<1tnurnrbtu IDqrnlngtrul flnut41y Continuing LEHRE UNO WEHRE MAGAZIN F UER Ev.-LuTH. HOMILETIK THEOLOGICAL QUARTERT Y-THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY Vol. III February, 1932 No.2 CONTENTS P��e FUERBRINGER, L.: Gedacchtnisrede auf Dr. Geo. liIezger 81 DAU, W. H. T.: The Meaning of CRlvary in the Minds of Modernists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 MAYER, E. A.: "DaB Wort sie sollen lassen stahn."... . 95 LAETSCH, TH.: Die Schriftlehre von del' Verstockung .. , 108 KRETZMANN, P. E.: Christi btellvertretende Genugmung als dll,s wesentliche Moment in seinem Erloesungswerk 113 LAETSCH, TH.: Studies in Hosea 1-3" . . . . . . . . . . ,. . . . . 120 LAETSCH, TH.: In Memory of Prof. George Mezger, D. D. 127 Diopositionen ueber die zweite VOll del' Synodalkonferenz angenommene Evangelienreihe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Miscel' 'Illen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Theological Observer. - Kil'chlich-Zeitgeschichtliches. . 140 Book Review. - Litemtur .. . . . . , ....................... , '" 152 ri. r .1i�er mu" nicht sHein weidtm., :11';0 d;JSS er die Schute untrrwcisc, wie e .. :h t e Cbr:'iten BOU('fl in, oondern RI1(; n�ot!n den Woclfen wcl,,"cn, dass sie ,He S�1afe nicht angreifen und mit falg ',,:( Lf"hre verfuehren und IT' tum ein fuchrcn. - Luther. Es 1st lein Dino::, das die Leutc mehr bei drr liirc!le bch!lclt den die gute PrnJi;!t. - Apolorit, Act. ?4. If tIe truli pel- t,riv �n uncertain sound, "'j, J .hal! prcpnrc himself to the b3ttle? 1 Cor. 11,. 8. Published for the Ev. Luth. Synod of Missouri, Ohio, and Other States CONCORDIA PUBLISHING IIOUSE, St. Louis, Mo. The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. 85 anaufjoren. (g girt bieImefjr, burd) 5tat unb ~roeit, burd) @Jmft, ®e~ Mffenfjaftigfeit unb 5treue ®o±± bafur au banfen, baB er un£; manner wie ~ieper, mente unb meager gefd)enft unb fo range geIaffen fjat, unb fo bafur au forgen, baB ifjr ®e.bii:d)tni£; unter un£; im ®egen oreioe. ~a£; woIIe ®ott an un£; widen nad) feiner ®nabe um Z5@Jfu, unfer£; Sjeiranbe£;, wiIIen I ~men. .2. g: u r Or i n 9 e r. ~ . ~ The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. * The Ohrist of Modernism has been "made in Germany," at the German universities, and it has taken about a hundred years to make him. The one book that recounts the genesis of the Modernists' Ohrist with fulness and sincerity has been written by Albert Schweitzer and bears the title Von Reimarus zu Wrede. (A second edition appeared in 1913, bearing the title Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung.) This book was published in an English translation in 1910, but under a new title, The Quest .of the Historical Jesus. Schweitzer says of the German attempt to produce the modernist Ohrist: "It is impos- sible to overestimate the value of what German research upon the life of Jesus has accomplished. It is a uniquely great expression of sincerity, one of the most significant events in the whole mental and spiritual life of humanity." (Engl. tr., p.397.) Another book which it is well to read in order to understand the method by which German university research works is that of J. T. Mertz, History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Oentury. It was published in Edinburgh, 1896-1912, in several volumes. This book depicts in the first volume the "life of unsurpassed intellectual intensity" which the German university professor is enabled to lead, no matter whether his domain of research is science or history, philosophy or theology. Methods and means are the same in every department. Presumably strict and correct reasoning, worked out with inexorable logic to the last legitimate conclusion, no matter what the result may prove to be in the end, is the order and plan of work. Among the theologians at the German universities, circles of con- genial minds are formed who work for a uniform object and are "extremely sensitive to each other's influence" and have their "eyes directed mainly upon the work of those who are like-minded with them- selves" and with whom they have built up a well-connected system of intercommunication. These circles have frequently been called "schools." For instance, we have heard of the Tuebingen and the Erlangen schools. They * Published by request. 