God and man through the fixed order of the world. The divine immanence is here the regnant idea. The creation viewed as in a process of development has a capacity for receiving and expressing God that is illimitable. This order of nature is the environment of man. Saturated with the divine presence, it acts ceaselessly upon man. Man lives and moves and has his being in God without transcending this environment in which the laws of nature are in force. The communion with God is nowhere immediate and supernatural; it is effected through the mechanism of the world. It is as if God, through the symbols of nature, telegraphed to the soul, the marvelous substance of the brain being the receiving instrument. But such a figure fails, for the telegraph suggests distance, and God is not far away. He is immanent in the soul itself as well as in the world; he is manifest in all the movement of its life-in experiences under law as really as in abnormal visions and emotions and activities that seem to be above law. The Holy Spirit dwells in the sanities and regularities of the mental life, and every illumination of orderly reason is the shining of the divine light.

The new theology has had a peculiar elusive quality; many have thought it vague and indefinite. The reason for this is that it is sometimes the new theology of Biblical interpretation, and sometimes the new theology of evolution, and that these two new theologies are wholly unlike. They agree only in attempting to define the intercourse of God and man. According to one, that contact is personal and supernatural, according to the other it is organic and under law. Neither solution of the problem alone is adequate. Each by itself is over-simple, just as Calvin's doctrine of divine sovereignty was over-simple and the Arminian defense of freedom was over-simple.

Such simplicity is reached by ignoring half of the factors of the problem. The imperative need of the new theology is the reduction of these contrasting modes of thought to one harmonious conception. Conceived as a supernatural person, almost as a greater man, God lacks immensity, majesty, indefinable glory, infinity. Such a God is inadequate for the moral order and insufficient for worship. Thus construed, religion is familiar, intimate, joyful, but deficient in awe and authority. On the other hand, the immanent God lacks distinctness of being and tends to fade into abstractions. Pantheism is ever in the background, certain to emerge when faith wanes, as the hidden stars gleam out when the sun goes down.

Theology, then, has its next step marked out for it. The cosmic and the personal answers to the question concerning the relationship of the infinite and the finite must be combined-not set side by side merely, but fused in one conception. The divine person living in the cosmic order compasses and acts upon the human person at the focus of the universe, with such use of means that all is under law, with such directness and freedom that all is spiritual. God, who is revealed in the universe while He transcends it, meets man who is immeshed in the order of nature tho conscious of divine sonship. It is not enough to say that the son meets the Father, nor that man set in the order of nature is played upon by the forces of the world. Man, who lives in organic affiliation with the world and possesses a consciousness in which the world is interpreted, is in communion with the indivisible God, in whose personality the world lives and moves and has its being.

This reconciliation is first of all a problem of philosophy. The supernatural and the natural are two sides of

ence.

soul can not escape. Religion, above all the religion of the Bible and the religion of Christ, is in the supernatural. The religious man thinks, feels, in the freedom of the spirit; only when he acts does he find that he can not work miracles. The popular idealism, in the momentum of spiritual freedom, goes forth into the world expecting its hard and fast realities to be plastic and obedient. If we were as gods, that might be. To God, perfect in reason, the mechanical order is pliant and serviceable, expressing exactly the divine thought and purpose. God uses the fixed order of nature with an infinite mastery, as if it were an instrument offering no resistance.

Evolution offers important aid in uniting the personal and the cosmic conceptions. The soul cries out for God, seeks Him, affirms Him, rejoices in Him. In experience, this is mystical and above all reasoning. Why does the soul act thus? The old answer was that God made it with these hungers and demands. It was a spark from the infinite flame yearning for its source and dying if it failed to kindle in its glow. Evolution treats man as the product, the highest product, of the universe. He has come to be because such a being as he is is adapted to the environment that compasses him. He has this life of religion because it gives

The race has been sifted through immeasurable eras, and always a fraction more of faith has counted for survival. The result is a religious species, a humanity that has a religious consciousness. God, who lives in the process of the world, has wrought upon the creation until at its most sensitive and critical point there is developed a soul with a religious faith. When the soul meets God in the most distinctly personal communion, affirming Him without question, it does this because. the discipline of the universe has made it what it is. Thus intimate with the mechanical order is the soul that feels itself detached and free.

Theology is at present engaged upon this problem of personality in the universe, its vindication in man and in God, and its relation to the fixed order that science explores. Meanwhile it uses the language of mystical supernaturalism and of scientific naturalism by turns.

When it has mastered its own proper speech, it will find itself far on in the path of progress, which is the main line of theological inquiry. The meeting of this newly conceived God and this better understood man is rich in interest. There are wonderful new possibilities in a greater and more glorious God acting upon a greater and more exquisitely fashioned man, and in a more rational tho more complex man seeking a more accessible and more attractive God. A fatherly God, revealed in the abounding beneficence of the world and increasingly manifest in the patience of time, is only less fascinating to mind and heart than spiritual humanity, developing in the process of the world, learning to live by faith, and coming at last into the likeness of Christ. The meeting of God and man thus conceived is the thrilling drama that is from everlasting to everlasting.

