ck to the period immediately succeeding that of the Refortion, nor like Anglicanism with a lofty tumble into the bosom that immediately succeeding the days of the Apostles. The urch of the middle ages and that of Rome are in the same ise parts of the mystical body of Christ as is the Church of › Reformation. It behooves modern Protestantism to look usly back upon the whole movement of Christianity, and to rn lessons of truth and wisdom from Rome itself, lest it fortits title to be included in the Holy Catholic Church. Dr. ftan seems to take the opposite view. We have renounced e hierarchy with all that is essentially bound up with it. We < not what the old Church was, nor what it taught. We ow what the Reformation was and it devolves upon us Protants to be true to it, come what may. What could be more phatic than the following, from page 53: "Protestant ristianity is not simply or in some respects connected with tholicism, but a totality of its own kind, born out of God's ord and resting upon it. Protestantism, as all are agreed s its mission. How can it fulfil it, unless it be true to elf? Must it not consistently carry out its idea? Must it not npletely round out and bring to full light all that is involved its nature? What its very essence is, is now coming to be own through the diligent, unflinching efforts of men like us. d yet you call us rationalists. We understand perfectly y. It is only the angry cry of despair. And yet you turn und, and in your dying struggles, call upon your arch my, human philosophy, a monster with as many tongues as ds, as an auxiliary force to support you in your last life aggles. Beside in turn charging upon you, as the true secret your misfortune, the same idolatrous reverence for what is estral which you ascribe to Romanists, we want to inform that your doom is sealed, for not without a miracle can that quickened into life which history has shown to be dead. me to your senses, therefore, and be brave, consistent Protests, such as your fathers, of former centuries, would not be amed to own. Forward! is our battle-cry. Backward is a

word not found in the Protestant vocabulary. And like Luther on his way to Rome, carry your Bible under your arm, and with this weapon alone you may rest confident of victory.

III.

Agreement in important particulars with the position taken by the "Review" in what may be called its illuminated period, as distinguished from what has been called its heroic period.

1. The glorified Christ is the only proper object of the Christian's faith and the centre of all Christian life and thought.

Here Dr. Kaftan is exceedingly satisfactory and explicit. To I. H. Fichte he would say, "No, sir! With Heilswahrheiten the real believer is not content; a person can be the only proper object of his faith. Contrary to what you say, further, it must be a historical person, but far more than that, -it must be one who is the living embodiment not only of your Heilswahrheiten, but of all truth. Now you philosophers have correctly learned from Hegel that God is the truth. It must be that person to whom the Christian believer says, "My Lord and my God!" You seem to have come to a sense of what religious faith involves, and your purely speculative philosophy (and it is certainly a credit to it) has led you in this particular to agreement with all really Protestant theologians. But don't you see that the Christian's glorified Lord is its sole object? The one is the complete counterpart of the other. On page 71 he tells us: "We Protestant Christians derive the certainty of our faith and the power of our life from the proclamation of the living, glorified Christ, who is none other than the historical one." On page 56, "If we start out with the fact that it is the living glorified Lord whose divinity faith immediately (unmittebor) acknowledges, we are then in a situation to bring the Gospel life-picture of our Lord into proper arrangement with our faith." By this he seems to mean as he afterwards says, "we can thus make the spiritual contents of His glorified divine life intelligible, through the account we have of Him in the Bible." "Faith has not to do with the

ernal mysteries of Deity, but with the revealed and present eality. This reality is the Lord as the glorified head of all elievers" (page 55). "We have in mind the glorified Lord talics his), the living present head of His Church when we onfess His divinity" (page 55). "Faith in His divinity is the ving heart of all our belief, the real and true centre of all se" (page 53). "We believe in the divinity of our Lord; en we believe in His coming from God (Ursprung aus Gott). e was a man, certainly-on this depends our salvation. But e was also the man in whom it was the Father's will that mannd should be united with Himself, the divine head of humanity ited to God,-on this depends our salvation none the less." the REVIEW 1883, page 7, we read: We can never be sure the real evangelical sense of any Christian doctrine except our apprehension is determined first of all, and exclusively all else from the overpowering vision of what the Redeemer in His own glory," the glory as of the only begotten of the ther, full of grace and truth. Such vision may well serve to settle some notions of Christianity, more or less mechanical d somnambulistic, taken from beyond the idea of Christ Himf. The history of the Church is full of that. Whole tomes theology have been constructed in this way, and still conme to be so constructed. For that very reason, however, y deserve to be shaken and unsettled, that the good and true ngs in them which cannot be shaken may remain. And this be only by their coming into new construction, where rist shall be seen and felt to be, not only one great stone, but chief corner-stone, the only real foundation-stone of the ire structure." On page 20, of 1882, we read: "In our istological estimate of the Gospel, viewed in this way from highest summit in the person of our Lord Jesus Christ, we confronted at once with two great mysteries which enter the constitution of His person, namely, the mystery of the y Trinity and the mystery of His Holy Incarnation. se, it is easy to see, are beyond all natural thought, and beg to a region which is higher than the highest finite intelli

