they fail to commend it to the heathen, and to impress upon them the offered mercy and the certainty of the coming judgment?

I may be permitted to cite one instance of the disastrous results of this twofold sense, or double-application, theory. It is that Daniel xi refers largely to Antiochus Epiphanes primarily, and secondarily to the Antichrist. What has been the effect? The utter nullification of that part of Scripture for almost everyone! The application to Antiochus Epiphanes, suggested by Josephus and used by Porphyry, was accepted by Christian scholars owing to the twofold reference theory, with the result that so orthodox an authority as The Speaker's Commentary sees Antiochus Epiphanes and nothing of the Antichrist, although the Scripture says definitely that the chapter reveals the events of the last days. To the careful Bible student it is absolutely clear that the prediction has no reference whatever to the Syrian king. Daniel xi, 6, takes us to a point much later than his time. We are told that "in the end of years" an Egyptian queen, who is the last ruler of independent Egypt, will make a league with the then ruler of Syria. Cleopatra was the last of the Ptolemies, and the prediction suits her and Mare Antony exactly-even to his overthrow and death, her own overthrow and death, the assassination of her son (see the Hebrew "her offspring "Luther, mit dem kinde), plainly Cæsarion, a lad of about 20, who was done to death by order of Augustus.

If that is. so, then verse 6 brings us down to 30 B.C.—134 years after the death of Antiochus Epiphanes, to whom therefore, the description from verse 21 to verse 45 can have no application at all.

I have read with pleasure the words of my old friend and valiant fellow-soldier, Professor Langhorne Orchard. I must also thank the Chairman and the other speakers for their kind appreciation of the paper.

539TH ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING,

HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE ON

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 3RD, 1913, AT 4.30 P.M.

MR. DAVID HOWARD, V.P., TOOK THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the preceding Meeting were read and signed.

The SECRETARY announced that Miss Cruddas had been elected a Member, and the Rev. W. Laporte Payne an Associate of the Institute. The CHAIRMAN then called upon the Rev. Dr. Skrine to read his paper.

VISION, IN SACRED AND OTHER HISTORY.

MY

By the Rev. JOHN HUNTLEY SKRINE, D.D.

Y title may suggest a scope too great to be modestly proposed for a brief paper, and I must begin by defining the limits of the inquiry. "Vision" is a name, in its higher use, for the contact through the senses of finite human nature with the infinite, and to ask what Vision is might be asking to "know what God and man is." To ask that question, however, is what man is for; and to gain some morsel of that truth shall be the purpose of this inquiry, which will place side by side two stories, recorded one in sacred, the other in secular literature, of visions of the supernatural world, and endeavour to extract from the comparison some element of fact. as to the relations of divine and human.

The story I take from the Scriptures is the record either of an illusion or of the most cardinal event in man's history. It is the vision seen by Mary of Nazareth, when the angel Gabriel was sent from heaven to a virgin espoused to Joseph, a carpenter of Nazareth, and announced to her the birth from her womb of the Messiah.

Beside this story I will place the tale of another woman who, through the impulsion of a vision, having some features in common with that of Mary, entered on a fate which had issues incommensurate indeed with those which sprang from the

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Syrian maiden's, yet within their range also great and wonderful. Joan of Domremy, in France, bears to the history of her own people a relation similar and proportionate to that which Mary of Nazareth, in Galilee, bears to the race of man. Each became mother of a deliverance. And if there seem no measure of their respective deeds, if Joan's battles and Mary's childbirth seem at first glance so disparate in character, and so incommensurable in scale, as to make their juxtaposition an irreverence, a closer look will disclose a spiritual affinity which makes the comparative study not only reverent but religiously fruitful.

It is only the French maiden's story which needs recalling, and that only in an outline in which we can trace the features of the Nazarene. A European nation lies in the extreme of political helplessness. The kingdom is occupied by invaders whom its cowed soldiery can no longer face in battle rank, the king bankrupt, at refuge in a corner of his dominions, and despairing of rescue from his abject plight. A peasant girl (she, too, presently to be known as "The Maid") has a vision of an archangel, who announces to her the destiny of redeeming the realm and setting the king on his throne. At first she cannot believe it. "How can this thing be, seeing I am only Jeanne, daughter of Jacques d'Arc, a yeoman of Domremy, and know nothing about soldiering, nor have even learned to ride a horse?" The Visitant assures her that the powers of heaven will have it so, and at last, after many reluctances, she is able to speak her "Be it unto me," sets forth on the enterprise, converts to her belief the king's broken spirit by a feat of thought-reading which that age thought a miraculous sign, leads her countrymen in battle, turns to flight the armies of the aliens, and redeems the nation's life as a nation. It has been unto her according to that angel's word.