86 The Meaning of CalvarY'in the Minds of Modernists. watch each other closely and in publishing their views may take notice of the views of others in curt footnotes or parentheses like these: uGegen Ritschl," ufuer Harnack," etc. But they may also completely ignore, even studiously ignore, important views of others. Whenever this happens, there is the devil to pay in scientific journal- ism; for such ignoring is a deliberate rebuff and brings out keen resentment. Sometimes the repartee becomes so vicious that the theological menagery is turned into a cage of spitfire wildcats. The whole scientific coterie of theologians is an armed camp of Ishma- elites, every man's hand being turned against every other's. The effort to build up the Ohrist of Modernism starts in every case with two assumptions which are basic and essential to the entire movement: 1) Deity in the proper sense of the term cannot possibly be predicated of Jesus Ohrist; He must simply be taken as a historical figure that iooms in the annals of our race; 2) the occurrence of genuine miracles, properly so called, is impossible. For miracles lie outside of the scientific circle of reasoning and do not answer to scientific formulas and laws. With these two postulates firmly :fixed in their minds, Modernists begin to examine the New Testament records of the life of Jesus. The question that interests them is not. the question whether the test of the records is authentic, whether that which has been written down is a true account of what has actually occurred, but whether it would according to the laws of science have occurred as set down. The recorder may have been a sincere person, but he may have been unscientifically biased by his enthusiastic admiration for his subject, or he may have written from a low level of information; he may have written with the innocence of ignorance; he may have lacked the ability to sift evidence; he may have written out of a practical trance, a mental delusion, and so on. In other words, what interests Modernists in the Biblical biographies of Ohrist is not textual, or Lower, Oriticism, but criticism of the thought and teaching of the recorders, or Higher Oriticism. This Higher Oriticism at one time constructed what was known as "the liberal Jesus." William Douglas Mackenzie, president of the Hartford Seminary Foundation, has characterized this liberal Jesus of the Modernists "as a prophet and reformer who made no divine claims, whose words were confusedly preserved in tradition and re- corded in successive documents out of which at last the present gospels were fashioned. Jesus used the current Jewish religious conceptions, but shaped them to be instruments of His own clear insight into the Fatherhood of God and His strong grasp on the true moral principles which must guide men in religious and social conduct." (ERE, 7,547a.) This liberal Jesus has been painted with varying lineaments by The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. 87 Wernle, who still believes that Jesus possessed a superhuman con- sciousness, which, however, cannot be defined and which did not pre- vent Him from committing grave errors; by N. Schmidt (The Prophet of Nazareth), who knows Jesus "only as a prophet whose character of pure self-sacrifice and faith in God has proved the highest source of inspiration down to this day" (ERE, ibid.); and by G. B. Foster (The Finality of the Ohristian Religion), who has simply swallowed whole what J. Weiss, Wernle, and Bousset wrote, and sets it before the world as the last word on Jesus Ohrist, at which all further thought must stop. Now, there is one great fault to be found with this Jesus: He never existed in a personal reality; He is not a historic figure at all. The men who started the "Quest of the Historical Jesus" have only produced a fancy of their philosophical imagination. For the English translation of Wernle's book F. O. Burkitt wrote the preface. In it he says: "Few except professed students know what a protean and kaleidoscopic figure this 'Jesus of History' is. The stubborn facts remain that Jesus knew Himself as Messiah, as unique Son of God and Head of the kingdom of God and that the Ohristian Ohurch sprang from the disciples who by His own self-manifestation in these superhuman relations passed into a new range of experience in a new consciousness of the power of God." (ERE, ibid., col. 6.) Some of the advocates of the liberal Jesus have pushed their conclusions to the extreme of entirely denying His existence. They hold that Jesus is a mythical personality around whom have been grouped religious ideas that were forming in the popular mind. Ohristianity, these men believe, arose as a syncretistic l·eligion, which took over from former religions certain ingredients. A certain person was needed around whom all these borrowed elements could be thrown, and popular fancy invented an ideal Ohrist as the revelation of God. Jesus is to them only a legendary hero, like Dietrich of Bern in Ger- man mythology. This view was started by Gunkel and worked out by Drews, against whom Gruetzmacher wrote his scathing treatise 1st das liberale Jesusbild modern? In English this view was propounded by W. B. Smith. It used to be part of the Modernist view of Ohrist to claim that the teaching of Jesus had reference only to the present life and aimed at no supernatural kingdom of God. Jesus' teaching was taken to be a Diesseitsreligion, not a J enseitsreligion. "What He held must have been the view that the kingship of God the Father over human souls is to be conceived and realized wholly within the conditions of this life. If He spoke any words about a future life, He must have spoken as all human beings speak of that matter, in terms of faith and hope, without any peculiar authority arising from a superhuman conscious- ness." (Mackenzie, l. c., p.54'7.) 