hindering the work of positive construction. But before his teaching at Rochester ended, his views had to a considerable extent crystallized, and he had proceeded a long way in the elaboration of his "Christian Theology." Three hundred and twenty pages of it were actually printed. He reached the subject of Regeneration; but there the work stopped. His new duties at Brown absorbed him, and theology was never taken up again. The loose sheets, with the exception of a few which fell into the hands of favored friends, have been boxed up for these twenty-two years. And so the work remains, like Aladdin's palace-hall, with only a window to add, but with no one to finish it.2

When I began my own work, as Doctor Robinson's successor, I deeply felt the overmastering influence of his teaching. I knew that my ways of theological thinking had been largely shaped by him. I feared, if I made use of his recently printed notes, that I should become a copyist. I resolved, therefore, to construct my own sytem de novo, without once looking at what my former teacher had written. In fact, the pages of his work have only, within a few months, been in my hands for careful scrutiny.

Two things I desire to say with regard to the impressions which the reading has made upon me. First, I have a new reverence for the general weight and correctness of Doctor Robinson's theological teaching. Here is a noble body of doctrine, grand in its leading conception, wrought out with singular originality, and

Since this article was written, the "Christian Theology of Doctor Robinson, the latter part copied from the notebooks of former_students, has been published by the E. R. Andrews Printing Company, Rochester, N. Y., 1904.

in most of its lines true to Scripture. The quarter of a century which has passed since he began to print it has brought some new truths into prominence; if he could now write it over again, he would, doubtless, qualify some of his statements and make others clearer; yet it is still true that the work is even now one of great significance, and sure, if published, to attract the attention and respect of the theological world. Secondly, I am humbled to find how much of my own thinking that I thought original has been an unconscious reproduction of his own. Words and phrases which I must have heard from him in the classroom thirty-five years ago, and which have come to be a part of my mental furniture, I now recognize as not my own, but his. And the ruling idea of his systemthat stands out as the ruling idea of mine; I did not realize until now that I owed it almost wholly to him.

Jean Paul says, beautifully, of the obscure teachers of village schools, that they fall from notice like the spring blossoms, but they fall that the fruit may be born. Doctor Robinson's self-effacing way of pouring his own mind and will into his pupils, rather than of putting himself into printed books, has lessened his fame, but it has brought forth abundant fruit. Through hundreds of the foremost men of our Baptist denomination, he has been preaching truth and righteousness for forty years. I wish to be one of the first to put the praise where it belongs, and to say that the impulse to clear and manly utterance in the pulpit, the love of exact statement, the disposition to preach truth rather than tradition, which have of late years transformed our Baptist pulpit and brought it

abreast of our advancing age, have been chiefly due, under God, to the teaching and the example of Doctor Robinson.

I have said that the passionate bent toward reality was the central characteristic of his intellectual life. He believed in reality because he believed in God. Yet many of his struggles and difficulties originated in a philosophy which obscured the testimony of our nature to God's existence and attributes. He had been greatly influenced by the reading of Kant. Hamilton and Mansel, who reproduced a part of Kant's doctrine, strongly attracted him. The relativity of knowledge perpetually discounted the things of faith. It is interesting to see how Doctor Robinson, while greatly influenced by this philosophy, made his way, notwithstanding, through it, and in spite of it, to essential truth both with regard to God and with regard to God's revelation. He was one of the first in this country to subject the common arguments for the existence of God to a careful criticism, after the Kantian fashion. Here, as well as elsewhere, he was the sworn foe to overstatement in doctrine,—indeed, he preferred to err on the side of doubt rather than on the side of dogmatism. Rational minds, he would say, cannot observe their own laws of thought in the contemplation of cosmical phenomena without believing in a primal and personal Force, lying behind all, and originating the universal whole. The world abounds in adaptations to ends; therefore the world must have been purposed; or, in other words, there is a personal Intelligence by whom it has been fashioned. Man, with his aspirations and cravings, can find an

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ideal only in God, while the moral distinctions which man is forced to make give unmistakable testimony to the existence of One who is at once man's Author and his ultimate Standard of right and wrong.

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Although I do not find anywhere, in Doctor Robinson's chapter on God's existence, the phrase “immanent finality," I do find such an avoidance of the old carpenter-phraseology" as to suggest that he viewed God's relation to the universe as not mechanical, but organic. Yet while man, conscious of causality, intelligence, and responsibility in himself, is reminded, as he looks out into the universe, of a supreme and universal Cause, Intelligence, and Judge, no one of all the arguments can be said to be a demonstration. "The evidence of the Divine existence is not so much logical as moral; it is adjusted rather to the eye of the soul than to the logical faculty; if the eye be darkened, God is not seen in any evidence of his being." It is to man's moral consciousness, then, rather than to argument, that Doctor Robinson would appeal, while he still regards the arguments for God's existence as valuable means of stimulating this consciousness, and of calling attention to the revelations which God has made of himself.

There is a striking similarity between our author's method in speaking of inspiration, and his method in speaking of the existence of God. He treats God's revelation in his word just as he treats God's revelation in nature. As it is not the fragments and petty details of the universe that reveal the designing Mind, so in the Bible, the argument for inspiration is drawn from the book as a whole rather than from its separate parts.

To inspire, he would say, was not necessarily to educate. The whole early church was inspired, and the office of the Spirit in inspiration was not different from that which he performed for many ordinary Christians at the time when the New Testament was written. Inspiration was consistent with imperfect ideas in the minds of the Scripture writers, and the literary, logical, scientific, and historical defects which modern investigation has made apparent are only indications of a human element which the divine pressed into its service, or in spite of which the truth was progressively unfolded. The higher criticism had not become rife when Doctor Robinson constructed his system; but the principle and spirit of it, so far as it is theistic and reverent, are Doctor Robinson's own, and his whole conception of inspiration is surprisingly like that which has of late become so current. He did not regard the imprecations of the Psalms, for example, as inspired by God. Only the divine purposes and ideas were inspired, and the imprecations were but the drapery or the vehicle by which those purposes and ideas were necessarily interpreted to early times. As David's adultery was not commanded by God, yet was made the means of the descent of Christ, so human error was sometimes made the means of introducing into the world the revelation of the perfect God.

Yet Doctor Robinson declares the Christian religion "to be, in comparison with all other religions, in an exclusive sense, revealed," and its records were "made by men who were guided, as no other writers ever were, by an omniscient Spirit." He discards all theories of inspiration, and "declines any attempt to