was reduced relative to the matter of diction and structure and general style. "Some honest and great clerks (scholars) have been with me and desired me to write the most curious terms that I could find; some blamed me, on the other hand, saying that I had over many curious terms which could not be understood of common people, and desired me to use old and homely terms," and he adds, "Fain would I please every man.' Just here lay the difficulty-to please alike the courtiers and scholars and the common folk; to write an order of English which should not mark a violent transition from the days of Chaucer and Orm, and, yet, should be sufficiently in sympathy with the modern movement as to look oftener down the centuries toward Latimer and Spenser than backward to Bede and Alfred. Bred, as he was, in the "broad and rude English" of the Weald of Kent, and yet absent from home for more than a generation in Holland and Flanders, it was no easy matter for him to do what he wished to do and practically did, to use the common terms that he daily used," rather than the quaint and curious terms of court and school. Hence it is that all the more honor is due him for what he did, so that, instead of condemning too broadly the foreign element in his diction, we should seek to discover and worthily praise whatever we find that is genuinely home-born.

As a translator and printer and simple-minded Englishman he wrought enthusiastically on behalf of his vernacular idiom; made the best use of his opportunities; conciliated, as far as possible, conflicting tendencies, and, with all his faults of word and phrase, has left the deep impression that, as English as he was, he would have been glad to have been more thoroughly so. His style as a writer is crude and imperfect; he gives no special evidence of what one would now call, literary culture, and yet back of all that he says and pens there is clearly evident an honest and a robust Englishman, wholly bent, by God's help, upon furthering the best interests of English speech and life. (b) It is here that we note a further claim that Caxton has upon us, in that he sought to lift the life of his time to higher ethical levels; to counteract, as best he could, those debasing influences connected with the bitter struggles of the day, and thus to do his part in opening the way for better things in England. Caxton was more than a printer. He was a Christian man and a Christian printer, utilizing his influence for the worthiest ends. Not infrequently he seems to us to have anticipated that widespread revival of life and letters and biblical spirit which may be said to have begun before his death, in the early years of the reign of Henry VII. Tyndale and Latimer were boys in their teens as Caxton came to the year of his death, and yet it was not difficult for this old English Westminster printer to see that new forces were at work, and that Providence was gradually ordering events and adjusting conditions so as to usher in a new and nobler economy.

Caxton was, in no inferior sense, a careful student of his age and

environment, seeking to ascertain, as fully as possible, his place and function as divinely assigned him, and wondering, after all, what it meant for England and for the cause of truth that printing had been invented and applied, and that he was the heaven-appointed primate of the English press. Let us imagine for a moment that Caxton should have been any other than he was; that the weight of his influence should have been cast on the side of Romanism and against the preparative agencies working toward the English Reformation; that his sympathies as a translator should have been intensely foreign, and his unwearied labors exerted against freedom of conscience and freedom of the press. In such a case, what evils in Church and state, in education and literature, in life and speech, might not have followed, and might not the Protestant awakening of Elizabethan days have been deferred for half a century? It was not simply the invention of printing, as is so often said, that made this awakening possible, but also the fact that such men as Caxton and, his devoted colleagues guided aright the earliest applications of the art, and with all their failures of judgment and result, sought, above all, the honor of God and of God's truth on English shores. It is thus that Elliot fittingly sings:

'Lord taught by Thee, when Caxton bade

That chain has

His silent words forever speak;

A grave for tyrants then was made,

Then cracked the chain which yet shall break."

already broken, the English world over, and truth is free and we are free because such men as honest William Caxton have lived and wrought.

IV.-BIBLICAL HOMILETICS.

III. TO WHAT EXTENT CAN THE SCRIPTURES BE USED?

BY CHARLES E. KNOX, D.D., BLOOMFIELD, N. J.

II. We find now, secondly, in the Scriptures, diffused through these very elements, a preparation for all varieties of preaching for all peoples in all future ages.

