all want to finish the work which the Reformers began. But allow Dr. Kaftan to explain himself a little further. He tells us that early in his theological life he was confronted with a question, which took the deepest hold upon his thought, and which ever since has been a ruling factor in his theological and religious life. It was not until he had worked himself into the clear on the subject that he ventured upon authorship, and felt called upon to urge others-" allen und niemandem, dem grossen Publikum "—to lay to heart certain thoughts about the connection of Christian things, and about what is of advantage to the church of the Reformation. He owns frankly, further, that he got it from a Roman Catholic source. People may charge him with Catholicizing tendencies, and with considerable show of reason. For whilst Roman Catholics continue to make vast and vital account of the principle, among Protestants, it has gone entirely out of fashion. But does that charge disturb him? The very reverse of it! Referring to the writer to whom he is so much indebted, he says on page 12, "When an earnest Christian of that church-and we are proud, as Protestants, that we need not deny Christianity to Roman Catholics as such; it is a refreshment and a joy to find in a man like Möhler something of the one truth and of the one Lord of all Christendom; yes, when such a Catholic Christian speaks for the cause of his church it is not unusual for Christian thoughts and ideals to lie back of what he has to say." The great question had agitated his own soul, what is truth? Only after he had sat at the feet of Möhler, did the fact properly dawn upon him that the truth is not something that we get, but that gets us, not something that we master, but that is independent of us and greater than we. How are we to be brought to it? By intellectual activity, whether of an analytical, dialectic, intuitional or any other kind, if there be one? Nothing of this. The method is none other than the pure and simple one, the original one of the Gospel itself, and the one practiced by every true Christian since the days of the apostles until the present time. St. Paul calls it the "obedience of faith." But what

has St. Paul to do with Möhler? Möhler has a great deal to say about the authority to which faith must render obedience, and throws some light upon the relation of obedience to true liberty. Now we have no time here to present in detail the views of Dr. Kaftan on this vital and fundamental problem of the science of revealed religion; nor is it necessary to do so. They are substantially those which have been set forth in the pages of this Review from the beginning, which have given, perhaps, more than any other, specific character to the theological position it represents, and which were never made account of, more vigorously and with more practical effect than in what we may call the dying utterances of that great champion of them who, forty years ago, entered the lists for their vindication and found a foeman worthy of his steel in the person of the distinguished New England convert to Romanism, Orestes A. Brownson. Well may Dr. Kaftan lament that in modern Protestantism the great principle of obedience to properly constituted authority has verstummt. To our mind there is no lesson that orthodox Christians of the nineteenth century should more deeply lay to heart than that contained in the following statements, found on page 13 of the pamphlet before us: "There is a two-fold obedience, of which one leads into freedom, the other ends in slavery. The former is that which deserves the name. And this is the portion of us Protestants since Luther gave us the Gospel anew, and emancipated its liberating forces. If only we could remain conscious of the fact that, freedom takes its rise from obedience. This holds not alone in the ethical sphere. It holds of Christianity as a whole, for this latter is a totality, unseparated religion and morality. It holds also of faith. Only on Protestant soil, only in the Church of the Reformation, does that obedience of faith which Paul had in mind become an unadulterated reality. It will become such to the greatest extent when once the activity of, and agencies employed by, the Church lead on to this obedience. Then will evangelical Protestantism develop a hitherto undreamed of power in all lands and among all nations. Then

ll it be a well-rounded and self-consistent whole, the pure ceptacle of the Gospel and the fountain of divine and spiritl blessedness for mankind,"

