place. The Japanese believed himself able to dispense with all the creeds hitherto formulated. He would have none of them. He did not care to accept even the Apostles' Creed. He would make his own, from the Bible alone, as others assumed that they had done. He would do with religion and the Church as he had done with constitutions and naval systems and posts and women's frocks. He would examine, adopt, modify, reject, or assimilate as he judged well, in religion as he did in educational schemes. The spirit of nationalism abroad always demanded Japan for the Japanese. It has never departed from that fundamental principle in individual or national action. This will explain what seems often to be a vacillation in the Japanese and has made them to be considered a very fickle race. The misapprehension of the foreigner of the intent of the Japanese in the intermediate stage of his progress is the only ground for it. The Japanese Church to-day thinks itself sufficiently developed to take charge absolutely of its own affairs, if only the foreigner will give over his money without dictating the uses to which it is to be put.

All this may appear as the precociousness of an unbearded youth, and that element does enter into it; but it is well to bear in mind that a spirit of self-reliance is of all things that which we should hail in an oriental. A spirit of patriotism should be respected anywhere. We may differ with the Christians of Japan as to whether they have been long enough in pupilage to secure them against heresy or wasteful energy in things ecclesiastic; but the spirit of self-poise and self-direction is inherent in the problem of self-support and self-propagation. Whatever we think of it, nationalism, or patriotism, is one of the forces we have to reckon with, whether we like it or not, in the propagation of the Gospel in foreign lands, whether it be progressive as in Bulgaria and Japan, or obstructively conservative, as in Turkey, where the government will not so much as allow a constitution of a Christian Endeavor Society because it might train the young people in constitutional government.

ZENANA BAPTISM.

Ir has been evident for some years past that the Church must, sooner or later, face the question of providing baptism for women who have become Christians in heathen lands, where social customs of an inexorable order immure them in zenanas. It is idle to force an issue with the custom under present conditions, and it is far from sure that any sudden and severe modification would be in any wise prudent. Sir William Muir, who has made as thorough a study of social conditions of India as any living man, and who is a warm friend of Christian progress, expressed probably the judgment of all experienced persons in Hindostan, that any serious modification of the purdah system would be deleterious to good morals. In the simpler society of the Hindoos before the invasion of the Moslem rulers seclusion of women was not essential to the preservation of the respectability of the family; but the ruthless and disastrous conduct of the Mohammedans as a conquering race introduced such environments as

simply compelled the Hindoos to find in enforced privacy of females protection of the purity of the home. The whole moral tone was lowered by the presence of this freebooter in morals. The order of society has become fixed on the plane of nonassociation of the sexes. Christianity dare not seek to lower moral fastidiousness among people who are without sufficient development of moral resistance to justify the removal of artificial restraints. It would, under existing environments, compromise the character of the minister, as well as of the inmates of the homes, were he to enter these precincts to administer baptism to the women. They cannot leave the privacy shielded by the purdah. Perhaps there are twenty thousand women in the zenanas of India to-day who have become Christians and are unbaptized by virtue of the embarrassment of this social condition, which, as we have said, it is not wise at present to materially or rapidly change. These women desire baptism as the complete expression of the Christian life they have adopted and as conducive to it. What will the Church do with the question? It is already a large one and being augmented daily. It is not only what we shall do to-day, but to-morrow. A great movement is sweeping over the land, and tens of thousands of women are annually coming to Christ. Must those of them who have accepted Jesus Christ as their Saviour, through the ministries of women who can enter their abodes, be denied baptism? Shall the Church recognize lay baptism and allow authorized women visitors to baptize these women in their homes? Shall they be taught to believe that baptism is a matter of indifference, or that it is a matter which requires that they must violate their standards of existing society and their own sense of moral propriety and womanly decency, to secure it at the hands of an ordained minister? It is no small problem, and the Churches in India are probably the only competent parties to judge of the proper course to be pursued. The Calcutta Missionary Conference, composed of the missionaries of all Churches in that city and vicinity, meets monthly for the consideration of missionary questions. It is the largest body of missionaries meeting regularly in the world. They have recently given this matter of zenana baptisms most careful consideration in at least two sessions of their body. The matter was also under consideration at the Bombay Decennial Conference. There is not uniformity of view, by any means, among the missionaries themselves; but there is a deepening conviction that the issue must be squarely met ere long, and that meanwhile provision should be made in some form to cover cases of special character, but that the Hindoo home must be kept inviolate.

THIBET is the only country which can now be said to be closed to the Christian evangelist. Miss Taylor, partly in disguise, has within a year crossed China and gained entrance into the eastern edges of Thibet. Miss Taylor seems so convinced that something can be done in a missionary way that she is in England organizing a Thibet mission on the plan of the China Inland Mission.

FOREIGN OUTLOOK.

SOME LEADERS OF THOUGHT.

H. G. Ibbeken. This scholar has made himself a leader by his ex egetical studies. Of these his researches concerning the Sermon on the Mount are the most thorough. He has produced a work on this theme worthy of a place alongside of that by Tholuck. Ibbeken holds that the Sermon on the Mount was intended to be to the Christian system what the giving of the law by Moses was to the Mosaic system. This, he thinks, was indicated, first of all, by the ascent of Jesus to a mountain for the giving of his evangelical law. The thought that he went up into the mountain that he might be the more easily heard, as also that he might furnish for his auditors a more impressive environment, he rejects as insufficient. But he argues that Matthew's entire portraiture of the life of our Lord is governed by the thought of making it a reflection of the history of Israel. He thinks that to Matthew, as well as to Paul, the important personalities and facts of Israelitish history are types of Jesus and his life. And especially is this parallel apparent to and through the Sermon on the Mount. There is a parallel between the miraculous birth of our Lord and Isaac, through whose birth the Israelitish people were made possible; between the emigration of Jacob and his sons to Egypt and the flight of Jesus's parents to Egypt with their child; between the murder of the innocents by Herod and of the Israelitish boys by Pharaoh; between the baptism of Jesus and the baptism of the Israelites in crossing the Red Sea; between the forty days' temptation of Jesus and the forty years' wandering of the Israelites in the wilderness. He closes his argument with a parallel between the congregation to which Moses proclaimed the law and that to which Jesus spoke. The latter does not, indeed, include all Israel, but it did include, he thinks, a sufficient number and from a sufficiently wide and varied circuit to fairly represent the whole Jewish people. But Ibbeken does not draw from all this the conclusion that Matthew invented the history. He believes, rather, that the history of Israel was, in fact, a type of the history of Jesus, and that Matthew simply follows the facts in the case. He argues his theory with great ingenuity. But its practical value is so doubtful as to prevent its taking hold upon the deeper elements of the soul.