The Bible does not shut us up to Jewish methods nor even to the noblest Hebrew models. It provides within itself an adjustment to systems and forms of speech which spring up outside the Hebrew people.

There were nations lower than the Hebrews in knowledge. There were nations who esteemed themselves far higher than the Hebrews in mental and social culture. Whatever was the truth in the comparison, these communities must be met, if not on the level of their own selfesteem, at least with consideration of their national taste and conceit.

The wide comprehension of the New Testament compassed within its scheme crude nations, plain communities, cultivated society, massive

power, polished minds and manners. It gives us not only intimations, but the very mode of address for rural Lystrans, for barbarous Miletans, for imperious Romans, for commercial Corinthians, for refined Athenians. However dissimilar the people to the nations of the biblical histories, the scope of the biblical movement in sacred speech takes in all their forms and modes of address. There is no contempt for any systematic form, for any new framework or covering or embellishment of thought; but there is a holy contempt for that undue nicety of form which suppresses or destroys the vigor of spiritual utterance and spiritual life.

Two principles are the source of and the reason for the future unfolding of every grade and type of expression.

1. One is the principle of Development.

From the beginning to the end of the Scriptures there is a constant growth in the conception of preaching. There is enlargement in kinds of sermons, in types of thought, in varieties of style, in change of circumstances and change of the preacher's attitude, in the specific ends and in the varied means to the particular ends.

In the Old Testament this development began in the direct and plain speech of Enoch against "the way of Cain" (Jude 14, 15), and of Noah against the violence and the wicked imagination of the world. It expanded through all those older historic periods, developing in the historical sermons of Moses, in Levitical instruction, in priestly interpretation of the Sacrifices and of the Law, in the chant, in the proverbial and the epigrammatic, in prophetic exhortations and predictions, and in a constantly increasing detail of type and style. This constant expansion teaches the Hebrew people and the succession of the Hebrew prophets to expect expan

sion in the future.

The wider homiletic expansion comes at once as we enter the New Testament. John the Baptist and our Lord break directly over the limits to expansion which the literal teachers had set. It is as when the landscape of the widening mountain ravine at last breaks from the ravine ridges and bursts out into the broad plain. Beyond our Lord's wider area the apostles go. The diverging lines which our Lord had set they follow. The angle opening to the west sweeps out to the pillars of Hercules, and includes the great Mediterranean, the Roman provinces and capitals.

So that within the homiletic range of the Old Testament and the New Testament canon there is a constant development ever widening-a development which, in its vast expansion at the end of the sacred history, teaches the homiletic mind of the early Christian Church a further development in all secular history. The last word of the New Testament is : Develop to the utmost these principles to all nations of men. Go preach as holy men of old have preached-comprehend the various periods and places. Go preach as your Lord has preached-follow His principles of instruction; comprehend the nations and the races. Go preach as the apostles have preached-see new visions on the new shores of new seas;

occupy new divisions of the earth; embrace in your hallowed purpose new civilizations and new developments; carry the ready and penetrating mind of the Lawgiver, the kingly leader, the royal singer, the great prophets, the disciples, the apostles, of the Lord Himself into your preaching methods to the last discoveries, to the last race, the last tribe of man; through apocalyptic visions behold the kindreds and nations and tribes and tongues gathering in multitudes, as the old heavens and the old earth pass away.

2. The other principle is the principle of Adaptation.

Such a development contains within itself the law of adaptation. No more does the preacher adapt his subject and his address to the moral character of the individual hearer than he adapts it to the wide varieties of life. Habits, manners, modes of thought, geographical scenery, national and tribal relations, historical associations, modes of worship, moral and religious observances and institutions, are recognized. With ready instinct they are all considered in framing and phrasing the speech and pointing the mode through which the effect shall be produced. False habits, national customs, mythologies, hostile laws, antagonistic histories, persecutions, afflictions, necessitate the adaptation. Age, station, domestic relations, degrees of mental strength, types of thought, conditions of labor, conditions of society are no less recognized than departures from morality or growth in the graces.

