races, but only of a host. They do not propagate their kind. There is no fearful entail of sin and suffering down the lines of an historic descent. But when man sinned, and carried a race down with him, immediately the heavens were moved. Father, Son and Spirit took counsel together, and the sublime economy of Redemption was at once inaugurated. Hence there are no right lines in human history. Men go straight neither to heaven nor to hell. Rising towards heaven, sin tugs at our spirits to drag them down. Sinking towards hell, grace interposes to arrest us in our course. And so we move in zig-zag lines either up or down.

The Church, then, had its beginning with Adam. Its creed was the promise of redemption; its ritual, sacrifice; its life, grace in the heart. While its polity was patriarchal; the heads of families, or elders, being the Priests. A modest, feeble germ, for so large a growth as then awaited the coming centuries.

The call of Abraham, and the institution of circumcision, was the beginning of a new stadium of development; the national, which was consummated by the Mosaic legislation. At Sinai, a change was made in the Priesthood, the tribe of Levi being selected in place of the first-born of all the tribes. (Num. 3: 12.)

Later still, by some hundreds of years, came the bright suc cession and goodly fellowship of the Prophets. And, close upon their heels, the Kings. Thus completing the circle of historic types, which syllabled the three-fold office of our Redeemer, as Priest, Prophet and King. And after this again, perhaps, the Synagogues, slowly exalting instruction, the land over, into fellowship with the central Temple Sacrifice. Church and nation were coïncident; and yet, though mixed, they were never confounded. There was always a spiritual Israel within the political, as there is now an invisible Church within the visible. "He is not a Jew," says Paul, "which is one outwardly." (Rom. 2: 28.) "For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel." (Rom. 9: 6.)

The Church was thus grafted, first upon the Family, and then upon the State; both of them institutions of God. These two economies lasted some four or five thousand years; the

Jewish economy having been rendered necessary by the failure of the Patriarchal. Together, they constitute the pupilage of the world, preparatory to the Incarnation of God in Christ. The whole was one grand experiment upon the freedom of man, to demonstrate historically his impotency to redeem himself. This, indeed, was presumed in advance, and loudly proclaimed in the redemptive interposition of God. But human pride resented the assumption, spurned the proffered help, and set up for itself. Hence the gigantic array of heathenism, born, as Kurtz* has finely said, in the rebellious cry at Babel, "Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven;" a heathenism of stupend ous proportions, and innumerable grades, ranging widely from the gorgeous pantheism of India to the meagre ethics of China, but all equally astray from God, and equally unable to return. And yet a part of the world's history, which the constraining Providence of God would not let slip from the grasp of His own decrees; working against God in its own intent, but negatively working for Him in spite of all. Philosophy achieved its utmost in Greece, standing between the Orient and the Occident. Civil government achieved its utmost in Rome. A religion of types and shadows, its utmost in Palestine. And so the discordant world was still one, under that wise and invincible Providence, which overrules equally the folly and the wrath of man, to the furtherance of its own designs. The final contributions were, from Judaism, a monotheistic faith, and synagogues in all parts of the world; from Greece, an incomparable language, without which the nice distinctions of theology would have been impossible; from Rome, roads, jurisprudence and universal empire. And so, Judea became the mediator of life, Greece of doctrine, and Rome of organization, to the newly-established Church.

Thus the law is that of development throughout. From the first Adam to the second Adam, there is one steady precess of growth. The counter-forces are sin and grace, sin struggling to empty the world of its God, grace struggling to

*Geschichte des Alten Bundes. Erster Band, p. 56.

fill it with truth and love. The vital product of this conflict is the Church. God is in it, and over it, from first to last; revealed at first in dim but refreshing promise; enshrining His truth in symbols; finding voice for it in Prophets; and, in the fullness of time, beconing incarnate in the Virgin's Son. The Divine agency, throughout the process, is two-fold; imparting knowledge and imparting grace; and, in both these lines of movement, there is a manifest enhancement of efficiency from step to step. There are those who would fain believe, that a large volume of divine truth, including even the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity, that crowning doctrine of our Christian faith, was communicated to man in the earliest morning of history. In support of this assumption, appeal is made to the Trinities of India, of Persia, and of Plato, as dying reverberations of the primal creed. But the Trinities of the Orient are pantheistic, and the Trinity of Plato only subjective. They witness decisively to no Paradisiacal revelation, but rather to a trinal structure of our nature, which, perhaps, dimly shadows the Triune nature of God. The Old Testament Scriptures warrant no such conception of the early history; on the contrary, the volume of revealed truth appears to have been comparatively small at first, swelling larger and larger from age to age. Larger, even at the start, than appears in the Mosaic records, as we may readily concede; but larger on the practical side, rather than on the speculative; unfolding the way of life to ruined men, rather than explaining the mysterious nature of God; and, in a word, putting religion before theology. There is no warrant whatever for the notion that Adam and Abel were as well informed in regard to divine things as John and Paul. As of knowledge, so of grace. Enoch walking with God before the deluge, exhibits a childlike sanctity, as compared with good old Simeon, ready to die as soon as he had seen his Saviour.

