of man as a human being, and upon the universal call of duty. Below all special capacities is the universal humanity; below all the separate callings is the undivided summons to quit ourselves like men.

Religion generates this just perspective because religion founds it upon the universal capacity and the universal call. Religion lives in the heavenly vision and obedience thereto. In the courses of this obedience the perspective is purified and extended, as with this obedience the new perspective was introduced. When Paul said, "I was not disobedient unto the heavenly vision," he there and then changed the perspective of his life; Jesus of Nazareth, who had been the object of his enmity, then became his Master. We hear further of this perspective in these words: "What things were gain to me, these have I counted loss for Christ"; still again, "If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature; old things have passed away, all things have become new." Religion begins in the vision of the moral ideal as the image of God's will for

man; the resolve to become the servant of the moral ideal puts one on a new earth and under a new heaven; it does this with all religious souls. It therefore opens up one general perspective; and the basis of this one general perspective is, as I have said, the universal capacity and call.

From the life of the soul in God there arises when unhindered the normal perspective of faith. The trouble is that this normal perspective in the ideas and beliefs of religious men is so often suppressed. Our attitude toward the Bible may serve as an example. The old theory of the verbal inspiration of the Scriptures was an error in sound human perspective. It made of equal importance all parts of the Bible because all stood in an equal infallibility. The modern method of research is wanting in perspective. All parts of the Bible are equally questionable because all share in a common uncertainty. Besides, the truth of research has thrown into shadow the truth of religious intuition. The ensign of Scotland is a lion rampant on a field of blood. That en

sign hardly tells the truth about the heroic, but peace-loving, people of Scotland. Modern discussion about the Bible presents the historical scholar rampant on a field of waste and ruin; and thus it has come to pass that the Bible as the witness to the Eternal has suffered that last woe of greatness, it has been taken for granted.

Since the Bible has its chief value as a witness to the Eternal, the approach to what is central in that witness, whether historical or human, should be in the vision of sound perspective. The approach should be like that to Zermatt along the valley of the Visp. There is tumult and wild beauty all along the way. When, however, one gets to Zermatt, still more when one ascends to the Riffel Alp or the Gorner Grat, a new and grander perspective has replaced the old, and in the centre of the vista towers the mighty obelisk of the Matterhorn. It is useless to cry that this is not all; it is all the traveler thinks worth while; at all events, it is better worth while than anything else.

There is a similar ascent in the Bible through historical research and through ideas of worth to that which is central and supreme. There is the rich humanity of Genesis, the stormy epic of the Exodus, the roll of great oratory in the Deuteronomy, the barbaric magnificence of Joshua and Judges, the sign of growing civilization in the records of the kingdom, the interior depth of the Psalms; there are the piety, speculative daring, and world-sympathy of Job, the moral theism and the moral humanism of the prophets. All along the advance, the scenery is great. Still, when one comes to the elevation from which the sublime figure of Jesus is visible, it is seen to be central, and to call at once for a new perspective of values.

So we judge concerning the very numerous beliefs of Christian people. The apostle tells us that all flesh is not the same flesh, that one star differs from another star in glory. All faith is not the same faith; there is a faith in the relatively unimportant and there is a faith in the central and supreme. The jumble of

interests and values that one so often sees, as if all were of equal moment and worth, is a sign of the uneducated intellect and the unenlightened conscience. The men who contend for apostolical succession with as much zeal as they do for the permanence of the prophetic mind, who fight for ritual as uncompromisingly as for the morality of the Sermon on the Mount, who are as sure of the miracles of the Lord as they are of his love, who are unable to discern between beliefs about Jesus and the reality of his Person working through conceptions clearly inadequate, who refuse to judge between the temporal and the eternal, who believe in the coming of the Holy Ghost and yet leave little or nothing for him to do beyond giving his sanction to the arrested intellect of the church, who will not subordinate the ends of the ecclesiastic and the traditionalist to the ideals of the Christian thinker and man, are not "walking in the light," to quote the negro melody, but in the night of which Hegel wrote, in which "all the cows are black."