our spiritual nomenclature has been made to grow up from and out of this fertile soil, is the main purpose of the writer in preparing these essays. For nearly forty years he has resided in this land, in daily communion with its scenes and scenery, and in personal contact with those external and physical influences which suggested so large a part of our religious language. In this way, and to this extent only, can he pretend to any special qualification for the task he has undertaken. The more recondite, but rich field of philological research he leaves to the lexicographer, the grammarian, and the professional critic, and deals mainly with biblical language in its secondary and popular sense. His aim is to show by what process of analogy, of contrast, or otherwise, things physical and mundane come to signify and illustrate things spiritual and heavenly. That the essays are very imperfect the writer is painfully conscious, but he ventures to give them to the public, in the hope that with all their deficiencies they may impart fresh interest to the devotional study of the word of God.

An additional thought or two may not be out of place in these introductory remarks. It is possible that the fundamental idea which underlies this whole discussion may be questioned, or even denied. There may be some who still believe that from the very beginning man was miraculously endowed with a rich and largely developed spiritual language. The author of "Paradise Lost" represents Adam and Eve even in the garden, as holding high converse not only with each other, but also with angelic visitants, and with the Infinite Creator himself, whom no man hath seen, or can see. But, although this may be cheerfully granted to the poet, as a necessary part of the machinery of his magnificent poem, it cannot be accepted as historic truth on this subject. Relegating therefore this theory to the domain of romance, to which alone it belongs, and reverently assigning to superhuman aid whatever of linguistic endowment was required to enable our first parents to meet the exigencies of their unique condition, we may be allowed to prosecute. undis

turbed, our inquiries on the lower level of human history and experience.

Philologists with one consent teach us that human language, even in its primary and mundane sphere, is of very slow growth. Some of them demand many thousand years for its development. But upon this debatable ground we need not enter. Sufficient for our purpose is the admitted fact that, in the infancy of society, human language is quite limited in its range, and material in character of the earth earthly. As in other matters, so here, necessity is the mother of invention. At first men seek only names for things with which their physical senses and wants are conversant. Hence any primitive language is material, rather than spiritual; physical, not metaphysical. This fact presented one of the greatest difficulties to be encountered and overcome before a divine revelation, such as man needed, was possible. The invisible and immaterial had to be made known through a clumsy and material vehicle. Holy men of God, though moved and guided by the Holy Ghost, were nevertheless compelled to employ the common language of mankind, and to describe the world within by the world without, the soul by the body, heaven by earth, and even the invisible God by frail man. Examples of this occur in the very beginning of the Bible: "God said let there be light"; and again, "God saw the light that it was good"; thus endowing the Almighty with our vocal organs and optic apparatus. And, so from the commencement to the close of the sacred volume, we read of his head, his hands, his feet, his arm, his finger, his eye, his car, his heart, etc.; and emotions, words, and works appropriate to these various members of the human body are fearlessly ascribed to him. This is not only natural, but inevitable. We see with the eye, hear with the ear, work with the hand, and speak with the tongue; and, as action without these instruments is to us impossible, we transfer the same to God, forgetting, or seeming to forget, that he needs no such instrumentalities; that he can and does act wholly independent of them. But with

the mind fully aware of the tendency of such language to materialize the Deity in our conceptions of him, we nevertheless find it impossible to adopt any other. We can scarcely think of, and still less speak about, God without using these physical, corporeal terms. Hence it is that children must make a long advance in mental culture ere they can escape from this physical image of God. And, as in the infancy of society all men are children in this respect, their God will be merely a very great man. He sees vastly farther than we do, but yet he does really see. His sense of hearing may be infinitely more acute than ours, yet is it a real sense; and so of all other human attributes and faculties ascribed to him in the Bible. And it may not be amiss for each one, however intellectually cultivated, to inquire whether there may not still be some image of God floating in the imagination, vastly refined it may be, and endowed with atributes co-extensive with the universe, but still a real, substantive image. If so, our Jehovah is only a most marvellous man. This is not a matter of minor importance, God himself being judge. On no other point are his admonitions and warnings so minute and emphatic.

"Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves (for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire) lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of any thing that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath. the earth; and lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven" (Deut. iv. 15). This comprehensive and most earnest admonition is by no means superfluous at the present time, and never will be. We learn from history that idolatry is the religious heresy which man

kind has ever been most prone to embrace; and from the Bible that this is the one thing which the Lord most intensely abhors. Take good heed; we are always in danger of this kind of pollution.

A similar caution is equally applicable and needful in regard to our ideas about the kingdom of heaven and the nature of true religion in the soul of man. The same difficulty in human language meets us. It has a mundane, physical basis, easily misunderstood, which has in fact been very generally perverted so as to teach ruinous error. Thus the Jews could not divest the Messiah's kingdom of those external worldly elements with which the earth-born language of the prophets seemed to invest it. Even the apostles, under the immediate instruction of the King himself, learned slowly and with difficulty, that this kingdom was spiritual, not temporal; not of this world, but of heaven. Nor have succeeding ages been essentially wiser in this fundamental matter. To this hour the vast majority of nominal Christians do not understand the peculiar language of the kingdom any better than did the ancient Jews. It is of the utmost concernment, therefore, that we so study the holy oracles as to escape these seductive but fatal errors. The Bible is a rich storehouse of histories, parables, prophecies, proverbs, precepts, prayers, psalms, and hymns. It contains an endless variety of figure and metaphor and symbol, selected and set forth with superhuman skill, to reveal and illustrate the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven. To the obvious and the literal, there is a hidden and higher meaning; and if we cannot discover this, we do not truly comprehend the book. Our present essays may, it is hoped, afford some aid in this important study.1

1 Max Müller in one of his Lectures on the Science of Religion, has some profound remarks on this general subject. "Ancient language," he says, "is a difficult instrument to handle, particularly for religious purposes. It is impossible in human language to express abstract ideas except by metaphor, and it is not too much to say that the whole dictionary of ancient religion is made up of metaphor. With us these metaphors are all forgotten. We speak of spirit without thinking of breath; of heaven, without thinking of the sky, etc. But

There is one aspect of this general subject of such vital importance that the writer desires to present it with special distinctness and emphasis. Properly treated it will form a valid and cumulative argument for the reality of divine revelation. The testimony which this study gives to this fundamental problem is, to a certain extent, the complement of that which the material universe bears to a Creator. The numberless evidences of design in the visible creation necessarily imply the hand of an all-wise Designer, and they constitute the basis of our natural theology. So, likewise, do the countless arrangements devised and carried into effect through long ages for this specific purpose testify to the reality of a higher and a heaven-taught theology. Nor does the fact that there are unexpected obscurities, and to us even inexplicable difficulties, in the outworking of the scheme of divine revelation, disturb our faith; for similar perplexities abound in the material creation. But in neither case should they be allowed to unsettle our confidence that all has been devised and guided by him whose thoughts and ways are high above ours as the heavens are above the earth, and infinitely more wise. We cannot, of course, discuss in this place, or even allude to, the entire list of these divine arrangements. Indeed, our programme restricts us mainly to one class of them to those, namely, by which an adequate spiritual language has been provided. On this limited field of inquiry the following propositions will indiin ancient languages every one of these words, nay every word that does not refer to sensuous objects, is in a chrysalis stage, half material and half spiritual, rising and falling in its character according to the varying capacities of the speakers and hearers." Max Müller illustrates, at considerable length, the processes through which ancient religious teachers had to grope their way in painful search for adequate names for their ideas about God and spiritual things; and adds: "The language of antiquity is the language of childhood; and we, ourselves, when we try to reach the Infinite and the Divine by means of mere abstract terms, are but like children trying to place a ladder against the sky. The 'parler infantine,' in religion is not extinct; it never will be. . . . . In all our religion, and in the language of the New Testament, there are many things which disclose their true meaning to those only who know what language is made of; who have not only cars to hear, but a heart to understand the real meaning of parables."