88 The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. This view, of course, could not be harmonized with the escha- tological sayings of Jesus. He spoke not only occasionally and vaguely of the life to come, but referred to it in terms of striking force and with much detail and delivered whole discourses on the end of the present world and the new life in the kingdom of His Father. Modernists were forced to accept "the eschatological Jesus," who "speaks of the kingdom of God as near at hand and is thinking of a catastrophic, supernatural act of God in which He will share as its supreme organ and controller, by which the natural life of man will be submerged and a new universe be established." (Mackenzie, l. c.) But, sticking stubbornly to their two basic presuppositions mentioned before, they decided to treat the eschatological elements in the teach- ing of Jesus as "an illusionary element in His consciousness," but admitted that through this illusion in Jesus "the divine spirit had seized upon the course of human history and given men the assurance of God's love." (Mackenzie.) In other words, the belief in God's love which Jesus taught and which has so utterly changed men's natural view of their relation to God has flown from an enthusiastic idea in Jesus' mind, but is nothing else than a beautiful lata morgana. Modernism in theology endeavors constantly to remain in closest touch with the findings of the two great modern sciences which deal with the highest forms of the phenomena of history, biology and psychology. Biology wrestles with the sphinxical problem, What is really life, and what is the process of its evolution ~ Whence does it spring, and whither does it lead ~ Psychology tries to grasp the work- ings of intellect and will in man, to define his mental conditions, his consciousness, subconsciousness, and subtraconsciousness. These terms, which are current in the sciences, are not absolutely fixed, but assume new meanings as the research of the scientists seems to yield new results. During the last quarter of a century they have been struggling with Morton Prince's claim that personality can become dissociated and that human consciousness is a complex thing with various centers and an intricate interplay between these centers. The situation in these sciences is really quite confused. Now, the personality of Jesus, every phase of His life, His in- carnation, His inner life, are continually being measured against the findings of biology and psychology, with the result that such an event as the person of God entering into a human organism and living a human life causes an ominous shaking of scientific heads. This skepticism becomes still more pronounced when the mission of Christ is considered, which is involved in His incarnation. For according to the uniform teaching of the Bible, Jesus assumed the nature of a human being that He might lead a vicarious human life among men and that He might have a body that could die a vicarious human death. He came, as He declared, "to give His life a ransom" The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. 89 for men. This truth is echoed resonantly through the New Testa- ment: "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself." It is the reason why all the apostles of Christ who have left us writings emphasize both the sinlessness of Christ as a lamb without blemish and without spot and His crucifixion as a malefactor. With this mission of Christ, even as with the incarnation of the only-begotten Son of God from which that mission results, Modernists can do nothing. The fundamental idea in the Biblical teaching re- garding the reconciliation of God to the sinner is, on the one hand, the imputation of the guilt of mankind to the sinless and impeccable Christ and, on the other hand, the imputation of the righteousness of Christ to the sinner, so that Christ is a sinner by proxy and the sinner is righteous by proxy. Paul is the most eloquent exponent of this rec- onciliation in the New Testament: "God hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." This teaching Modernists pronounce absolutely