We have now seen that Dr. Kaftan makes full and intelligent rnest with the claims of history. We have seen, further, at he tries hard to get at the true sense and spirit of orthoxy, and that he has the highest respect for what he conceives essentially to be. Still he insists upon it that we need a new gma. And by the way he ridicules and deprecates the idea. an undogmatic Christianity as much as any one. The atement must be definite and distinct, and in all respects ust meet the requirements of a dogma. Now we would turally infer that he presumes that he is competent to draw o a new formula of this kind calculated to meet the wants of e Christianity of the present day. O that our modern. ctarians had some of the modesty of this decried Berlin prossor! And it would not be harmful to many of our creedvisionists, especially those who would undertake to tinker at e most venerable of them, the symbolum apostolicum. He lls us on page four, that no man can make the dogma that is eded, nor any dogma that is worthy of the name. He thinks at it would not be far out of the way to say that if that man ved, as he does not live, who could lay the dogma finished on e's table, it would be of no use to us. "It cannot be made - this or that one. In the on-goings of history it must force self upon us, as something which the moment demands and n never be forgotten, as is wont to be the case when the Lord od creates anything in His church on earth." What, then, es he mean, and at what is he aiming? One thing is to rect attention to, and bring the reader to realize, the fact at no man can make the dogmas. It is a fact certainly that eans much. To hear some of our modern theological sages lk, is to infer that had they been at the elbow of the man no wrote the creed, a few suggestions might have been made ich, if adopted, would have rendered it a symbol acceptable all right-minded men to the end of time. One of the things

12

Kaftan's "Brauchen wir ein neues Dogma!"

that Dr. Kaftan aims at is to get such nonsense entirely out of his readers' heads. What he has in view in addition to this he tells us in the following language, on page five: "All historical growth is the result of individual attempts and efforts. These can in no wise be dispensed with. They are and must be presupposed when in a given situation, in consequence of the necessitation which is involved in it, something new arises and finds place. As an individual we allow ourselves some concern and give ourselves some trouble about a matter of great significance and weight, and in this sense must be taken all that is here said about the new dogma"

Now the question must arise in the minds of many, Cui bono. They are ready to say to Dr. Kaftan: You disclaim any desire to disturb the old orthodoxy; you concede that everything essential is there; and yet, how can anything but agitation, doubt and confusion arise from the course you are pursuing? The smooth and peaceful current of evangelical Christianity can only become troubled and beclouded by your pedantic investigations, speculations and beating about for improvements upon what is old, tried and commonly accepted. You theological professors seem to think that the Christian public, like the Athenians in the days of the Apostle Paul, is constantly on the lookout for something new, and deem it your chief business to entertain it with some startling invention or discovery. Why not stick to your legitimate work as teachers of the Church, that; namely, of setting forth the plain old truths of the Gospel, which during these long centuries have proved themselves efficacious for the salvation of souls? Dr. Kaftan would reply to such: Your interrogations are precisely to the point; your point of view is identical with my own; you represent that sensible class of church-members constituting the great majority of them whose deeply-felt wants precisely I am anxious to have met; and I would be ashamed to find myself in the number of the impractical and unhelpful professors to whom in terms of stricture so proper you refer. On we find the following, which might cause us to suspect that he On page 28

had been taking lessons from some theological fectarer in Iowa or Kansas and had caught the spirit of our trans-Mississippi advancement: "We want to say to the corporation sünftigen) professors: Soar aloft into the airy regions of speculation, grasp the shadows, form them into combinations, untie the knots, and begin the play anew. That may be a fine employment for thought on the part of those who can spare the time and pay the cost. But for the church, her ministers, and the service to be rendered to the people, all that is labor lost. For our part, we are a plain folk; we should like to serve the church; we have gotten an idea, which will not let us go, that the concern of the church is the salvation of men, and that to minister to this end is the highest dignity of our theological labor. Hence we do not go out airing ourselves, and investigate questions which nobody can answer, and discuss problems which nobody can solve; for, we hare something to do. A practical profitable task has been committed to us. Qar aim is to bring the truth of God to the people; to awaken faith, that men may be born anew." Sooner accomplish something in this direction than to have written ten volumes of theological speculation, which to-day gratify clever realers, but after a generation, at most, moulder away in the cool shades of the library."

Of the four chapters of the brochure the second is entitled, "Hid with Christ in God." Orthodoxy has its truth and its right. In so far as it has these, it must be respected and defended. But one of its errors has been to overlook the truth and right of pietism and mysticism, two most important elements in the development of the history of Christian life and thought. In this second chapter he shows how justice must be done to these. It will be necessary for us to translate somewhat at large in order more fully to comprehend the aim Dr. Kaftan has in view. At the same time we will become better acquainted with the method by which he would accomplish it, and also with the man.

"The Apostle Paul never grows weary of inculcating the