as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry: for I am verily persuaded, the Lord has more truth yet to break forth out of His holy word. For my part, I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are come to a period in religion, and will go at present no farther than the instruments of their reformation. go beyond what Luther saw; whatever part of His will our God has revealed to Calvin, they will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery much to be lamented, for though they were burning and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated not into the whole counsel of God, but were they now living, would be as willing to embrace farther light as that which they first received." 1

The Lutherans cannot be drawn to

These words of the Puritan teacher, spoken as long ago as 1620, are instinct with the nobility which distinguished the Berœans. And surely, in this present age, when from so many sides, and by such various instruments, Almighty God is pouring on us the light of new knowledge, it is this temper of mind which we should most earnestly desire and

1 Neal's Puritans, i. 476-77.

most carefully cherish. To have an open mind in the Christian sense is to have a mind to which unaccustomed truth is welcome, not because we have never really known anything, and are therefore unable to understand the gravity of intellectual judgment, but because we venerate truth for its own sake, and have learned in the school of experience that our only hope of holding any truth is to be accessible to the appeal of all truth, and that we do violence to the distinctive principle of the Christian Religion when we admit to our minds the timorous and irrational supposition that as Christians we can have any separate interest from that of honest and reverent seekers after truth. Christ, the Truth Incarnate, commissions all genuine scientific investigation, and gathers into His message all the sound conclusions to which it leads; and Christians are, in a world enslaved by prejudice, ignorance, and the servitude of unrighteousness, as men enfranchised and illuminated. "With freedom did Christ set us free," cries the apostle; "stand fast, therefore, and be not entangled again in a yoke of bondage." may not, nay, we cannot, be able to correlate all the separate testimonies of truth which claim our acceptance; but we may not reject any, and, for the rest, we make an act of faith in the Truth Incarnate, and

We

The end is not yet.

"For now we

rest in hope. see in a mirror darkly; but then face to face: now we know in part; but then shall we know even as also we have been known."

On the earth the broken arcs: in the heaven a perfect round.

VII

HONOUR IN TIMES OF RELIGIOUS

TRANSITION1

TAKE THOUGHT FOR THINGS HONOURABLE IN THE SIGHT OF ALL MEN.-Romans xii. 17.

THERE are reasons for thinking that St. Paul was, by some of his contemporaries, regarded as personally dishonourable. They accused him of a tendency to dishonest compromise in matters of doctrine, of a disposition towards unworthy compliance in matters of practice, of personal ambition readily served by a men-pleasing habit, even of a base covetousness of sordid gain. All these suggestions of dishonourable conduct seem to underlie the careful, or vehement, or exculpatory, or indignant language of the apostle in his extant letters. He explains to the Corinthians his strangely suspicious versatility. "I am become all things to all men, that I may by all means save

1 Preached on the third Sunday after Epiphany, January 24, 1904, in the Temple.

some." He defends his attitude of tolerance towards the scrupulous "weaker brethren" in Rome and Corinth, and his attitude of intolerance towards the ascetics of Colossae, and the Judaizing ritualists of Galatia, He takes pains to make clear the precautions against dishonesty which he has taken in the matter of the great collection for the Hebrew Christians; he resents and, with some warmth, repudiates the suggestion that he trims his gospel to meet the wishes of his hearers, and occasionally, as in the second epistle to the Corinthians and in the epistle to the Philippians, he is carried by his emotion into eloquent and impassioned apology. Indeed, St. Paul was wont to pour into his teaching such genuine personal conviction, to identify so completely himself and his message, to associate himself so closely with his converts, that the imputation of dishonourable conduct gave him acute pain. "Am I now persuading men or God?" he cries, “or am I seeking to please men? if I were still pleasing men, I should not be a servant of Christ."

The very largeness of the apostle's heart and the singular honesty of his character would, in any case, have exposed him to the suspicions and misconstructions of lesser men; but, perhaps, even more risk of popular mistake arose from the nature of his task

H