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THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORIC RESEARCH 
 
 FOB THE 
 
 THEOLOGICAL STUDENT OF TO-MY ; 
 
 Rev. HUGH MACDONALD SCOTT, B. D., 
 
 At his Inauguration as Sweetser and Michigan Professor op 
 Ecclesiastical History in "Chicago Theological Seminary, 
 
 WITH i UCf* J?-?, 
 
 \* 883 
 
 THE CHAKGE, 
 
 By Eev. TRUMAN M. POST, D. D. 
 
 PUBLISHED BY VOTE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS. 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 
 Jameson & Mobse, Pbintebs. 
 1882. 
 

INAUGUKAL SERVICES. 
 
 The public exercises in connection with the Inaugu- 
 ration of Rev. Hugh Macdonald Scott, B. A., B. D., as 
 Sweetser and Michigan Professor of Ecclesiastical 
 History, took place on Tuesday Evening, April 25th, 
 1882, in the First Congregational Church, Chicago, 
 111. ; E. W. Blatchford, Esq., President of the Board of 
 Directors, presiding. 
 
 The Services were as follows : 
 
 Invocation by Rev. F. Bascom, D. D., Hinsdale, 111. 
 
 Reading of the Scriptures by Rev. N. A. Hyde, D. D., 
 Indianapolis, Ind. 
 
 Declaration of Faith, by the Professor Elect. 
 
 Charge, by Rev. T. M. Post, D. D., St. Louis, Mo. 
 
 Inaugural Prayer, by Rev. G. F. Magoun, D. D., Grin- 
 nell, Iowa. 
 
 Inaugural Address, by Prof. Scott. 
 
 Benediction, by Rev. Edward M. Williams, Minne- 
 apolis, Minn. 
 
 The Charge and Address are published by vote of 
 the Board of Directors. 
 
THE CHARGE. 
 
 My Dear Brother : 
 
 As this evening you are to be inau- 
 gurated in the chair of Ecclesiastical History in Chi- 
 cago Theological Seminary, I have been deputed, in 
 behalf of the Directors of the Seminary, to address 
 to you, in connection with our cordial gratulation and 
 welcome, the charge customary on such occasions, 
 relative to the duties and functions of that department 
 of instruction committed to you; more, perhaps, from 
 a regard to the moral proprieties of the occasion and 
 a fitting recognition of its solemn importance, than 
 from a feeling of the need of such suggestion or 
 reminder to you from myself. And yet my utterances 
 will be no mere matter of form. Indeed I could not 
 well overstate my sense of the solemnity of the trans- 
 action in which we are engaged — a transaction which 
 commits it over to you, in the instruction of this Insti- 
 tution, to set forth and interpret the story of the Church 
 of Christ — to present in truthful historic picture its 
 spirit, methods, aims and achievements, its errors and 
 dangers, its disasters and its victories. I know of no 
 department that applies itself more widely and vari- 
 ously to all the elements of christian character and 
 action. So vast and varied are its themes and inter- 
 ests, so wide its range of aspects and situations, so 
 
THE CHARGE. 
 
 manifold its suggestions and instructions and its ap- 
 peals to our judgments and our sympathies, that it 
 seems to address itself to every side of our nature; 
 and that no department of instruction can more power- 
 fully affect the entire cast and complexion of christian 
 manhood or do more to determine the theory and 
 practice of the christian life of the individual or of the 
 Church, and the question of our proper sympathy with 
 God's idea and purpose in his kingdom on earth. And 
 when I reflect how much it will lie with you, by your 
 own mental attitude and sympathy, and by the adjust- 
 ment of light and shadow, standpoints and aspects, 
 setting and environment, to affect the entire impres- 
 sion and lesson of the picture, there seems to me com- 
 mitted to your hands, in dealing with the minds of the 
 students in interests of mightiest moment, a plastic, 
 almost a creative power that oppresses me with a sense 
 of the vastness of responsibility that rests on you. 
 When, moreover, I reflect that these minds are to be 
 among the master-builders of the House of God — the 
 founders and primordial architects of christian churches 
 in this new and rising world of the Northwest — -when 
 I reflect on all these things, I feel that nothing can 
 transcend the solemnity of your position or its respon- 
 sibilities, or the urgency of supplication which it re- 
 quires in the outset and will require constantly in all 
 the future, should ascend for the baptism of that Spirit 
 which gives light and serenity and energy to the hu- 
 man mind, and for the overshadowing presence of that 
 Christ whose living consciousness pervades and whose 
 heart-beat pulsates through the entire life of the Church 
 from its genesis in time till it emerges in the upper 
 glory. 
 
THE CHARGE. J 
 
 And here it befits first of all that we note that the 
 Spirit we thus invoke is the Spirit of Truth, and 
 that your first concern and quest in your office is truth; 
 that you anchor it in the very depth of the soul that 
 God is served or honored of no lie; that gt>od is shel- 
 tered or fostered of no falsehood; that iron mixed with 
 the clay is sure to collapse, no matter how grand the 
 structure involving the truth with the falsehood in the 
 peril of a common ruin; that your function is not to 
 foist your own thought as the divine organic idea 
 into history and build upon it, but that you educe 
 God's idea and plan from his Word and his Provi- 
 dence; that God wishes no colored vision, but the 
 white light of the very truth ; that it is not yours to be 
 the advocate, champion or partisan, or to make a case, 
 or to "trammel up the consequences." Some men fear 
 truth as dynamite, and handle it as gingerly, lest it 
 tear everything to pieces. God requires no Uzza to 
 lay profane hand on the ark lest it be jostled and 
 wrecked. Your concern is truth; God will care for 
 the consequences. It is yours to see, listen and 
 report. You need first of all a candor pure as the 
 sun — a mind entirely achromatic. 
 
 By an achromatic mind I mean no utter blank, no 
 tabula rasa. That were an impossibility, and would 
 prove, if possible, an incompetency for your office. 
 
 The very condition of your appointment, the state- 
 ment of the creed, assumes certain things as posited. 
 Yet the creed is presented chiefly as a criterion of 
 your competency to your office and fitness to work in 
 harmony with the aims of this seminary; not surely 
 as a project and programme of what you are subse- 
 quently to find and prove in history. When you open 
 
8 THE CHARGE. 
 
 that volume you are to dismiss all inquiry but, What is 
 truth ? 
 
 But though the mind is to be achromatic, it is not to 
 be icy. It is to be like sunlight, warm and genial, as 
 well as colorless. You must have an intense and liv- 
 ing sympathy with the history you pursue in order 
 truly to know it. You must feel into its very reality 
 in order truly to apprehend and utter it. You want 
 in history not a skeleton of dry bones, wired together 
 by dates and dogmas, but the very resurrection of the 
 dead with all their living personality and human heart- 
 beat. You want more than the bare, isolated facts; 
 you want facts with their environment; you want a 
 living sympathy with the conditions and circumstances 
 in order to the proper setting of truths. Truths apart 
 from their settings are but half-truths, often the worst 
 of lies — such as set men and peoples crazy. 
 
 Again, you are to study Church history as a life; as 
 one life, under the inbreath of one Spirit and the pres- 
 ence of one Christ. You are to study it as a human 
 life, not of the angelic orders; as a family life, not of 
 aliens or masters, but of fathers and brothers, of men 
 like yourself, compassed with infirmities, trials and 
 sufferings. 
 
 You are to study it as a perpetual life, without break 
 or syncope, often hid it may be, yet always existent; 
 not traceable always through hierarchies or dynasties, 
 through prelates or princes, through temporal or spir- 
 itual Caesars. Often that life shrinks from the con- 
 spicuous fields of history, from the heights to the 
 lowly vales and hidden glens, from the cathedral to 
 the cottage, from the courts and capitals, the Canter- 
 burys and Romes of history to the hovel, the cata_ 
 
THE CHARGE. 9 
 
 comb, the wilderness, the dens and caves of the earth. 
 Yet you must have faith in its perpetual existence be- 
 fore God and in human souls, and as revealed to many 
 exiled Elijahs in the procession and proclamation of 
 God through the lonely waste. 
 
 You must study history as having under God one 
 life-trend. You may not always clearly trace it — may 
 not thread its seeming labyrinths or unravel its tangled 
 maze. Often its movement may seem devious — often 
 retrograde, and giving of itself no explanation; tedi- 
 ous, weary, objectless as the Exode. And yet it may 
 be the briefest course to the desired goal — the briefest 
 in accordance with the eternal laws of the divine econ- 
 omy, and of the human mind. The pilgrims have to 
 be fitted to the promised inheritance, and the sweep 
 of the movement must be broadened to carry with it 
 the world. The deviation and retrogression are by 
 the force of the same laws that bear it on to ultimate, 
 complete success. They broaden its current, deepen 
 its channels, accumulate its flood and its force to break 
 through new obstacles and rush into new rapids; even 
 as the Mississippi, while seemingly mazed in endless 
 zigzag around cliffs and headlands and through morass 
 and wilderness is meanwhile waiting and deflecting to 
 receive the affluents of half a continent, and is all the 
 time, every drop of it, under the grasp of one great 
 law bearing it swift and straight as the face of the 
 world will permit to the great gulf. 
 
 Again, you must study the life of the Christian 
 Church as a germinal, progressive, adolescent life — one 
 after Christ's own similitude of a vegetable growth; 
 a development from embryonic germs, unfolding and 
 uplifting ever to new altitude, strength, beauty and 
 
IO THE CHARGE. 
 
 fruitage — one destined to exhibit, with perpetual iden- 
 tity of germs, changes of outward form and aspect — 
 as of blade, stalk, leaf, flower, "the ear and the full 
 corn in the ear." Nor are we to be surprised or dis- 
 mayed if amid its changes it exhibits at times exfolia- 
 tions analogous to those of the shrub or tree, the cast- 
 ing off of foliage which, having served its time in 
 ministering to life and growth, but having become 
 incompetent longer to do so, will, if retained, only 
 obstruct, bind up and smother its life, and breed in it 
 mould and decay. Kindly autumn comes and strips 
 off the dead leafage and leaves the tree bare, seem- 
 ingly blasted and dead. But it is not death, only the 
 preparation for a new, stronger, loftier, more majestic 
 and fruitful life. So it is at times with the germinant 
 life and growth of the kingdom of God; periods of 
 exfoliation come, periods of change, which are like the 
 turning over of a new page; not that the former page 
 has been useless, but it has been read, has given its 
 story and lessons, and fulfilled its office, and being 
 unturned, it would cover the one next in the continu- 
 ous volume. 
 
