but others not so committed. Last year, about a thousand students who were not willing to accept the basis of the Student Christian Movement, which would require them to say, "in joining this union, I declare my faith in Jesus Christ as my Saviour, my Lord, and my God," were willing to join a Bible circle, and many who have begun by joining a Bible circle have, later on, accepted the basis of the Movement. This subject of Bible study is one to which we should give most earnest attention. We ought to encourage all Churchmen to study the Bible daily as a means of spiritual growth. We lament the lack of spiritual power in the life of the average Christian to-day. That lack of spiritual power is a sad fact. Is it not to be attributed almost entirely to the neglect of private Bible study and secret_prayer? I have heard two or three references during this Congress to the Student Movement as a spiritual force at the present time. In so far as it is a spiritual force, it owes this to its emphasis on the need for cultivating the spiritual life, and its success in helping some college men and women to do so. And before I sit down, may I add that those who have advocated this Bible circle method, which lays so much emphasis on the importance of daily private study, have always urged that the daily Bible study should be done during the first half-hour or hour of the day. "The first hour is pre-eminently the still hour. The noises of yesterday have receded, and the din of the world of to-day has not yet broken in upon us." What a difference it would make to the world, if all we who name the name of Christ, spent the first hour of the day in Bible study and prayer. "Without doubt, our failure to prevail against man and against evil in the world during the day, is too often due to our more fundamental failure to prevail with God at the beginning of the day." CONCLUDING ADDRESS By the RIGHT REV. F. H. CHASE, D.D., Bishop of Ely. We have listened this morning to papers of singular interest and suggestiveness on the subject of the Devotional Study of Holy Scripture. One of the great and anxious tasks which, in the providence of God, seem especially to rest on our generation is the reconciliation of two elements in Biblical study, which too often appear to be antagonistic-the one in some sense new, the other old; the literary and the devotional, the intellectual and the spiritual. I hope and believe that this discussion will be fruitful of lasting good. The time has now come for me to bring it to a close. The first paper, written by a trusted theologian of the sister Church of the United States, dwelt on the relation between the Incarnation and the Bible. In these final words I desire to return to that subject, and to touch on one aspect of it. "Ever in the Scriptures did the Word become flesh that He might tabernacle among us." So wrote Origen, one of the deepest thinkers of the early Church. In the one Person of the Lord Jesus Christ deity and humanity were perfectly united. He was, He is, "perfect God and perfect man." In that union there was, there is, a full and complete revelation of God. "The Word became flesh." "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father." So in the Bible the Word clothes Himself in the fleshly garment of a human literature, the typical literature of the Church of Israel and the typical literature of the Church of the redeemed. The mystery of God's will is veiled and revealed in arr age-long history, recorded and interpreted in the words of prophets and apostles, human words conditioned and limited by the characters, the powers, the environment of those who wrote them. The personal Incarnation infinitely transcends what I venture to call the literary incarnation in the Bible; but the analogy between these two modes of divine revelation is rich in practical teaching. 1. To her who watched beside the cradle and stood beneath the Cross, the perfect life was a life of perfect growth. The Lord did not abrogate for Himself the divine law of orderly development. He passed through each several stage of human life that He might redeem it and sanctify it. When He was a child, He was perfect as a child; when a youth, perfect as a youth; when a man, perfect as a man. At every stage there was a perfection relative to that stage. So it is with the lower revelation in Holy Scripture. There too there is growth. The truth of each of its “ many parts" is a relative truth. The science of Biblical criticism enables us approximately to determine the context of life to which each "part" belongs. A large view of the Bible shows us how God educates man through the aspirations and the yearnings which He has implanted, in order that in His good time man may be prepared to receive the unimagined gifts of His love. 2. Again, "the disciple whom Jesus loved," who through the months of close fellowship watched with patient growing insight all the phases of the Lord's earthly life, as he looked back upon it, gathered up his supreme experience in the single phrase, “We beheld His glory." Yet he would not have compared in importance (we say it with reverence) the hours which his Master, "made like unto His brethren," spent in taking of rest in sleep, with the hour of His great high priestly prayer or the hours in which He suffered and "reigned on the tree". But the hours of sleep, no less than the hours of filial communion and the hours of the Passion, were necessary to the completeness of the human life through which the glory was manifested. So it is with the lower revelation in Holy Scripture. Sometimes we are tempted to complain that there are portions of the Bible which sober and reverent criticism seems to stamp as so human that they appear as excrescences on a divine revelation, and that we cannot discern in them any immediate message to the heart and spirit. But, if we are calm and patient, may we not believe that light will be given to us through the