that man will be brought into saving and sanctifying contact with the active Personality of Christ; and we judge it may be safely averred that the whole personality of man, volition, thought, and sentiment, will actively participate in the shaping of the future statements of Christian faith and reflection.

As on that of personality, so also on the problem of freedom, which the nature-philosophers and certain other objectors have been, as touching its actuality, pleased in recent days to impugn, it will have much to say, for it will be true of it, Sie führt tief hinein in die schwierigen Untersuchungen über die menschliche Freiheit.

On the question of Atonement, in the fact of which we have august illustration of the closeness of the union between humanity and the Son of God, it will cast fresh light by its fuller apprehension of the basal fact of the solidarity of mankind, as realised in Christ, the living Head of humanity, in Whom the race finds unity of redemptive efficacy, as that fact, with its closely woven web of obligations, looms into larger view.

Of that coming time it will be true, in fuller

sense than when Biedermann wrote, that "the Christian religion will be the redemption of the natural man out of his disunion with God into freedom in God through the full revelation of God's grace in Jesus Christ, the Object of its faith."1 And that coming Christianity, with its more deeply marked humanitarianism, will, in its wise endeavour to combine the social forces and the speculative elements of faith, lay profounder emphasis on the new spiritual constitution of humanity given in the world-embracing kingdom founded by Christ, the kingdom of heaven with upward-drawing power for humanity, with service for its law and brotherhood as its ideal, for it will, in its theological expression, no more cast an indifferent eye on social science. The theology of the future will, in these more factual and less verbal methods of proof, carry forward the present movement towards the real and the concrete, towards the historical and the spiritual, and, in the mas

1 Biedermann, Christliche Dogmatik, S. 131, and § 113: "Die Christliche Religion will die Erlösung des natürlichen Menschen aus seinem Zwiespalt mit Gott zur Freiheit in Gott durch die volle Gnadenoffenbarung Gottes, die sie in Jesu Christo zu ihrem Glaubensobject hat, sein." Zürich.

terful grasp of its conceptions in their practical developments, it will not be able to rest in arid. rationalism and inflexible dogmatism, nor, in fact, in any ground short of a synthesis, such as its own age will demand, in which reason, history, and experience, shall be duly represented. When that synthesis shall have been reached, it will be found that the central place and primordial worth, in creation, in revelation, and in the completed kingdom of God, belong to the Person of Christ, in conformity with Whose image, and in compliance with Whose teaching, the pathway of all progress lies.

The notion that has recently found favour with some in Germany, and in Britain also, which in substance is, that the Christian theology of the future will resolve itself into a purely undogmatic form of Christianity, we, keeping in view the supernatural facts and implicit dogmas of the Christian faith, take to be founded on no firmer base than illusion, readily as we may acknowledge dass der Glaube das Erste, Originale, Unwandelbare, die Lehre das Zweite, Abgeleitete, Veränderliche sei, and that diese Aufgabe, lebendigen Glauben an den lebendigen Christus zu pflanzen, steht an

Wichtigkeit wahrlich keiner anderen nach.1 The needs of the religious sentiment may surely in the future be met without thought being repressed however religious faith may be, there must live in it rational thought, and such animating thought will find for itself expression in theologic form. The form will bear the stamp of its own time, determined by the living principle that shapes the form after modern needs and yet ensures that the essential Content, spiritual and divine, be preserved. The historic continuity of organic life will be maintained through all the changes to which, in the natural and necessary evolutions of Christian dogma, the theological organism will be subject: religion, as a real historic magnitude, will draw Christian thought more surely to the historic disciplines, with their atmosphere of fact, not theory, and their evolutional points of view: the hyper-historic tendency that has in recent years decried the metaphysical elements presupposed in Christian theology will have its one-sidedness corrected in the interests of

1 Otto Dreyer, Undogmatisches Christenthum. Braunschweig, 1888. Vide S. 81, 77.

historic revelation itself: the dream of a psychologically possible non-dogmatic Christianity will be dispelled before the historico-dogmatic forces. of the future, and the claims of scientific thought will be recognised in the rhythm of growth as well as the demands of the religious sentiment be satisfied.

The theology, like the science, of the future will base its positions on oft-renewed observation and ever-extended experience, for it will certainly hold that facts within the theological domain admit not less of true observation and scientific result than do the facts of nature, and, by perpetual recurrence to historical and spiritual fact, it will, with scientific rigour and under laws of rational insight, subject its theological theories to progressive and unceasing verification, appropriate in kind to the peculiar nature of the facts with which it has to do.

Conspicuous among the features of that reconstructed theology will be its wiser adjustment of the relations of naturalism and supernaturalism, so that fuller justice shall be done to the claims of both, and their perfect reconciliation sought.