advance in the last fifty years. The fact that a man is a clergyman gives him no right whatever to pronounce an opinion on such questions as the dates of various Psalms, or the authenticity of Daniel, or the time at which this or that prophet wrote, or whether the whole books of Isaiah and Zechariah were written by single authors, or the Mosaic origin of the Book of Deuteronomy, or the genuineness of the Second Epistle of St. Peter, or of the last twelve verses of St. Mark. If he has well-matured opinions on these subjects, based upon thorough inquiry and not upon the supposed sacredness of a tradition which in hundreds of instances has been proved to be not only fallible but even absurd, by all means let him say his say. But even then he is bound to do so with modesty, and with the frank admission that many who know ten times more of the subject than himself have come to conclusions different from his own. The tone adopted by some preachers—who would fain usurp the title of orthodoxupon these points of dispute, is thoroughly reprehensible. They assume that the results of the newer criticism are the consequence of something which they call "unbelief"; and they stigmatize them, not as the result of intellectual mistake, but as the fruit of moral perversity. The unbelief and the moral perversity rest rather with themselves, when they substitute idle denunciation for serious argument, and think that anathemas will serve for refutations. He is an unbeliever, he is morally perverse, who refuses to recognize the truths revealed to us by the widening light of knowledge, and who turns the Bible into a sort of fetich or teraph, whose utterances-picked out here and there to support his own views, and interpreted exclusively in the one sense which he chooses to put upon them-he substitutes for the witness of the Spirit and the voice of God. A preacher is not bound to adopt the conclusions of modern critics, whether German or English; but what he is bound to do is to abstain from denouncing them until he has fully and fairly studied the grounds on which they rest, to abstain from confounding questions of criticism with questions of religion, and above all to abstain from the uncharitable folly of casting insinuations upon the good faith of those who hold them, and who can advance strong arguments from history and philology in favor of their views.

Nor is it less necessary for a modern preacher to observe that, though the few great fundamental truths of Christianity remain unchanged, there are multitudes of religious opinions which in no sense belong to the essential gospel, but are unauthorized accretions to it. A man may, as we have seen, have particular opinions about the inspiration of Scripture; but, seeing that the church has never attempted to define either the nature or the limits of inspiration, he has no right to excommunicate those who do not share his private interpretation. So, too, all Christians alike believe in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; but as to the method and philosophy of the atonement, and the manner in which the sacrifice of Christ affects the mind of God, there have in all ages been the widest differences. The forensic theory, the doctrine of satisfaction, the doctrine of vicarious punishment, the doctrine of exact substitution, and many others have been defended in huge volumes of theological subtlety. A preacher can preach these theories if he holds them, and many preachers have preached them in such a way as to alienate the hearts of thousands. They have insisted on errors so revolting as a representation of God the Father as remorseless, and God the Son as pitiful. They have portrayed a Deity who is not to be appeased except by the anguish of the innocent, or one whose attributes are in a condition of chronic antagonism to each other. But no preacher has any warrant to impose his special theology upon his hearers as though its rejection involved the crime of apostasy from revealed truth. Christ revealed to us the blessings of his life and death in their effects on the souls of man; he did not reveal them-it would probably have been beyond our capacity to grasp them—from the point of view of their relation to the divine will. All that we are told is only sufficient to exclude the false and revolting deductions in which systematic theology has often reveled. Nothing is more plainly taught us than that the Incarnation, and the entire redemptive work of Christ, were due to the love of the Father no less than to that of the Son. Many views of the Atonement which were once accepted are now seen to be incompatible with that which God himself has made known to us; and preachers should learn, as educated hearers have long learnt, to discriminate

between the wheat of divine revelation and the immeasurable chaff of human theories and systems.

