izing tendency, and the firm advocate of Christian liberty, himself not excepted. (Acts xviii. 21.) Yet the universal Christian consciousness, Greek, Roman and Protestant, of what the Gospel itself is and requires of true believers, has superseded the zealous practice of inspired Apostles and the force of the Lord's own example; and this, too, in virtue of the new, broad, contra-judaizing life and spirit of the Gospel as taught in the writings of these Apostles themselves.

Our Lord, before He celebrated the feast of the Passover for the last time, washed the feet of His disciples and wiped them with the towel wherewith He had girded Himself. Then, when He was set down, He said unto them, "If I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye ought also to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you." (John xiii. 1-17.) Yet in the Christian judgment of the Church, and agreeably to her practice, the Gospel does not demand outward conformity to His example, nor a literal fulfillment of His command.

The first council of Apostles, elders, and the whole Church, held at Jerusalem, decreed, after much disputing, that no greater burden be laid upon believing Gentiles than these necessary things; that they abstain, 1st. From meats offered to idols. 2d. From blood. 3d. From things strangled; and 4th. From fornication. Yet some of these prohibitive decrees have for ages been obsolete. Indeed only the fourth grows so necessarily out of the nature of Christianity that it is of permanent and universal obligation. The third, for example, declares it to be a necessary thing that believers abstain from things strangled. In the course of time, however, though established by the Apostolic Council under the guidance and direction of the Holy Ghost, this decree was superseded by the free spirit of the Gospel, and is now regarded as having no direct binding force on the conscience.* No minister of the Re

*The Roman theory respecting the fixed and unchangeable character of dogmas, and the continuous authority of ecclesiastical decisions, is contradicted by her own practice relatively to the obsolere decrees of the Apostolic Council, than which no council possesses stronger claims to Christian confidence; for the Encyclical Letter states explicitly, It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things. Acts xv. 28.

formed Church would take this Apostolical decree as the basis of a sermon, and enforce the prohibitive requirement upon the consciences of his people, maintaining that it is a sin to eat the flesh of a snared rabbit.

Other instances illustrating the same general principle might be adduced. Indeed the outward, verbal form of the record would throughout serve the purpose of illustrating it. But these are sufficient. These facts show that, in spite of all abstract theories to the contrary, the intuitive sense of the living mind of the Church perceives the generic difference between the nature and spirit of the Gospel, and the letter or outward form of the written word. They show that in the actual history of the Church, fidelity and devotion to the Gospel are not the same as fidelity to the letter of Scripture, nor the same even as mechanical conformity to Apostolic practice and Apostolic decrees. They show that a slavish subjection to the external word of Holy Scripture, and subjection to the particular form of Apostolic practice and teaching that confronts us in the books of the New Testament, may involve a perversion of the Gospel; as this is an order of life in the world that generates and legitimizes forms of practice and teaching other than those which prevailed in the Apostolic age. The facts cited, moreover, illustrate the wide difference between the Gospel and the Scriptures, between the life of the Gospel and the letter of the Scriptures, without in the least degree contradicting the impregnable truth, that Jesus Christ and His salvation are the same yesterday, and to-day, and forever; and that Christianity being a real divine revelation is in itself true and whole, and therefore not susceptible of additions or improvements by the will and reason of men, nor by any supposed subsequent illumination or inspiration of the Holy Ghost.

This prevailing sense of difference between the Gospel and the particular form of the sacred record, manifests itself in the universal practice of the pulpit,-the practice which is commonly called accommodation. Ministers do not as a rule enforce that particular aspect of meaning which they find in the written word. It is not fit. The life of the Church has devel

oped itself into a different character-the times have changed. Hence her wants as is seen and felt, are in many respects not the same as those which prevailed when the Apostles lived and wrote. The Scriptures cannot in consequence be used mechanically. The truths which they teach must be adapted to the present attitude of the Church. This principle every intelligent preacher of the Gospel perceives and acknowledges. He endeavors to adapt scriptural teaching to existing wants. Hence he instinctively searches for a meaning in the Scriptures which is not formally expressed; but which he believes underlies it or is involved in it. Many preachers even transcend these limits. They put a meaning of their own into the Scriptures which will serve their purpose; but which is not in the passage, nor justified by the context.