Such was the history of the Church from the Promise of Redemption in Eden, to the fulfillment of that promise in the manger at Bethlehem. Now, the presumption is, and must be, that from Bethlehem onward to the Final Judgment, the method of procedure will not be changed.. Through two

economies of redemption, the Patriarchal and the Jewish, the law of the Church has been that of growth. In this final economy, which we call the Christian, the law will remain the

same.

And so we find it. No other conception of Christianity will abide the test of history. The changes undergone in every department of the Church, are too palpable to be winked or argued out of sight. The Church, as we find it in the writings of Clement, Ignatius and Hermas, is not the Church of Cyril, Athanasius, and Augustine; is not the Church of Hildebrand, and the Council of Trent, and of Bellarmin; is not the Church of Luther, Zwingle and Calvin; is not the Church of the Puritans of England and America. Polity, life, ritual and doctrine have all been changing, and, as can easily be shown, have all been shaping themselves towards better and better forms. Not that each new epoch is in advance of the one immediately preceding it; but each, on the whole, and in the end, will be found to have been essential to all the rest. Winter, stripping the trees of their foliage, looks like defeat and death. But Spring returns, and the leaves that fell and rustled on the frozen ground, now rot and nourish the living 100ts.

To make good such statements as these, would be to review the whole history of the Church itself; and this would be to write a book instead of an article. A brief and rapid glance at the course of our Christian history is all that is possible.

In regard to the outward extension of Christianity, great apparent losses have indeed been incurred. Central and Eastern Asia, which took the Gospel so quickly, as quickly let go its hold of it. Africa, once so grandly irradiated, from the Nile to the Pillars of Hercules, soon went back into night again. The Roman Empire dissolved, in spite of its Christian baptism; its western half going down under the Gothic avalanche; its eastern half succumbing to the Saracen. And so the theatre has shifted; from Asia to Europe, from one race to another; but always with a real advantage, in spite of all apparent reverses. The Teutonic civilization, supplanting the Græco-Roman, is a great gain. Even Mohammedanism will

be found to have been a gain, falling, as it did, upon an idolatrous Christendom, and pressing on to the subjugation of Pagan races, which are thereby held to a monotheistic faith, as in a sort of "quarantine," till a purer Gospel can be furnished them. Thus, though Christianity has not always held its territorial conquests, it has held on to its conquering march; gaining more and better territories, and, above all, gaining to itself better and better races of men from age to age.

Take the polity of the Church. The lines are faint in the record; but distinct enough to be traced by a mind free from sectarian bias. Paul sent Titus to ordain elders in every city, that is, in every church, since, as we learn in other connections, there was but one church organization in each city, how populous soever the city might be. So that a plural eldership was the Apostolic arrangement. Nor was there any office above the eldership, since elder and bishop are synonymous in Paul's Epistles. Ordination to ministerial office was not, exclusively, an Apostolic prerogative, for Timothy had hands laid on him by the presbytery; so that if Apostles took part in the service, it was not as Apostles, but as presbyters. The only other office-bearer, was the deacon, and in some churches, the deaconness. As to local churches, they were in many respects independent of each other; and yet the Apostolate, so long as the Apostles lived, was a common bond, clasping them all together; while the Synod at Jerusalem, in the year 50, unique as it was in its constitution, is yet a plea for concert and harmony of action through all time.

Such appears to have been the Apostolic polity. But we do not find it prescribed as an indispensable, and the only legitimate form of government. Hence, the Church is at liberty, if she please, or if pressed to it by some exigency from without, to change the form.

She did change it, and that very shortly. Early in the second century, in the Epistles of Ignatius, we see the head of a bishop looming above the eldership. The impelling causes were various First, the sense of bereavement, consequent upon the removal by death of the College of the Apostles; secondly, heresies and disorders within the Church, which