 Such a germinal growth is presented in repeated 
 symbols, by Christ himself, as representative of the 
 life of his Church on earth. His instructions in them 
 forbid the idea of some perfect paradigm, some type 
 of completed life and growth in some past era or 
 epoch — some authoritative model, cast in eternal ste- 
 reotype, toward which all subsequent times, conditions 
 and peoples must ever work. Under the perpetual 
 presence of Christ and the Holy Spirit, history shows 
 us such a germinal development, — a development 
 which did not stop with the Apostles or the Fathers, 
 
THE CHARGE. I I 
 
 nor yet with the Reformers or the Pilgrims ; a devel- 
 opment not limited or bound up by Origen or Athan- 
 asius or Augustine, or by Wyckliffe, or Luther, or 
 Calvin, or Edwards, or Wesley ; which has not pre- 
 sented its final outcome in the platforms of Nice, or 
 Augsburg, or Geneva, or of Wesminster, or Savoy, 
 or Saybrook, or Cambridge, or of Boston. These are 
 landmarks of movement, not ultimate barriers or con- 
 summations. They are not final utterances of Chris- 
 tian thought, nor have we reason to believe such 
 utterance will be delivered until the second coming of 
 the Lord. Now, this does not imply that the Church 
 has learned nothing, gained nothing, settled nothing, 
 in the past centuries. The child has learned some- 
 thing, gained something, settled something, yet he 
 continues to grow and to learn; and this because he 
 has gained, learned and settled something. But the 
 past has changed by incorporation into a larger future. 
 
 Changes, in order to be genuine progress, must be 
 developments of germs which are primordeal and 
 immortal. Forms and formulations, the offspring of 
 certain conditions of mind and of the world, are liable 
 to change with those conditions. If they are dead — 
 have no longer congruity with the mind and life of 
 the world — they must be cast off, or they work ob- 
 struction, disease, and gangrene. Aspects and phases 
 of thought or speech, which have served their end to 
 special times and cultures which are past, must give 
 place to others, or disaster will ensue. 
 
 Who that has walked amid the terrible frescoes of 
 the Santo Campo in Pisa, or those of the Last Judg- 
 ment in the Sistine chapel in the Vatican, or whose 
 imagination has been led by Dante through the hor- 
 
12 THE CHARGE. 
 
 rors of the circles of eternal sin and sorrow, and seen 
 in those depicted certain forms of thought attaching to 
 the orthodoxy of the middle ages, has not felt that 
 there were presented certain ideas of God and Christ, 
 which, of whatever service they may have been in the 
 rude and gloomy ages preceding, the Church must in 
 time cast off or die ; or, at least, cumbered with them, 
 could not move on to the future conquest of the world. 
 
 But, on the other hand, while we recognize as true 
 this germinal theory of church life, we are still to bear 
 in mind, that history, together with reason and Scrip- 
 ture, admonishes us there are limits to changes which 
 we may not pass ; there are changes which are not 
 germination, but extirpation, — where a break, even 
 from the closures of the old prison-house, in a given 
 direction, were only a burst into chaos and old night. 
 There are transitions with no progress ; exfoliations, 
 not unto life; new growths, which are not at all devel- 
 opments or outgrowths of the primal immortal germ, 
 but only the alien parasitic misletoe feeding on the 
 decay of the old stock; or the poison oak or ivy cling- 
 ing to the noble monarch of the forest — climbing, and 
 killing as it climbs, till at last it flaunts its deadly 
 brilliancy high above the stately trunk now dead and 
 decaying, and soon to fall. 
 
 The signs of the times emphasize to us the admoni- 
 tion of the Apostle John to the churches of his age, 
 " Brethren, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits 
 whether they are of God." See whether they show 
 us a development of the primal principles of Christian 
 doctrine and life. 
 
 The past history of the Church, and the aspects of 
 the times, admonish us of a media via a middle path, 
 
THE CHARGE. I 3 
 
 as the one of life, midway between a dead conserva- 
 tism and a wild pseudo-reform. To find it now and 
 hold it, — here is the patience and faith of the saints, 
 here the crisis and agonism of the hour to the Church. 
 Woe! worth the day! if she find it not, — the middle 
 path the pilgrim found, uplifting in the valley of the 
 shadow of death, between the foul morass and mock- 
 ing ghouls on the one hand, and on the other the dark 
 deeps eddying with eternal flames or screaming with 
 everlasting rage and woe. Woe to those who call 
 ruin reform, or reform ruin; woe to the iconoclast, 
 that mutilates and desecrates the tombs and altars of 
 his fathers, or who converts their images to a Chinese 
 lararium; woe to him who will not look on the brazen 
 serpent, or who perverts it to a fetish ; woe to him 
 who cuts himself off from the body of life, and to him 
 who binds himself to a body of death; woe to those 
 who worship the mummies of hoary Eld, or who — like 
 the renegades and apostates seen by Ezekiel through 
 the hole in the wall, amid chambers of foul and abom- 
 inable imagery, and at last standing between the 
 porch and the altar — in their eagerness to worship the 
 rising sun, impiously turn their backs on the temple 
 of Jehovah ; woe to the wretch that scuttles the ship 
 that carries him, or the dotard who ties himself to the 
 anchor against the terrors of shipwreck ; woe to him 
 who despises and dishonors the infant Church under 
 the presence or near memories of Christ and the 
 apostles, and to him as well who would crowd eighteen 
 centuries and a half of history, experience and pro- 
 gress back into the cradle. 
 
 History is no pandect of ecclesiastical law; narrative 
 is not legislation; action is not command, even in case 
 
14 THE CHARGE. 
 
 of inspired men, unless associated with express enact- 
 ment or exact parallel analogy. God knows to com- 
 mand, if He wills, with all fullness, precision and 
 circumstantiality of detail, in matters of form, or order, 
 or liturgy, as in the Mosaic Institute. His omission 
 to do so in the New Testament is significant. The 
 organic principles and immortal germs being given, 
 their development and application, as regards phase, 
 form and phrase, seems largely relegated to the free 
 reason and conscience of men, under the guidance of 
 the Divine Spirit and the ever present Christ. 
 
 History is the thesaurus of instances, analogies, 
 illustrations, and of the best thought and achievement 
 of the past, though neither the thought or achievement 
 is divine or of authoritative example. It is an exhibit 
 of causes, consequences, tendencies and results, errors 
 and disasters, as well as of heroic and martyr doing 
 and suffering. It shows also the limits and conditions 
 of the progress of the Kingdom of God, and God's 
 plan and economy for its final triumph in the conver- 
 sion of the world. It summons us to the paths indi- 
 cated by Christ, and trodden by the apostles, evan- 
 gelists and martyrs of earliest times, as the true way 
 to this result. It gives the chart of earlier voyagers, 
 and plants danger signals against rock and tempest 
 along the deeps over which we are to sail. In all 
 these regards history offers vast aids, if we seek from 
 it counsel and not authority. It also admonishes us 
 of transition periods, their perils and hopes, and the 
 necessity of the middle path. 
 
 Within the sphere left open to human freedom we 
 may not wonder or be startled at signs of change. 
 What we have to see to is that the change be a devel- 
 
THE CHARGE. I 5 
 
 opment, an unfolding and not uprooting of that planted 
 by Christ and his apostles ; that it is merely the re- 
 moval of forms of thought which man has created and 
 *man may also modify or rescind. Such changes in 
 theologic systems often unnecessarily alarm us, as if 
 the pillars of the eternal truth itself were shaken. Is 
 not God, we ask, is not Christ " the same yesterday, 
 to-day, and forever?" Yes! But man is not the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and forever ; nor is man's knowl- 
 edge of God and his word. Truth is eternally one 
 and the same ; but not so is man's science of truth. 
 The heavens are from of old unchangeably the same — 
 over a Ptolemy, a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Newton, a 
 La Place — but not so is Astronomy, man's science of 
 the starry universe, nor would their aspect be the 
 same to a stand-point on the earth and on Sirius. 
 " But," it is urged, " is not Christ's presence promised 
 to be with his Church always, and does not this insure 
 her unchangeableness? Yes. Christ's promise is to 
 us of His perpetual presence, and therein is all our 
 hope. But that insures progress, not unimprovable 
 perfectness at the beginning. Christ has been with 
 the Church in all the past ages, and thereby we know 
 what that promise means. That presence is influence 
 — not force, not fatalism. It is not, as we clearly see 
 in the past, a guaranty of infallibility or impeccability 
 to any man, or order, or class, or age, or church, but 
 a promise of readiness to aid and guide the willing 
 and obedient, and to overrule disaster and failure, so 
 as to secure the final victory, and to guarantee to the 
 Church that the gates of hell should not prevail against 
 it. We glory in that presence, and in it is our confi- 
 dence of hope. We rejoice in that presence, a'* still 
 
1 6 THE CHARGE. 
 
 and ever with us as with our fathers, and as it will be 
 with the Church in the coming happier ages. Christ 
 still lives, and the Spirit of Truth, and the Eternal 
 God, and also the human reason and conscience com- 
 muning with immortal truth; therefore, the Church of 
 Christ still lives, and with the franchise of freedom 
 and of power on her as of old; and she stands, with 
 no sphynx face — ever turned toward the climes of 
 memory — but like the fourfold visaged cherubim, seen 
 by Ezekiel at the river Chebar, full of eyes, and with 
 universal outlook, sweeping at once the horizon of all 
 the ages. 
 
 Let us not be dismayed at times of transition, as if 
 we were in peril of shipwreck ; Christ is on board, — 
 " Therefore will we not fear though the earth be re- 
 moved, though the mountains be carried into the 
 midst of the seas, though the waves thereof roar and 
 be troubled, though the mountains shake with the 
 swelling thereof. There is a stream whose waters 
 shall make glad the city of our God ; God is in the 
 midst of her, she shall not be moved ; God shall help 
 her, and that right early." Christ is on board ! If 
 God be with us, who can be against us ? What shall 
 separate us from His love ? Shall things present or 
 things to come ; or life, or death, or any other creature ? 
 The ship that bears the Christ ! Well may the utter- 
 ances of that sweet voice, that has just faded into 
 heaven, spoken of another ship, be applied to her. 
 Sail on, O ship, that bears the Christ, — 
 
 " Humanity, with all its fears, 
 With all its hopes of future years, 
 
 Is hanging breathless on thy fate. 
 
 ******** 
 
 " Fear not each sudden sound or shock, 
 'Tis of the wave and not the rock, 
 
THE CHARGE. I 7 
 
 Tis but the napping of the sail, 
 
 And not a rent made by the gale. 
 
 In spite of rocks and tempest's roar, 
 
 In spite of false lights on the shore, 
 
 Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea, 
 
 Our hopes, our hearts are all with thee; 
 
 Our hopes, our hearts, our prayers, our tears, 
 
 Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears, — 
 
 Are all with thee — are all with thee." 
 
