world may seem to be presumptions against God's existence. But from the moment when belief in God has become the primal certainty of my being, all problems about savage religion, or pain, or sin, can only be raised in the light of the vital certainty that God is God above all. As long as I stand in doubt whether the Incarnation is really true, I may be utterly perplexed or incredulous about the Gospel miracles; but from the moment when the Incarnation is to me the crowning illumination of all philosophical or theological thought, the evidence about miracles can only be examined-nay, can only be stated or seen in the light of the basal certainty of the Incarnation1.

Such problems are really only incidents in a larger question-into which indeed they enter as ingredients, but which can only be decided as a whole. If viewed persistently in isolation, they cannot be adequately viewed at all. And in a somewhat similar manner it is true that a critical examination of texts, however valuable, is only a part, not the whole, of the theologian's access to the meaning of that living reality, which is portrayed for us in the New Testament alike by historic action and recorded word-but by neither nor both together in absolute completeness, just for this essential reason, that living reality is always more than any of its possible expressions in word

or act.

It may be that the conception of the living

1 Those who have read Divine Immanence, by the Rev. J. R. Illingworth, in connexion with his Bampton Lectures on 'Personality,' will understand how infinitely larger is the range of thought to which I refer, than it would be at all within my own power to express.

Church, as realized in Christian experience, could hardly, apart from Christian experience, have been deduced with infallible certainty from a verbal exposition of St. Paul. But Christian experience, as a whole, is a real part of our insight into the meaning of the Scriptures upon which the experience itself is based. There may be such a thing as true insight into the Theology of the Person of Christ, with its meanings and corollaries, which is mirrored in, which illuminates brightly as nothing else illuminates, and brings into full coherence and harmony, yet is not itself absolutely deducible from, the words of apostolic exposition. When I am perfectly certain of my belief in God, I must construe all the evidence, which might before have been ambiguous, in the light of this, which is now my primal certainty. When I am perfectly certain of my belief in a divinely ordered Church, I am right in taking my certainty with me to the interpretation of passages, which might otherwise, perhaps, have been explicable without it. If indeed the passages in question were incompatible with it, I should have to modify my conception to suit the passages; but if they without it are so far ambiguous, I do certainly right to interpret them by it. I am not now either explaining or arguing on behalf of the conception itself. I am only contending that it ought to be examined -and that upon the widest possible grounds— before I can be in a position to make my exegesis complete. Supposing for one moment that the conception is true, and that those to whom it has been among the most transparent of certainties

have been dealing with spiritual fact and not spiritual fancy, then it would necessarily follow that exegesis which explains St. Paul's mystical teaching on the subject of the Church without reference to it-on the ground that his language can be explained apart from it would be, as

exegesis, misleading.

It is this which exegesis has to bear in mind. The separate texts are always merely parts of a whole. And it is in the light of the whole that alone they can, as parts, be truly understood. Suppose that the questions at issue are such as these: Was the method of the working of the Pentecostal spirit in the world, i. e. was the method of Christ's Church detached and. individual, or corporate? Again, Was the corporate Church organized on the basis of private consent, or of Christ-descended apostolic authority? If I claim to approach the examination of texts bearing on these questions in the light of the historical idea of the Church throughout the ages, it is to be remembered that the historical idea of the Church is not an a priori imagination drawn out of my inner consciousness; it is itself the actual product in history of the very evidence, as a whole, of which I am invited to try and cross-examine some detached parts.

It ought hardly, perhaps, to be necessary to be pleading for the legitimacy of a principle of interpretation to which all evolutionary thought bears emphatic witness. If evolutionary thought has taught us anything, it has taught us not to exclude the end, ex hypothesi, where we want to

understand the true nature of the beginning, but rather to recognize to how large an extent the beginning finds its true interpretation in the end.

But though evolution bears its witness to the intellectual method, this is no simple case of evolution. We are dealing not merely with a growth, but with a growth divinely guided and inspired. If the Church, articulate and harmonious, with its outward expression of ministry and sacraments, is now, or has ever been, a theological verity, it must have been a theological verity when apostles wrote. If the Church is a necessary corollary of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and the necessary expression of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost (and if not it would not be in place as an article of the Creed), then it was so on and from the day of Pentecost with a truth as true essentially as at any point since. If you were dealing with the writings of private, uninspired individuals, it might be a tenable position to say that they did not actually mean this great reality (though they say things strangely akin to it), because this great reality, though real, was as yet not realized in their consciousness to the full. But this is not an adequate form of statement in reference to the canonical writings of inspired apostles. Even if it were held (paradoxically, as it appears to me) that St. Paul, when he wrote to the Corinthians or Ephesians, had not yet grasped the theological conception of the Church; yet even so, on any tenable theory of inspiration or the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, you would have to say that the theological conception of the Church was, even

without his knowledge, the real, though latent, truth behind the conception which he had.

Of course it is possible that we may be mistaken, more or less, in the form or proportion of our theological conceptions; and that it is just these which themselves most need to be corrected. This is precisely the sort of possibility to which I desire that Christian thought should be keenly alive. That theological preconceptions, as such, should tyrannize over the interpretation of the text, is the last thing for which I should plead. But I cannot do less than put it that the historic theology comes with me to the text, if not simply as a voice of authoritative interpretation, yet as a hypothesis which offers to interpret; and a hypothesis which has at least a presumption in its favour. By all means let any one approach, if he will, with alternative hypotheses also. There must be many, in fact, who do so approach, with tentative hypotheses half-formed, and with a view to deciding between rival hypotheses. If the question were asked, Which hypothesis interprets and illumines the evidence as a whole? I should be quite fearless as to the ultimate answer. But it must be remembered that no answer can be accepted as adequate which does not interpret and illumine the evidence as a whole. If, for example, half a dozen passages be examined in connexion with the question of apostolic authority, and of these a, b, and c, by themselves, can be almost, if not quite, as easily interpreted without it, d and e certainly suggest it, but not imperiously, while f is difficult to account for on any other hypothesis, what would