my example and do not attempt more than you can do, I have devoted my life to the Greek article, I meant well, but it was too much, I should have confined myself to the dative case." The members of the faculty should have all the letters of the alphabet marshalled in solid phalanx after their names in token of their great attainments. Each professor should be recognized as the greatest living authority upon some subject. Accurate and profound scholarship should be the one thing aimed at in this institution. For example, instead of allowing the student to dwell upon the repentance and love set forth in the parable of the prodigal son, the professor should put him to studying the word translated "husks," and tracing the root through all its ramifications in the Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Sclavonic, Sanskrit and all other possible languages, lost in the misty distance. He must also study the carobtree botanically, tracing it through its species, genera and families, and must be able to stand a thorough examination on every related plant in the flora of the world. Then he should go to Palestine and find that husks do actually grow there, and did so grow at the time our Lord had reference. If after that, he will try his own digestive powers on husks and find that they will support life, he will then be prepared to defend the parable from the attacks of infidels, however unable he may be to use it so as to bring men to repentance.

How proud we should all be of such a seminary! How much credit its deep learning would reflect on the denomination it represented! One such institution would be enough for a continent, and we would send to it all the young ministers who are too dry to become effective preachers, that they may be made into critics and become great authorities on all subjects except how to save souls and build up character. To this seminary also should be committed the task of reconciling science with religion. There should be an ample endowment so that the professors be not overworked, but have time for original investigation and for writing books.

Besides this great institution devoted to thorough and profound scholarship, I would have a sufficient number of seminaries devoted to the training of preachers, and whose one aim should be not to teach them things they did not know before, but to make them better preachers than they were before. The functions of a preacher and of a critic are not the same, nor do they require the same sort of training. Prof. Austin Phelps has well said, "a zealous rather than a profound pulpit is the need of the hour."

In my model training-school the Bible should be the great textbook, and other books should be used only as aids to the right understanding of God's Word. And I would have the Scriptures studied, not as a botanist studies plants, taking them to pieces and labeling them, but as a gardener studies them, as living things to be loved and cherished for the life that is in them and for the good they can do. It

may be said of some Bible students, as Emerson said of some naturalists: "They freeze their subject under the wintry light of their understanding." The Scriptures should be studied as a revelation from God, and the student must be made to feel that his great work is to get such hold of Bible truth that he can make it effective among men. He should strive for force more than for accuracy, and to convince men rather than to prove propositions. Dr. Dry-as-dust would be very accurate and very logical, but nobody would be converted under his ministry.

The professors should impress upon the student that the Word of God is given them to believe and to preach rather than to criticise. It is a sword for fighting and not for chemical analysis. Their life work is to preach in such a way as to win souls and to build up the Christian character. Prof. W. C. Wilkinson has stated the whole duty of a minister in the best words possible when he says that the preacher must have but one aim clearly before him and that to bring men to obedience to God. The unconverted are to be brought to accept 'Christ as Lord in repentance, and the Christian to unquestioning obedience to His commandments. This is the whole duty of man-obedience to God-as a soldier obeys his captain, as a child obeys his father.

I would have the students urged to complete, if possible, a thorough course at college before entering the seminary. Particularly should they understand Greek well enough to feel what cannot be translated. They need not be philologists. A man may understand English so as to see the most delicate shades of meaning without being able to trace out the roots of words. By all means let the young minister go through a full College course, even though it cut short his stay in the Seminary. The college sharpens the tools and the seminary teaches how to use them. A man with a well sharpened axe and trusting experience to teach him how to use it, will get more work done than if he knew ever so well how to use his axe that had never been sharpened.

None but those who had proved themselves successful preachers should be made professors in my model institution; for a man cannot teach others to do what he does not know how to do himself. Much that is now taught in theological seminaries I would omit. For example, dogmatic theology should be reduced to the limits of what the students are to believe and teach with a "thus saith the Lord," for every point. They should not be taught all the various false doctrines that have been advocated in the world. The best way to enable a man to combat an error is to fill his head and heart with the opposite truth.

In the library of this seminary and in the books the students are advised to read, I would have nothing heretical, however brilliant it might

be. Nay, the more brilliant it was the less would I have it, for it would be the more dangerous to immature minds. The professors should not imagine that they can counteract poison in the mind of the student so that it will do no harm. Better, a thousand times better, put poison in his food, trusting to giving him an antidote afterwards. I know students who have been seriously injured by books their professors advised them to read. The books should be thoroughly devout, thoroughly consistent with God's Word, and the ablest and best to be had, with that limitation. Students should be taught that working pastors must read, but their time is short and they can afford to read only the best. The preacher must learn to deny himself the pleasures of polite scholarship and confine his acquirements to such things as are useful in giving him power with God and with man. Wisdom he needs, intellectual power, but he has no time to acquire stores of knowledge. He must learn how to get at the meaning of Scripture, so he can study the Bible for himself and bring to the people from that great storehouse "things new and old." He must also learn human nature, so he can get hold of the hearts of men and lead them to obedience to God.

It should be the duty of the professors to give the students moral and religious as well as mental training. All egotism and conceit should be taken out of them. They should be cured of "sensitiveness," and guarded against envy, selfishness and unreasonableness. A graduate of this seminary in after life should be quick to see when the time to resign has come, and not injure the cause by outstaying his usefulness. Nay, he should have wisdom and grace to avoid the things that would render his resignation desirable. They that bear the vessels of the Lord must have clean hands and true, brave hearts; so true that all deceit shall be impossible to them and all maneuvering and trickery-so brave that they shall know no fear, no jealousy no malice.