 The history of Christianity in the past is of a life. 
 It shall be so in the future, — a life climbing ever 
 mightier and loftier, in a more inspiring atmosphere, 
 and clearer light, and larger vision. It is not to die : 
 not till the throb for immortality has ceased in the 
 human breast, or an answer, surer and more hopeful 
 than that of the risen Christ, shall come to the ages 
 applying the ear to the abyss of the grave ; not till 
 that risen Christ has ceased to be the uplift of the 
 world, His Gospel to be the power of God unto sal- 
 vation, and the vision of the beauty and glory of 
 Christ has sunk from the gaze of the world into the 
 deeps of the eternal past, and the New Jerusalem, with 
 its faces of the loved and beautiful and blessed, has 
 been resigned by man to everlasting oblivion; not till 
 then, shall the stone rolled by the angels from the 
 door of the sepulchre be rolled back again, and the 
 history of the Church of Christ become epitaph — the 
 memory of a dream the sweetest, most beneficent, 
 most beautiful, most blessed, that ever descended on 
 human vision, but drifting itself to the same grave to 
 which it marshalled the deluded race of man. Till 
 then history, standing by the open tomb of Him that 
 liveth and was dead, and is alive for evermore, shall 
 utter with the beloved disciple, "This is the true God 
 and eternal life." 
 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
 
 Mr. President, and Gentlemen of the Board of 
 Directors: 
 
 Studies are usually divided into direct and oblique, 
 or those which are of immediate value by imparting 
 knowledge and those which are educative, and are 
 prized because of the mental training which they 
 afford. The traditional system was largely of the 
 former, the modern method is chiefly of the latter 
 type. How merry educationists have made them- 
 selves over learning by rote, burdening the memory 
 with a mass of ill-digested facts, and turning the mind 
 into a vast curiosity shop, we need scarcely be told — 
 for the laughter is still in our ears. It might be more 
 profitable, perhaps, to venture to ask if we have not 
 gone just a little too far in this direction ; and, in 
 our philosophic desire to cultivate the understanding, 
 enliven the fancy and polish the language, may not 
 have forgotten to give the mind material enough on 
 which to think, and provide our eloquence with 
 information enough wherewith to balance it in its 
 flight. 
 
 We will certainly be within both the Baconian 
 method and the practice of the most progressive 
 studies, when we emphasize the supreme importance 
 of a wide acquaintance with facts, and of a head full 
 
20 ALL STUDIES HISTORICAL. 
 
 of the results of other men's labors : for wisdom im- 
 plies knowledge ; principles presuppose a familiarity 
 with phenomena ; a weighty opinion must be based 
 on broad and clear information, and the highest deci- 
 sion of the present must rest upon the deepest study 
 of the past. The stream of investigation in our day 
 runs more than ever before in the direction of the 
 historic, and a wide accumulation of facts, to be care 
 fully kept in mind, is pronounced an indispensible 
 prerequisite to all independent effort. 
 
 The modern scientist deals as much with the science 
 of history as with the history of science, — for we are 
 pointed everywhere to unity, organism, development. 
 Geology is a chronology of the earth, the dates of 
 which are to be carefully remembered ; botany tells of 
 the generation and migration of plants ; physiology is 
 the successive biographies of protoplasm, fish, monkey 
 and man; philosophy has become a history of thought; 
 morals is traced as the unconscious product of long- 
 continued habits ; and religion itself is decided to be 
 the historic translation of subjective states into objec- 
 tive deities. 
 
 Although we approach the history of the church in 
 quite another spirit than that which seems to prevail 
 in the studies referred to, we find ourselves in hearty 
 agreement with the demands which they make for a 
 wide and sweeping knowledge of facts. 
 
 For, what is the foundation of Christianity? It is a 
 fact — Christ and His work. Where are these set 
 forth? In the Scriptures, especially those of the New 
 Testament. What is the New Testament? It is a 
 certain collection of books which church tradition has 
 given us. Where did the Church get them? Why 
 
NEW TESTAMENT INTRODUCTION. 2 I 
 
 diH she receive them ? What are they to us ? These 
 questions history must answer. Its light alone can 
 reveal the time, the circumstances, the authors, the 
 receivers, the authority of such writings ; for the testi- 
 monium spiritus sancti is no longer appealed to in 
 deciding the date of the Apocalyps.e or the canonicity 
 of Jude, and the argument from prophecy and miracles 
 as proofs of revelation has fallen into neglect, because 
 of the general character of the one and the circum- 
 stance that the others must themselves be first histori- 
 cally defended. 
 
 If, then, the entrance to theology and faith be 
 through the canon of Scripture, and the doorway to 
 the canon be through history, it will not be inappro- 
 priate, in seeking to show the importance of our 
 department, to notice at the outset the present state 
 of the science of New Testament Introduction, and 
 the necessity which it creates for a very special 
 acquaintance with the life and labors of the early 
 church. 
 
 I. 
 
 Tertullian tells us 1 that in his time the Christian 
 was painted by heathen wit as a man with an ass's 
 head reading a book. With a little more delicate 
 satire the same idea is uttered in our day by the 
 advocates of advanced Biblical criticism, in reference 
 to what they call the wooden orthodoxy, the slavery 
 of the letter, the blind traditionalism of unillumined 
 Christianity. The so-called dogmatic view of the 
 canon of Scripture is pronounced emphatically wrong. 
 It leads to an utter perversion of the origin of the 
 
 1 Apologeticus, c. xvi. 
 
2 2 THE TUBINGEN SCHOOL. 
 
 church ; it brings its advocates into conflict with the 
 science and culture of the age ; and to be persevered 
 in, after all that modern historic research has brought 
 to light, argues either pitiable weakness or wilful 
 blindness. 
 
 The apostle and high priest of this critical school 
 was Baur of Tubingen (d. i860). He applied the 
 Hegelian philosophy to the study of history with a 
 marvelous acuteness of vision and almost incredible 
 mastery of details, and out of his crucible but five of 
 the New Testament books came forth unmixed gold, 
 viz., Romans, I. and II. Corinthians, Galatians, and 
 the Apocalypse. 
 
 Hilgenfeld, a disciple of this school, claims to follow 
 the literary-historic rather than Baur's tendency theory, 
 and adds /. Thessalonians, Philemon, and Philippians 
 to the genuine books. His historic principle — that of 
 the so-called "scientific theology" — in studying the 
 New Testament canon, is that "the Apostolic period 
 was moved by a contrast — not original, but appearing 
 gradually, and therefore capable of being harmonized; 
 a contrast which the several books of the New Testa- 
 ment represent in its whole course." 1 
 
 Upon the foundation of this Petro-Pauline schism 
 two further appearances especially enable these critics 
 to pronounce upon the origin of the New Testament 
 Scriptures. These are the Roman persecutions and 
 the inner crisis caused by Gnosticism. In the light of 
 these historic torches we are told that the first Epistle 
 of Peter was written under Trajan, — about A. D. 
 113, — not only because it echoes the Epistle to the 
 Romans, the Epistle of James, and that to the Heb- 
 
 1 Einleitung in d. JV. Test., 1875. Vorwort, S. V. 
 
HILGENFELD, HOLTZMAN. 23 
 
 rews, but because its notice of busybodies (i Peter 
 iv:'i'5) indicates the Delatores, who became active 
 again in the reign of Domitian and during the perse- 
 cution under Trajan. 1 
 
 // Thessalonians belongs to this period, because the 
 "man of sin" is Nero, and the circumstances attend- 
 ing him point to the preaching of the Jewish Christian 
 Elxai, who lived under Trajan. 2 Hausrath 3 finds in 
 6 naTexoDv (2, 7) a punning reference to Claudius! 
 
 Holtzmann, in an elaborate work, 4 proves to a cer- 
 tainty, in the eyes of the new school, that the pastoral 
 epistles are a product of the first half of the second 
 century, and are only possible historically when viewed 
 as an effort to promote union in the church in the 
 face of distraction, caused by persecution without and 
 heresy within. 
 
 Every historic indication, we are informed, is against 
 them. No place can be found for them in the life of 
 Paul ; they are full of words and phrases drawn from 
 the philosophy of the second century ; the gnostic 
 heresy attacked is unknown to the apostles ; they 
 show a developed church hierarchy not reached till a 
 late period ; and the subjective nature of their teach- 
 ing betrays in its mediating tendency the irenical 
 efforts of the post-apostolic age. Historic criticism, 
 therefore, declares they are a continuation of the writ- 
 ings of the Pauline tendency, and form a bridge 
 between Paulinism and the Logos-Gospel. 5 
 
 The Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians belong 
 to the same late period, as is seen in their speculative 
 
 1 Cf. Pliny's letter to Trajan. 2 Hilgenfeld— Elg. p. 648. 
 
 3 Neutestamentl. Zeitgeschichte—Bd. I., p. 102. 
 
 4 Die pastoralbriefe, Kritisch u. exegetisch behandelt, Leipzig, 1880. 
 
 5 Holtzmann — Einleitung. 
 
24 RESULTS. 
 
 coloring, and are very likely the product of historic 
 transition from Christian essenism to gnosticism. This 
 is the view of Lipsius. 1 
 
 The Epistle of James, Hilgenfeld sets in the year 
 A. D. 90, because it borrows such phrases as rpoxo? 
 rr/b ysveeeoQS from Orphic hymns — a realm of gnosti- 
 cism of which James could know nothing. 
 
 II. Peter is given up, we are told, by all his- 
 toric critics, orthodox and liberal, except Weiss and 
 Thiersch. 
 
 If internal evidence, combined with a perfect con- 
 sensus of historic indications, is worth anything, the 
 Acts of the Apostles and the fourth Gospel cannot be 
 the work of Luke and John. On this point the new 
 school is unanimous, and regards the question as 
 settled. 2 The only apostolic portion of the Gospels is 
 the substratum in Matthew and Mark, before it was 
 worked over into its present form. 
 
 There are thus, we are told, two periods in New 
 Testament literature. The first, the Apostolic, includ- 
 ing the genuine epistles of Paul, the Apocalypse, and 
 the two oldest synoptic gospels; the second, the post- 
 Apostolic, embracing the remaining writings, which 
 betray in nearly every instance the pre-existence of 
 the others. 3 This deutero-canon, the loftiest part of 
 the New Testament, is the result of Christian Platon- 
 ism in Alexandria building, in the second century, a 
 system upon the foundation laid by Paul. 4 
 
 In other words, at the close of more than thirty 
 years historical research, by a school of critics that 
 has no superior in solid learning, patient investigation 
 
 1 Gnosticismus, S. 141. 
 
 2 Cf. Holtzman, " Recht u. Pflicht der Biblischen Kritik, 1874, S. 15. 
 
 3 lb., p. 22. 4 Hausrath, N. T. Ztgsch, Bd. III., s. 560. 
 
CLASSICAL CUSTOM. 25 
 
 and subtle conjecture, we are told that nearly two 
 thirds of our New Testament canon belongs to the 
 post-Apostolic period, and was quietly put into cir- 
 culation under the honored names of Peter, John and 
 Paul. Of these later works Hausrath says, 1 " the 
 church herself received of the products of this literary 
 movement what satisfied her religious need, . . *. . . 
 but this choice was more a matter of religious tact 
 than a work of historic criticism." Such words as 
 fraud and forgery and deception, we are told, at once 
 betray a total ignorance of the historic circumstances 
 amid which the New Testament writings arose. The 
 church's views of literary propriety, the rights of 
 authors, and the measure of importance to be assigned 
 to the supposed writer were, we are assured, simply 
 those of the first centuries ; and how different these 
 were from those in our day no careful historian needs 
 to be informed. 
 
 It was a well known and common practice among 
 classic writers, 2 both Greek and Latin, to publish their 
 own views under the name of some great author of 
 the past. Every schoolboy remembers, and is not 
 •deceived by it, how Livy and Tacitus put speeches 
 into the mouth of their historic characters. Plato, 
 amid minute details of time and place, makes Socrates 
 teach the ideal philosophy, and every student knows 
 we have spurious dialogues under the name of Plato 
 himself. 
 
