our hands to vindicate everything which is really historical. Historical Criticism enables us successfully to sift the entire material and to separate the wood, hay, straw, and stubble of human opinion from the gold and gems of the real historical and everlasting city and kingdom of God. At Constantinople one sees the greatest and noblest of all Christian churches transformed into a Mahometan mosque. The cross was displaced by the crescent, the towers by the minarets, and the beautiful mosaic work, telling in pictorial art the wonders of the life of Christ and of Christian history encircling the dome, was plastered over and hidden from the eyes of men for centuries. The plastering is beginning to disappear, and keen eyes can see through it the outline of the mosaic work which still exists behind. Some day when the Church has gained possession of this metropolitan cathedral of the East, it will remove all this plastering, cut down the crescent and the minarets, elevate the cross, and the story of Christ and Christianity will once more shine from every part of the Church of the Divine Wisdom. Just so the true Biblical History has been plastered over for centuries by traditional theories. Men have been adding layer on layer to these traditions. The Reformation began to rub them off. But the reactionary age conserved those which were left and plastered others on. Modern Historical Criticism will not cease its work until they have all been removed once for all and forever. Critics are determined to know the true Biblical History for themselves and for all men. CHAPTER XXIII BIBLICAL THEOLOGY BIBLICAL Theology, as a theological discipline, had its origin in the effort to throw off from the Bible the accumulated traditions of scholasticism, guard it from the perversions of mysticism, and defend it from the attacks of rationalism. Its growth has been through a struggle with these abnormal tendencies. It has finally developed into a well-defined discipline, presenting the unity of the Scriptures as a divine organism, and justly estimating the various human types of religion, doctrine, and morals. I. THE FOUR TYPES OF THEOLOGY The Bible is the divine revelation as it has become fixed and permanent in written documents of various persons in different periods of history, collected in one body called the Canon, or Holy Scripture. All Christian theology should be founded on the Bible, and yet the theologians of the various Christian churches, and of the several periods of Christian history, have differed greatly in their use of the Bible. Each age has its own providential problems to solve in the progress of our race and seeks in the Divine Word for their solution, looking from the point of view of its own immediate and peculiar necessities. Each temperament of human nature approaches the Bible from its own needs. The subjective and the objective, the form and the substance of knowledge, the real and the ideal, are ever readjusting themselves to the advancing generations. If the Bible were a codex of laws, or a system of doctrines, there would still be room for difference of attitude and interpretation; but inasmuch as the Bible is rather a collection of various kinds of literature, poetry and prose, history and story, oration and epistle, sentence of wisdom and dramatic incident,- and is, as a whole, concrete rather than abstract, the room for difference of attitude and interpretation is greatly enhanced. Principles are not always distinctly given; they must ordinarily be derived from a concrete body of truth and facts, and concrete relations; and everything depends upon the point of view, method, process, and the spirit with which the study is conducted. 1. Thus the mystic spirit arising from an emotional nature and unfolding into a more or less refined æsthetic sense, seeks union and communion with God, direct, immediate, and vital, through the religious feeling. It either strives by mystic insight to break through the forms of religion to the spiritual substance, or else by the imagination sees in the sensuous outlines of divine manifestation and its colours of beauty and grandeur, allegories to be interpreted by the religious æsthetic taste. The religious element is disproportionately unfolded, to the neglect of the doctrinal and ethical. This mystic spirit exists in all ages and in most religions, but it was especially prominent in the Ante-Nicene Church, and in Greek and Oriental Christianity, and it was distinguished by intense devotion and too exclusive absorption in the contemplation of God and of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Its exegesis is characterized by the allegorical method. 2. The scholastic spirit seeks union and communion with God by means of well-ordered forms. It searches the Bible for well-defined systems of law and doctrine by which to rule the Church and control the world. It arises from an intellectual nature, and grows into a more or less acute logical sense, and a taste for systems of order. This spirit exists in all ages and in most religions, but it was especially dominant in the middle age of the Church and in Latin Christianity. It is distinguished by an intense legality and by too exclusive attention to the works of the law, and a disproportionate consideration of the sovereignty of God, the sinfulness of man, and the satisfaction to be rendered to God for sin. In biblical studies it is distinguished by the legal, analytic method of interpretation, carried on at times with such hair-splitting dis tinction and subtilty of reasoning that Holy Scripture becomes, as it were, a magician's book. Through the device of the manifold sense the Bible is made as effectual to the purpose of the dogmatician for proof texts as are the sacraments to the priests in their magical operation. The doctrinal element prevails over the religious and ethical. Dogma and institution alike work ex opere operato. 3. The speculative spirit seeks union and communion with God through the human reason, and, like the mystic spirit, disregards the form, but from another point of view. Under the guide of conscience it develops into a more or less pure ethical sense. It works with honest doubt and inquisitive search after truth, for the solution of the great problems of the world and man. It is distinguished by an intense rationality and morality. It yearns for a conscience at peace with God and working in faith toward God and love toward man. This has been the prevailing spirit in the Germanic world since the Reformation, and is still the characteristic spirit of our age. The Church, its institutions and doctrines, the Sacred Scriptures themselves, are subjected to earnest criticism in the honest search for moral and redemptive truth, and the eternal ideas of right, which are good forever, and are approved by the reason. The ethical element prevails over the religious and the doctrinal. 4. The practical spirit seeks union and communion with God in various forms of Christian life and work. It aims to obey the word of God and do the will of God. It is distinguished by an intense interest and enthusiasm for all kinds of religious activity. In biblical studies it seeks above all, practical exegesis and the application of the teachings of Holy Scripture to human conduct. This spirit is a special characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon race, and it is dominant in British and American Christianity. 5. The truly catholic spirit combines what is true and of advantage in all these tendencies of human nature. Born of the Holy Spirit, it is ever appropriating all the faculties and powers of man, and eliminating therefrom defective and abnormal tendencies and habits. It is reverent, believing, loving + approach to God through the means of grace. It is above all vital union and communion with the Triune God in the forms of divine appointment, and the love and service of God and the brethren with all the faculties. It uses the form in order to the substance. It is inquiring, obedient, devout, and reformatory. It combines the subject and the object of knowledge, and aims to realize the ideal. It unites the devotional with the legal and moral habits and attitudes. It strives to unite in the Church the various types of human experience in order to complete manhood, and the completion of the kingdom of God in the golden age of the Messiah. This spirit is the spirit of our Saviour, who speaks to us through four evangelists in the various types, in order to give us a complete and harmonious representation of Himself. This is the spirit which combines the variety of the Old and New Testament writers into the unity of the Holy Spirit. This is the spirit which animated the Christian Church in its great advancing epochs, when a variety of leaders, guided by the Holy Spirit, combined the types into comprehensive movements. This was the underlying and moving principle of the Reformation, where vital religion combined with great intellectual activity and moral earnestness to produce the churches of Protestant Christianity. The The great initial movements by which the Christian Church advanced in every age combined the variety of forces into harmonious operation; but these in every case gave way to reaction and decline, in which the various forces separated themselves, and some particular one prevailed. So it was again in the seventeenth century after the Reformation. successors of the Reformers, declining from their vital religion and moral vigour, broke up into various antagonistic parties in the different national churches, in hostility with one another, marring the harmony of catholic truth and the principles of the Reformation. The reaction first began with those who had inherited the scholastic spirit from the Middle Age, and substituted a Protestant scholasticism for the medieval scholasticism in the Lutheran and Reformed churches of the continent, and a Protestant ecclesiasticism for a papal ecclesiasticism in |