cared for their truth as a manufacturer cares for his science; he can use it for the purposes of his business-not as a scientific student cares for it, for its own sake and apart from its material services.

In brief, Evangelicalism cared supremely— this was its power, this its glory, this its claim to the eternal honour and veneration of the Church-Evangelicalism cared supremely for men, for living men who were to be saved or lost, and on whom it had to press, with tears and agony and prayers, the gospel of Christ in order to save them. It saw the flames in which they were in peril of being consumed, and the city of God from which they were in peril of being irrevocably excluded. It cared nothing for building up ideal Churches, or for creating an ideal social order; it did not care very much for any development of personal life and character which was not necessary to make sure of eternal blessedness and to augment it; it cared very little for any truth which had

not a direct relation to salvation. What it cared for was to save individual men from eternal death. This done, Evangelicalism was apt to assume that everything would come right with them either in this world or the next. This was the 00s, the spirit, of Evangelicalism. To what extent do we, who belong to the Congregational Churches of England, retain it ?

Nearly fifty years ago a great panic was created among English Congregationalists by charges coming from high authorities against the faith of the younger ministers and of the students who were at that time in the Congregational Colleges. The charges were set out with great elaboration in a series of articles which appeared in The Congregational Magazine of those days. The articles discussed the Theology of the College, the Theology of the Study, and the Theology of the Pulpit. The editor of the magazine was the Rev. John Blackburn, a man of very considerable intellectual force and of large public influence. The young men

protested vehemently; declared that they held fast to the Evangelical faith; that if there were any differences between their own creed and the creed of their elders, the differences were differences of form, not of substance; that the charges brought against them were unjust, and wholly without foundation. Their protests did not quiet the fears of the older men, nor cause the agitation which the charges had produced in the Churches to cease. The young men felt and said that they were cruelly wronged.

Looking back upon that controversy, which I had occasion to examine a few years ago, I think I see that the older men were in error in charging their younger brethren with having surrendered any of the central articles of the Evangelical Faith. But I think that they would not have been in error if they had said that the 0os, the spirit, of their younger brethren was not precisely the same as that of the Evangelical Revival.

For about that time the younger men began to care for truth for its own sake-not merely

as an instrument for converting the world. What may be called the scientific spirit, the disinterested love of truth, which had previously been illustrated in only a few exceptional men began to take possession in large numbers of the younger ministers. They were interested in Biblical criticism. They wanted to make sure of the authorship and the dates of the books of the Old Testament and the New. They discussed the nature of Inspiration. They distinguished between verbal inspiration and plenary. The Bible was authoritative; but they wanted to construct a theory of its authority.

They felt a still keener interest in Exegesis —an interest which, happily, has lasted to our own time, and is now keener than ever. They became impatient of the traditional exegetical methods. Any text that looked like a Biblical proof of a great truth was quoted by many of the older men as proving it. The young men said: "We believe the truth-believe it with all our heart; but this text and that text and half a dozen more, which you have

quoted to prove it, do not prove it. You have missed their real meaning." The older men could not see why they should be so scrupulous. The young men, with their disinterested love of truth, insisted that they were under the most solemn obligations to be scrupulous; that since the Bible contained the record of Divine revelations, they were bound to discover exactly what it meant; that to put a meaning of their own into a Bible sentence and to claim Divine authority for it, was just as bad as to put a sentence of their own into the Bible and to claim Divine authority for it.

They, therefore, read the Bible, not merely for personal edification, like many of the older men, who put more gospel into the Book of Leviticus and the Book of Judges than some people now-a-days can find in the Epistle to the Romans; nor merely for the purpose of collecting fresh materials to use for the conversion of sinners; but to discover what the Bible really meant. And that was surely admirable. The gentle the violent-pressure which used to be