 The Neo-Pythagoreans thought they honored their 
 master by putting their exposition of his teachings 
 into his own mouth. More than fifty such works 
 
 l Ib. Bd. III., s. 559. 
 
 2 Cf. Zeller, Abhandl. Gesch. Inhalts, s. 298. 
 
26 JEWISH LITERARY METHODS. 
 
 were assigned to Pythagoras, and no one raised a cry 
 of forgery or literary dishonesty. 1 In our period this 
 became a favorite style of publishing thought. Cicero 
 says, 2 " this method of composition, which bases itself 
 upon illustrious men of the past, seems, I do not know 
 how, to have great weight." 
 
 We are called, further, to observe that Jewish liter- 
 ature followed this early custom. The translators of 
 the LXX. not only did not hesitate to insert explana- 
 tory remarks into their text, but added whole books. 
 Susannah and Bel and Dragon were inserted as part 
 of Daniel. The Wisdom of Solomon was published 
 by a Greek Jew as if a genuine work of that king, 
 Ecclesiastes, though claiming to be written by the 
 " son of David," even orthodox divines now admit not 
 to be from Solomon. The book of Enoch — itself 
 apocryphaf— received all kinds of apocryphal additions 
 from later hands. Dillmann, speaking of Jewish liter- 
 ature in the century before Christ, says, 3 "At that 
 time it had become a familiar custom, based on the 
 example of certain Old Testament writings, for an 
 author to express himself under the name of another, 
 putting traditional teaching into the mouth of some 
 ancient man of God who lived when the spirit of 
 prophecy still spake with men." In the Diaspora the 
 Jews carried this tendency so far as to insert lines in 
 Homer teaching the Sabbath, and made Orpheus 
 speak of the Decalogue. 4 
 
 It would be, then, we are assured, a marvellous 
 thing if early Christian writers regarded as a sin what 
 both Jews and Greeks considered simply a literary 
 
 1 Holtzmann, R. u. Pf., p. 26. 2 De Amic, I. 4. 
 
 3 Das Buck Henoch iibersetzi u. erkldrt. — Elg. s. xxvi, 1853. 
 
 4 Hilgenfeld, p. 167. 
 
NEW TESTAMENT APOCRYPHA. 2J 
 
 method. It is pointed out that what constitutes right 
 and wrong in actions varies in different ages. Hier- 
 onymus, the greatest scholar of his time, speaking of 
 the Epistle of James, says, 1 "It is said to have been 
 published under the name of James, and may as time 
 went on have little by little obtained authority." The 
 primitive church was not horrified at the thought of 
 interpolated or substituted writings. The important 
 matter was the teaching that was offered and not the 
 author of it. In proof of this we are bidden consider 
 the mass of apocryphal literature which arose in the 
 first two centuries. 
 
 And first of all the New Testament itself refers to 
 such works. The Epistle of Jude quotes (v. 14-15) 
 the " Book of Enoch," an apocryphal writing of the 
 first century B. C. ; and II. Timothy (iii. 8) gives 
 information from the Assumptio Mosis, written about 
 the time of the birth of Christ. The Gospel to the 
 Hebrews, once canonical for a part of the church, is 
 now lost. 
 
 Various books, now rejected, were regarded as 
 authoritative by some early churches and Fathers. 
 Irenaeus received the Shepherd of Hermas as Scrip- 
 tural Tertullian considered 3 the Book of Enoch 
 genuine, and thought Noah might have preserved it 
 orally, or have been inspired to restore it. The 
 Apocalypse of Peter was received by the Muratorian 
 Fragmentist, who also speaks of an Epistle to the 
 Laodiceans and another to Alexandria as wrongly 
 assigned to Paul. Clement of Alexandria ascribes 
 the "Dialogue of Jason and Papiskos" (by Aristo of 
 
 1 Catal. Scrip. Eccl., c. 2. 
 
 2 IV. 3, Cf. also Tertull. De orat, c. xvi. 
 
 3 De Idololatria, c. iv ; De Cult. Fern. i. 3. 
 
28 CHURCH CRITICISM. 
 
 Pella) to Luke. 1 The Epistle of Clement of Rome 
 was read in churches, and is numbered in the canon 
 in Codex A. In a Syrian MS. (Paris, 1876, dis- 
 covered) it forms part of the New Testament, stand- 
 ing after the Pastoral Epistles. The Epistle of Barna- 
 bas was Scripture for Origen. The Ebionites received 
 the Clementine writings, and referred to the so-called 
 " Witness of Timothy " as the words of Jesus. Clem- 
 ent of Alexandria did not receive Jude or II. and III. 
 John, yet he allowed them to be used in church be- 
 cause written in honor of the apostles. The author of 
 the pseudo Acts of Paul and Thecla, when charged 
 with the fiction, said 2 he did it to magnify Paul. The 
 great body of New Testament apocrypha, containing 
 among others about filty apocryphal gospels, had a 
 similar aim. We name only "The Testament of the 
 XII. Patriarchs," the " Protevangelium Jacobi" "The 
 Discourse of Peter," "The Acts of Pilate," "The Acts 
 of Matthew," "The Acts of Andrew," "The Apoca- 
 lypse of Paul," "The Acts of Thomas," the correspon- 
 dence between Jesus and Abgar. 
 
 In the first two centuries an unprecedented number 
 of such writings arose, and the church, having a faint 
 conception of historic criticism, accepted simply, we 
 are informed, those which were useful for her purpose. 
 How ready she was to act on such a principle is seen 
 in the use she made of supposed heathen revelation. 
 Justin Martyr appeals to the testimony of the Sibylline 
 books, and Clement of Alexandria cites a work of 
 Zoroaster, in which, after his return to life, he de- 
 cribed the region of the dead. It was but another 
 step in jhis direction to produce or use supposed deci- 
 
 1 Scholia ad Dionys. Alex. 2 Tertullian, De Baptismo, c. xvii. 
 
CANON CLOSED. 29 
 
 sions of Governors or Emperors. Such were the 
 spurious edicts of Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, fit 
 forerunners of the donation of Constantine and the 
 Isidoran Decretals. Viewing these things from a 
 rationalistic point of view, Lecky exclaims, "The 
 immense number of forged documents is one of the 
 most disgraceful features of the Church History of the 
 first two centuries," 1 and elsewhere (p. 399) speaks of 
 " the deliberate and apparently perfectly unscrupulous 
 forgery of a whole literature." After more than two 
 centuries of such use of fluctuating Scriptures, the 
 church was led — by a growing demand for a fixed 
 canon in public worship, and by heretical writers who 
 published false doctrine under apostolic names — to 
 close the collection of sacred literature. The earliest 
 attempts were neither exact nor uniform. The Coun- 
 cils of Laodicea and Hippo, which first enumerated 
 the books, give different lists — neither of which agrees 
 with our canon. As Paine coarsely puts it, 2 "Those 
 books which had a majority of votes were voted to be 
 the word of God." 
 
 The New Testament, then, according to this new 
 school, is " a selection of the classical writings of 
 original Christianity, enclosed by movable boundaries, 
 and arose throughout the century extending from 
 about A. D. 53 onwards." 3 It is an organic part of 
 the religious literature of the first two centuries, differ- 
 ing from other parts only in a degree of excellence, and 
 only to be understood by a study of all the surround- 
 ing works. Now, it is plain to every thinking man, 
 that we have here to do with a vast array of facts, or 
 
 1 Hist, of European Morals, Vol. I., p. 363 — note. 
 
 2 Age of Reason, p. 7. 
 
 3 Holtzmann, R. u. p., p. 18. Hilgenfeld, Der Kanon, s. 67. 
 
30 PATH OF ENQUIRY. 
 
 supposed facts, and with a view of Scripture built 
 upon them, which, if true, must largely change our 
 mode of teaching and obeying that which we call the 
 word of God. The path of this enquiry is strictly 
 historic. It runs through the Apocryphal New Testa- 
 ment, the Apostolic Fathers, the Clementines, the 
 works of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, and the 
 Alexandrian school, — for from all these plausible argu- 
 ments are drawn in proof of the new theory of the 
 canon. It leads into the views of Marcion, Gnosticism, 
 Montanism, and the Passover controversy — all of 
 which, we are told, indicate the late origin of the con- 
 tested books. No century in the history of the church 
 is so obscure as that succeeding the apostolic. 1 Only 
 the acuteness of modern historic science, we are as- 
 sured, has enabled us to discern the truth amid the 
 blended shadows of ignorance and credulity. If these 
 things are so, it is certainly a very simple and honest 
 conclusion that the Christian student, who will pro- 
 nounce for or against the results reached by such 
 investigations, should, in common decency, make him- 
 self master of the facts adduced, and learn to weigh 
 the evidence offered in the balance of historic enlight- 
 enment. The church cannot, and dare not, be ignor- 
 ant or silent over her own past, whence weapons are 
 being drawn that may slay her future. When scien- 
 tific research and blatant unbelief unite to proclaim the 
 Scriptures unhistoric — and that in tones so loud that 
 they are heard to-day in remote country parishes — it 
 will not do to cry, in startled rhetoric, " procul pro- 
 fani" and declare, by short and easy faith, that the 
 word of the Lord abideth forever. No amount of 
 
 1 Cf. Stanley, Eastern Church, p. 39. 
 
THEORIES OF HISTORY. 3 1 
 
 philosophic acumen, or keen orthodoxy, or pulpit elo- 
 quence, or appeals to experience, will answer what 
 claims to be historic testimony. All such attempts 
 are but fighting darkness with a broom. We must 
 know whereof we affirm, and be able to give an 
 answer based on facts to every man that asks a reason 
 for the faith that is in us. 
 
 II. 
 
 But, turning to another relation of our subject, it 
 seems especially necessary at the present day that 
 religious history should be carefully studied in view of 
 the materialistic, rationalistic and speculative theories 
 which do not hesitate in the light of the nineteenth 
 century to claim the whole being and history of man 
 for their respective domains. The lowest of these is 
 the teaching of the present-day scientists — a kind of 
 Ishmaelites — whose creed usually runs, "there is no 
 god but matter, and Darwin is his prophet." With 
 marvellous skill and patience they have weighed the 
 mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance; they 
 have calculated forces, formulated equivalents, con- 
 served and transmuted energy, wrested secret after 
 secret from the grasp of nature ; and, under the guid- 
 ance of experiment and observation, reduced the most 
 complicated physical phenomena to the reign of law. 
 But beyond the universe of matter seems to lie a 
 world of mind ; could not this be conquered by the 
 same triumphant method ? May not the intricate facts 
 of consciousness — thought, emotion, purpose, worship 
 — be reduced to law, and expressed by a mathematical 
 formula? This the modern scientist is ready to affirm. 
 
32 MATERIALISTIC DEVELOPMENT. 
 
 Roger Bacon said to his pupil " Tu meliores radices 
 egeris" 1 (you will strike root deeper, and bear fruit 
 higher than I). That, we are told, was a significantly 
 prophetic remark. Man has advanced through the 
 periods pointed out by Comte — those of fetishism, 
 metaphysics, and monotheism — to the full liberty of 
 the children of science. God has been eliminated 
 from the problem, as Ruskin says, because he has not 
 been found in a bottle anywhere. History, we are 
 informed, shows that the advance of mankind has 
 always been over the graves of deities. Virchow 
 says, 2 "We have the office to morally free the people.'' 
 Haeckel declares, " Our century forms, through the 
 discovery of the origin of man, the most important 
 and glorious turning-point in the whole history of the 
 development of humanity."' 
 