BY THE REV. JOHN BRITTAIN

FOR the greater part of my public life I have been pastor of churches in some of our largest cities, and have become acquainted with the methods of pulpit preparation of some of our foremost preachers. The following notes are almost entirely derived from this personal knowledge acquired during a series of years.

I think no preacher to-day has a wider hearing or greater influence than Dr. Lyman Abbott. In conversation, in extempore address, or in sermon, there is always the same wonderful lucidity and practicality. I was privileged to see a college boy's diary one day, and read this entry on one of its pages: "Lyman Abbott preached this morning. He is remarkably logical and clear. No man touches the fellows as he does." Yet Dr. Abbott has little of what ordinarily passes for eloquence or oratory. He does not write his sermons. The time so many spend in writing he spends in acquiring. Getting his subject wherever he can find it, but always in the intellectual strata of life, he keeps digesting and adding to it all the week. Early Sunday morning he goes into his study and is in absolute retirement. His light breakfast is brought to him there. That active brain of his broods over the thoughts of the week and molds them into logical development. When he enters the pulpit it is all done. No writing, no note of any kind, is before him. His sermons at Plymouth and elsewhere were stenographically reported and afterward revised by the speaker before publication.

Henry Ward Beecher, whom Dr. Abbott succeeded, was a law unto himself. He wrote the barest plans only. I have one by me, and few preachers, I think, would consider it a sermon plan. Frequently he entered the pulpit not knowing just what he would preach. Between the hymns or during the Scripture reading he would settle on his topic, and, the topic once got, the subject fell very rapidly into an outline, sufficient for him, if utterly inadequate for the average preacher. When the time came he would preach from that out

CLARK, DETROIT, MICHIGAN.

line as only Mr. Beecher could preach. His illustrations would carry him like a life-preserver over the broken and tumultuous sea of his thought. It mattered little to him whether all he said came naturally from his text. Mr. Beecher once said that he regarded a text as simply the entrance into a pasture; the bars once down and he once in, he had a right to walk all over the pasture and browse where and on what he chose. He picked up his illustrations here, there, and everywhere. A friend said to me once: "I saw Beecher intently watching a ferryboat entering its slip. I said to one with me, 'Beecher will use that somehow next Sunday.' The next Sunday we went to hear him preach. Beecher preached that morning on submission and resistance, and in the course of his sermon said: 'Watch a ferryboat entering its slip. It will beat against the piles on this side and on that. If they stubbornly resisted, they, and the boat as well, would be crushed. They give, they yield, but they keep their root positions just the same.

For many years an intimate friendship existed between Mr. Beecher and the superb pulpit orator of America, Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, for over fifty years the famous minister of the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, N. Y. To have known Dr. Storrs, to have been given the use of his study, to have occupied his pulpit, to have sat by his side at the communion-table, to have interchanged confidences with him, is one of the cherished privileges of my life. In his earlier years Dr. Storrs wrote all his sermons and addresses, but for many years in the latter part of his life he wrote nothing for public address. He felt so hampered by manuscript that he determined to give it up or to give up preaching. How magnificently he succeeded need not be told. He has left the story in his little book, "Preaching Without Notes." Dr. Storrs found his themes, many of them, on the piazza of his delightful cottage at Shelter Island, looking out over the water and at the gloriously tinted sky. Some who read this article may recall the sermon he brought back

one reality. There is ever the idea and the expression of the idea, the thought and the thing. There is the meaning of the universe and the universe itself. In the universe there is no miracle; in the realm of idea and meaning there is no chain of causation. The personal and supernatural are correlated to the impersonal and natural. In immediate consciousness only the personal appears; the feeling is of independence and of detachment from means. Yet experience interpreted by reflection discovers the fixed order from which the

soul can not escape. Religion, above

all the religion of the Bible and the religion of Christ, is in the supernatural. The religious man thinks, feels, in the freedom of the spirit; only when he acts does he find that he can not work miracles. The popular idealism, in the momentum of spiritual freedom, goes forth into the world expecting its hard. and fast realities to be plastic and obedient. If we were as gods, that might be. To God, perfect in reason, the mechanical order is pliant and serviceable, expressing exactly the divine thought and purpose. God uses the fixed order of nature with an infinite mastery, as if it were an instrument offering no resistance.