untenable because unethical. Responsibility and guilt, they say, cannot be shifted from one to another, neither can merit and virtuousness be transferred from one to another. Modernists argue that one or more persons may indeed be made to suffer the effects of some one else's wrong-doing, even as they can become the beneficiaries of some one else's well-doing; but the actual evil or good deed always remains attached only to the person of the actor and can never be lodged in any other person. Accordingly, the Modernist argument insists, like the Socinians four centuries ago, that whatever righteousness Jesus accumulated in His life He needed for Himself; for, being man, He was under the same obligation as any other man to live in strict conformity with every ethical norm. Even if He wished to aid His less fortunate fellow-men with His righteousness, He could not; for while He had all righteousness, He had none to give away. As a moral human being, as a member of His Church, and as a citizen in the commonwealth He was in duty bound to obey every law of moral, ecclesiastical, and social conduct. The fulfilment of all these laws would indeed con- stitute Him perfectly righteous, but no one else. Supposing that a Modernist might grant, for the sake of the ar- gument, that substitution of one person for another were possible in a moral issue, he would insist, I think, that the substitution could be for only one person at a time, and for that time Christ would have to live His perfect life over again for that one person and then repeat the task for the next person, and the next, and the next, and so on. Of course, in every generation Christ would substitute only for one person, and the next would not be benefited by His vicarious living and dying. Moreover, Christ's own life would have to continue through all generations, which is inconceivable. Or if by some un- 90 The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. known arrangement His vicarious living and dying could be made available for each human being that has ever lived, is now living, and will in the future live on earth at the rate, say, of thirty-three years- His own span of life - for each individual, that would require an impossible length of time. For instance, in 1929 the population of the earth was 1,899,878,368 persons. Substituting for these alone the life of Ohrist would have to extend through 62,695,986,144 years, and that would not take care of the unnumbered billions of human beings that have lived before 1929 and of the unnumbered billions that may live after 1929. The only other way out of the dilemma would be to assume a multitude of redeemers equal to the multitude of human beings. So you see, says the Modernist, the substitution theory is mathematically and physically impossible. A subsidiary argument against the vicarious character of Ohrist's suffering and death, in particular, is built up from the eternity of the punishment for a moral fault, and the Bible itself is cited in support of it. The torments of the wicked are without end. So the conscience of man and the teaching of Scripture testifies. Now, Ohrist's suffer- ing terminated; it was in point of time £nite. How, then, can this finite suffering be substituted for the in£nite retribution that awaits wrong-doers ~ In this manner the logic, the thinking processes, of the natural mind of man are hurling themselves like the ceaseless surf of the ocean tides against the fum teaching of the Scriptures of the Ohris- tian Ohurch on which the Rock of Ages gleams over the darkling waters. The verdict of these minds on the idea of a redemption of mankind by the vicarious atonement for their guilt by a single in- dividual is that it is preposterous to ask intelligent men to accept such a proposition. It is to them nothing but "foolishness." But the Ohristian view of that remarkable life which was termi- nated so ignominiously on Oalvary is attacked by Modernists from another angle. They charge that the process of redemption by means of the vicarious living and dying makes salvation altogether legalistic. This plan of salvation, they point out, starts with the first human pair breaking the Law of God and thereby coming under the curse of God and incurring His temporal and eternal displeasure. The plan assumes an angry and vengeful God, who demands full satisfaction for the affront offered Him by the breaking of His holy and inviolable Law. He is so utterly forgetful of His own essential attributes of mercy, loving-kindness, and readiness to forgive that He becomes a fierce, relentless exactor of a recompense due Him, a hard Shylock demanding his pound of flesh. He measures the righteousness of His own Son against every iota and tittle of His Law to see whether it is a full equivalent for that righteousness which man must render to Him, and only when His anger has been fully appeased, does He let go of His wrath and admit the sinner to His favor. The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. 