Is this practice of accommodation a perversion of the sacred Scriptures? We must answer in two ways.

We must answer in the affirmative. The practice perverts the Scriptures, and perverts the Gospel whenever it is arbitrary; whenever it is governed by the individual will, taste or fancy of the minister; or whenever, ignoring the supernatural mystery and order of grace, the accommodation proceeds from a point of observation that is foreign to the objective idea and spirit of the Gospel.

But we must answer also in the negative. The practice of accommodation does not involve a perversion of the Scriptures when, recognizing the living reality and the unchangeable nature of the Gospel, it is determined and properly governed by the Christian faith. Standing in the same objective faith in which the Apostles stood, the minister uses the written word of God in the light of the Spirit by whose inspiration it was indited, and for the same general purpose. But instead of being slavishly bound by the letter, he lays hold of the general truth which the letter teaches, and proclaims the truth in a way which the present posture, relations and circumstances of the Church require. Such a modification and adaptation of the written word is Scriptural. It accords both with the nature of the Gospel, and with the interior reigning spirit of the

430 Lessons of Church Year not a Perversion of Scripture [JULY, Scriptures; the spirit which prompted the particular form in which they were written.

It is on this general evangelical principle that the order of the Church year proceeds. The Church uses the lessons not according to the letter only, which always kills; not simply according to the particular sense which a passage bears in its relation to the context, and the special purpose of the inspired writer; but according to the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus. Recognizing the objective general truth that obtained expression through Apostles in the peculiar language of the New Testament, the Church year appropriates suitable portions of the Scriptural text from the stand-point of this general truth, which is the same for the faith of the Church in every period of her history. In thus appropriating the Scriptural text to the purpose of teaching the Gospel, the original particular meaning gives place to a modified sense,-a sense which is developed from the passage taken in its relation to the entire order of grace, and adapted to the prevailing state of the Church and the world.

Such accommodation of the Scriptures to present needs, the Gospel itself necessitates and legitimizes. So far then from perverting them, the lessons of the Church year, when apprehended and enforced from the stand-point and in the spirit of the Gospel, guard the Scriptures against perversion, and conserve the faith which they teach. The lessons guide, aid and sustain the minister in proclaiming firmly the whole truth of revelation, in opposition to all the false demands of the age.

ART. VII. THE STUDY OF METHOD IN MODERN CHURCH HISTORY.

CHURCH historians generally agree in recognizing three Ages in the history of the Christian Church, the Ancient, the Mediæval, and the Modern. Each of these ages has its own peculiar characteristics. The age of Primitive Christianity, reaching from the founding of the Church to the time of Gregory the Great, or, according to some historians, of Charlemagne, is the age of Christianity in the Græco-Roman Empire. It includes the subordinate periods of the Apostolic, the Persecuted, and the Established Church. To this age belong the founding of the Church on the day of Pentecost, the period of inspiration under the Apostles, the forming of the oecumenical creeds, the production of the primitive liturgies, the settlement of great fundamental doctrines, in all of which the universal Church, Roman, Greek, and Protestant, claims a common patrimony. "The first age presents the immediate union of objectivity and subjectivity; that is, the two great moral principles, on which the individual human life, as well as all history, turns, the authority of the general and the freedom of the individual, appear tolerably balanced, but still only in their first stage, without any clear definition of their relative limits."*

The Medieval Age is the age of Romano-Germanic Catholicism, during which the Church occupies a new field and has under its tutelage new peoples. It has to do now not with ancient, classic, civilization, but with European barbarism. These new barbaric peoples, as they come upon the stage of history, as though summoned by an invisible power, were to be Christianized, and this gave rise to the great mission work of the Middle Age, under such leaders as Columbanus, Boniface, Ansgar and others. It was the age of new empires, the Franko

Schaff's Hist. Apostolic Church.