feebled by age; nor do we hoodwink reason, in seeking to furnish this serviceable forecast to faith, by forgetting what new elements beyond our reckoning things that θεῶν ἐν γούνασι KEITαι 1-may enter into the course of theology, what changes of environment will accrue to truth, and what bearings on theology truths may have that yet lie all undiscovered; but we seek to give insight into present needs, and foresight into future issues, their due place alongside reflection on past history and experience. We see not one of the great Christian doctrines, whether the conception of God, the doctrine of the Trinity, of Inspiration, of Christ's Divinity, of the Atonement, of Miracle, or, in fact, any other, which, in newness of life, has not found change of form in the recent, not remote, past; and we cannot doubt that the Christian theology of the future also will know how to fashion for itself more fruitful and flexible moulds, and to scoop out new dogmatic grooves or channels into which it may pour the currents of its thought for the quickening and inspiration of the men of its own

time.

The theologian who would not have his

1 Iliad, xvii. 514.

spiritual science deemed wholly unprogressive, must make it his care to wipe out such reproach as might otherwise be directed in the word,— Signa autem temporum non potestis scire.

That theology will not, we know, be the theology of the present: based upon that, brought forth by it presumably in its own image, but still adapted to the needs and temper of a new time, it will, as a result of development, not discontinuity, be more spiritual as well as more scientific, though not more final. It will be not less influential than was the theology of the past, while more sympathetic and humble, taking its place among the sciences less as monarch than mediator, and realising, through its mediating and harmonising offices, a sweeter sovereignty and a surer destiny than before. Its beginnings shall be with man rather than with the First Cause of all things and the evidences of cosmical contrivance; with man as he is, conscious that he is not an end in himself, but that, with will so finite and limited, he is and must remain dependent on a Supreme Will. The Christian thought of the future will proceed less than that of the past on the lines of showing adapta

tion and adjustment to ends in nature, and will, with larger resource, present its Theistic philosophy of the universe, with its rhythmic movements of evolutions vast, in the highly complex aspects and the cumulative grounds of its argument, purified of all mechanical traces, as the strong implication and the sure appeasement of the whole nature of man in his many-sided being, so leaving far behind the irrational demand for a rigorous deductive demonstration of the Being of the God of Christian Theism. It will rely less on such arguments as those from miracle and prophecy, now less effective from an apologetic standpoint, and will afford larger scope and function for the ethical argument or evidence, but we do not believe that the activities of Christianised intellect, however mindful that God tantum cognoscitur quantum diligitur, will, as we have seen sometimes hoped in recent German thought,— allow the arguments addressed to reason, Energising Reason the while retained as the ultimate Ground of the universe, to be in any wise displaced by arguments that are distinctively moral, and destined only to be complementary to arguments of intellectual mould. It will receive,

from the rigorous psychology of to-day, with its analytic, historic, and genetic methods, larger results bearing on the theological basis of the future, and will obtain, from its growing study of the epistemological problem (Erkenntnisslehre, Wissenschaftslehre), greater light on the Agnosticism of the future, of which it will yet more. searchingly demand reason for the unfaith that may be in it. It will seek a sounder doctrine of cognition than the Ritschlians, founding on Kant and Lotze their theory of all religious cognitions as judgments of value (Werthurtheile), by which things are viewed in the light of their worth to us, and not as they are "in themselves," have been able to produce for the basis of the theological system, but it will abjure the Ritschlian dependence of theology on preliminary epistemological investigations, and will, without any indifference to epistemological problems, realise the immediate necessity under which it lies to be about its scientific business. Founding on the ineradicable spiritual instincts of man's nature as furnishing the subjective elements of religion, it will find in these an impregnable basis for God-the God of revelation, Father of the spirits of all flesh-being

necessary to us. No more will He be to us the far-off Deity of Deism, but the immanent God alike of Scripture and of science, the secret Force of creation, the eternal Energy of the universe.

But, while the theology of the future will continue, with the theology of the present, to recognise God as the immanent principle of all things, it will seek to correct the exaggerated tendencies of those who do not now see how deeply the doctrine of the divine immanence is grounded in that of the divine transcendence, and will endeavour to make its doctrine satisfying and complete in both directions. It will better perceive that, though we are happily not called to choose between the two, the divine transcendence is the more essential truth - without which the Christian religion would not remain-though it is on the divine immanence the needs of our times have called for stress. It will exhibit, in higher light, the thing of prime moment to be, not the merely physical aspect of nearness which immanence implies, but the moral nearness which is pledged to us in the fact of personality, however transcendent. It will rest, not on the old absolute divine sovereignty nor on inscrutable