perceive that the Hebrew nation is the type of all national life, and that its history is meant to illustrate the laws of that life, what shall we make of all this ado over kings and wars and revolutions? What else is the use of a great part of the Old Testament? Why is it included in the canon at all?" This reasoning is strengthened by the fact that the Old Testament is not an ordinary chronicle of the national evolution of the Hebrews. As the editor of the Biblical World for 1901 remarks, "it is the theistic interpretation of such evolution". As I would add, it is the supernatural and, consequently, infallible interpretation of it. In a word, the Old Testament, while primarily and chiefly the supernatural record of the divine preparation for the Messiah, is at the same time other than this; it is also God's text-book of national life.

When we come to the New Testament, we find the sociological element equally, although differently, prominent. In the words again of Prof. R. E. Thompson (The Divine Order of Human Society, p. 7), "The Baptist and our Lord both begin their mission by proclaiming, not a way of salvation for individuals, but a kingdom of heaven,—a new order of society, a holy and universal brotherhood transcending all national limitations, and embracing or aiming to embrace, the whole family of man. It is the laws of that kingdom, the conditions of life within it, that our Lord sets forth in His chief discourses. It is the nature of that kingdom and its relation to that of Tiberius Cæsar which are mooted at His trial before the Roman procurator. It is for the establishment of a kingdom that He sends forth His apostles to bring the old world to an end and the new to its birth. Through all their labors, their preachings, their epistles, they are concerned with the relations of men within this kingdom, this "city that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God". And our canon closes with the vision of its coming down from heaven to earth to permeate and pervade all the families, fellowships, and nations of men with its divine principles.

Now, the questions which at once suggest themselves are, Can information and instruction which bulk so largely and so prominently in both testaments, be mere by-products? Can no more authority attach to the sociological utterances of the Bible than to its statements in the sphere of science, which statements, while always true in the sense in which they were intended, are not regarded by us as authoritative in the sense of final deliverances? On the contrary, is it not what we should expect, in view of the way in which and the degree to which social ethics is implicated in and determined by dogmatics and individual ethics-is it not just what we should expect that so much of God's Word would have a sociological character and purpose; and does not the fact that it has warrant the inference that its sociology is as authoritative as the dogmatic and ethical teaching that demands and determines it? Involved in them and having the same aim with them, it must be equal to them in authority, and how could this be emphasized more strongly than by the prominence which God Himself has given to it in His own Word?

(4) The Bible is the final revelation of the will of God for man in his present state of existence. This is either the direct or the implied teaching of each one of our standards. They all represent the Scriptures as giving the last word with regard to "faith and practice" as clearly as Paul teaches this when he says in Galatians i. 8, 9: "Though we, or an angel from heaven, should preach unto you any gospel other than that which we preached unto you, let him be anathema. As we have said before, so say I now again, if any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let him be anathema." It follows, therefore, that, unless the Bible be the final and so adequate authority also in sociology as in dogmatics and ethics, then we have no such authority in sociology. That is to say, we have no absolute norm for social development; we have no sufficient ideal for social realization; there is no "divine

order of human society": and, consequently, there is, in the last analysis, nothing for us to do in the social sphere but to lie around, Micawberlike, and see what will turn up. It is not ours to determine in accordance with the divine plan the evolution of society; it is only ours to be evolved. The mere statement of this position should be its refutation.

Nowhere is it more important that there should be an authority than in sociology. The fact is that in the social sphere no more than in the individual one can we simply lie around and be evolved. Society is made up of men, not of stones, not even of beasts: and it is characteristic of men, it is the characteristic of men, that they are self-conscious; that they evolve themselves; that they themselves work out the plan of God for them, and that, consequently, they "live and move and have their being" in "the realm of ends", of ideals, of authority. To take the ground of the alarmingly popular naturalistic and mechanistic philosophy that, instead of determining and so evolving himself, man is merely determined and evolved-this is to shut your eyes to what man is, even more than if one were to deny that he is an animal and so must breathe. Man is the animal whose very nature it is, and, therefore, in the social sphere, as really as in the individual, to realize and to demand authority. This is the essence of his essence.

