divine plans or decrees, of which, with Faust, it will say that it can nothing know, but, as it ceases from à priori conceptions of Deity, on the universal and declared love of the Living God. It will gain, in its most philosophical thought, broader and surer grounds for its Theistic beliefs, without seeking admixture of pantheistic leaven, mindful as it may remain of all it owes to modern Pantheism.

From the direct and fearless appeal to man's spiritual intuitions, it will, as a theology of love, rise not alone to the Being but the Fatherhood of God, as that objective relationship which finds its corollary in the faith that evidences man's sonship and his sense of the essential obligation which is his to grow without limit into his heavenly Father's likeness. Its basis shall be laid in this truer anthropology, with its deeper, more explicit recognition of the divine imageship of the race, derived from no à priori dogmatic system, but founded on the study of the origin and the growth of religion in man. It will, at the same time, evince—it is already indeed evincing—an eminently rational superiority in rebutting the hackneyed and rather unillumined modern charges

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of Anthropomorphism, as these have come from writers like Spencer, whom Büchner has in his turn charged with like "anthropomorphic disfigurement,” and others, who do not see how entirely they are in their own theories enclosed in anthropomorphic meshes, and how much less anthropomorphic theology has in its idea of God actually grown in this increasingly scientific age; and, to this it may be added, will display an augmented power in dispersing the pious shadows of a belauded but unsatisfying Cosmism. For, as "it is indubitable that the human mind has from the earliest times worshipped the reality hidden behind phenomena, but consciously felt in the heart, and has ascribed to it greater analogy with ideas than with matter or force," so it is certain that the Christian thought of the future will, on stronger grounds, present for man's acceptance the truly personal God of theism, free from the imperfections and limitations with which the clouded thought of man has continued to invest His Personality.

No magnified abstractions, whether of the universe or of humanity, will be able to satisfy the Christian thought of the future any more

than of the past: not in any storehouses of future philosophy, and not in any repertories of the science of the future, will any equivalent for the personal God, that highest Reality which is the universal demand of rational intuition, be found. The Christian theology of the future will be intuitional in character, sounding, by that intuitive power or instinct of the divine which is destined to work greater theological marvels, the spiritual intuitions of the whole man, and rising by degrees from these into the orbed truths of Christian theology. Starting from the historical investigation and comparison of man's diverse. forms and modes of religion, it will set the unique and supernatural character of Christianity in juster, saner light, and, this done, will acknowledge, with more light and sweetness, how real and large remains the province of the unknown that lies without the domain of fixed dogmatic thought. Its theory of Theopneustia and its theory of the Canon it will seriously modify, as demanded by the advances of Modern Criticism, shaping the former more simply after the spiritual content of the Scriptures, but also searching out with more care and insight the

limitations of the fallible element or human factor, so that Scripture credibility may be preserved, and the latter with an absence of the old concern as to questions of authorship, particularly, of course, in the case of the Old Testament. Criticism will, we believe, become a more helpful guide and a more healthful corrective to the spiritual sense of the future, and Scripture will continue to wield its unsurpassed authoritative sway because of the saving purpose that pervades it taken in whole, and because of the residuum of permanent and infallible truth that is found with self-evidencing power in its many parts.

Pursuing, from Christocentric basis, as finding its fundamental principle in the divine - human personality of Jesus, the broad inductive methods of historical and comparative investigation to which we have already alluded, the Christian theology of the future will lose in provincial flavour and individualistic aspect, and grow, through increasing interchange of the theological mind, in international character and cosmopolitan significance, which things, it should hardly be necessary for us to say, do not mean that we shall sacrifice individuality of thought or suffer

break in the continuity of our own theological developments, results of which there will sometimes be danger from an unthinking and too easy receptiveness of foreign thought. It will seek to breathe not alone the air of our own age and planet, but the breath of the spirit that fills eternity and impels the universe. It is a surer hold on positive truth, a firmer grasp of spiritual reality, the theology of the future will seek, and thus its teachings will so solidly rest on grounds that need fear no scrutiny as to make it impossible for men to mistake its living dogmas for mummies or chimeras. When the misrepresentations that still cleave to our theologic teachings shall have quietly floated away, it may be that the things surely believed by the Christian theology of the future will be fewer than they are to-day, but the foundations of these shall have grown so firm and broad as to know no trembling for their own existence.

In method the theology of the future will be speculative in the sense that it will rear the fabric of its Christian speculation, massive and reverent, on no airy foundation, but on the solid basis of the material furnished to living Christian faith