having been established, all musical advance is in new combinations of the basic tones. In mathematics the multiplication table will never be improved, neither will the point, or the line, or the circle. The seven colors will never become out of date, but there will be many new arrangements of them. These ultimates in music, mathematics, painting, having once been found, are of permanent, unchanging value. All progress lies in using them with better understanding and in fresh combinations. So with religion. Faith, hope, and love are ultimates. We may grow into profounder conceptions of their meaning, we shall learn to apply them more wisely, but they are as truly ultimate factors in life as the point and the circle in art. They cannot be diminished or superceded; they are the essence of religion. There is nothing further in that direction. Having learned his true relationship to God and his fellow men, and the abiding and sovereign dispositions of the spirit which make for salvation from the love of sin and the

dominion of fear, has not man reached an unchanging stratum in religion? To this can anything be added?

Yes, there is one more possible disclosure. Let faith, hope and love find a perfect expression in a human being who lives his days as a true son of the Highest, and a genuine brother to humanity; let the ultimates of religion become flesh and blood in some Son of God and Son of Man, and something has come into history which can never be ignored or out of date.

Thirdly, the Bible is a collection of the original documents which describe the process by which the religious ultimates became permanent in the world. It shows the expanding spirit of man gradually throwing off the bondage of fear and superstition, and with ever increasing wonder laying hold of the increasing revelation of truth. It contains the records which witness to a perfect life, a life incarnating all the truths and forces of religion. Now the original documents of an epochal movement never lose their value.

Another reason may be mentioned why the Bible will not be superceded. The book is much more than a collection of historical documents describing the process by which the final truths of our faith came into the world. It is literature, and parts of it are literature of the very highest order. Now great literature comes down through the centuries in ageless youth because it radiates spiritual power. You will recall De Quincey's distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power. The distinction is interesting, but in fact there is no literature dealing simply with knowledge. No book becomes literature until its truths stir the emotions, the fountains of power. Books containing information merely do not endure, for having acquired the facts, we throw the book away. Books live, not for the knowledge they contain, but for the moods they induce. The eternal volumes are those which lift us into the timeless world by the exalted moods they create in us. To attain the mood we must read the

book.

Preeminently is this true of the Bible. Its writers were men of spiritual genius profoundly moved by the very spirit of the truth of which they wrote; they were aquiver with moral passion. The word of God was on their lips and his spirit was in their hearts. To attain the gospel moods there is no better way than to read the gospel books. Here we find the power to become sons of God, the strongest inducements to love our fellow men and to hope for a glorious future. The final truths of religion cannot be stated with more beauty, simplicity and spiritual power than they are stated in the noblest passages of the Old and New Testaments. Supreme truths, fashioned in forms of perfect beauty, are not forgotten. They have that kind of fire in them which the world will not let die.

The second method by which science has influenced religious thought is through the introduction of the scientific spirit and the scientific method into theology. Let us bear in mind that theology

is ever to be distinguished from religion, as botany is distinct from flowers. Theology is our theory of religion, as botany is the science of flowers.

The theologies of the past have been discarded one by one, not through lack of logical articulation, but because these mighty structures were reared upon shaky premises. Discredit the major premise and the superstructure collapses. Grown wise by the experience of the past, and thoroughly imbued with the scientific spirit, our leading thinkers in the religious world do not assume some broad generalization, such as the Fall of Man, or the sovereign decrees of the Almighty, upon which to build imposing systems of thought. On the contrary, they are keeping very close to facts of human experience; they deal almost exclusively with the near end of truth. And while undoubtedly their interpretations of the facts and truths may change with advancing knowledge, the foundations are secure. Their appeal is not to dogma, but to life.