alone against priests, and against the world; of men who have flashed into dead generations the electric spark of truth. Churches need many Pentecosts, and many Resurrections. And God grants them. Sooner or later He shakes down from their flimsy pedestals the gilded idols which men set up for themselves to worship, and delivers His children from the burning fiery furnaces kindled for them by those who would slay them in His name. Sooner or later He bids His lightnings stab through the dim but irreligious light of voluntary illusion, with which men swathe their own imaginations. He did so in the sixteenth century. He did so in the eighteenth century. He will do so again in the nineteenth, or in the twentieth, and if need be again and yet again. He will raise new Prophets when the old have been slain or silenced; and those new Prophets shall, like the Reformers, lead us back once more to simplicity from artificiality, to truth from tradition, to the Word of God from the inventions of men.

"Man nimmt fremde Glossen aus der Heiligen Schrift dass es zu erbarmen ist."-TAULER.

"Majestas theologica quam multi pluris faciunt quam Christum.”— ERASMUS to LUTHER (Epp. i. 427).

"We should not interpret the Scriptures by the Creeds, but the Creeds by the Scriptures."-SPENER, Bedenken, iii. 478.

"Tous les scholasticismes me rendent douteux de ce qu'ils démontrent, parce qu'au lieu de chercher ils affirment dès le début. Leur objet est de construire les retranchements autour d'un préjugé, et non de découvrir la vérité.”—AMIEL, Journal Intime, ii. 136.

LECTURE VII.

POST-REFORMATION EPOCH.

Questionings and disputes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings, wranglings."-1 TIM. vi. 4.

IF the slow but general and permanent adoption of principles by the Christian world be any proof of their correctness, it must be admitted that the Reformers gave a mighty impulse to the science of Scriptural interpretation. They made the Bible accessible to all; they tore away and scattered to the winds the dense cobwebs of arbitrary tradition which had been spun for so many centuries over every book, and every text of it; they put the Apocrypha on an altogether lower level than the sacred books; they carefully studied the original languages; they developed the plain, literal sense; they used it for the strengthening and refreshing of the spiritual life.

"Thus truth was multiplied on truth; the world

Like one great garden showed,

And through the wreaths of floating dark upcurled
Rare sunrise flowed.

And Freedom reared in that august sunrise

Her beautiful bold brow,

When rites and forms before her burning eyes

Melted like snow.'

We might have hoped that the splendid progress would have been continuous, but, alas, the experience of mankind has made us only too familiar with the spectacle of arrest and of retrogression in the history of thought. Imperfection and failure are stamped on all human efforts, on all human institutions. Toilsome and incomplete is all that men