ceivable by finite minds. To pronounce him unconditioned, unchangeable, omniscient, ommipotent, omnipresent, using these words in their ordinary and fullest acceptation, placing no restriction upon their meaning, is simply falling, unintentionally no doubt, into nothing less than word jugglery, affirming what to human minds must of necessity be absolutely unthinkable. The only rational course is to take for our basic thought that we have been created in God's image, and then to picture God as a spirit possessing in perfection attributes analogous to our own, although these are yet germinal and sin-distorted.

I am now ready to answer the question, How can we reasonably hope by our petitions to effect a change in the divine purposes, and why should we plead importunately, why kindle our souls into such intensity of fervor? The Scriptures in enjoining earnestness need not be understood as favoring attempts to coax and tease God, as we too frequently do our earthly parents, to act against his better judgment out of some weak, short-sighted sympathy. If that be our purpose, we may be certain of flat failure. Our prayers will never induce him to deal any more generously with us. He has always stood with outstretched arms, with overflowing sympathy, waiting impatiently to bless us. What untold wealth of deep inventive thought, what untold eons of slowly passing years, he has already lavished in his preparations for our coming, for our maintenance, for our unfolding, for our permanent weal! While our prayers will not make him any more kindly disposed, will not noticeably increase his sympathy for us, they will in most marked measure increase his sympathy with us, will profoundly change our attitude toward him and multiply our capacity for blessing ten thousand fold. Indeed, so radical is the change wrought, that what would have been poison before, becomes medicine now. We thus furnish God new facts upon which to act, facts of mental attitude, the unforeseen outputs of our sovereignty.

That attitude is one of Christ-like love, manifesting itself in five forms, that of willing obedience, of self-sacrificing service, of sense of divine dependence, of restful confidence, and of intensest longing. Until that attitude is attained in all these its prime essentials, God, if he should interfere by stepping outside his general providence, in which the evil and the good are served alike, to confer especial favors, would be doing violence to his conceptions of fitness and of true beneficence, would work his children a most positive injury, placing a premium on qualities that stand over against these forms of love, thereby countenancing a spirit of rebellion, selfishness, self-sufficiency, distrust, and ignoble apathy. It is the fervent prayer of the righteous man that availeth much. He must be righteous and his righteousness must be on fire to fulfil the Scripture conditions. That availing power is something more than retroactive; it moves the arm that moves the world. As this is a moral state of the soul within the circle of its sovereignty, the product of its absolutely free choice, there cannot be, as I have shown, any sure prophecy of its coming. But when it comes, all barriers are burnt away. Reserve gives place to closest sympathetic intimacy. What more natural when the spirits of father and son thus meet and mingle, than that the son, care-cumbered it may be, or broken with grief, or baffled in purpose, though battling still, should pour out in most impassioned utterance his deep and noble longings? Love itself would so prompt; for love casteth out fear, is the very essence of liberty. Cautious reserve cannot live in its atmosphere of holy confidence. All curtains of concealment fall instantly at the magic touch of sympathy. He could not keep his longings back. His father's tender look and tone would break the seals of silence, would touch his lips with coals of fire. The thought of trying by coaxing to melt down his stern reluctance is. utterly foreign to such a scene, repugnant to such a state, and was never contemplated

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in the gospel. What more natural than that God's heart should be deeply stirred by the fervid outflow of such a passion of love and longing, and that he should by direct willpower supply the deficiencies of his general providence, or by timely suggestions reveal its resources, and place them in reach to meet the needs of such a soul in such an hour?

These views are not only thus in deep accord with the principles of sound philosophy and the revelations of modern science, but also with the profoundest intuitions of human hearts; for when once our sense of world-dependence and of self-sufficiency is rudely swept away by some disaster, and we come intently to long for what we find we cannot reach without God's help, how soon we brush aside all hindering creeds, and in dead earnest plead our case, and plead believing that the heart and arm of God will answer to our plea! But in this intensely materialistic and scientific age there have so insidiously settled about our thought the bewildering fogs of learned and subtile sophistries breathed out by those who would either relegate God altogether from his universe or make his relations quite inconsequential and remote, that only in the distressing stress of crises in our history do our long-neglected religious intuitions assume their rightful sovereignty, and restore us to our true relations with Him who in his great love never wearies in caring for his own. But may we not hope that the night is well-nigh spent, that the fogs are lifting, that a new day dawns-a day of deeper, clearer, truer thought, of more perfect knowledge, of more enlightened faith, and a faith whose kindly light will prove the sure harbinger of God's perfect day?

[To be concluded.]

ARTICLE V.

PROPHETIC TESTIMONY TO THE PENTATEUCH.

BY THE REV. HENRY HAYMAN, D. D., ALDINGHAM, Ulverston,

ENGLAND.

I.

IN dealing with the objections of current criticism to the genuineness and relative antiquity of the Pentateuch, it seems best to meet them in their most popular form. this in the following pages the lectures of Professor RobertOf son Smith on "The Old Testament in the Jewish Church," are taken as a type well known. There can be no more important section of the whole area of evidence by which these objections are to be tested, than the testimony of the prophets of Israel and Judah. At the same time that they do not absolutely prove a much higher antiquity than that of their own age, yet so far as they prove this latter, they render highly probable a much higher one. tion thus opened briefly: If the Pentateuch be substantially To put the quesolder by even half a century than the close of Uzziah's reign, it must be vastly older. There is no period of the monarchy since the earlier part of Solomon's reign to which it can even with plausibility be ascribed. But that reign, rich in administrative and centralizing power, shows no trace of nomothetic energy. The earlier reigns are too largely warlike struggles, first for existence and then for supremacy, for such energy to have been developed. What we know of Samuel's personal practice is too largely antithetic to the Levitical norm for us to regard him as a possible author of it. This antithes is arises from contemporary events and their influ

ences, chiefly indeed from the divorce of the ark from its sanctuary. Besides which a sanctuary, claiming to be central, under a fixed and inherited priesthood of divine origination, and with fixed rules and customs of cultus, is what meets us on the threshold of Samuel's personal history, and points backward to a series of some ages of continuity. No one would think of ascribing such a work to the highly disorganized period of the Judges. The question of origin is thus thrown back between Joshua and Moses; and to ascribe it to Joshua is simply to make the whole record in the literal sense preposterous. These are the reasons for attaching far more than the mere weight of contemporary testimony to the evidence furnished by the prophets.

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new moon and Sabbath, the

they deny that Of these the professor asserts, that " these things [sacrifice and ritual] are of positive divine institution, or have any part in the scheme on which Jehovah's grace is administered in Israel. 'Jehovah,' they say, 'has not enjoined sacrifice'" (p. 288). He holds that such passages as Isa. i. 11 seq.; Amos ii. 10; v. 25 prove tion. Let us examine them. Isaiah says: "To what puris the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? . . . When pose ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand [i. e., the sacrificial fat, blood, incense, etc.]? . . Incense is an abomination; . . When ye spread forth your calling of assemblies. hands, I will hide mine eyes from you; yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood." Now it is clear that all the items here enumerated stand precisely on the same footing. Therefore, if sacrificial blood and fat and incense are not of divine institution and reof all. quired of Jewish obedience, neither is the Sabbath, nor even proves any one it What it proves prayer itself. But the Sabbath is acknowledged by the professor as a part of the earliest code, delivered in the wilderness; and without prayer all access to God, whether ritualistic or not, is

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