in a gradual enlargement, expand in their occult implications and extend in new directions the vital truths given us in this inalienable inheritance, so that the outgrowths of knowledge, reason, reflection, and experience, may be seen in a progress whose continuity and symmetry shall prove it to be, as one has said in another connection, "a logical and graduated evolution, in which the idea of to-day is connected with that of yesterday, as the latter is to a still more remote past." The law here as in all progress must be that, as the theology that is to be increases and that which is decreases, the becoming theology will in its waxing life be absorptive and assimilative of everything that is discoverably new. "The real question is, whether the whole of the past can be so wrought into the life of the present as to become the guarantee of the future. Bare external tradition is lifeless: the utterly new is formless: what we need is eternal and historic truth born fresh in the living soul. Not fixedness nor revolution,' says Ullmann, 'but evolution and reform' is the motto for our times."1

1 Dr II. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, p. 127.

Whereas the bane of theology has been the excessive and burdensome authority wielded by systems that could only be provisional statements of the Christian contents, the fascination and inspiration of theological study lie in the free appropriation of the truth achieved in the course of theological progress-a course strictly independent of, and sublimely indifferent to, any churchly sanctions of its methods and results.

We do not dwell on the transience of all theological systems for the Mephistophelean reason that "All that grows deserves to decay," but because, while the theological organism preserves, at every stage of its development, a rounded completeness, an apocalypse of progress always gathers before the vision of its maturest attainment, and beckons it to higher fulness and perfection. The state or "law of becoming," rather than of being, is, according to the cardinal idea of this progressiveness or Christian evolutionism, to be taken as characteristic of our theological systems: to them we may apply the words of Plato,-Tí TÒ Alles, was entsteht, ist werth dass es zu Grunde geht."

1 Faust: ""

γιγνόμενον μὲν καὶ ἀπολλύμενον, ὄντως δὲ οὐδέποτε ov. Man's theology, like himself, "partly is and wholly hopes to be." Of philosophy it has been said that "each great philosophical system is in its turn set aside a dead-looking seed of thought from which, by the combined agency of intelligent experience and speculation, a new philosophy will one day spring." The same we here hold as true of theological thought.

1

The Christian theology of to-day, with an absolute faith in the moral and spiritual, hesitates not to say to the timid guardians of defunct theologies or superannuated systems, Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis. For it is fully conscious, while admitting no possibility of true progress by dispensing with, or departing from, those essential facts and truths whereby men are saved according to those elements or aspects of Christian truth which are unchangeable,-what need and room exist for unlimited progress, indefinite expansion and improvement, in the human apprehension and verification and exposition of the questions relative to these facts and doctrines. This is not to undervalue past

1 "Prolegomena" to Wallace's Logic of Hegel, p. xli.

progress, or depreciate the revelation committed to the earliest centuries, that we may gain for our own age the appearance of progress and the sensation of growth;1 rather, it is to magnify that revelation which, in its pure full substance, the enjoyment of the earliest times not less than of our own, is a treasure - house which yields, before the unwearying process of living Christian thought, always larger stores of truth, brighter gems of spiritual reality.

Progressive theology keeps in view that, in every realm, a truly scientific progress postulates basal beliefs, ascertained facts, as the groundwork of further progress. The forms of Christian theology may vary from age to age, but there is an inner essence or substance which, as we take to be now well understood, is constant ; and the law of progress which obtains in theology as in other spheres of scientific inquiry may be taken as finely typified in the lines of Dante,—

"Ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,

Sì che il piè fermo sempre era il più basso,”

1 Mozley, Theory of Development, p. 158.

"2

2 Dante, "Inferno," canto i. Mr Cary's rendering is,—

"I journeyed on over that lonely steep,

The hinder foot still firmer,"

or, in words of a modern poet,—

"Who climbs keeps one foot firm on fact
Ere hazarding the next step."

The fitting motto of a truly progressive Christian theology may be found in the word of St Vincent of Lerins, "Profectus non permutatio' -progress not change, expansion not displacement, extension not extermination, advance by the fusion or interpenetration of the conservative. elements of the "faith once delivered to the saints" with that progressive spirit which is of the essence of living faith. "The past is no more a whole without the present than the present without the past." So rooted in the past is the theology of the present that, while welcoming fresh light from every quarter, it forgets not that, as the human heart has altered little essentially with the growth of the generations, the saving truths by which it lives remain the same, but, just because this is so, it feels the danger to be greater of our allowing stagnation and death to creep over our formulas and beliefs, and the need more pressing that we pass beyond the historical and traditional into the vital spheres of psychology and Christian experience. Stag