III. CHRISTOLOGICAL THINKING. BY REV. J. I. SWANDER, D.D. Doubtless many of the readers of this REVIEW, as they enter upon the present new measure of time, acknowledge that it is meet, right and their bounden duty that they should give thanks to God for the lives and labors of those immortal pathfinders who contributed to its pages during the last half of the nineteenth century, and blazed the way for us through the modern wilderness of sentimental abstraction out into the broad and open fields of a better mode of Christian and scientific thought. Upon this plane we now stand, and from this more central point of view we may now survey the knowable regions round about, and sweep a larger field of theology, philosophy and science. They helped to make it possible for us to occupy this commanding position; their giant faith in the invisible God brought out and made more clearly visible the objective realities of the invisible world: Their mental perspicuity and logical acuteness helped forward the solution of problems which had hitherto defied the best efforts of many scholarly men. Indeed time would fail us in any attempt to measure the swelling current and widening circles of their influence in moulding, enlarging and enriching the storehouse of the world's knowledge. Therefore, in the paraphrased language of Tennyson, we might "Talk no more of their renown But in God's great Cathedral leave them, Than any wreath that man can weave them." These men, the majority of whom have entered into their reward, yet speak. Their utterances now, as during their days in the flesh, are not so much in the loud thunders of Jupiter, as in the semi-tones of that still small voice so often found in sweet ac cord with the diapason of God's great universe. Their names will continue to sparkle upon some of the brightest pages of Christian literature. Their work will live in the records of the last half century of America's most incisive educational activity. They helped to found and man and manage some of those less pretentious colleges and seminaries of learning whose mode of thinking and manner of apprehending God's revelation of eternal truth has fully entitled them to the proud distinction they have merited among some of the more historic educational institutions of the American continent. With sincere appreciation of their valuable services, we would make a pious pilgrimage to the graves of those departed worthies, "We'd deck their tombs with flowers, The rarest ever seen, And rain our tears in showers To keep them fresh and green." We enter into possession of the They have entered into rest. rich inheritance which they have left to their successors in labor and responsibility. May this valuable possession remain with us until it shall be transmitted by us as an "inheritance undefiled, incorruptible and that fadeth not away." Among the chief elements of worth is the commanding centrality of position which they occupied in their searches and researches after truth-a posi tion, the proper occupancy of which affords us an advantageous survey of the whole field of warranted human investigation--a survey limited only by the limitations that bound the categories of time and space, and the equally embarrassing limitations that circumscribe the narrow circle of our knowledge. And yet a sense of these barriers should not be permitted to drive us into the convulsions of hopeless despondency. Occupying the proper position of legitimate inquiry, everything within the compass of time and space belongs to us as devout students-at least to the extent of the means at hand, and our ability to use those means in our efforts to solve the problems lying within these catagories. In this position of commanding eminence, we propose to make the most of it. No pent-up Utica will be allowed to contract our limited powers. Consistent courage to the front! Cowards to the rear! We are not disposed to be found among those who draw back to the charnel house of dead traditions; neither do we propose any attempt to spring forward with a radical bound or fly upward in a silly effort to scrape the skies for truths not yet revealed to the children of men. We acknowledge no new sun in the heavens which are of old, but hail with new joy the recent risings of the old luminary. With justifiable courage we shall move forward in the confidence that all growing revelations of truth in the latitudes and longitudes, and attitudes and profunditudes of time and space may be consistently summoned to pass before our growing vision. Mention has been made of the limitations placed upon our ability to solve some of the problems which seem to challenge our attention. Some of these limitations may be measurably removed. One means of their removal may be found within ourselves and employed among ourselves. Teacher and students keep too far apart. Although they are not identical, they should come more and more to regard each other as reciprocally interdependent. Indeed, they should dwell within the same personal temple and under the same dome of thought. What God has joined together let not man put asunder. The man as a lecturer dare not divorce himself from himself as an auditor. We make proof of the apostolicity of our calling by our diligence as disciples. Only as we continue