 And all this, we are assured, is not accidental, but 
 is a part of nature's results under the law of history. 
 Buckle maintains that Shakspere was just as necessa- 
 ry a product of his time as a corn-cob is of the Sum- 
 mer sun. Herbert Spencer has written a history of 
 Ethics to show that morals is a physical product, de- 
 veloped in time under the law of animal pleasure and 
 heredity. Conscience is simply the result in us of 
 certain nervous modifications produced from agreeable 
 experiences of past generations inclining us to do 
 what is pleasant. 3 Kant's Categorical Imperative is 
 nothing but a shiver in the brain — the fruit of a fore- 
 father's fear, and all morals form a branch of physio- 
 logical mathematics. The pleasant is always the good ? 
 the painful is always the evil. The supreme law of 
 
 1 Quoted in Gold. Smith's " Study of History" p. 39. 
 3 Rede 29, Sep. 1865. 3 Data of Ethics, p. 123. 
 

 MATERIALISTIC DEVELOPMENT. 33 
 
 history is selfishness. Might is always right. The 
 survivor, whether Nero or the Devil, is always the 
 fittest, and the only gospel of the race is that of evo- 
 lutionistic hedonism. The school of Necessarians 
 make free will in history an illusion. It is at least no 
 more mysterious a contrast to the physical law of the 
 universe than to the sovereign will of God. Man is, 
 in fact, an automaton. Mind is a product of the brain; 
 emotion is a certain movement of the nerve centre; 
 religion may be traced to the liver; and poetry is a 
 product of the smaller intestines. The whole of man 
 — as individul and race — is claimed as a development 
 to be explained only by Natural Science. History is 
 as much a physical growth as a cabbage, and when 
 Horace compared humanity to a forest and the suc- 
 cessive generations to the falling leaves, he was most 
 prosaically and scientifically correct. Lofty ideas 
 about Providence, prayer, the miraculous and the 
 divine are- mere poetic personifications born from the 
 course of nature and the fond wishes of men. 
 
 What works through these facts and laws we do 
 not know. We hear much of a nisus formatives, a 
 Bildungstrieb, a something in flowers and clouds and 
 man, which builds teleologically and well; but the 
 radii of this mysterious quiddity never transcend 
 the horizon of the material, and the stream of 
 human history, with its dash of purposes and ceaseless 
 fret and foam of volition against the iron edge of the 
 centuries, must not be regarded as essentially differ- 
 ent from the muddy movement of the Mississippi 
 which bears the mire and dirt of a continent to the 
 troubled sea. Such a view of human life, whether 
 materialistic or pantheistic, Spinoza frankly admits 
 
34 TRUE VIEW OF HISTORY. 
 
 makes all idea of aim and plan and goal in history 
 impossible, and resolves all into a blind ebb and flow 
 movement of the life of the world. 1 This, then, is 
 the final word of advanced thought, "The popular re- 
 ligion has entered on its last phase," and the school of 
 modern theologians seeking to bring the creeds into 
 harmony with science are just Plotinus and Porphyry of 
 old fighting in the red light of a setting sun in behalf 
 of an outlived faith. 
 
 It is beside our purpose to reply to the erroneous 
 views adduced in illustration of the necessity of his- 
 toric research, but we may notice in passing the out- 
 line of a better, because necessary, line of thought. 
 Tour points seem important to be urged in a full view 
 of history, and receive proper attention only in a 
 religious treatment, i . The highest end of history is the 
 history of humanity. This is based on the unity and 
 brotherhood of the race — a point only clearly and 
 (emphatically taught by Christianity. 2. A world-his- 
 tory cannot be understood without a world govern- 
 ment 2 — this, also, Christianity has taught mankind in 
 its God over all blessed forever. 3. A history to be 
 philosophic and complete must deal with sin and sal- 
 vation, for these are phenomena called forth by all 
 human life. Here, too, Christianity stands alone in 
 claiming to offer perfect faith and hope. And, 4., a 
 satisfactory view of history must leave place for freest 
 individual effort and activity. The three great themes 
 of every independent mind, viz., God, free will and 
 immortality are blasted by the breath of materialism, 
 but in the history of the Christian church find health- 
 iest stimulus to fullest development. 
 
 1 Cf. Eiehm. Religion und Wissenschaft, 1881, p. 13. 
 
 2 W. Von Humboldt, in Riehm, R. u. W. S., 11. 
 
COMPARATIVE RELIGION. 35 
 
 Another phase of thought prevalent in our day 
 makes the study of church history especially impera- 
 tive. I refer to the great prominence given to the 
 history and comparative treatment of different relig- 
 ions. The sacred books of the East have been pub- 
 lished, missionaries from all lands furnish illustrative 
 data, and the science of comparative religion is claim- 
 ing a place in the classification of studies. The fun- 
 damental principle underlying all this department of 
 thought is, that religion is a unity based on the nature 
 of man and manifesting in all its historic forms the 
 same essential features. Renan says lm . " An absolute 
 revelation of truth is contained in no human religion; 
 the aim rather of each is according to its excellence to 
 make man, as far as possible, happy here upon earth." 
 Christianity accordingly is but the purest manifestation 
 of what the Hegelian school calls the Absolute Re- 
 ligion, and excels the others only in leading its follow- 
 ers by a shorter and plainer road to that paradise 
 where Socrates and Mahomet, the Calmet Tartar 
 and the cannibal from the Pacific will sit down together 
 with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In other words, we 
 have the Neo-Platonism of the third century revived, 
 with the slight addition that vulgar sincerity is put on 
 a par with devout culture. The very nature of relig- 
 ion is apprehension of the infinite, 2 hence the name, 
 the idea and worship of God are fluctuating and indif- 
 ferent. Religious conceptions are the natural product 
 of the exercise of man's senses upon the physical 
 world about him. The loftiest idea of the infinite, 
 virtue, law, immortality, 3 and the sacred words faith 
 and revelation, are an irresistible growth of man's un^ 
 
 1 London lectures, 1880. Lee. IV. 
 2 Max Milller, The origin and growth of religion,^. 2. 3 lb., p. 362. 
 
36 CHRISTIANITY WHAT. 
 
 aided powers of observation and generalization. 
 
 In broad contrast to all this the Christian principle 
 proclaims itself as the Absolute, resting upon a reve- 
 lation in Christ, and guided unto all truth by the Spirit 
 of wisdom and of knowledge and of a sound mind. 
 The church has from the beginning declined all com- 
 promise with mere natural religion. A torn and bleed- 
 ing fugitive, she has refused to enter the Lararium of 
 Alexander Severus or accept the hospitality of the 
 mosque of Omar. The God she worships is not one 
 spirit among many — an individual of a genus; 1 neith 
 er is our religion one among many, or the Christian 
 sanctuary coordinate with Druid circle or Hindoo tem- 
 ple. The church is not the favorite bride in an orient- 
 al harem, she is the Lamb's wife, the sole object of 
 his saving regard, the sole possessor of his will and 
 covenant. Church 4 history is, therefore, in an import- 
 ant sense much more than a branch of religious his- 
 tory. It is the history of religion, the only record of 
 the foundation and growth of God's kingdom on earth. 
 By all the holy instinct of its origin; by the uncom- 
 promising nature of truth, by the blood stained story 
 of martyrs and confessors is church history com- 
 pelled to protest against the attempt to reduce Christ- 
 ianity to a mere natural creed. The modern science 
 of religion is quite ready to yield it the first place 
 among religions, and then proceed to show how it has 
 attained this preeminence as the last step in develop- 
 ment from a low state of irreligion or fetishism. But 
 a careful study of the history of religion shows this 
 assumption to be unproven. The Greeks described 
 Clio — the muse of history — as the daughter of Mnem- 
 
 1 Cf. Delitzsch. System der Chvl. Apologetik. Thl. 7, § I. 
 
CHRISTIANITY TRUE UNITY. 7>7 
 
 osune (memory) and Zeus, the living one, (from Zaoo) 
 i. e. the story of humanity when properly told implies 
 an union of heaven and earth — of God and man. 
 Such a myth utters a prophetic impulse of the human 
 heart, which finds its realization only in the history of 
 the kingdom of God in Christ. Here alone do the 
 seen and unseen, the finite and the infinite find a har- 
 monious relation, for the very life of Christianity is 
 Jesus Christ, a divine and human Saviour, and the his- 
 tory of the church is the fulfilment of his promise, 
 " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the 
 world." One or other of these sides of the true re- 
 ligion has been emphasized by the great natural re- 
 ligions, but because both were not united as soul and 
 body there was no life, no organic development. 
 
 Brahminism unfolded the loftiest ideas in regard to 
 God. In his awful, impenetrable infinity, like wavelets 
 lost in ocean, sink all finite things. The last thought 
 of the dying Hindoo, forgetting earth and sense, is 
 to drop into the abyss of a dreamless Nirvana with 
 the word Brahm upon his stiffening lips. Max Miiller 
 has tried to show x how the ancient Hindoos speculated 
 from nature to henotheism and polytheism, and thence 
 to monotheism, which led through atheism and doubt 
 to a pantheism cold, mystic and ascetic. But he does 
 not explain why that system so poetic and philosophic 
 has rested unprogressive and dead for two thousand 
 years like a royal mummy in the pyramid of Cheops. 
 Brahminism has made no advance; and it is to-day no 
 nearer the catholic humanity and infinite pitifulness of 
 Christianity than it was twenty centuries ago when 
 Guatama arose to preach Buddhism to hearts that 
 
 1 lb., p. 245f. 
 
38 RELIGION OF CHINA. 
 
 were hungering amid pantheistic abstractions. 
 
