craftsmen magnify the word of the Lord, and tell its marvel in their halting and imperfect phrase. But we are vexed and shamed to hear ignorance belittling what is and has been to so many a very sacred thing. For certainly, with all the criticisms of the Bible, it has not yet been made a superfluous appendage to our religious order, has not yet come to be a superseded book. The rationalists write more about it than the liberal believers, and find that it quickens their study. We cannot, with all our reasoning, make this book seem like other books, or less than other books. This book is always excepted in the classification of values; and every preacher, however broad his range, feels that this, more than any other, is the book that he must own. For the right understanding and the right use of this book, then, a special study is needed, to learn what it is not, as well as what it is; to meet that inquiry concerning the Scripture, which, if not one of the most momentous questions of the time, is certainly one of the most frequent, and one of the most interesting. The time has not yet come when a preacher in any Protestant body can say with decency that he knows nothing and cares nothing about Biblical criticism; that he is in no sense an expounder of the Bible, or concerned with the Law of Sinai, or the Gospel of Galilee. Whether as historical record or spiritual discourse, whether as the foundation of the religion or as the enduring life of the religion, the Sacred Word will keep its place in the work of the ministry.

3. And then, in addition to this demand which the heretical and Biblical exigencies make upon the liberal ministry, there is also a need of more thorough preparation, in the very wide range of its sympathy. A liberal preacher ought to have more adequate training for the very reason that he brings so much more into the province of theology. His thesis of faith may be simpler than any; but it has much wider connections, a very small nucleus, almost too small to be measured, and yet from this a train of light that covers half the sky. His rule of ethics may be short, and yet how many things it reaches! Science, philosophy, history, art, all secular things in the liberal view, are involved in the

VOL. LXXXIV. -NEW SERIES, VOL. V. NO. I.

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science of the religious life. The Church is as broad as the world, and it includes all good men in the world. A course of liberal theological study takes in all things in which the work of God appears, - mathematics and physics, economics and politics, not less than dogmatics and criticism of the Scripture. The religious teacher must have trained himself to discover the way of Providence and Law in these large provinces of study, and to show how God comes to the apprehension of men out of nature and history as well as out of the written Word. If the old technicalities of theological study are of less importance, the added breadth of survey brings added need of investigation. Preaching, on any theory, is something more than precept; it is exposition: and the material for exposition is much larger on the liberal theory. You have to explain, not only Genesis and John's Gospel, and the Apocalypse and the Athanasian Creed, and the Articles and the theses of Calvin; but all nature and life, the heavens above, the earth beneath, and man dwelling on the earth. You have to show how this simple precept of obedience and virtue is enjoined by the facts of human life, in its natural and its spiritual functions. Physiology and psychology, in the liberal system, hold theology by either hand, and make an inseparable Trinity in Unity. You cannot know God or tell of him well, without knowing these, and having something wise to say of them.

4. The very boast of liberal religion, that its scheme is so comprehensive, lays upon it corresponding obligation. And this is the greater from another fact, that this large survey, to so many minds, seems not to allow religion at all; but to deny and discredit all faith in any thing spiritual, to deny the ideas which belong even to the simplest scheme of religion. The teacher of the liberal faith has to defend it, not only against the assaults of orthodoxy on the one side, but against the assaults of materialism and atheism on the other. has not only to show the Church that his heresy is not infi delity, but to show the world, which is or thinks itself infidel, that its assumptions are not sound, and that it mistakes the teaching of science and history and life. He has to make