Edgar Loening. While not a theologian, his investigations as a professor of law have led him into the department of early ecclesiastical polity; and because he can look with the eyes of a lawyer and without any dogmatic or ecclesiastical prepossessions his conclusions will have all the greater weight. According to him the earliest bishops and presbyters were, at least in some places, identical. The bishop was neither a priest nor a ruler, but a servant of the Church. There is very

little evidence that the early Church adopted either the form of government in vogue in the synagogue or that employed by the heathen religious societies, although temporarily at first the organization resembled that of the synagogue. The government of the Church grew directly out of the spirit and needs of Christianity. The bishop was the expression of the unity of government and of doctrine. But as late as the middle of the second century there was no external bond of union between the Churches of the various cities, although all the elements were then at hand which were necessary to the development of the Roman Catholic Church. The distinction between the ministry and the laity had its origin very early. It was supposed that the bishops, presbyters, and deacons received a special charism by the laying on of hands at their entrance upon office. It was their duty to feed and care for the flock, and to preserve the doctrine in its purity, and to exhort those to repentance who had violated their religious or moral obligations. They were without definite salary, and might follow a temporal calling for support. But support at the hands of the congregation became more common as the congregations increased in size and wealth. As this custom grew the bishops, presbyters, and deacons were more and more separated from the masses of the Christians into a distinct class. The belief that the first bishops were ordained by the apostles increased the respect in which they were held, and led to the expectation that they should become the true preservers of the faith. The introduction of the idea of the Old Testament priesthood into the Christian ministry still further increased the power of the clergy. All this shows that the Protestant conception of church government is correct as against Romanisin, and the Low Church idea correct as against the High Church.

Johannes Draseke. It is a common mistake that the critical spirit which is abroad in Germany is confined chiefly to the Bible. It is a still more common mistake that the motive of criticism is the discovery of error in the book and the overthrow of the faith in the supernatural. In fact, the purpose of all criticism of written documents is to test the value of their contents, and the Bible is but one of many documents which pass under the critic's hand. The greater importance of the Bible alone makes it the more frequent subject of critical treatment. An illustration of the work of the critic in another field is found in Dräseke's researches among early patristic literature. It is not enough for a critic like Dräseke to have in his possession a document whose text has been carefully edited and accredited to a certain author. He must have proof, not only that the text is approximately authentic, that is, essentially the words written by the original author; he must have proof, also, that the document originated with the person to whom it is attributed. In testing this tradition is worth something, but internal evidence must correspond. For example, Dräseke takes up two documents directed against Apollinarius, Bishop of Laodicea, and handed down to us under the

name of Athanasius, and undertakes to prove: 1. That the two documents could not have been composed by the same person; 2. That they could not, in spite of tradition, have been written by Athanasius; and 3. That they originated in Alexandria, and were probably written by Didymus and his pupil, Ambrose. Such criticism is valuable to all who wish to be accurate. No careful thinker wishes to attribute to one author what really sprang from another, especially if by investigation it It is all the more necessary to is within his power to ascertain the truth. proceed on critical principles in the use of early literature because it was not regarded as wrong in those days to attach the name of a celebrated author to a work in order to give it weight with the reader, and also because, even where no intentional deception was practiced, the real name of the author was often lost, and it was left to conjecture to determine the authorship of the document. Dräseke is one of the foremost of those who have attempted in recent years to furnish the material for a correct history of early Christian literature.

RECENT THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE.

"Zwingli's Theology," by Dr. August Baur. Until this work appeared no attempt at a comprehensive and critical presentation of the theology of the great Swiss reformer had been made. In the work of Dr. Baur we have a history of the theological development of Zwingli from his earliest years to the period when he completely broke with Roman Catholicism and his evangelical ideas were fully formed. This is followed by a systematic presentation of the fully developed theology, including his antagonism to the views of the radicals, the Anabaptists, and Luther. The only point we can here take up is his view of the parallel which D'Aubigné draws between the sickness of Zwingli and the bitter penitence of Luther. Baur declares that the comparison is more brilliant than correct. In the anxiety of his heart at Erfurt he was a seeker who was compelled to find salvation in Christ by a painful breach of all the means of grace known to the Church. Zwingli never experienced anything like this, but by a gradual process of events and studies had been led to a knowledge of salvation and saving truth before he was attacked by the plague. Zwingli himself never attributed to his sickness of 1519 any such significance. His poems of that period disclose nothing of the kind, but rather bear witness that during his sickness the certainty of a gracious relationship with God was a source of consolation to him. Rather was this period of suffering one in which he personally tested the experience which he had previously attained in quiet and regular development. Yet it must be confessed that while his sickness was not necessary to bring him low before God that he might find salvation it did have the effect of leading him to a higher appreciation of his future obligation. That he was spared from death made a powerful imHe looked upon the divine favor by which he was

pression upon him.