91 There is, Modernists claim, not a grain of Gospel in all this plan. It wipes out the God of love, the God of fatherly compassion, the God of comfort to the stricken heart, and substitutes for it a hideous, man-eating ogre, a cruel Deity, worse .than any of the ap- palling monsters which pagan religions have invented. Moreover, it is asserted that by this plan the restoration of the sinner to the divine favor becomes a pure act of barter, a give-and-take transaction, a truly Jewish bargain. The sinner pays God with borrowed money, money transferred to Him from Ohrist. But He must pay to the uttermost farthing or be damned. Modernists claim that the teaching of the vicarious satisfaction lowers the ethical grl:lndeur of Jesus' mission infinitely. Dr. Harnack of Berlin, at the religious parliament in connection with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, declared that the genius of Jesus was revealed in this, that He broke the spell which the idea of God's wrath had cast on the human race and taught men that God was only a God of love and a heavenly Father, eager and ready to come to the aid of His erring children and to embrace every returning prodigal with loving affection without any intervening compensation for His love. Thus the vicarious satisfaction, the atonement, which both Testaments of the Ohristian Scriptures teach, becomes to Modernists an insurmountable stumbling-block. Many volumes, some of them ponderous, have been written to set forth the Ohrist of the Mod- ernists. I shall mention only a few, such as:- H. Weinel, Jesus im 19. Jahrhundert. Tuebingen, 1903-4. W. Sanday, The Life of Ghrist in Recent Research. Oxford, 1907. E. Digges la Toncha, The Person of Ghrist in Modern Thought. London, 1912. T. Wernle, Die QueUen des Lebens Jesu. Halle, 1904. A. Kalthoff, Das Ghristt6sproblern. Leipzig, 1902. A. Drews, Die Ghrist·16smythe. Jena, 1911. W. B. Smith, Der vorchristliche Jesus. Jena, 1906. S. J. Lare, The Historicity of Jesus. Chicago, 1912. N. Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth. New York, 1905. W. Bousset, Jesus. Halle, 1904. A. Harnack, Das Wesen des Ghristentums. Leipzig, 1900; Engl. transl.: What Ls Ghristianity? London, 1904. T. Adamson, Studies of the Mind of Ghrist. Edinburgh, 1898. A. E. Garvie, Studies in the Inner Life of Ghrist. London, 1907. D. W. Simon, Reconciliation by Incarnation. London, 1898. W. L. Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation. Edinburgh, 1901. A. Morris Stewart, The Grown of Science. London, 1902. Etc., etc., not to mention innumerable articles in works of reference, scientific periodicals, and popular journals. 92 The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. It is plain the entire Modernist argument against the Christ who works out redemption by His integrity and innocent suffering dis- regards Bible facts. It disregards the Bible-teaching that the in- carnate Christ has not ceased by the incarnation to be what He was before the incarnation, viz., the eternal God, who is in His essence perfect righteousness and communicates His divine righteousness just as any other perfection of His to His assumed human nature. It furthermore disregards the plain Bible-teaching that the man Christ whom we behold busy as a servant under the Law to fulfil the I,aw has not ceased to be what He was before, namely, the supreme Lawgiver and as such exlex, i. e., outside the pale of the Law issued for mere man, superior to all laws and amenable to none. By both these counts the incarnate Son of God is under no obligation to fulfil the Law. His fulfilling it can add nothing to His own righteousness either as God or man. All the righteousness which He acquires by His actual submission to the Law can never have been intended for Himself and is therefore accumulated by Him as proxy for men, to be credited to them and to set them up in the judgment of God in a righteousness that cannot be impeached. Moreover, this God-man Redeemer takes up the life task of the human race at the point where our co=on ancestor, Adam, had to take it up. Christ, in the db-ine account, is "the second Adam." As the fate of every descendant of Adam was bound up in Adam, so it is again bound up in Christ. There is therefore in the Scriptural view of the matter no need of many Redeemers or many repetitions of the redemption. One Christ and one sacrificial life and death of Christ suffices for all. It must furthermore be borne in mind that the suffering of Christ is the suffering of the eternal Deity. Though