yet learned how to apply Christian principles to the perfect subduing and coordinating of the harsh and discordant elements of human life. Yet the pain of our imperfect wisdom shall not make us shrink from the high calling-so high that we cannot glory in any past, however worthy and successful, nor consent to any condition in which even a remnant of wickedness exists. Our duty is to follow the white and lofty standard that is borne at the front. When we hear the sneering taunt that Christian civilization is a failure we resolve to toil and fight, until that charge shall be so obviously and glaringly false that decency will constrain the makers of it to take it back; and, with a Christlike love for sinful men, a settled and implacable animosity toward vice and iniquity, and a determination as rigid as the dogged desperation of wickedness itself, we fix our eyes upon the banner of our divine ideal and march on. We will learn from our blunders and organize victory on the field of our defeat.

In part, the humiliation and chagrin with which our high standards overwhelm us are the penalty we pay for being Christian men and women. They are, also, the token and the measure of man's capacity for nobleness, a trace of his heavenly heredity, and a prophecy of his destiny. We derive somewhat from Adam's Father.

Rejoice we are allied

To That which doth provide

And not partake, effect and not receive!

A spark disturbs our clod;

Nearer we hold of God

Who gives, than of his tribes that take, I must believe.

Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!

Be our joy three parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain;

Learn, nor account the pang; dare, never grudge the throe!

For thence-a paradox

Which comforts while it mocks

Shall life succeed in that it seems to fail:

What I aspired to be,

And was not, comforts me:

A brute I might have been, but would not sink i' the scale.

30-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XI.

THE ARENA.

"DIVINE REVELATION."

THE article under the above title by the Rev. J. T. Chaffee, D.D. (Methodist Review for January-February), calls for more than a hasty reading; and this, not merely because of the acceptable statement of important truths which it contains, but especially because of the inferences which the writer suggests or quite directly declares. A prominent, if not the chief purpose of the writer, apparently, is to prove that divine revelation is a fact of the present day. This purpose makes itself most clear and emphatic in the closing paragraphs. "The canon, whether rightly or wrongly, is closed," says the doctor; "but let us devoutly thank God that the revelation continues." Ministers and others, it is rather vehemently argued, may act and speak as inspired men. In short, the doctrine carnestly advocated is that of a continuous, present-day inspiration. The statements upon that point lead me to raise the following questions:

I. Just what does the writer mean by present-day inspiration? Does he mean what the apostle meant when he exhorted Christians to "be filled with the Spirit," or that ministers and others, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, may be assured of the validity of the contents of special divine revelation, as found in the Holy Scriptures, and may be divinely aided in understanding and unfolding and applying those Scriptures? Does he mean what Christian theology has commonly held and taught with regard to the general revelation which God has made and is still making to the world, through history and in other ways? Or does he mean that divine revelations on a parity with those of the Scriptures are still being given forth-that, in the same sense and with the same fullness of authority, men of the present day may be inspired as were the writers of the Holy Scriptures? This is a timely question; for the matter under consideration is one upon which ambiguous general statements or incorrect statements are, especially at the present time, very dangerous. One of the ways in which the attempt is being made to relatively weaken the authority of Scripture revelation is by magnifying beyond all proper proportion the importance and authority of present-day religious thinking. A short time after the death of Philips Brooks, at one of the great memorial services held in his honor, one of the speakers, a prominent representative of the new theology, said, “We were discussing inspiration, when, lo, an inspired man stood before us!" Was it necessary, in order to pay a fitting tribute to the great preacher, that he should be assigned to the same rank with the prophets and the apostles? Dr. Chaffee writes of present-day inspiration as if he were seeking to correct a prevailing misapprehension or endeavoring to establish a proposition not generally accepted by the Christian Church. This makes the question only the more urgent as to the sense in which he uses his terms.