conviction that at least they are needful organic parts of the human literature through which God has spoken, and still speaks, to His Church? It is our great loss, a loss which we shall bequeath to those who come after us, if we allow any feeling of present perplexity to tempt us practically to excise them from the Bible. We have need of patience. Every moment which the disciples spent in the presence of the Word made flesh was, in its measure, profitable to them. "Every Scripture," every piece of the literature through which the Word speaks, is in its measure profitable to us: first, as simply enabling us to discern a little more of the methods of divine revelation; ultimately, it may be, when the waiting "eyes of the heart" have been enlightened, as the vehicle of some unexpected spiritual lesson. "The Word became flesh." So St. John summed up all we can conceive or know of the final revelation of God in Christ. So, too, we may express the character of God's revelation of Himself in the human literature of the Bible. an If this be so, then it follows—the inference is as important as it is obvious-that our study of the Bible must be "in the Spirit." The ancient teacher who has suggested to us the luminous thought that Holy Scripture is in a true sense incarnation, in the same passage draws a striking parallel between the disciples ascending the mountain with the Lord and then beholding Him transfigured before them and the Christian man rising from the study of the "letter" to a true discernment of the "spirit" of Holy Scripture. If for the Transfiguration we substitute the Resurrection and Pentecost, the cycle of teaching is, I believe, complete. On the first Easter Day, the birthday of the Christian Church, before the close of which by His sacramental act the Lord made His disciples partakers of His risen life, He dealt with the perplexities not only of the chosen apostles but also of two average men from the company of His followers, Cleopas and another, "foolish men and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets had spoken." To all His gift was the same. He Himself drew out the true and final spiritual meaning of the "letter" of Scripture, which had hitherto been sealed to them-" He interpreted", "He opened to them the Scriptures." On the other hand, that they might themselves be able to appropriate His teaching, "He opened their mind to understand the Scriptures"; and that their fresh intellectual apprehension of "the things written aforetime" might be to them a vital force, a spring of comfort and hope and strength, He touched their emotions: "Was not our heart", they asked each other afterwards, "burning within us, while He spake to us in the way, while He opened to us the Scriptures?" The communings on the road to Emmaus and in the upper room are the Church's inheritance for all time. The gift of Pentecost has opened a way in which that fellowship becomes a present and a perpetual experience. The Holy Spirit unfolds, little by little, to the Church and to each member of the Church the boundless significance of the Incarnation. He takes of the things of the Word made flesh and reveals them unto us. So it is also with the lower revelation in Holy Scripture. The Holy Spirit, despite our perplexities and misgivings, little by little guides the Church and each member of the Church into a fuller understanding of the words of the prophets and of the apostles. He in these latest days emancipates the intellect to understand the "letter" of Scripture, rightly to read the fleshly garment of the human words of the Bible. He kindles the heart that we may live and rest and labour in a vital apprehension of the "spirit" of Scripture, the divine Word Who speaks to us through the “letter". He invigorates the will that we may translate the lessons of Scripture into a daily life which is according to the will of God. Through Him the threefold witness is given to the world-the witness of the Word made flesh, the witness of the Word written, the witness of the Christian life. The gift of the Holy Spirit is indeed ours. If we live by the Spirit, by the Spirit let us also read and study and think. THE CHURCH'S CALL TO PRAYER INTERCESSION, AND THANKSGIVING HOARE MEMORIAL HALL, TUESDAY MORNING, JUNE 23. CHAIRMAN: THE LORD BISHOP OF SOUTHWARK I. THE CALL TO PRAYER BY THE REV. G. H. S. WALPOLE, D.D., Rector of Lambeth. The close of any long-expected event brings with it inevitable regret, even though all may have gone beyond our expectation. And regret has its dangers in producing reaction, a kind of slackness accompanied by doubt; doubt whether we have not been satisfying ourselves with fancies instead of realities, with vain hopes instead of substantial truths. You know how Browning expresses that sense of want we have when some great inspiration has gone :-"Well, it is gone at last— Gone! and the good tears start, the praises that come too slowFor one is assured at first, one scarce can say that he feared, That he even gave it a thought, the gone thing was to go, Never to be again! But many more of the kind As good, nay better perchance: Is this your comfort to me? To me who must be saved because I cling with my mind To the same, same self, same love, same God: ay-what was, shall be." "Is this your comfort to me?" If that is all you can say, that the hopes by which we have been uplifted, the conceptions of real Catholicity by which we have been startled, the convictions which have been strengthened, are in another ten years to be succeeded by fresh hopes, larger conceptions, and deeper convictions when the Congress may meet again, then we shall turn elsewhere "Therefore to whom turn I but to Thee, the ineffable Name? Builder and Maker Thou, of houses not made with hands! What? Have fear of change from Thee Who art ever the same? Doubt that Thy power can fill the heart that Thy power expands ? There shall never be one lost good! What was, shall live as before; |