To take but one more instance, how wide and radical has been the change of opinion on the subject of the future life! The fact that there is a divine law of retribution; the fact that this retribution may continue beyond the grave; the fact that as long as sin lasts there must be a continuance of that punishment which results from the alienation of the soul from God; the certainty that men shall receive the things done in the body, and that they must reap as they have sown; that where there has been no penitence and no amendment there can be no remission of sin or of its consequences-these are truths which all Christians believe. There is nothing in such truths which is either unmerciful or unjust. They are enough for the guidance of life so far as the elements of fear are in any way necessary to restrain the passions of men. They are the very essence of the christian doctrine of present and future retribution. For that doctrine is based on the conviction that the moral law, as set forth in all its perfectness by Christ, is an expression of the will of God; that except in obedience to that law there can be no union with God; and that separation from him is the misery of spiritual death. But how far removed are these truths from the revolting and Tartarean horrors which filled the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, Nathaniel Emmons, and their modern followers; from the crude representations of medieval art; from the foul descriptions which Father Furniss published permissu superiorum; and from the pictures of red hells and lewd devils which may still be seen under ghastly crucifixes by the roadsides in the Roman Catholic cantons of Switzerland! The modern preacher who should preach hell fire and endless torments in the same unamended forms which could be listened to with torpid acquiescence a generation since, would find the elements of revolt from his dogmatism in the natural horror of every mind which refuses to accept such travesties of the divine love at the hands of an unnatural theology.

To conclude, then, and to sum up, I maintain that the modern preacher must never forget that though sermons yet retain an immense force in the moral, the spiritual, and even the intel

lectual world, they can no longer occupy the place which once they did. There was a time when to most hearers the sermon was the Bible, the history, the romance, the newspaper, and the political harangue, all in one. It occupies a different position in these days. The schoolmaster is abroad, and of writing of books there is no end. Not only is the Bible in every hand, but the best information respecting its meaning and history has been so widely popularized that even a hearer of moderate attainments may know as much about it as the preacher. Science has been revolutionized, opinions altered, doctrines reconsidered and set in new lights, Scripture retranslated, and multitudes of texts rescued into their true significance. Let the modern preacher adapt himself to these changed conditions. Let him do his best to keep pace with the advance of knowledge. Let him be quickeared to the whispers of all new or rediscovered truths. Let him cease to be so intolerably dictatorial. Let him learn tolerance and modesty, and endeavor to the best of his power to preserve some freshness of thought. Above all, let him sink himself and his party as far as possible out of sight. And then, amid his thousand failures and imperfections, he will still find that sincerity and simplicity have not lost their power over human hearts, and that when a man's one endeavor is to speak the truth in love, he will find his reward in the unfeigned gratitude of many souls whom he has helped; because now, no less than in the days of old, God sends forth his Seraphim, with the burning coals from off the altar, "to touch and to purify the lips of whom he will."

FREDERIC W. FARRAR.

THE OWNERS OF THE UNITED STATES.

IT has been and still is the boast of the American people, that wealth is more equally distributed here than in any other part of the world. While every one admits that the old days of New England, in which none was very rich and none was very poor, have passed away, yet it is still believed that the land, buildings, and personal property of this country are owned mainly by the majority of its people, and that there is no danger of any such concentration of wealth in a few hands among us as exists in older and more aristocratic nations. Statistics as to the wide distribution of wealth, shown by the deposits in American savings banks, by the large number of American farms, and by the supposed high standard of American wages, have been constantly set forth as conclusive evidence that American wealth is substantially owned by the mass of the American people. The object of the present inquiry is not to determine whether such a condition would be desirable or not, but simply to ascertain whether it actually exists.

Interesting as such an inquiry must be, especially to that laboring class on whose behalf it was supposed that labor commissions were established, little effort has been made by any of them to solve this problem. The very able gentleman at the head of the National Labor Bureau, after taking statistics of industrial depressions, convict labor, and strikes, seems to have felt that he had exhausted all subjects of special interest to the laboring classes; and he therefore directed the energies of all his assistants to an investigation of the subject of divorce-the one subject, among all grave social questions, with which the masses of laboring men have the least practical concern. One who desires to investigate the great problem of the distribution of wealth in this country must, therefore, feel his way, without much assistance from the official representatives of the very class which has the deepest interest in the question.