gence. But it is wrong to think of them being therefore with-
out inward relation to our human rationality, having no force
other than blind external authority.
Where the Spirit

of the Lord is, there, and only there, is liberty. Let us beware
then, of turning the high doctrines of the Trinity and the In-
carnation into the dead lumber of outward memory and confes-
sion. Do they not meet us everywhere in the Gospel as the
cardinal pillars of Christian theology, the underlying forces of
the universal Christian life? What must we think of our
Christianity, then, if we see in them no practical relation to
either, but imagine we have to do with them only as abstrac-
tions, which cannot enter our intelligence or will in any way,
but resolve themselves into empty words and nothing more?"
Then later, "Alas that our common Christianity should be so
generally shorn of its strength just here, by not seeking it in
the Divine Man Jesus Christ!"

2. The Bible the only means of reaching Christ. Dr. Kaftan insists upon it that the Bible alone furnishes what awakens faith and supports it. For here alone we have what can be called revelation, and revelation is for faith, and faith for revelation. Now Christ is the only proper object of faith and so the substance of all revelation. By laying hold of the promises of the Gospel and submitting our will to the requirements of the Gospel we are brought into union with Christ. The "REVIEW," 1883, p. 33, says: "That is the mysterious constitution of God's Holy Word, its miraculous constitution, over against all simple naturalism in the other view, whereby it is fitted to be a real living bond for men between the natural and the supernatural, a veritable ladder of communication between heaven and earth, with the angels of God there ascending and descending in token of the restored harmony of paradise lost by the fall." *

*See "Review," 1873, article on Christianity and Humanity," a paper read before the Evangelical Alliance, which turns around this point at its centre. The paper seems to have fallen flat at the time, but as facts are brought to light by men like Kaftan, it looms up more and more in its full significance and force.

3. Something new wanted. A new era must certainly be at and. For with an effete dogma and a church impotent to enrce "obedience and faith," necessary to union with Christ, e idea of authority having verstummt, no wonder that the cry for something new. Dr. Kaftan pretends not to know extly what. God alone can "make" it; man cannot. "We y that if that man lived, as he does not, who could lay it ished upon our table, perhaps it would be of no use to us." ertainly a noble confession. All that we can do, he tells us, to concern ourselves with mind and heart about it and thus seek" this something new so imperatively needed. Still he lls us that this something must have one quality. It must be compulsory power (Zwang) which we cannot resist, which erpowers us, which makes us certain that we are not followg fancies or the idle inclinations of our will, but that we cognize the truth. Only this compulsion lies in the sphere of eedom. In a word it compels obedience, the obedience of th. But it has become evident that only a person can coml such "obedience of faith." There is no doubt who that rson is. But we have seen that we have communication th Christ solely through His word. Is there, however, no ssibility of His coming anew through His word so as to mpel the obedience of faith in such a way as to correspond th Dr. Kaftan's Zwang der Thatsachen, the resultant of ich always, but of which alone, is certain knowledge; ly, however, when the Thatsachen are empirical, it is the owledge of sense, therefore without freedom, but when they espiritual it is that of faith, therefore with freedom. "Blessed e they that have not seen and yet believe." Already in 1873, the article on the old Catholic movement we have the folving: "That the world altogether is in the midst of a crisis the most extraordinary kind is becoming continually more in. Never was a great epoch heralded, not simply for the ought but for the very feeling of men, by a more impressive ray of prophetic and admonitory signs. The concurrence outward and inward forces, flowing together from different