limited in point of time, it is nevertheless permeated, suffused, with the quality of ever- lastingness, because of the sublime personality of the Sufferer, who is the eternal God, before whom all time-measurments are futile at- tempts to measure an existence that has had no beginning and will have no end. Furthermore, the Modernist argument against the legalistic character of the Biblical plan of salvation operates with the love of God to the exclusion of the justice of God. It makes God forget what He had threatened to do to the lawbreakers and represents Him as a good-natured sire who is ever ready to condone the offenses of his sons. It forgets that, while the general loving-kindness of God is impartially extended to all His creatures, to the evil and the good, the just and the unjust, to sustain them in their natural life, the redeeming love of God, which sets them up in a spiritual relation to the God against whom they have rebelled, is imparted only through Christ. John 3, 16 does not read: "God loved the world to give every The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. 93 one eternal life," so that heaven would be ours merely by a fiat of the sovereign good pleasure of God, but this is how it reads: "God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." It is verily as Luther insisted against his adversaries in His U Sie bedenken nicht die Koestel" that is, they do not consider the cost involved in our salvation. Paul and Peter ring the changes on the fact that we were bought with a price, a price, not of material quality like silver and gold, but with the purchase-money of the innocent blood of Ohrist, as of a lamb wihout blemish and without spot. Herein lies the un- fathomable depth of the redeeming love of God that in His infinite wisdom He found a way out of the dilemma created by man's sin, by which, on the one hand, His justice and His truth could be vindicated and thus remain inviolate, and, on the other hand, His mercy and love and compassion could be given free and boundless scope to go out to every sinner and release him from the guilt, curse, and power of every sin. In reviewing the Modernist view of the crucified Ohrist, we must not forget one fact: In propounding the divine plan of redemption, Paul again and again states that he is explaining to his hearers and readers the last and greatest of the mysteries of God. To quote only one statement of this kind, permit me to quote from 1 Oor. 2: "We speak wisdom among them that are perfect; yet not the wisdom of this world nor of the princes of this world, that come to naught; but we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the bidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory; which none of the princes of this world knew; for had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. But as it is written, Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God hath revealed them unto us by His Spirit. . .. We have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God. . .. But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned," vv.6-14. This is in tenor the same declaration as that which Ohrist made when in the region of Oaesarea Philippi He accepted Peter's confession with these words: "Blessed art thou, Bar-J ona; for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in heaven," Matt. 16,17. Paul made the declaration to the Oorinthians just cited to explain two things to himself and to us: 1) why the Ohrist crucified whom he preached was to the Greeks foolishness and to the Jews a stumbling- block. It is that to every man by nature. In his unregenerate state every man is a Modernist. The Modernists deceive themselves when 94 The Meaning of Calvary in the Minds of Modernists. they think and assert that they have discovered a new Ohrist. They simply repeat in modern terminology and with a modern scientific array of reasonings the old arguments of Oelsus and his followers in the centuries after him. To all of them the cross on Oalvary is the great enigma of the history of mankind. The dying Jesus is to them a misunderstood teacher like Socrates, a viqtim of jealousy by men who could never hope to be His equal and therefore removed Him, as they have removed thousands before Him and thousands since, a spiritual hero, who has given the world an inspiring example of the nobility of the human heart that can philosophically rise superior to the sordid things of this life, and so on. But they never rise by nature to the thought: That is what it cost to restore me to God's favor, open heaven, and close hell for me. 2) Paul declares that the crucified Ohrist who is despised by Jews and Greeks is nevertheless "to them that are called the Power of God and the Wisdom of God." To men and women all over