Since by the foolishness of preaching men are to be saved, it is preaching which is the most important work of a minister, and therefore his time in the seminary should be chiefly devoted to learning to preach. The students should be required to preach to actual congregations, and to present before the professor and the class only such sermons as have been thus preached. A sermon prepared for the classroom would be designed to meet the objections of critics rather than to impress truth. The sermons should be sometimes expository and sometimes topical, sometimes written and sometimes extempore. The students must be made to feel that the one aim of a sermon is to hold forth God's Word in such a way as to save sinners and to build up godly character in Christians. The professor should commend, not the most finished production, but the sermon which shows the most complete self-forgetfulness and most earnest desire to make men be

lieve the truth. The polishing of essays and "doing justice to the subject" and etymological hair-splitting should be left to Dr. Dryas-dust and his students. The professors should see that the sermons are thoroughly orthodox, that one doctrine is not dwelt on to the exclusion of others, that the words have the ring of earnest conviction, as becomes embassadors, and that the obvious design is, not to be eloquent or beautiful or entertaining, but to impress truth of vital importance upon the hearts and minds of the hearers. Every sermon must make God the centre-the alpha and the omega. An intelligent Southern woman, who had heard many able and eminent Northern ministers, said of them-"They do not put God in their sermon enough.” The graduates of this model seminary should not be open to such a criticism. Special instruction should be given in the use of illustrations. If an eloquent preacher I once heard had graduated at this seminary he would have learned that a sermon is not to be a string of touching and beautiful stories very dramatically told. The professor would have cut them out with ruthless hand and would have taught him that illustrations must not bear the proportion to truth which sack bore to bread in the celebrated bill against Falstaff.

The only effective way to learn to preach is to preach, and the students should be engaged in practical gospel work while pursuing their seminary course. This will enable them to be self-sustaining, to a great extent, and will train them to be self-reliant: for, while it is right for young men to receive help while preparing for the ministry, it is better if they can make their own way. I would, therefore, have my model institution located in a large city, where there are opportunities for ministerial labor, and where the students can gain a practical as well as a theoretical knowledge of preaching. No student from this seminary would be like the graduate who became pastor of a village church, and wrote to a neighboring minister: "Do come at once and help me, for a revival is about to break out on my hands, and I don't know what to do with it!"

No preacher can move men to obedience to God unless he speak as one having authority. He must believe what he preaches with every fibre of an earnest heart, or he will not persuade others. He should not say "if," or "perhaps," or "it may be," but "yea, and verily, and amen." He must not be afraid of condemning sin, or commending holiness too strongly. Some preachers are so fearful of making too strong statements that they say nothing with any edge to it. Dr. Dry-as-dust never says a rash thing. Instead of declaring with emphasis that the radii of a circle are and must be, always and everywhere, equal, he would calmly suggest that, "at times, and within certain limits, the radii of a circle have a tendency to be equal !"

Every graduate in my model seminary should be a more earnest believer in the sovereign God, the atoning Savior, the infallible Bible,

and all the other truths of revealed religion, than when he entered. No professor should be allowed to retain his chair, the effect of whose teaching was to weaken the student's faith in these things. Each graduate must be a better reader, a better speaker, and a more vigorous preacher for his course in the institution, He must also be braver and truer than before; more conscious of his utter dependence on the Holy Spirit, and more on fire with zeal to do with his might the one work to which he has been called-that of bringing men to faith in Christ and obedience to God.

Such, then, is my idea. Let us have one institution in America, presided over by Dr. Dry-as-dust, where critics are made, of whom we can be proud as the greatest living authorities, who shall write ponderous tomes and learned articles, and whose occasional sermons are as finished and polished as an elephant's tusk, and do justice to the subject. The library should contain everything ever written on theological questions, sound and unsound: and the faculty should be able to give an answer longer, deeper and more incomprehensible than his heresies to every Spinoza and Comte and Strauss and Spencer of them all. And in each of our large cities I would have a seminary whose one aim is the training of preachers who shall give their lives to the ministry of the Word.

IV.-SABBATH-SCHOOL BIBLE STUDY.

NO. II.

BY PRESIDENT D. S. GREGORY, D.D.

THE STUDY OF THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE AS WHOLES.

THE aim of the present paper is to outline a method of studying the books of the Bible as organic wholes, as suggested in the previous paper. This implies, of course, a stage of Bible study beyond those ordinarily pursued and appropriate to advanced Bible classes. It also implies

A NEW POINT OF VIEW,

from which to regard and study the Word of God. It is our conviction that the Church is preparing to advance to this new point of view. This will become more apparent by a brief presentation of the

old and the new.

When, in the troublous times of the middle of the Sixteenth Century, Robert Stephens, during a journey on horseback from Paris to Lyons, divided up the New Testament into verses, he accomplished a feat in vivisection which, like all successful performances in that direction, left the once-living body dismembered and, so far as might be, dead. From the time of that mechanical division on, through centuries, the Word of God, for the average reader, consisted of so many verses, connected very much as the grains in a sand-heap are con