arose"; men were roused to a sense of sin and to the fact that something was to be done about it. "It is in vain," said Bellamy to his congregation, "to pretend that we are not voluntary in our corruptions, when they are nothing else but the free, spontaneous inclinations of our own hearts."

Such preaching might be based upon a determinist philosophy, but it was a determinism robbed of something of its paralyzing sting. The preaching and the application, it may be believed, were often better than the system itself; and these men were the inspirers if not the personal leaders of much beneficent activity. Edwards was a missionary to the Indians; Hopkins bore valiant witness against the slave trade; Taylor was a powerful and gracious evangelist, despite his uncompromising avowal of the doctrine of decrees; and out of the New England in which this theology prevailed there grew the great missionary and educational agencies which carried New England influence not only into all parts of the country, but over the world. Both the strength Both the strength

and the weakness of this theology lay in the fact that it was a system,

logically developed from specific from specific premisses. In intent, as least, it was a complete and therefore a static. thing, instead of a vital and partial but ever-growing thing. It is true that because religion is so essentially vital this intent was defeated, and every generation of thinkers tried its hand at "improvements"; but these, in turn, were like improvements to a structure to be effected by pulling down here and building on there, still bent on completing an architectonic scheme instead of pruning and developing a growing experience.

Then, too, the guiding principles of the New England Theology were governmental and forensic, and those who maintained it seemed more con

cerned to defend God's authority as a ruler than to bring men into vital contact with a heavenly Father. The modern reader wonders how scholars who were so well versed in the forms of Pauline argument in the fifth and eighth chapters of the epistle to the Romans could have taken these and the framework of the epistle to the Hebrews so literally while apparently making little but a pretty story of the parable of the Prodigal Son.

The whole structure was in danger if its premisses were threatened or if a new guiding principle for religious. thought should appear. Just these things happened. Biblical learning advanced. The method of proof-text argument lost much of its cogency. The theory of evolution began its mighty march into all realms of human knowledge. The happy fact that man was made in God's image and that therefore an enduring theology must be humane as well as divine began to be considered. The synoptic gospels were rediscovered and with them not only the words but something of the method of Jesus. Glimpses of the divine immanence were caught. Here and there a tentative essay was made toward a truer doctrine of the Spirit-and the days of the old New England Theology were numbered. It is customary to say that it collapsed, but I do not think the phrase altogether happy. There was no cataclysmic crash. Men simply left its precincts, most of them quietly and gradually as the tenants of a castle built for life's bare defense might move out into more modern and sanitary tenements better adapted to life developments.

The great protagonist of this change was Horace Bushnell. He was far from being a systematic theologian-too far, perhaps, because of his habit of sometimes publishing the processes rather than the results of his thinking. But his "Christian

Nurture was the herald of a new day; his Dissertation upon Language was like a declaration of independence from the tyranny of mere logic-chopping in theology; and his profoundly humane and moral views of atonement went far to dissipate the mists that had so long distorted the idea of God into a sort of broken specterthe magnified reflection of man's own least lovely governmental instincts and habits. He saw, too, something of the real significance of the Unitarian movement, and was content to ask what might be learned from it instead of merely what might be done to it.

To him succeeded a long and honorable line of men like Samuel Harris, Henry Ward Beecher, Munger, Abbott, Tucker, Egbert, Newman Smyth, and George A. Gordon, who have stood in the New England succession and developed a theology not only adapted for to-day but vital enough to grow up to the needs of to-morrow. There is the less need to characterize these men and their views individually because this has so recently been done by Professor J. W. Buckham in his informing book, Progressive Religious Thought in America.' 1. It must suffice to say that the earlier of them brought much of the beneficent influence of Coleridge, Carlyle, and F. W. Robertson into our religious thinking. Theology became more scientific in the modern sense as it became more humane. Its Christology and its doctrine of the atonement dealt less with a celestial device for saving God's face and men's souls than with a true reconciliation between a heavenly Father and his erring sons. The decrees which loomed so large in the thought of earlier theologians have been relegated to the category of God's business rather than ours. The thought of man's depravity was felt

1 See the HOMILETIC REVIEW for April, 1920,

to be so ungracious that the profound truth in it has been neglected; until a world sunk in the physical and moral iniquity of war has rebuked the neglect and at present furnishes something like an illustration of a total inability to rescue itself.

One of the problems that greatly occupied the generation of Bellamy and Hopkins was that of theodicy, or the reconciliation of God's goodness and power with the presence of evil in the world; and it was a fruitful problem which forced men's minds in the direction of an adequate doctrine of human freedom. The same problem faces us to-day and theology finds itself once more deeply influenced by our thought upon it. The pragmatism of Bergson and James and the "neo-realism" of men like Professor R. B. Perry with its reflection in the minds of their more thoughtful students (as witnessed, for instance, by Miss Ruth M. Gordon's able paper, "Two Contrasting Attitudes toward Evil" in a recent number of the Harvard Theological Review, are both profoundly concerned with the seeming antinomy between an ade

quate idea of God and the very patent fact of evil. Mr. H. G. Wells has found in it such stuff as very profitable dreams are made of, thus bringing it into the circulating library and the street..

Meanwhile for more than a generation leaders of the later New England Theology have directed both thought and effort upon problems of sociology and their necessary relation to questions of faith. W. J. Tucker and Washington Gladden have been pioneers here with their insistence upon human values; while Dr. G. A. Gordon has brought a wealth of philosophical learning together with a dietion as noble as his passion to the service of theological science interpreted in terms of personality. His emphasis upon humanism, "the doc