ers, especially the great poets, have always held this theory. It is beyond question true. There are several passages in Browning in which this is made very clear. There is no temptation stronger than that toward unbelief. Probably it is the master temptation of our time. Yet the poet shows how it is at bottom faith itself. For he says, speaking for the bishop:

"With me, faith means perpetual unbelief Kept quiet like the snake 'neath Michael's foot Who stands calm just because he feels it writhe.

No, when the fight begins within himself, A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,

Satan looks up between his feet-both tugHe's left, himself, i' the middle: the soul wakes And grows."

The same great poet makes the Pope judge the young priest thus:

"Was the trial sore?

Temptation sharp? Thank God a second time! Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot,

And so be pedestalled in triumph? Pray
'Lead us into no such temptations, Lord!'
Yea, but, O Thou whose servants are the bold,
Lead such temptations by the head and hair,
Reluctant dragons, up to who dares fight,
That so he may do battle and have praise!"

And finally we have this from the same militant poet:

"And so I live, you see,

Go through the world, try, prove, reject,
Prefer, still struggling to effect
My warfare; happy that I can

Be crossed and thwarted as a man.
Not left in God's contempt apart,

With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart.”

So speak the great souls of literature. And the Bible gives us the whole story of God's dealing with mankind on precisely this basis. We need to get something of this heroism, of this tonic into our blood. The old doctrine of perfection through suffering is as true to-day as it ever was, and is more needed to-day than perhaps ever before. We may, nay should be kind and tolerant and gentle and sympathetic and charitable, but we can not afford to put evil

for good and good for evil, or light for darkness and darkness for light. The moral distinctions must be insisted on. And instead of trying to comfort and console the weak by telling them that they are the victims of temperament or environment or heredity, we should strive to get some strength into them, try to nerve them for the struggle, to make them ashamed of themselves, and to bring them into direct relations to Almighty God, who is the source of all spiritual strength. The world can not be saved by any such flabby gospel as that which is now so popular.

THE CANDOR OF THE NEW

TESTAMENT

IN an extremely interesting discussion of this

subject, the Spectator advances a theory that is capable of a wide application. Every one knows that the writers of the Gospels and Epistles told the truth exactly as they understood it, no matter how seriously it reflected on them and their cause. Their weakness and cowardice, their lack of faith, their dullness and blindness, their petty quarrels with one another—all these are given to the world with perfect frankness. When their Master spoke to them of high and holy things, they admit that they took what He said in the natural and materialistic sense, as when He spoke of having meat that they knew not of-His meat being to do the will of God. Again, when He told them that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood, they asked how He could give them His flesh to eat. Even when He told them that "it is the Spirit that quickeneth,"

and that "the flesh profiteth nothing," they still failed to enter into His thought. It may be said in passing that many Christians, after all the centuries that have passed, still adhere to the old materialistic conception held by the disciples before they received the fuller revelation. But the point is that here, as in everything else, the evangelists freely put themselves in the wrong, and do not hesitate to show themselves to the worst advantage. When we think how prone men are to conceal such things in themselves, how often the participators in great events strive to glorify themselves, this uncompromising truth on the part of the New Testament writers seems all the more remarkable. It will not do to explain the phenomenon by saying that these men were inspired. That is true, but they were not controlled. Had they been, there would have been no inconsistencies in the record. Even the slightest mistake in regard to the most trivial thing is enough to overthrow such a theory of inspiration. Indeed, these very inconsistencies have been used by Christian apologists to prove, not the exactness of the record, but the utter honesty of the men who wrote the record.