EDITORIAL.

SHORT PASTORATES FROM THE SOCIAL POINT OF VIEW.

It is not difficult to notice that there is at present a prevailing unrest among ministers. The thought of remaining for a period of years at work in one place seems to be unattractive. There is many a Congregational church that is under the itinerant system to a greater degree than the neighboring Methodist church is: the pastoral terms are shorter, and there is a dispiriting interregnum between them. It is very often the case that ministers in such a church, instead of being pastors, are to all intents only chaplains, or at most evangelists. And it is a not less serious matter that, so far as the social life of the community is concerned, they have the little share of one who has but lately come, and is soon, it may be expected, to go away. There are many towns and villages where the minister is looked upon as securing the benefits of the organized life, without touching its burdens and responsibilities. In that larger proportion of life, even of Christian life, which goes on apart from direct church associations, the minister is too often a passing visitor, enjoying no confidences, and consciously without influence. In a time when it is beginning to be realized that one of the greatest openings before Christianity lies in the way of social citizenship, it cannot be right that Christian ministers have so rarely given hostages to fortune, and become pledged and naturalized members of the community in which they live.

It may be admitted at once that the old kind of pastoral authority has passed away, perhaps to no one's special regret. And yet the minister of the past wielded a power that may well be envied by the new generation. He knew his flock, and called them by name. He was known of them. They associated the thought of him with all the marked events of their individual and common existence. The minister's influence was in many respects narrow, but it was a social influence. If it was narrow, the reason was that life itself was under close limits. He compassed the life of his community; he participated in all of it, from year to year, even to children's children.

The pastoral activity which has taken the place of this is freer but less forceful. Preaching is more interesting, more inspiring; but it is more distant. Pastoral visitation has lost the old religious intensity that it had when the minister catechised from house to house; and there seems to be much doubt among young ministers, at least, how to make this part of their work most useful. The ministry is conscious of change, conscious of new occasions and new duties, sensible of the fact that there are widening opportunities; and hence the unrest we have noticed is a sign of promise. The difficulty is in the way this unrest expresses itself, in sending men hither and thither in search of the larger possibilities,

when the whole lesson of the theology, as well as of the sociology, of the present, is that these possibilities are to be found close at hand. It is to be feared that the ministry may make the old mistake doubly dangerous now - of thinking that they must go far afield and find broad lands, in order to gain the richer harvests. It is the depth of soil that

counts.

The people of the churches are coming, often unconsciously to themselves, into a new kind of life, something more varied, more eventful, more interesting, than they have lived before. The popularizing of education, it may even be said of culture; the increase of comforts; the development of the feeling of humanity which comes from intercourse with the distant world; and above all, the vague sense of coming changes, these influences are giving a larger horizon to the simplest walks of life. The social movement does not exist merely where it is being discussed, or where it is visibly at work. It is in the air. And people nearly everywhere are waiting to know what is the bearing of Christian faith upon the new hopes that are abroad among men. They are as yet uncertain whether the church has a mission to the whole of life, or only to a fraction of it. At bottom, their question is whether Christianity is set for the redemption of individuals, or for the redemption of the world.

In the face of this longing for nobler truth, and with it a willingness for nobler action, it is too often the case that the minister, the only guide as to higher things the people have, sees an opportunity, but sees it elsewhere. From the social point of view, a large proportion of the ministers of the present leave their work when they have but just made a fair beginning. Many a man, convinced that his parish furnished him too slight an opportunity, might find a call to a fresher and more devoted ministry, without change of location, in the signs of the times, and in the strivings among his people for a larger life and for a better relation with humanity.

The next great revival is going to be in the direction of social Christianity. Under its impulses, the best men will go into places now considered slight in opportunity. They will dispel the notion that the more extensive field necessarily allows of a man's doing the more in his day and generation. Instead of touching many people on a single side of their nature, these men will take a few, and influence them deeply through the whole range of life. We cannot but believe that such men, when they come, will introduce another era in Christian history. They will be discoverers. They will open up new avenues to the church at large, until it shall be more nearly coterminous with the kingdom of God.

For one thing, the ministry of the future will need to show explicitly how the religious motive expresses itself in the different spheres of life. The art of living the Christian's life in these modern days is the most intricate of all arts, and yet the present state of instruction in the art is

to a large extent as if a teacher of sculpture should confine himself to the history and possibilities of sculpture, and never enter with his pupils into the handling of the clay. The ministry of the future will, we think, give more effort toward showing how religion adjusts itself to the other elements of the better life; thus bringing out the essential harmony of all good things, showing that nothing which makes men truer and nobler is foreign to Christianity, and making it clear that Christianity condemns only what is false and absurd in the nature of things.

Let us also hope that in the future there may be brought out more than ever the Christian possibilities of art and music, of education, of refined social intercourse. Why should not the church hold before its people everywhere that ideal of cultured manhood and womanhood toward which it is already working in the Christian college? There would thus be new means through which Christian people could be established and confirmed in their faith in spiritual things. There would be new means of approaching on some other side of the higher nature those who are not first of all appealed to by the more direct ministry of religion. There would be the possibility, with this broader programme, of getting Christian principles registered in the public life of communities and of the nation.