 The ancient faith of China, on the other hand, lays 
 great stress upon the personal in religion. Its tradi- 
 tional creed is an adoration of the human. It has a 
 belief in one God who is worshipped twice a year by 
 the emperor for the nation; but the hearts of the peo- 
 ple pray to their ancestors, and the thought of the 
 infinite is almost absent from the national conscious- 
 ness. 1 ; Here, also, has religion failed to maintain its 
 balance and sunk into the ground. But not merely do 
 these ancient systems show no power to rise into 
 Christianity, they manifest further an inevitable pro- 
 cess of perversion and decay. Prof. Legge says: 2 
 "The religion of the ancient Chinese was a monothe- 
 ism," and it was only through long centuries that it was 
 affected " by a nature worship on the one hand and by 
 a system of superstitious divination on the other." 3 
 Max Miiller has shown that the prevalent idea that all 
 religion began in fetishism is utterly untenable. 4 In 
 the early dawn of every nation we catch glimpses of a 
 paradise, and hear broken voices telling of commun- 
 ion with God in the fellowship of truth. The history 
 of all religions is a story of error, superstition, priest- 
 craft and corruption. The human element in Christ- 
 ianity is no exception to this change and decay in 
 religion; but, unlike other religions, it possesses a 
 divine element as part of its very being, through 
 which it has the power of reform, and the ability to 
 rise from its sloth and sin, and go forth again the mes- 
 senger of life to men. M. Miiller finds 5 only three 
 historic missionary religions, viz., Buddhism, Mo- 
 
 1 Cf. Wordsworth. Bampton Lectures, 1881. " The one religion." p. 58. 
 
 2 The relig. of China, p. 11. 3 p. 16. 
 
 4 O. and gr. of Rel. p. 50 ff. 5 Lecture on Missions, 1874. 
 
THREE MISSIONARY RELIGIONS. 39 
 
 hammetanism and Christianity. These alone have 
 shown the power to overleap boundaries of race and 
 clime, and with an enthusiastic propagandism go forth 
 to convert the nations. The days of comparison, 
 however, are now past and the day of contrast has 
 come. Buddha prophesied that in five thousand years 
 his relics would be burnt up and all knowledge of his. 
 doctrines would disappear from off the earth. 1 The 
 testimony of close observers is, that his prophecy is 
 approaching fulfilment. 2 Islam, which began in teach- 
 ing drawn from the Bible and flourished most in con- 
 tact with Christian nations 3 is now represented by 
 " the sick man " among the kingdoms and the crescent 
 is waning in the eastern sky. 
 
 No fact of modern history is more certain than that 
 Christianity now stands alone as the one missionary 
 religion of earth. In common with its two great 
 rivals it has known decline and has had its dark ages, 
 but, unlike every other faith, it has ever shown the 
 power of self-restoration, the capacity to profit by all 
 that science and philosophy, and other creeds, and the 
 ever unfolding experience of man have to offer, the 
 spiritual instinct to absorb truth from all sources and 
 yet not lose its identity or be turned aside from its 
 lofty mission for the Most High upon earth. 
 
 As we have observed the presence of the Divine in 
 the church, that which separates Christianity from all 
 creeds of earth and makes it the absolute religion, is 
 Jesus Christ — a divine, human Saviour and life. The 
 man who holds this in his heart is religious and Christ- 
 
 1 Wordsworth B. L., p. 275. 
 
 2 Of. Isaac Taylors' " Saturday Evening." 
 
 3 Cf. G. Smith. " Lect. on Study of Hist., p. 121f. 
 
40 A TEST DOCTRINE. 
 
 ian, the man who rejects this is irreligious and not 
 Christian. 
 
 This is a doctrine not only necessary in the logic of 
 the Christian system, but stands through the history 
 of the church as a sine qua non of activity and growth. 
 Ebionites, Sabellians, Arians, Socinians, Unitarians, 
 have produced men of great ability, earnestness and 
 zeal, but they laid irreverent hands upon this essential 
 principle and, despite all their intelligence and moral- 
 ity, they have never lived and taken root and leavened 
 the earth. They form a moral society, but never make 
 church history. 1 They exist as a philosophic sect — a 
 company of sociable philanthropists — but their suste- 
 nance is parasitic, and their extinction a matter of 
 time. On the other hand, the man or church that 
 holds Jesus Christ as the divine human redeemer is 
 Christian, and will live. 2 The Greek Church and the 
 Church of Rome appear in the light of history grow- 
 ingly corrupt, in many respects far beneath the sects 
 which they condemned for blaspheming Christ; but 
 they held the head, even the God-man, and they have 
 lived and will live. They possess amid much error 
 the secret of the Lord, and from their midst there can 
 ever arise a Chrysostom, a Wyckliffe, a Luther, to re- 
 form the church in the power of this great historic 
 truth. 
 
 Advancing another step, we are brought to notice 
 the importance of the study of church history in view 
 of the claims of the so-called New Theology of our 
 time. 
 
 Much is made here of the doctrine of development, 
 
 1 I believe the Unitarians of this country have one missionary, a Mr. 
 
 Dale in India. 
 12 Cf. The development of this idea in Delitzsch, Apologetik. 
 
THE NEW THEOLOGY. 4 1 
 
 and certainly this is an important truth for whose illus- 
 tration in our day we should never cease to be thank- 
 ful. The thought of God's church, i. e., its doctrine 
 has come to consciousness in history in a certain order, 
 and rooted in a divine revelation. In the Old Testa- 
 ment this can be traced in the long course of the rev- 
 elation itself, the prophecies and poetic books being like 
 an unfolding of the law. The only true theology of 
 the Old Testament is that which moves in a great his- 
 toric development. But the New Testament being 
 given within a single generation does not show so 
 much its development in itself, that is to be sought 
 rather in the history of the church through the subse- 
 quent ages. 
 
 The Greek church still in possession of the subtlety 
 and critical acumen of Athens and Alexandria dis- 
 cussed and formulated the teachings of Scripture and 
 necessary thought on the person of God the Saviour. 
 (Theology proper.) The Latin Church, with its Ro- 
 man eye fixed on practical life and every-day needs, 
 examined with legal mind and expressed in clear 
 judicial terminology the doctrine concerning the sinner. 
 (Anthropology.) Then arose the Germanic Church, 
 which, confessing the Greek creed concerning the 
 Saviour and the Latin creed concerning the sinner, was 
 called to teach as never before the great truth of jus- 
 tification by faith — that cardinal doctrine by which sin 
 and Saviour are exhibited in their proper relations to 
 one another and to God. 1 (Soteriology.) Within 
 these great outlines there can be traced a church 
 growth in wisdom and in knowledge along all the 
 courses of thought and activity. This development* 
 
 1 Cf. Kliefoth. Dogmengeschichte. 
 
42 DEVELOPMENT OF DOCTRINE. 
 
 however, is of truth from truth. It is a clearer appre- 
 hension of Scripture teaching in the light of more 
 facts, a more logical treatment and a more historical 
 setting forth of its contents. No step in such progress 
 brings us into conflict with the positive results of the 
 past. Paul's doctrine of sin can never become Hegel's 
 idea of unripeness, nor the New Testament view of 
 the death of Christ become the legitimate parent of 
 the Schleiermacherian theory of the atonement. In 
 other words, true development must include the funda- 
 mental facts and doctrines of primitive Christianity in 
 all their sharp objectivity and can never be merged 
 into what the new theology calls the growth of the 
 idea. On the other hand, legitimate growth of dogma 
 excludes all parasitic enlargements, or "corruption by 
 excess." The grand defect in Newman's well-known 
 essay on the development of Christian doctrine lies 
 in regarding all movement as growth, and all that does 
 not positively conflict with the idea as its lawful se- 
 quence. 1 We thus get the doctrine of perpetual reve- 
 lation in the form of so-called development. What- 
 ever views prevail in the church are true, and we are 
 led by another path to the " survival of the fittest" — 
 which may simply be the right of might. But to gain 
 an approximate idea of the results reached through 
 development by the new school whose disciples claim 
 to be nar egox?)v champions of historic theology, I 
 give an outline of their teaching as set forth to-day in 
 Germany and elsewhere. They teach, (i) a rational- 
 istic view of the universe which subserves all under 
 law, order and the impossibility of the miraculous. 2 
 
 1 Cf. Mozley. " Theory of Development." p. 31, ff. 
 
 2 Schwartz. Zur geschichte der neuesten theologie. Vierte aufl., 1869, 
 
 p. 586 f. Also, in general, Holsten, " Die Prot. Kirche u, die theoh 
 Wissenschaft" 1881. 
 
REVELATION AND INSPIRATION. 43 
 
 (2) The Bible is nava '"Oeia nai avdpGcniva navra — for 
 us arid our study a product of human mental activity. 3 
 With Luther, we must distinguish between the Bible 
 and the Word of God— the latter is found in the for- 
 mer, but they are by no means coterminous. The 
 Scriptures are the classical sources of our religious 
 teaching, but differ in no respect in kind from the 
 historic literature of any other period of church history, 
 (e. g., I Maccabees, Jesus Sirach, and the extra-canon- 
 ical New Testament literature are for historic purposes 
 just as valuable as the so-called Bible itself.) 4 Christ- 
 ianity is not a revelation or gift of God any more than 
 conscience or parental love. Jesus among men and 
 the Bible among books are pure, natural products 
 under the divine law of the universe and history. 
 
 (3) Inspiration is a creation of theologians. 1 The 
 early church claimed no such special importance for the 
 sacred writings, or held that the inspiration of Apos- 
 tles differed only in degree from that of all Christians. 2 
 Since the Bible is just the best expression of the 
 highest religious experience, it is only in a poetic way 
 that it can be called inspired or a revelation. "To 
 profit fully by the New Testament," says Matt. Arnold, 3 
 "the first thing to be done is to make it perfectly clear 
 to one's self that its reporters both could err and did 
 err." 
 
 (4) The proprium of the Protestant church is not an 
 infallible theological system of doctrine, but solely a 
 particular kind of inner religious life. The position 
 
 2 A favorite phrase of Hamann. 
 
 3 Bie " Eidbruchigkeit" unserer neukirchl. geistlichen. Kiel, 1881. 
 
 4 Holtzmann S. 17. 
 
 1 Holsten — Thesis 15. 
 
 2 Cheyne- Sermon. " The Christian point of view in the study of the 
 
 Bible," 1879, p. 9. 3 " Literature and Bog ma," p. 131. 
 
44 HISTORIC PROTESTANTISM. 
 
 of Schleiermacher is adopted and religion made a feel- 
 ing of dependence centered in the disposition (Gemiith). 
 Dogma is ever changing, and mutability of theological 
 views lies in the very nature of every religion. With 
 increasing knowledge the creed must be constantly 
 readjusted. And yet " our religious faith has remained 
 the same as that of the Reformers though our scien- 
 tific theological foundation for it has become essen- 
 tially another." * History shows that theological 
 dogma never was and never can be the ground of 
 unity in the Protestant church. As it is the work of 
 science to sift truth from imperfect historical state- 
 ments, so it is the duty of scientific theology to find 
 the kernel of truth in the old doctrinal forms of 
 Christianity. This is the only path of progress to- 
 wards perfection. 
 
 (5) The trinity is a theological figment — or at best 
 a historic illustration of modes of religious manifesta- 
 tion. 
 
 (6) Jesus was not divine. His godhead sprang 
 solely from the mistaken affection of his early follow- 
 ers. He is our Redeemer in the sense that he was 
 the first and only revealer of the only true religious 
 principle for mankind. He felt himself God's son 
 only in holy communion with the Father and in this 
 spiritualized sense he regarded himself as the Mes- 
 siah. 2 He was not sinless. (Schenkel, Keim.) 
 
 (7) Men are justified by faith in the grace of God, 3 
 and not as the Jews thought by the works of the law. 
 The sacrificial phraseology of Paul is but a theological 
 coloring from the schools of the Pharisees and does 
 
 1 Eidbricchigkeit. S. 68. 2 lb. S. 61. 
 
 3 lb., S. 36 f. 
 
