and self-sacrificing character of his efforts for the gospel, there is a larger presumption even than that based on practical results that he has a real place in the development of the life of Christ in his Church. It has been a favorite habit with the opponents of the Christian Church to point out that Christ stood, most of his life, in relations of opposition to the religious organizations of his time. This is both true and untrue. As a statement of Christ's personal attitude toward the men who stood in the places of leadership, thoroughly corrupt in character, unsympathetic, selfish, and wholly lost to the spiritual obligations of their positions, it is true to say that he spent most of his time in the opposition. But as descriptive of Jesus' attitude toward the temple and its services, the ordinances of the Jews and the religious life and practices of the great body of his countrymen, it is misleading and false. Even St. Paul, the most iconoclastic of the early teachers of the gospel, held firm and true to the pride of his race and training in the Jewish religion. To the Jews there was to him forever an advantage because to them had been committed the oracles of God. St. Peter went simply one step further than Paul. Paul conceded to the Jews precedence because of their possession of the oracles of God; Peter simply placed the ordinances of God on the same basis with the oracles. This was an error. The Word remains, the ordinances perish with the using. The one is the breath and mind of God; the other must often be modified by the hardness of the hearts of those whom God would make the custodians of his truth. But St. Peter's principle as a principle was as good as Paul's, and in the opinion of many was as sound in the application. Oracles and ordinances are not so far apart as it might seem; in fact, one might argue with considerable show of success that ordinances were the oracles in practice.

St. Peter, therefore, by the natural movement of his mind became an ecclesiastic. His theology is the theology of an ecclesiastic. His appeals are the appeals of a mind moved with a lofty sense of the necessity and supreme value of the church discipline and order. Whether the development of the Petrine idea in its later, especially its mediæval,

form is to be ascribed to the apostle is a matter concerning which there must always be differences of opinion, but there can be no doubt that it was under St. Peter's strong and vigorous conception of a churchly life and a churchly authority that the Church gathered itself into the compact mass which so resolutely faced the persecutions of heathendom only a few centuries later. If Paul's teaching and message gave the individual disciple a sublime sense of his personal worth and spiritual freedom, it was St. Peter's that gave him the sense of Christian solidarity which made him everywhere look for a united front against the assaults of godless men and persecuting rulers. And the idea of solidarity, of unity, is no less a productive idea than the idea of freedom. The enthusiasm for humanity is not to make us forget our duties, nor our love for the fatherland. No rightly constituted man forgets the soil out of which he sprang. If in Paul's life there gleamed always the splendor of a coming kingdom, wherein all were kings and priests, in Peter's there was always the majestic picture of the elders of Jewish history and tradition, the mighty prophets and seers of old. If the one was happiest in the open forest where God himself had reared the stately temples of oak and pine and fir, the other could not forget the glistening temple front and the solemn march of the priests, and the stately presentation of the nation to God for forgiveness by its authoritative high priest. Where the one represented the centrifugal form of individualism and democracy, the other represented the centripetal force of concentrated authority and fixed tradition. Both had their proper note in the early Church, and both were men of God.

It is possible, under the sway of a science which is destroying many of our most cherished illusions, under the influence of a literature which has gained in beauty and exactness of form what it has lost of impressional significance and power under the disintegrations of thought which leave us less theology than we ever had before, that perhaps we may with wisdom make more than we have of our church order and life. Certain it is that order and form must ever be the proper channels for the expression of the religious moods of