the world who since the days of Oaiaphas, Pilate, and Herod have been initiated by divine grace into that knowledge and insight into God's plan which faith in the Word of God begets the cross on Oalvary is the world marvel. Down the vista of the centuries they see that cross looming large in every generation of man. Once it stood silently on a gallows' hill outside the gates of Jerusalem; to-day it gleams from millions of church-steeples in every zone and clime, on every con- tinent, and in thousands of isles. Altars, pulpits, baptismal fonts, prayer-books, hymn-books, service-books of the Ohristian churches, are decorated with it. The first cross had been rudely constructed out of two pieces of wood laid across each other. Since then the great symbol of the Ohristian faith has been elaborately wrought in silver and gold, with pearl and precious stones inlaid, and artistically carved from rare woods and ivory. From infancy to old age, from the baptismal font to the final shriving of the departing saint, at every momentous stage in his spiritual progress, the sign of the cross has been given a place. With it the believer retires at night and greets the dawn of the new day. Mutely thus the disciples of the crucified Lord acknowledge their indebtedness to the vicarious atonement which was brought to a finish in the unutterable agony of Oalvary, and with mute eloquence the Ohristian world reverently and gratefully acknowl- edges the truth of the words of the Savior of mankind on the eve of His departure: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me." It is to His Ohurch the symbol of victory over all the forces of negation, skepticism, and agnosticism that have tried their intellectual cunning and their secular strength against its victorious valor and spells to them as it did to the pagan emperor in one of the early Ohristian legends: In hoc signa vinces! The Modernist fears the Scriptural meaning of the cross, the lIiln~ lffiott fie follen Inffen ftn~n.1I 95 theology which it expresses, with stupid inability for comprehension. He may speak of the Passion of the Redeemer as an iliad of woes, a tragedy of misunderstanding, etc. But he must admit that the Bible of the Ohristians treats this woe as unparalleled, unique, in a class by itself. The history of the Oross, the unquestionable power which the event on Oalvary has exerted on the development of our race in the matter of religion, is to him a most perplexing phenomenon. He may regard the reverent homage paid to the crucified Ohrist as a piece of superstition, and he may point to true facts of history to show that there have been, and probably are this day, instances where the cross is superstitiously used even within parts of the Ohristian Ohurch; but he is forced to admit that it is not all superstition; it is clear-minded conviction that is expressed by it; and this conviction is ineradicable. No research of science, no literary skill of renowned writers, no oratory of the greatest speakers, will ever be able to pluck from the hearts of all men the blessed assurance that the meaning of Oalvary is this: "He, the Son of God, loved me and gave Himself for me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in Him." Thank God, Oalvary has that meaning also for all Modernists, although they cannot see and refuse to admit it. But even in their ranks it has proved the power of God and the wisdom of God and brought men from their ranks to the foot of the cross to join the Roman centurion in his confession. If we are faithful in our testi- mony, Oalvary will still prove its power and wisdom also to the Modernists and help them out of their Verstandesstolz, out of their intellectual self-sufficiency, into the greater wisdom of the penitent believer to whom the profound mysteries of the eternal counsels of God's love are opened up as he stands at the foot of the cross on Oalvary and studies the tragedy in which mercy has in a most sublime manner seasoned justice. Valparaiso, Ind. W.H.T.DAu. "S)ll~ mud fie fulteu lllffeu ftllijU. II @:lo lingt Eutfjet in feinem @:ldju~" unb 5ttu~Heb. @5t roat fidj belfen neroutt, bat in bem ~ampf, au roeIdjem @ott ifjn netufen fjatie, e~ fidj nidjt um itbifdje @utet fjanber±e, um politifdje ~teifjeit, roertridje IDCadjt, nation ale @5igentiimIidjfdien, ~iitbetung bet m5ilfenfdjafi unb ~teifjeit be~ ~enfens unb anbete ~inge mefjt, bat e~ bielmefjt eih ~ampf roat um bie alleinige @eltung bes m50ties bet @:ldjtift unb bamit um bie @5fjte @otie~ unb bie @:leIigfeit bet IDCenfdjen. mon aroei @:leiten routbe gegen bie ~uiotitiit bet @:ldjtif± @:ltutm gelaufen, bom !jSapf±tum unb bon ben @:ldjroiitmetn. Broat fjier±en neibe in thesi an bem gOtt" Iidjen Utfptung bet miVel, ifjtet roiitiIidjen @5ingefJung butdj ben S)ei"