It may perhaps be suggested that the minister of the future will stick closer to his text than has been done in this present instance. To this it must be said that the main object has been to offer some considerations as to what the social point of view is; feeling that when that point of view is justly apprehended, any further discussion is almost unnecessary. In the light of such considerations as those which have been presented, and of the feelings which come from the progress of social Christianity, we are convinced that there are coming to be entirely different standards for measuring the opportunity furnished by fields for ministers' work. The lines of activity which seem to be indicated for the religious leaders of the coming generations cannot be undertaken except through influences moving slowly and profoundly. Social Christianity demands of any who would be its apostles a close, continued intimacy of knowledge and sympathy with those whom they would help. There are of course other points of view from which the question of short pastorates may rightly be looked at, but from the social point of view it is hard to see how there can be any such thing.

THE ACQUITTAL OF PROFESSOR BRIGGS.

THE Presbytery of New York, at its meeting of November 4th, after hearing Professor Briggs's reply to the charges of its prosecuting committee, dismissed the proceedings against him by a vote of ninety-four to thirty-nine. In view of the failure of the motion to dismiss the case, made and urged by the friends of the accused at the October meeting of

the Presbytery, the size of the majority must be taken as showing a strong reaction in Dr. Briggs's favor.

An important cause of the reaction was, no doubt, the calm, luminous. and incisive "Response" of Dr. Briggs. This, while not avowedly defensive nor explanatory, was perhaps more effective in removing prejudice and misunderstanding than a defensive and explanatory address would have been. It was professedly and in essential content a criticism of the charges of the prosecuting committee, made in the exercise of the right of the accused to file objections to the sufficiency of the charges in form and in legal effect. Incidentally, however, two of the utterances of the Inaugural declared by the committee to be heretical were cleared of misinterpretation and tested by the Presbyterian standards. This, no doubt, gave relief to some minds. Dr. Briggs's demonstration of the insufficiency of the prosecuting committee's charges and specifications must have helped many towards the conclusion reached by the Presbytery. For it was both natural and kind to attribute the committee's failure to make triable charges, not to its mental incompetency, but to the lack of material at its command.

The prosecuting committee will appeal to the General Assembly. It is very doubtful whether the Assembly will entertain the appeal. True. the Moderator of the Presbytery has decided that the committee is "an original party in the case." But excellent Presbyterian authority can be cited for the opinion, which seems to us supported by common sense, that a committee appointed by the Presbytery, having no powers except those given it by the Presbytery, cannot be an original party as against that body with a right of appeal from its decisions.

Dr. Briggs's opponents have, however, another string to their bow. Some thirty members of the Presbytery have announced their intention of making a complaint to the Synod of irregularity in the proceedings of acquittal. Presbyterian law doubtless gives the right of such complaint to a dissatisfied minority. Whether the Synod will sustain it, and require the Presbytery to try Dr. Briggs again, is, of course, doubtful. As the Synod does not meet until October, 1892, and as its decision, whatever its nature, will probably be followed by an appeal to the General Assembly of June, 1893, it seems unlikely that disciplinary proceedings against Professor Briggs will be resumed. The strength of the revision party in the church warrants this prediction. Dr. Briggs has in all probability secure standing as a Presbyterian minister.

This probably means that the Presbyterian Church will not hereafter require of its ministers and teachers profession of belief in the infallibility of the Bible. Dr. Briggs's refusing to make such profession was the real ground of the attack upon him. He admitted that he had found historical mistakes in the Scriptures, and claimed that the church cannot give the sacred writings the careful study necessary to the faithful use of them without coming upon such errors. This admission, it was said, was

a violation of the promise made by him at his ordination to be loyal to the system of truth embodied in the Westminster symbols. A cardinal doctrine of that system is that which presents the Bible as "the only infallible rule of faith and practice." This implies, it is said, the correctness of all the affirmations of the Bible, whatever their nature may be. Therefore, a Presbyterian minister who acknowledges that he has found historical errors in the Scriptures should be deposed from the ministry. The offensiveness of the critical positions taken by Professor Briggs was owing to their supposed contrariety to Biblical affirmations. He subjected himself to discipline, it was urged, in saying that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, and that Isaiah was the author of only half the book which bears his name, because the Bible refers to Moses as the author of the Pentateuch, and prefixes to quotations from both halves of Isaiah the name of that prophet. His opponents say that one who says that the facts of the Bible contradict these or any other affirmations "reviles and discredits the Word of God" (to borrow a description of Dr. Briggs's conduct used in the General Assembly last summer by a member of the prosecuting committee of the New York Presbytery), and is unfit to be a Presbyterian minister.

Professor Briggs maintained that loyalty to the Presbyterian doctrine about Scripture does not imply assent to all the historical statements of the Bible; that, on the contrary, one may heartily accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as "the only infallible rule of faith and practice," while conceding that it contains such errors. This position he maintained firmly at his trial, asserting it and vigorously defending it in his address to the Presbytery. His acquittal, therefore, if it be, as is altogether likely, the end of the attempt to discipline him, amounts to a declaration from the Presbyterian Church that it does not regard the religious authority of the Bible as necessarily excluding from it all human imperfection.

Professor Briggs will have done great service to Presbyterianism, and to the whole Protestant church, in securing this. The greatness of the service rendered, and the cost of it, may well cause any faults in the manner of defending the truth to be soon forgotten.

In justice to Dr. Briggs's opponents, it should be said that his Inaugural was unnecessarily aggressive in tone. It was also unwisely discursive. The sections treating of the religious office of the reason and of the state of the righteous after death marred the unity of the discourse, and invited misunderstanding by the meagreness which limitations of time made necessary. And the latter of these was so worded as to misrepresent Dr. Briggs's opinion. When the author said, "The bugbear of a judgment immediately after death, and the illusion of a magical transformation in the dying hour, should be banished from the world. . . . The former makes death a terror to the best of men. The latter makes human life and experience of no effect, and both cut the nerves