Such an adaptation to some extent is the first necessity of the preacher, as it is of any speaker. But the principle is asserted in no narrow limitations. The geographical limits of the Old Testament are narrow, but the range of adaptation from Moses at Moab, to Jeremiah and Ezra at the exile period is very great. Within these same geographical limits a more exquisite adaptation to personal environment and mental condition starts into life in the Great Preacher. The whole land opens anew with more affluent resource of apposite address. The missionary journeys pass beyond this narrow land to illustrate the same homiletic habit in new and large varieties. Whether St. Paul speaks in Greek to the captain on the temple stairway or addresses the Roman procurators at Cæsarea; whether persons addressed be the Lycaonian pagans or the Galatian Judaizers, the ship-captain and the ship-crew in the shipwreck or the mixed philosophers and people on Mars Hill, Timothy and Philemon as persons or churches or assemblies, excited crowds or calm officers of the guard over him, there is the same ready adjustment of the subject to the person. The last word of ripe apostolic experience is the permanent homiletic maxim of all ages: “To the Jew, a Jew; to the Greek, a Greek; to the weak, in weaker form and style; to the strong, in more powerful address ; to those without revelation by the law of nature and of conscience; to those under revelation by inspired authority-in all forms for all men, to save some." Logic for the logical, rhetoric for the rhetorical, culture for the cultivated, music for the musical, the pictorial for the picture-loving, the

the

philosophic for the philosophical, all arts for all minds, if only the arts be genuine and do not betray or suppress the truth. All modes for all possible schools, social, literary, philosophical, scholastic, may be truthfully and lovingly adjusted to the scholars of the schools, that all types and varieties may be won.

Not only may these principles of Development and Adaptation be used, but they must be used. There is a holy compulsion. It is the will of man which must be sought. Permanent habit must be formed by shaping or reversing the habit that is. The avenue which reaches the will is the avenue of language, but that language is not merely verbal. Whether it be the language of grammatical idiom and of national vocabulary, of action, of custom and manner, of historic modes, or of poetical, historical, or purely logical thought, that language the Christ-like preacher will learn. The heavenly mind is under loving compulsion to master any and every mode of communication which leads into the seat of life.

These two principles, therefore, carry the preacher into the representative address of each nation to which he goes. But is there any reason why he should not keep the great outline method of the Scriptures dominant when he enters into the representative discourse of Greece and Rome, of cloister and crusade, of Scandinavian and German and French and Scottish and English and American thought? Have not all the great preachers been great in proportion as they suited the Scripture methods to their time and their people? Chrysostom electrifies in exposition, starts not at the interruptive inquiry, and knows little of the set proposition and division. Augustine holds clergy and people under his spell without a text at the beginning of his sermon. Luther comes forth to dispute with dialectic acumen theses drawn from Aristotle, as well as to expound the Scripture in course. Texts and divisions have to fight their way into use in England against such men as Roger Bacon. The Puritans enter into the Baconian method and elaborate a thorough order. Wesley preaches in the spirit of an administrative genius who would marshall a straggling spiritual life into order. Whitefield seizes so fully the spirit of later rhetoric and elocution, that the power of his sermons dies with his wonderful voice. Each one found the best type of biblical thought for himself, and fashioned it to his local purpose.

America, with her broad political freedom, appropriates the logic and rhetoric of all ancient and modern leaders. The liberty of printing and the education of the people give a great variety to her ministry, and demand the widest develop.nent and the best adaptation of public address. We cannot afford, however, to be indifferent to the homiletic value of the Bible. If we set aside the Scriptures as having no guide for us, we are in danger of absorption in secular rhetoric.

So far as possible let the Scriptures be our first source and power. Let the biblical principles and illustrations, the biblical types and methods