to delve after the rudiments of knowledge are we able to spread our pinions and soar away into the eminence of successful apostleship. Probably it was Spurgeon who said that when the teacher ceases to be a learner he is ready to be put to bed with a spade. The ideal professor of the twentieth century must be primarily a student and yet no less a teacher. Why should it be regarded as unwarranted pessimism to gently intimate that much of the hard work now performed in many of our collegiate institutions is little better than the chattering of educated parrots? Professors and students investigate too little for themselves and do too little thinking upon their own responsibility. Individuality must arise and assert and exert itself-not over against solidarity, but in behalf and in exercise 66 of its own sacred and vested rights. What saith the Scriptures? Only to him that is joined to all the living is there hope." It is equally true, however, that to him to whom individuality is lost in the general mass of the living there is little hope of his accomplishing very much for himself, for the mass or for the age in which he professes to live. "A living dog is better than a dead lion," and yet there is no reason whatever that a radically conservative and conservatively progressive student of nature, and searcher after the deep things of God, should be cast and classed among the dogs of independence so long as he keeps himself in vital and coöperative relation with the general march of legitimate progress and the central current of the world's historic onflow. Wherever and as long as this constitutional relation between the individual thinker and the collegiate body is properly understood there will be no danger of elastic independence on the one hand or of scholastic imperialism on the other. Failing to keep this relation properly in mind as the pivotal point on which God balances and regulates the complemental forces and factors of human history, society is constantly liable to lose its equilibrium. This is true not only in the solution of the governmental problems of the age and in the business centers of the world where labor and capital are too often in conflict for the mastery, but in the efforts at the solution of the world's educational problems as well. The equilibrium between the general and the particular is disturbed if not destroyed. The presumption of scholastic imperialism provokes scorbutic independence of thought. The wisdom of a regular college course is called into question, and self-made men rush to the front in the exact image of their respective makers. The malaria of college eclecticism fills the air. Men inhale this atmosphere, expand their self-sufficiency and rush by the shorter way to the ephemeral glory of a superficial smattering of something supposed to be an education. On the other hand other men follow the beaten path of the regular college course, narrow themselves in the narrowness of scholastic ruts and graduate as classical pigmies because the more powerful drift toward scholastic aggregation is allowed to dwarf the dignity, absorb the energy and ignore the accountability of the individual student. And yet we pity the man who magnifies his individual apprehension of things to the extent that he is found puckering his pouted lips to whistle a discordant note while the grand central orchestra of the rational universe is moving on and making music in sweet accord with the law of history. While it is clear, according to the records of history, that God elects or selects men from the aggregate mass of humanity, and places them in representative positions on the world's great stage, it is also in evidence, according to the same pages of testimony, that God makes use of individual persons to emancipate and ele vate the masses. He made known His ways unto Moses before He displayed His power unto the children of Israel. For more than fifty centuries and through more than a hundred generations the current of human blood had been coursing its way in human veins, and yet it remained for the individual Harvey to discover the fact of such circulation. For thousands of years the masses of men had welcomed the rising of the sun, and yet it remained for the individual Copernicus to explain sunrise in the light of true science. The great men of the world have reached the zenith of their greatness by performing well their respective parts in the great drama of human life. True, they were debtors to an objective power resident in society as a whole, of which they were very members incorporate; and yet they succeeded in the solution of their own problems by asserting their own individuality. Individual thinkers must stand in organic relation with the thinking of the world. If in scholarly humility they bow their ears to the ground and listen to the mighty tread of the world's intellectual battle-march, they will have no desire for individual bush-whacking. They will hear the world of mind saying to their mind: "Without me ye can do nothing." The general mind is in the order of being, before the individual mind. It may be laid down as a general principle of truth and applicable to individual scholarship :-Only that which grows legitimately out of an organism and yet continues in and of and for such or |