realm, Paradise, who heard words, but they were "unspeakable"-a theology which it is "not lawful for man to utter." If I conjecture, or speculate on topics unrevealed, it must be with a sharp sense of limitation.

Once more, the saddest limitations to progress are in our manifold perversities. No wonder the Leyden pastor did "miserably bewail the state and condition of the Reformed churches." "The Anti-christian darkness" out of which they had so lately come is still "thick" in the world. Indeed, let one read what men like the late Van Oosterzee, of Holland, De Pressense, of France, Astie, of Switzerland, tell us of the condition of the Protestant churches in those countries, and his tone with regard to progress will be at least subdued. His must be a stout heart, which can follow down the history of opinion in the Christian Church without bating a jot of hope. For Bacon's idols of the tribe, and the den, and the market, and the theatre meet his eye at every turn. Saints and venerable councils are perverted by these idols from the worship of the Truth alone. He beholds an orthodoxy bravely and dearly won in one generation only to become dead in the next. He sees a pure and benevolent life reacting from this hard and dry doctrine and setting itself to undermine faith in the very revelation on which that life was nourished. He listens to voices many and loud in the high places of literature, which repeat for the thousandth time that doctrine has had its day. He hears men putting forth opinions as if they were new and beyond refutation, which have been examined and refuted centuries ago. What wonder if sometimes, in the reaction of feeling, in the sinking of his heart, all he can say be, I believe in progress, but, Lord, help my unbelief.

But if the father of our Congregational churches had given way to a fainting heart, if he had taken counsel of the limitations which he could not help bewailing, he had not deserved the "title of Ring-leader" in the work he was called of God to do. He was not the man to give up faith in a principle, because it was abused. The principle of a pure church exercising the power of Christ by the vote of its membership, was abused. It had been disgraced already more than once on the soil of Holland. There were plenty to look on and mock at

its practical working. Robinson felt to the quick "the scandal and opprobry" that these failures of other companies, organized on the same basis, caused. But the fire was too hot in his bones that he should go back on the truth which had been revealed to him. So although in our Congregational history, the ideas of liberty and of progress have had some conspicuous perversions, and are still bandied about in some quarters in shallow appreciation of their sound evangelical meaning, yet they are true nevertheless. They belong to us as they belong

to no other group of churches. Theclogical progress has had its illustrious representatives among us in the Edwardses, in Hopkins, in Dwight, and Taylor, and Bushnell, and Park. So let us never, under any provocation, be tempted to say with. bated breath, but rather with full, firm tone: If God should reveal anything to us by any other instrument of his, we will be as ready to receive it as ever we were to receive any truth from the ministry of the fathers who have gone before.

ARTICLE IX.-SAINT LUKE: PHYSICIAN, PAINTER, AND POET.

LUKE, the Evangelist, author of the Third Gospel, historian of the doings of the apostles, companion of St. Paul in his great missionary journeys, recorder of his deeds and words and partaker in his shipwrecks and sufferings by sea and by land, is spoken of by Paul himself as a physician.

There is a tradition, which obtained general credence at an early period in the Church's history, and has always been received with favor, that he was a painter.

That he was also a poet seems to us susceptible of quite as convincing proof as is contained in the casual allusions to the first of these professions or the tradition of the second. The possession of each of these gifts also goes far to strengthen the probability of the possession of the others, and grouped together they aid us greatly in any attempted reconstruction of the man.

That he was a man of education and of scholarly training and habit, familiar with the literature of his time, both Hebrew and Greek, and of an entirely different intellectual type from Matthew, Mark, Peter, and James, is sufficiently obvious from his writings. It is also beyond dispute that he possessed a poetic ear, insight, and taste, for, whoever may have been their author, it is Luke who has preserved for the ages some of the most exquisite hymns in the literature of the church. Was he the author of these hymns, known as the songs of Zachariah, of Elizabeth, of Mary, and of Simeon.

That he has not been recognized as such is doubtless due to the theory of inspiration, long held in the church, which led men to attribute to these several persons the authorship of the words which Luke has recorded as spoken by them.

Such a view of the case, however, is not the requirement of the literary canons or of the theory of inspiration of the present day. It has always been a common figure of descriptive writing to represent the thought sought to be conveyed

by putting words into the mouths of actors in the scenes to be described. This is a prominent characteristic of ancient literature, as well that purporting to be historical as that confessedly imaginative. Nor can it be questioned that the writers of the books of the Old and New Testament followed the literary usage of their time and are to be interpreted by the same rules as their literary contemporaries. No theory of inspiration is accepted by modern scholarship which requires us to believe that the song of Deborah was composed and sung by her as we have it handed down to us, any more than it requires us to believe that the words which this same song puts into the mouth of Sisera's mother were spoken by her. No scholar imagines that the graphic account of the conversation of Joseph's brethren at the well Dothan is a literal transcript of what took place, any more than we imagine that the speeches put into the mouths of Grecian or Roman generals by their historians were actually spoken by them. So far, therefore, as the doctrine of inspiration is concerned, and so far as any broad rule of literary interpretation is involved, we are at liberty to believe, if the proof points that way, that Luke himself is the veritable author of the poetry which appears in his writings.

Now, what do we know as to the facts?

First: That sixty years had passed between the birth of Jesus and the time when Luke sat down to see if, as he in substance says, he could not improve upon the many accounts already given of the rise and progress of the new religion. He and the others who had written were all, he says, largely dependent upon testimony and tradition, but he, having given the subject much careful study, and perhaps thinking, though he does not say, that by education he was better fitted for the work than most of the others, believes that he can compile an account which shall be a valuable addition to the literature of the subject.

Second: Of the writings of the 'many' others all have perished save those of Matthew and of Mark. In these no allusion is made to the poetic utterances under consideration. Mark, indeed, begins his account with the baptism of Jesus, but Matthew goes with much more minuteness of detail into

the circumstances of his birth. As in Luke's case, the poetic grandeur of the event inspires him; but while Matthew dwells on the choir of angels, on the celestial phenomena, and on the adoration of the wise men of the East, neither Elizabeth, Zachariah nor Simeon appear, and no utterance of Mary is recorded. Third: If the poetic utterances recorded by Luke were spoken in the manner represented by him they must have come down to him by a tradition so well known and general that it. is impossible to suppose that they could have been unknown to Matthew. Equally incredible is it that knowing, he should have failed to notice them. Gaussen, a competent critic, and rather rigid in his views of inspiration, notices the fact that the hymns are in the same style and bear internal evidence of being the work of the same person.

Now for Luke to open this grand epic, for such it is, and was to him, with a poetic prelude introducing the actors upon the scene, was a perfectly natural and altogether reasonable method of procedure viewed from a literary standpoint and would be so understood and accepted by those to whom it was addressed. All these considerations seem to make it rather more than highly probable that this poetic prelude is but a part of the recognized literary machinery by which the narrator opens and sets forth in a becoming manner the story he has undertaken to relate. If these are anything else than literally the inspired utterances of Zachariah, of Elizabeth, of Mary and of Simeon, miraculously preserved through a long lapse of years for Luke's especial benefit and use, little doubt can remain that they are the production of Luke himself. As we consider all the fragments of evidence pointing in this direction it seems hardly possible to reach any other conclusion.

If now we come to consider Luke as physician, painter, and poet, we seem to get a new light as to the sort of man he was, and his personality, always interesting, grows more clear. This poetic side of his character furnishes the key to all the rest; and it was because he was first of all poet that he was both physician and painter.

From the earliest period of authentic history till within the memory of a generation still living, the medical profession has