so complex a civilization as the world seems now to be entering upon. Of all calamities to which an emancipated intellect and spirit are subject, the malady of rampant no-churchism is the most pitiful and barren. Its natural fruits are sterility of intellect, loss of spiritual responsiveness, and the extinction of the higher sensibilities of heart which are the redeeming traits of mankind. To base such a life upon a theory of gospel freedom is to crucify Christ anew and to pervert the sublimest of sacrifices to the lowest of personal inclinations. The practical aspects of the case fully bear out this analysis. Where there is no church there is usually little or no religion. Where there are no ordinances there is no conviction. Where there is no Bible to preach there is no truth to maintain, and where there is no Christ proclaimed there is no Christ to serve. It is to the ecclesia, the church, the assembly of the men and women of Christ, to whom in special and peculiar measure these trusts are committed. And the figure of that small body from whose loins all of our Christian types have emerged, who at least once in his life uttered the final constitutive principle of union in the announcement of the supreme and final word of our Master, and the great Head of the Church, was the man who said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." It was a truth which flesh and blood could not and did not discover. It came from the Father in heaven. It was the filial recognition of the fatherhood through the Son. It is the uniting clause of all souls that have felt the divine fatherhood and have come into the relation of sonship and love. It was not the utterance of a rebel against a spiritual order and an organized fellowship of service and love, but the discerning comment of a churchman in Christ uttering the basal truth of the Christian life. Upon this faith the Church has been built. Against this Church the gates of hell have not been able to prevail. On its corner-stone shall ever be graven the name, and in its heart ever be cherished the love, of the apostle of churchmanship who first gave it utterance.

ST. THOMAS THE BELIEVING

RATIONALIST

JOHN XX. 29.

THERE are few terms in the vocabulary of modern Biblical learning and research which have had more terrors for Christian believers than the term "rationalist." To say that a scholar was a rationalist was for many merely a euphemistic way of saying that he was an unbeliever of some kind. The content which had been given and which still is given to faith was such that any inclination toward a rationalistic frame of mind was held to be evidence of spiritual degeneracy and the beginning of the decline of faith itself. And it must be confessed there was much to support this view. Those scholars and others who made the most use of the term, or who rejoiced most to be known as rationalists, were least prominent in the spiritual life and the practical activities of the Church. They appeared to be out of sympathy with the struggling masses of the Church for light and truth. Where these sought comfort and encouragement, they were usually received with a sneer or a rebuff. Humble and unquestioning faith in the final truth and authority of the gospel without a long career of antagonism, rebellion and interrogation was held by these rationalists to be evidence either of mental weakness or an unmanly spirit. And thus it came about that schools and seminaries controlled by humble and spiritually minded men warned their students against rationalism almost with the same vehemence and anxiety that they warned them against infidelity. They took pronounced steps against the encouragement of the habit of interrogation. They made strenuous efforts to confirm the feeble knees and lift up the hands that were hanging down by violent asser

tions concerning the nature of the Bible and the authority of its truths. In many cases they went so far that the recoil on the part of those whom it was designed thus to impress and strengthen in the faith was very much greater than it could possibly have been had they been freely acquainted with the writings of these rationalists themselves.

But this terror has almost entirely passed away. The term "rationalism" has grown along with other things. To say that a man is a rationalist in Christian thought in these days is no impeachment either of his character or his faith. It may still mean that he holds certain views which are not the common possession of all Christians; but it does not invalidate his claim to Christian fellowship or support. Indeed, we have all become rationalists in a sense. The desire of us all for evidence by which our belief can be confirmed, or otherwise made more tenable, is so strong that even the daily press has taken to printing elaborate accounts of any new discoveries which have any bearing on the problems of Christian belief. Our most conservative teachers have given us the example and inspiration of weighing and sifting evidence which has made us all in a measure rationalistic investigators of the gospel history. Our very methods of studying God's Word have taken on this general intellectual form and type. We believe, but we believe because we have made the reasons for our belief a part of it. We are steadily translating our religious life and beliefs into the terms of all our other knowledge. We have found that we cannot have one rule of evidence in the so-called secular portion of our lives, and another in the religious. We know now that belief and life are inseparably associated. It is no longer a question with us as to what we shall believe, but whether we are justified in believing what we do believe. We are more afraid than we used to be of taking sacred things into our hands and making sweeping assertions about matters of which at very best we can know but little. We are more hospitable to those who bring us light, from whatsoever source they derive it. We are learning to prove all things, and I hope are at the same time trying to hold fast to that which is good. This is a real