There will arise at once the criticism that Joan's story, wonderful as in itself it is, throws no light on Mary's. So far as the French tale resembles the Syrian it is a mere consequence of it, an unconscious copy. Joan's age believed that the Holy Ones could present themselves in vision, and every peasant knew that an angel Gabriel had appeared to Mary. Accordingly, the French girl, on whose nature a patriotic and religious impulse had fallen, visualizes that impulse as another angel, Michael, more suggestible to her than Gabriel, because under the patronage of St. Michael French soldiers had of late successfully repulsed the English from the Mount he guarded. And then, after all, who is St. Michael or what, that he should

appear to any one? Or who and what, for that matter, is Gabriel? There is no authority for the existence of either except the Rabbinic angelology. The angel who visited the house in Nazareth may, indeed, be the reflection in human senses of some reality and even a personal reality, but all that we can verify is that reflection in the human senses of Mary. The angel who appeared at Domremy is something greatly less: he is but the reflection of a reflection, twice removed from reality. I imagine that even convinced believers in the doctrine of the Incarnation find this consideration a difficulty for faith. The Lucan story of the Annunciation has round it airs of fancy and folklore which cause a modern Christian to turn faith's attention in other directions, and to rest it not on the scene in a chamber of Nazareth but on that in the Bethlehem stable. To do this is to turn away from the essential to the accidental, from ultimate fact to consequential, from the divine-human to the merely human. The true moment of the Incarnation in history is not the Nativity but the Annunciation. The mystery of God become Man will, indeed, never yield itself up to an intelligence limited by human conditions, but we shall approach it only so far as we grasp the significance of that event which is reported in the form of a parley between the Virgin and an Angel.

That significance, I have thought, can be brought out by an application of the comparative method which to all other subjects we have applied with most fruitful results. If I can see what the significance is of Joan's parleyings with her Council," what the event was in her personal history and that of her people which had vital association with her visions, it is likely there will be suggested to me the bearing of Mary's vision on the fortune of her soul and of the human race.

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This at once I feel sure of; it is vain to hope to discover the nature of Joan's visions and " voices" (for the communications through the ear alone were the more numerous, I believe) if we only study these phenomena in separation from the other facts of her career. Had nothing more happened than that the girl saw forms and faces in an empty space and heard words spoken in what to other ears was a silence, the phenomenon might remain inscrutable or might prove explicable by natural laws, but it would be without value spiritually. What actually happened was a train of vast and surprising consequence. A rustic girl, as a result of her visions, undertook an enterprise which in every judgment was impossible for any capacity whatever, but for the womanly capacity something more than

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impossible. She achieved this task, and that not solely by a moral inspiration of the soldiery, who were the practical instruments of the achievement, but by actual guidance in strategic council and leadership in battle and an astonishing aptitude for details of the military science, in especial the management of artillery, to which emphatic testimony was given by high authorities on war. The whole fact which we have to contemplate and analyse is not an apparition of Michael and a summons to redeem France, but that vision in all its repetitions and this solid mass of practical consequence from which the vision cannot be dissevered.

Contemplating then as a whole this fact of Joan's deed, the visions and the activities together, I say that we can only judge the former to be either the cause of the latter or else a joint effect of something which was cause of both. The full truth, one does not doubt, is this last vision and action are but the two sides of one fact, the inward and the outward, the subjective and the objective of that fact. Neither one nor other is intelligible until we discern the nature of the underlying fact. What then do we discern as the fact for which Joan the Maid has become the name? Unmistakably to my mind we are contemplating an act of faith; the most signal act of faith recorded in human history with one only exception, the act of Mary of Nazareth. By an act of faith I understand an act of concurrence between a human will and the divine. And this concurrence I would analyse more closely, and describe it by the figure of an interchange of the two selves, a mutual self giving between the divine and the human term in the relation of Creator and Creature.

Here, no doubt, I am taking the fact of the Frenchwoman's career out of the category of human history, as history is commonly understood, and am placing it in the category of spiritual history. In this I shall not be followed except by those who agree that the cause of sensible phenomena is to be found ultimately only in supra-sensible fact. But these will, I think, go on with me and seek for an interpretation of the vision in sacred story where they have found that of the vision in the secular record.

We have then interpreted Joan's vision of Michael and the Saints as a part of the whole occurrence of her career from her call to her death: it is the first moment in her act of faith, that sacrifice of herself to the Divine Will, which I have ventured to call by a more abstract terminology the SelfInterchange of divine and human. I make no attempt to