PAULINE ACCOMMODATION. 45 
 
 not belong to the doctrine itself. Through grace God 
 imputes a man's faith to him for righteousness. Paul 
 sets this forth in the form of a sacrificial death of 
 Christ — a form borrowed from Jewish customs, and 
 which was simply a mode of teaching fitted to lead 
 from the narrowness of Judaism to the Christian doc- 
 trine of grace, by means of figurative phraseology 
 taken from the law. But the doctrine of justification 
 by faith is quite independent of such a view. Paul 
 emphasizes grace in such a way as to exclude any 
 judicial notion. 1 The relation of God and man in 
 justification is that of father and child — a relation 
 which includes only love, trust and a sweet feeling of 
 dependence. In fact, it is said 2 that no prominent 
 German theologian, except Delitzsch and Ebrard, 
 holds a vicarious substitution in the atonement. 
 
 (8) Religion and morality are not twain, as the old 
 theology teaches, but one, as Kant teaches. Or as 
 M. Arnold says 3 " Religion is morality touched by 
 emotion." 
 
 (9) The eschatology of the new theology is univer- 
 salist and j estorationist — though the whole question of 
 immortality is usually relegated to the region of the 
 adiaphora. 4 
 
 The residuum of orthodoxy which cannot be ex- 
 plained by this semi-mythical method of objectionizing 
 the subjective into history, may be found, we are told, 
 in the accretions which have come to the primitive 
 creed from heathen culture or the mistaken notions of 
 theologians. The mechanical view of inspiration — a 
 
 1 lb., S. 39. 
 
 2 Matheson, Aids to the study of German Theology, 2d Ed., 1876, p. 70. 
 
 3 L. andD.. p. 46. 
 
 4 Cf. G. Dreydorf. Deutsch-Evang. Blatter. Marz, 1882, p. 187. 
 
46 ACCRETIONS TO THE CREED. 
 
 thing unknown to the Jews in the Old Testament, and 
 unclaimed by the New Testament for itself — is, it is 
 said, borrowed from the later Cabbala and Greek 
 heathenism. 1 We are told that the rival Christian and 
 Platonic schools in Alexandria greatly influenced each 
 other, and that as the philosopher must notice how 
 neo-platonism was tinged by Christian teaching, so 
 must the church historian admit that Christianity 
 borrowed not a little from the latest academy. Theo- 
 logical subtleties on the nature of the Godhead be- 
 came largely a substitute for decaying Platonism. The 
 Abyssinian church, it is said, still grows metaphysical 
 over seventy different theories of the union of the two 
 natures in Christ. 2 
 
 The trinity' is declared to be an echo of pre-chris 
 tian thought, influenced afterwards by the philosophic 
 trinity of the neo-platonists and not reaching its pres- 
 ent form till A. D. 381 at the council of Constantino- 
 ple. Such a dreadful doctrine as total depravity can 
 be historically explained, it is held, from the gloomy 
 remarks of Paul over his former wicked life, taken up 
 by Augustine, a converted libertine, and framed into 
 a church dogma as applicable to all men. 3 We are 
 pointed, further, to the Greek church, which has stood 
 still for a thousand years, and in its rejection of the 
 filioque in the creed, its three-fold immersion at bap- 
 tism, its administering confirmation and the Lord's 
 supper to infants, the almost total absence of the idea 
 of substitution in the work of Christ, 4 not to speak of 
 its rejection of purgatory, invocation of saints and the 
 
 Cf. Holsten, S. 22. Philo made the 6 inspired. 
 
 2 Stanley, Eastern Church, p. 110. 
 
 3 Farley, Unitarianism defined, p. 156 f. 
 
 4 Cf. Stanley, p. 138. ...... .... 
 
THE PERSON OF CHRIST. 47 
 
 papacy, perplexes not a little both Protestant and 
 Romanist. The theology of the Reformation has 
 grown, we are told, 1 from "the logical and legal ele- 
 ments in the West," "Forensic justification," "merit" and 
 "demerit," "satisfaction," "imputed righteousness," 
 "decrees;" federal headship, &c, are ideas almost un- 
 known in the East, and are therefore a late growth in 
 theology. 
 
 One point of paramount interest ever arises in this 
 discussion about the historic, viz: the person of Christ 
 and his miraculous life. Strauss and Baur, both disci- 
 ples of Hegel, and consequently ready to sacrifice 
 facts of history which conflict with the idea, found the 
 so-called divine Christ nothing but the product of the 
 thought of the early church. Martineau has sunk to 
 the same plane, and says: 2 "From the person of 
 Jesus everything official attached to him by evangel- 
 ists and divines has fallen away: when they put such 
 false robes upon Him they were, i. e. the evangelists 
 were, but leading Him to death. The pomp of royal 
 lineage and fulfilled prediction, the prerogatives of 
 king, of priest, of judge, the advent with retinue of 
 angels on the clouds of Heaven, are to us mere de- 
 forming investitures." The old rationalism against 
 which Butler wrote his Analogy is now little heard of. 
 The new rationalism adopts Butler's book and declares 
 it perfectly true that man has by nature religious in- 
 stincts. 3 The fulness of times of which Christian 
 writers speak is accepted by these new theologians. 
 The Jews looked for a Messiah. The classic religions 
 were dying or dead. Philosophy . had run its course. 
 
 1 j&.,p. 111. 
 
 2 Losses in recent Theology, 1881. 
 
 3 Cf. Matheson, p. 140 f. . . ■. 
 
48 PSEUDO BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 and humanity drifted doubting and confused over a 
 troubled sea. It was just the time for something new 
 and Christianity is just the natural product of such 
 circumstances. The first century with its fantastic 
 imaginings, the air full of astrology and magic and 
 oriental mysteries was just the age when men put their 
 reveries in the shape of fictitious history. "Chris- 
 tianity," we are taught, 1 "floated into the Roman empire 
 on the wave of credulity that brought with it a long 
 train of oriental superstitions and legends." We are 
 pointed 2 to the pseudo lives of Pythagoras, Plotinus, 
 Apollonius of Tyana, and the Clementines, and told 
 that the gospel life of Christ is just the fantastic story 
 of a noble teacher in whose person loving followers 
 put historically that union of the divine and human 
 after which every religious soul longs in spirit. Bruno 
 Bauer declares that Christianity is just a historic 
 setting forth of the disgust and despair of expiring an- 
 tiquity, as Hegel taught that the kingdom of heaven 
 in Christ was but a spiritualization of the Roman state 
 in the Emperor — a pure soul teleology blossoming 
 from the grave of a defunct political aim. F. Baur 
 can tell how this picture grew into its present divine 
 outlines between A. D. 50 and 150. The Petrine 
 theology shows us the prophet of God; the Pauline 
 adds the Greek idea of God revealing himself by 
 communicating himself; then, in the middle of the 
 second century, arose the Johannine doctrine betraying 
 the influence of Philo, and which blended the views of 
 perfect humanity and perfect godhead into the unity 
 of his person. The new theology makes Jesus but a 
 
 1 Lecky, Hist, of European Morals, Vol. I, p. 397. 
 
 2 Renan, Vie de Jesus. 
 
THE HISTORIC CHRIST. 49 
 
 lofty, though not sinless, illustration of true commun- 
 ion with God the universal Father. We thus find three 
 representations of Jesus in modern theology. Strauss 
 says in his latest work: 1 "The facts of his life are 
 such that it is partly certain they did not happen, part- 
 ly uncertain whether they did happen, and least of all 
 beyond doubt that they did happen" — in other words 
 he is a myth. The Tubingen critics make Jesus a pro- 
 duct of the union of Petrine and Pauline theology — 
 in other words an idea. The newest school strips off 
 both myths and ideas, and makes him a teacher and 
 guide to God — in other words a mere man. 
 
 •'Why? " it is asked, " should we all agree to reject 
 the fabulous and marvellous in the life of Simon Magus 
 as given in the Clementine Homilies and early fathers, 
 and yet accept the character of Christ with all the 
 legents put upon it by the same fathers " ? Now, it is 
 plain that the only method of defence here must begin 
 with historic investigation. The fulcrum on which 
 Baur rested his critical lever was the Clementine writ- 
 ings, therefore, the first step in examining his theory 
 must be a careful perusal of this apocryphal work. 
 The character of Christ the \6yo$ is borrowed — it is 
 asserted — from Philo. Then the man who will under- 
 stand Christ must read Philo. Justin Martyr, who 
 travelled from East to West, does not speak of Jesus 
 as a Redeemer, but as Hoards vo/aoOzt??? simply — if so, 
 we must study Justin the more carefully. The early 
 heathen critics, Lucian and Porphyry, maintained 
 against the first Christians that they made Jesus a 
 god — a thing he himself never taught; if this be so, 
 we must calmly and critically read what these men 
 
 1 Der alte und der neue Glaube. 
 
50 MIRACLES. 
 
 have written because fas est et ab hoste doceri. In a 
 word, we are told from Hebrew, Greek and Latin that 
 the character of the Lord we worship cannot stand 
 the fierce light that beats upon it from history; then 
 before we begin to reply we must read in Hebrew, 
 Greek and Latin what history has to tell us as well as 
 our adversaries on this cardinal article of our faith. 
 
 With regard to the miracles which form so essential 
 an element in the character of Christ, the new school 
 are equally confident. The great Schleiermacher ad- 
 mitted at least two miracles, the creation of man and 
 the person of Christ; but our present day divines have 
 outgrown their master, and declare miracles inadmis- 
 sible—philosophically, religiously and historically. 
 They are inadmissible philosophically because the 
 modern almanac has no column for the miraculous; 
 they are inadmissible religiously because Keim says: 1 
 " We are to make our faith in the crucified one 
 independent of his miracles;" and history condemns 
 them by showing (i) that they belong to all mythol- 
 ogy; (2) that the first century was wonderfully predis- 
 posed towards the marvellous; (3) that Tacitus 2 and 
 Suetonius 3 give a clear account of the Emperor Ves- 
 pasian's restoring a blind man to sight by spitting on 
 his eyes, and healing the lame — yet who believes such 
 stories? — and (4) that the miraculous in history forms 
 a complete series. 4 The gospels narrate it of Christ; 
 the Acts, of Peter and Paul; Irenaeus, of the saints; 
 Origen, of the Church; St. Patrick, of himself; the 
 mediaeval chroniclers, of St. Bernhard; and all priests, 
 
 1 Geschichtl. Christus S. 119. 
 
 2 Hist. IV. 8. 3 Vesp. 7. 
 
 4 Cf, "The mythical element in the N. Test," by F. H. Hedge, in 
 "Christianity and mod. thought," 1872, p. 166 f. 
 
METHOD OF STUDY. 5 1 
 
 of Loyola, Xavier and every saint in the calendar. 
 From the second and third century on the church is 
 described, according to the law of history, as a sacred 
 human growth under the guidance of the Spirit of 
 God. " So," the new theology demands, "treat the 
 first century. Make it purely historic and, stripping 
 off both the mystic and the mythic, give us a sure sci- 
 entific and historic standing ground on which to fight 
 hostile science and antagonistic culture." Here his- 
 tory throws us into the toils of an inescapable Sorites. 
 How much of this is true, and how much erroneous, 
 can be answered only by careful and prayerful study 
 of the past of man and the church. 
 
 III. 
 