Evolution offers important aid in uniting the personal and the cosmic conceptions. The soul cries out for God, seeks Him, affirms Him, rejoices in Him. In experience, this is mystical and above all reasoning. Why does the soul act thus? The old answer was that God made it with these hungers and demands. It was a spark from the infinite flame yearning for its source and dying if it failed to kindle in its glow. Evolution treats man as the product, the highest product, of the universe. He has come to be because such a being as he is is adapted to the environment that compasses him. He has this life of religion because it gives

ence.

him advantage in the struggle for existThe race has been sifted through immeasurable eras, and always a fraction more of faith has counted for survival. The result is a religious species, a humanity that has a religious consciousness. God, who lives in the process of the world, has wrought upon the creation until at its most sensitive and critical point there is developed a soul with a religious faith. When the soul meets God in the most distinctly personal communion, affirming Him without question, it does this because the discipline of the universe has made it what it is. Thus intimate with the mechanical order is the soul that feels itself detached and free.

Theology is at present engaged upon this problem of personality in the universe, its vindication in man and in God, and its relation to the fixed order that science explores. Meanwhile it uses the language of mystical supernaturalism and of scientific naturalism by turns.

When it has mastered its own proper speech, it will find itself far on in the path of progress, which is the main line of theological inquiry. The meeting of this newly conceived God and this better understood man is rich in interest. There are wonderful new possibilities in a greater and more glorious God acting upon a greater and more exquisitely fashioned man, and in a more rational tho more complex man seeking a more accessible and more attractive God. A fatherly God, revealed in the abounding beneficence of the world and increasingly manifest in the patience of time, is only less fascinating to mind and heart than a spiritual humanity, developing in the process of the world, learning to live by faith, and coming at last into the likeness of Christ. The meeting of God and man thus conceived is the thrilling drama that is from everlasting to everlasting.

BY THE REV. JOHN BRITTAIN

FOR the greater part of my public life I have been pastor of churches in some of our largest cities, and have become acquainted with the methods of pulpit preparation of some of our foremost preachers. The following notes are almost entirely derived from this personal knowledge acquired during a series of years.

I think no preacher to-day has a wider hearing or greater influence than Dr. Lyman Abbott. In conversation, in extempore address, or in sermon, there is always the same wonderful lucidity and practicality. I was privileged to see a college boy's diary one day, and read this entry on one of its pages: "Lyman Abbott preached this morning. He is remarkably logical and clear. No man touches the fellows as he does." Yet Dr. Abbott has little of what ordinarily passes for eloquence or oratory. He does not write his sermons. The time so many spend in writing he spends in acquiring. Getting his subject wherever he can find it, but always in the intellectual strata of life, he keeps digesting and adding to it all the week. Early Sunday morning he goes into his study and is in absolute retirement. His light breakfast is brought to him there. That active brain of his broods over the thoughts of the week and molds them into logical development. When he enters the pulpit it is all done. No writing, no note of any kind, is before him. His sermons at Plymouth and elsewhere were stenographically reported and afterward revised by the speaker before publication.

Henry Ward Beecher, whom Dr. Abbott succeeded, was a law unto himself. He wrote the barest plans only. I have one by me, and few preachers, I think, would consider it a sermon plan. Frequently he entered the pulpit not knowing just what he would preach. Between the hymns or during the Scripture reading he would settle on his topic, and, the topic once got, the subject fell very rapidly into an outline, sufficient for him, if utterly inadequate for the average preacher. When the time came he would preach from that out

Clark, DETROIT, MICHIGAN.

line as only Mr. Beecher could preach. His illustrations would carry him like a life-preserver over the broken and tumultuous sea of his thought. It mattered little to him wheth

er all he said came naturally from his text. Mr. Beecher once said that he regarded a text as simply the entrance into a pasture; the bars once down and he once in, he had a right to walk all over the pasture and browse where and on what he chose. He picked up his illustrations here, there, and everywhere. A friend said to me once: "I saw Beecher intently watching a ferryboat entering its slip. I said to one with me, 'Beecher will use that somehow next Sunday.' The next Sunday we went to hear him preach. Beecher preached that morning on submission and resistance, and in the course of his sermon said: 'Watch a ferryboat entering its slip. It will beat against the piles on this side and on that. If they stubbornly resisted, they, and the boat as well, would be crushed. They give, they yield, but they keep their root positions just the same.

For many years an intimate friendship existed between Mr. Beecher and the superb pulpit orator of America, Dr. Richard Salter Storrs, for over fifty years the famous minister of the Church of the Pilgrims, Brooklyn, N. Y. To have known Dr. Storrs, to have been given the use of his study, to have occupied his pulpit, to have sat by his side at the communion-table, to have interchanged confidences with him, is one of the cherished privileges of my life. In his earlier years Dr. Storrs wrote all his sermons and addresses, but for many years in the latter part of his life he wrote nothing for public address. He felt so hampered by manuscript that he determined to give it up or to give up preaching. How magnificently he succeeded need not be told. He has left the story in his little book, "Preaching Without Notes." Dr. Storrs found his themes, many of them, on the piazza of his delightful cottage at Shelter Island, looking out over the water and at the gloriously tinted sky. Some who read this article may recall the sermon he brought back