We may and should go further. It is not enough for man to have an authority. In social relations, specially, he needs an authority that is adequate because final. Legislation, which is merely to meet the need of the hour, of which at the present time we have so much, does not and cannot satisfy any thoughtful person. The doctrine that society should. determine itself simply according to the requirements of each new age can not permanently win approval. Made by God and for God and in his image, man can realize himself only as he can aim at and determine himself according to the Eternal and Unchangeable. As he must have an authority on which to rest, so the only authority on which he can really rest will be absolute and thus final.

As has been remarked, this is not only true in the social sphere; it is conspicuously true in it. While we can not with William Temple, Headmaster of Repton, make the moral depend on the social and say that "The isolated individual may be wise or foolish; he can not be moral or immoral, and that an atheistic debaucher upon a desert island is not liable to moral censure", we do hold that the social, is both the goal and the crown of the moral. Man was made for society and fully realizes himself only in society. But who understands society, its nature, its functions, its development? It is of all things the most complex, the most complicated. If no man can know himself thoroughly, still less can he know the society of which he himself is but one insignificant member. And, therefore, if man by the very constitution of his nature demands an absolute norm and so a final authority, much more does that most wonderful of all organisms, the social body which men constitute, and in which alone they can fully find themselves, demand it. That is, God Himself must reveal His kingdom from heaven, if we are ever to realize it on earth. A final authority in and for sociology would seem, consequently, to be specially demanded by the divine purpose. Indeed, the Bible would fall short of its own revealed end, if it were the final authority in dogmatics and ethics and not in sociology. It is precisely in the kingdom which it was revealed to introduce, the divine order of society which, while it is to be consummated in heaven, must be established on earth, that we see most clearly the absolute need of such an authority. On these four grounds, then, to adduce no others, we would seem to be justified in claiming the Bible as the authority and so the text-book in sociology as really as our standards affirm it to be so in dogmatics and ethics.

II. There are, however, many who admit the force of our reasoning and yet deny our conclusion. They make this denial on the following grounds:

(1) The Old Testament, while containing, as we have

seen, much sociological information and instruction, has been abrogated with the dispensation to which it belonged. Its sociological function, if not its dogmatic and ethical one, was vacated when Christ came. The text-book of national life before this, it can not be so since then. The kingdom which our Lord set up was not of this world.

This position, while plausible, is invalid.

(a) The dogmatic and ethical and sociological elements of the Old Testament are so implicated as to be inseparable. Not only does the dogmatic determine the ethical and do they together determine the sociological, but the sociological is given either as an implication of the dogmatic and the ethical or as the conditions which demand them. Its fate, therefore, is one with theirs. If it has been set aside, they, too, have been; and as we do not claim that the Old Testament is no longer a part of the "only infallible rule of faith and practice", for the individual, so neither may we claim that the New Dispensation in fulfilling the Old has abrogated its sociology.

(b) That it has not done so appears in the fact that some of the sociological teaching of the Old Testament is either reaffirmed in the New Testament, or is based on grounds which are permanent. Thus we could not be shown more clearly in the case of Saul and of David and of the kings generally that government is of God than it is asserted to be so by Paul in the thirteenth chapter of Romans. So, too, the obligation of capital punishment for wilful murder is made to rest on the fact that man was created in God's image (Gen. ix. 6); and this reason, from the nature of the case, is and must be as much in force to-day as ever.

(c) While it is true that most of the social enactments of the Jewish theocracy, such as the judicial or civil laws regulating the duties of husbands and wives, the distribution of property, the punishment of crimes, etc., inasmuch as they grew out of the temporary and peculiar conditions of the Old Dispensation, ceased to be binding with the ceas