 But we must turn for a moment to the very practi- 
 cal question of the right method of studying history, 
 and the benefits of such a method. We might here 
 undertake to illustrate the three fundamental laws of 
 Church History, viz. : that of objectivity, or a faithful 
 statement of facts; that of the pragmatic principle, by 
 which the logic of events is set forth; and, finally, the 
 canon of theological investigation, which requires 
 catholicity without indifference, faith without credulity, 
 and religious sympathy without party prejudice. In- 
 stead, however, I desire, in closing, to urge the great 
 necessity of a study of the sources of history. The 
 system of teaching by text-books gives elementary in- 
 formation, very often quite comprehensive, but usually 
 affords little stimulus to further research; and lectures, 
 however carefully composed, cannot give the vivid 
 touches, the direct impression, the indescribable sense 
 
52 CLASSICAL EDUCATION NECESSARY. 
 
 of nearness which comes from reading a work of the 
 period studied, from putting one's ear to the mouth of 
 the Past and hearing its varied accents in its own 
 mother tongue. Here a teacher can do his very best 
 work, if time and the requisite prequalification on the 
 part of students can be obtained, in leading inquiring 
 minds to dig for themselves among the roots of antiq- 
 uity, and so, perhaps amid creative joy, help to his- 
 toric blossom some important truth. To do this, our 
 students should be able to read patristic Greek and 
 Latin with some degree of ease. 
 
 As a matter of mental discipline, nothing can take 
 the place of a classical education. 
 
 The University of Berlin, after a ten years' trial of 
 the contrary, has just decided unanimously, on motion 
 of a Professor of History, seconded by a Professor of 
 Mathematics, that the only satisfactory preliminary 
 training for students of all departments must include 
 the Humanities. For the student of Church History, 
 such a training is both indirectly and directly indis- 
 pensable. The biography of the Church, since it left 
 Jerusalem, has been written in Greek and Latin, and 
 he who would really understand it, should hear the 
 early witnesses in the tongue wherein they were born. 
 Doctrinal discussions are almost inseparable from 
 the language in which they arise. The questions of 
 6/Aoovffiov or 6fjowvGLov 7 eB, ovk ovroDVy OsoTOHoZ, or Pat- 
 ripassianism, the hypostatic in God or the trichotomic 
 in man, etc., receive their full illustration only in the 
 light of their original nomenclature. 
 
 I speak hesitatingly, but the American. Church 
 seems to me here to occupy a back place. To every 
 Romish priest the Latin treasure house lies open. The 
 
GERMAN METHOD. 53 
 
 Greek priest can read history from Eusebius to Anna 
 Commena in his own mother tongue. In Britain, 
 scores of well-qualified students annually enter the 
 church able to consult with ease the sources of history. 
 The boys who leave Eton have read twice as much 
 classics as our ordinary college graduates, and studied 
 more of the Greek Testament than is overtaken in 
 many of our seminary courses. A friend of mine — 
 the senior classic at Cambridge in 1880 — had read, by 
 his twenty-second year, all the Greek and Latin in ex- 
 istence down to the age of brass. Theological stu- 
 dents in Germany must pass their examinations in 
 Latin, and having spent four hours a day, six days in 
 the week, for eight or ten years, over the classics, are 
 ready, at the invitation of Church History, to enter 
 with zest upon a new field of ancient research. This 
 German system of historic study aims at promoting 
 original investigation. One great stimulus to such 
 research is the private society held by the Professor, 
 at which students, who wish to excel, study with him 
 some source, and seek to discover about some person, 
 place or thing, all that is possible to mortal man. e.g. 
 The first year I was in Leipzig, Prof. Harnack 
 took up Muratori's Fragment, examined the fac simile 
 text, discussed the strange readings, conjectured to fill 
 lacunae, and investigated everything that could shed 
 light on this important witness to the New Testament 
 Canon. Another young Professor, a friend of mine, 
 read, with his private class, Minucius Felix' beautiful 
 apology, Octavius. I have spent an evening a week, 
 winter after winter, in such a society with Prof. De- 
 litzsch, Hebrew bible in hand, tracing critically historic 
 growth in the sources of the Old Testament, with con- 
 
54 HISTORIC CERTAINTY. 
 
 stant reference to the radical assaults of the Reuss- 
 Graf-Wellhausen school. 
 
 Thus to get a view of the whole range of thought 
 some one peak is climbed with patient toil to the very 
 summit, whence the student can see things in a light 
 and relation he would scarcely have thought of by 
 simply measuring with ecclesiastical theodolite from 
 the valley below. 
 
 Such methods of study make the young minister 
 continue historic research. A clergyman of my ac- 
 quaintance, near Tubingen, has thus become an autho- 
 rity on the history of the Jews. Another, whom I 
 met in Miihlberg, was making Clement of Alexandria 
 a special study, expecting to write a book on the 
 ethical system of that father. . Thus, strange to say, 
 some of the most learned works in Germany are writ- 
 ten by country pastors; who, after the thorough start 
 of the University, use their leisure to produce a book 
 of permanent value. Such thoroughness in student 
 life enables the reading minister to speak with author- 
 ity in controversies which constantly draw their weap- 
 ons from historic arsenals. Since the time of Niebuhr 
 dogmatic ideas concerning history have gradually 
 passed away, till now the other extreme seems in 
 sight, and the past has sunk to the region of the prob- 
 able. Holtzmann says 1 "History can no longer be 
 believed as we believe in God, or known as we know 
 logic, or constructed with certainty as we frame a 
 mathematical system; but all real historic knowledge 
 rests upon the modest art of ascertaining the highest 
 degree of probability from more or less complete, but 
 also more or less conflicting, material." If then, as 
 
 'P. 7. 
 
ATTITUDE OF THE HISTORIAN. 55 
 
 these critics maintain, church history is even remotely 
 subject to the uncertainty and need of sifting here 
 described, it is clear that the matter will be still more 
 fluctuating when studied through impressions of im- 
 pressions — by means of secondary or tertiary authori- 
 ties, and the only hope of approximating certainty will 
 lie in a direct examination of the sources themselves. 
 
 Such a method alone promotes impartiality, for the 
 calm objective study of the early church shows that 
 almost every modern sect emphasizes some point of 
 early doctrine or worship, while none can claim to be 
 a perfect development of primitive Christianity. The 
 true church historian, therefore, must sit with judicial 
 calm above the water floods of party strife, tracing 
 with unjaundiced eye the flow of facts and the deep 
 currents of thought and feeling. He must belong to 
 no church, save the Church of Christ. He must have 
 a kind of honest recklessness such as perhaps no other 
 student can have, for it is his duty to follow faithfully 
 his narrative, listen carefully to the voices of the past, 
 and record what his authorities give, regardless of his 
 own preconceived notions or the hopes of any party 
 or sect. The whole play of good and evil — the sphinx 
 riddle multiplied a thousand fold — lies before him for 
 observation and estimate. He needs knowledge and 
 thought, facts and law, investigation and judgment. 
 He must seek carefully to measure theory and prac- 
 tice, for Christianity is both doctrine and life. He 
 must mount up and distinguish faith and reason, rev- 
 elation and understanding; and in the broad catholic- 
 ity of truth show how the church as God's gift to man 
 is above all philosophy — offers the only guide to 
 eternity, and yields the only true peace to the soul. 1 
 
 1 Cf. Ullman, Studien u Kritiken, 1829, Hft. iv. 
 
56 ONENESS OF THE CHURCH. 
 
 Finally, such a study, and such a method of study, 
 fill the mind with a vivid and growing sense of the 
 living unity of the Church of God. The "unceasing 
 purpose" of the Christian ages adds impulse to our 
 prayers to-day. In the Epistle of Clement, the Presbeia 
 of Athenagpras, the sermons of Chrysostom, the coun- 
 sels of St. Bernhard, the theses of Luther, the treatises 
 of Edwards, we catch the same tones and feel the same 
 throbbings of a Christ-filled heart. Protestantism, far 
 from being a product of the renaissance, or the neces- 
 sary reaction of rationalism against superstition, is found 
 to be in perfect unity and vital harmony with all bat- 
 tling for the truth, all preaching of the gospel, all resist- 
 ance unto blood striving against sin. A long, unbroken 
 line of faithful, educated pastors can be traced from 
 our day to Pentecost; the Lord's supper — a living 
 argument — has been proclaimed on the first day of 
 every week from " that night on which he was betrayed " 
 until the present; the thousand sacred associations of 
 Sabbath and sanctuary are fragrant with the incense of 
 the ages. The intelligent student of history feels the 
 thrill and pulse-beat of such an unity. He has not 
 merely the wisdom and experience of the church behind 
 him, but he realizes its strength, its organic and abso- 
 lute oneness as the mystical body of Christ pervading 
 his soul-life, making him rich not merely as the heritor 
 of the ages but as the concentration in himself of the 
 power of the past, and impelling him by a blessed 
 necessity to transmit with increased energy to the 
 generations to come " that power that makes for 
 righteousness." 
 
 The intelligent worker for God and his church must 
 know the will and working of God — not merely as 
 written in the Scriptures, but as told in the long story 
 
PAST AND PRESENT. 57 
 
 of his providence and the grateful experience of his 
 saints. An acquaintance with the past — showing what 
 has been done and what left undone, what leads to 
 success and what to failure, what has proved itself 
 essential and what unimportant, whither certain tenden- 
 cies lead and why apparent trifles must be resisted unto 
 blood — is as important for the profitable church work 
 of the future as the memory and experience of child- 
 hood and youth are indispensable to the best efforts of 
 matured manhood. Every gospel must begin with a 
 genealogy of Christ in history, showing what he is and 
 has been to the church. Taking up the work where 
 left by our predecessors, we can build wisely and well 
 only in the knowledge of their lives and plan and hope. 
 Here the historian and the preacher, the antiquarian 
 and the evangelist, the student and the Christian meet 
 — for here all wisdom and knowledge break into life 
 and growth. Based on such historic teaching, Peter 
 and Stephan and Paul and our Lord himself preached 
 the gospel as a fruit of the fulness of time. From this 
 historic bow have the sharpest arrows of the Lord been 
 ever shot against the enemies of the King. In such a 
 spirit and with such an aim I desire to teach the history 
 of the kingdom of God on earth — so following the life 
 of Christ as set forth in the experience and doctrines 
 of holy men of old, that from every mission field, from 
 every seat of controversy, from every place of prayer, 
 from every home of thought, from every variety of 
 worship there might be heard for our encouragement 
 and growth the blessed gospel of the Son of God, — 
 " unto Jews a stumbling block and unto Gentiles fool- 
 ishness, but unto them that are called both Jews and 
 Greeks Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of 
 God." 
 
THE IMPORTANCE OF HISTORIC RESEARCH 
 
 THEOLOGICSL STUDENT OF TO-MY 
 
 fm jwarBss 
 
 v Rev. HUGH MACDONALD SCOTT, B. D., 
 
 At his Inauguration as Sweetser and Michigan Proeessor of 
 Ecclesiastical History in Chicago Theological Seminary, 
 
 THE OHAEGE, 
 
 By Rev. TRUMAN M. POST, D. D 
 
 PUBLISHED BY YOTE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, 
 
 CHICAGO: 
 
 Jameson & Moese, Printers. 
 1882. 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 014 088 918