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good the position of belief as against that of unbelief, and to show how his verities differ from the denials of scepticism. One-sided, partial, and obstinate science will have it that materialism is the only truth, and that all these theories of the soul, the spiritual life, a conscious existence beyond time and sense, all this pretence of morality, conscience, right and wrong; all this separation of man from other races; all this talk of God as a personal being, and of men, in any peculiar sense, as children of God,— is weak and delusive, to be pitied and spurned by the intelligent mind. That assertion must be met, and met not alone by bare denials, but by a better science, which is able to show wherein the other is hasty and partial. Pious simplicity, which only repeats the phrases of the conference room, deprecates dogma, and bids Christians to love, is not sufficient as an answer to the materialism which summons men in the lecture-room and the review and the newspaper. The essence of religion may be all in the new commandment, which a child can understand; but will you urge this against a denial of religion altogether, or of the need of any religion? You have to deal with a previous question, and to deal with it all the more that your own course is in the same broad field and on the same track as this materialism. You have to know enough of the world in nature and in life, to show that it does not justify these confident denials. One who is to answer these arguments of sceptics and infidels must have learned to appreciate the arguments, and to understand what they mean. The pleas of Büchner and Moleschott, of Darwin and Huxley, cannot be set aside merely by reading an excellent short sermon in the "Monthly Religious Magazine," or an article in the "New Englander." The gospel of mammon-taught so speciously in the financial summaries of the leading journals, and the popular works on banking and tariff- cannot be disproved even to one's own mind, much less to those who are striving and busy in the world, by devout reference to the words of Jesus and Paul, who spoke to another class, with another civilization, to men who did not handle much money, and had no railways to build, and no continent to subdue. You

do not meet the materialists and the mammonists on their own ground, when you quote to them texts of which they dispute the wisdom and deny the authority. They ask you for reasons, and not for texts.

Those who are half inclined to this materialism, whose daily reading and hearing has shaken their former traditional faith, who feel themselves to be on the road to denial of God and virtue and the spiritual life,- denial of all but physical facts and instincts, - naturally turn for guidance to the teachers of liberal religion. These teachers, going in the same way, professing earnestly to have learned from a broad and secular philosophy, have yet found a faith, are happy in a religion. They will give comfort where the evangelic ban has driven out the honest inquirer. Into the liberal churches mostly come these troubled souls, who are compelled to deny, but would fain believe. They come to hear the higher rea son, which may correct their doubt, to learn what the best science has to say. And it will be bitter disappointment if they hear in these churches no science at all, no strong reasons; if they find no sign of any study in these difficult questions, and must take for food only a diet for babes, even if it be the "sincere milk of the word." Can we imagine any thing more disheartening than this poor answer to troubled seekers, -this discovery that there is no real knowledge in the very place where knowledge is exalted, and reason stands equal with revelation? A liberal church that can give no answer to the questions of the age, which attract men to it, and stir in the minds of the men who come to it, will be an empty church; and it ought to be. It holds out a lying promise, and its large pretension is the more ridiculous. I read once of a baker who, in the last French Revolution, hung over the doorway of his shop a placard inscribed, with huge letters, "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité." A customer came in, and invited him to discuss these great ideas; but the baker had not a word to say. "Why did you put that motto there, if you cannot defend it?"-"Oh! I only did as my neighbors did, and hung out the sign of the party."-"Well, if that is all you have to say," returned the other, "I shall not buy

any more bread at your shop. I don't want the bread of one who has no reason to give for his professions." It will be so with the preachers of the liberal gospel. They must justify what they profess, else the inquirers will not come to them for the bread of wisdom and life.

There are these reasons, to mention no more, why, in spite of the fact that the liberal scheme of faith is in its essence very simple, and that the liberal gospel is adapted to the unlearned, a special training is needed for its ministry, that its position in the Christian world is heretical; that it has to interpret the Bible, the traditional authority, intelligently; that it has to show the large range and application of religious ideas; and that it has by eminence to deal with the questions of the world outside of the Church. The practical question then is, In what way shall this education be given, and how far shall it go on in time and in amount? Shall we keep the expedient of schools for the ministry, which has been tried in these last forty or fifty years? or shall we return to the old way, when candidates were apprenticed to a regular clergyman, and learned their trade as a carpenter or blacksmith learns it? or shall we devise some new plan, shorter and more effectual? Shall we go on with the old routine method, treating theology in its four departments of dogma, criticism, history, and pastoral duty? or shall we invent a new programme of study, suited to the wants of the age and the changed ideas of the pastoral relation? These are perplexing questions. We find ourselves in a troublesome dilemma. On one side is this demand for men, to fill the places made vacant, to open new places, to go on missionary service, to write and speak for the liberal faith, this call for men, of which we hear so much; which, however much we may doubt, and smile at its pretended urgency, is a real call, a wide call, a pressing call, not to be silenced by doubt or ridicule. On the other side is the demand for wise men, trained men, competent men; who know enough to defend the faith, to illustrate it, to meet orthodoxy on the one hand, and materialism on the other; a better class of men than the old way gave, or than any routine way can