by imparting clearness and definiteness of conception, and thus contributing to the clear and forcible statement of truth. But further than this, it is needed, if I mistake not, in order to the right apprehension of many of the highest and noblest themes. Whatever appeals to the imagination can be rightly comprehended only by the imagination, as what addresses the reason and judgment can be appreciated only by those faculties. The Bible has much that is addressed to the plain common sense of man, and it requires common sense to understand these things. It has much that is addressed to the reasoning power, and some degree of the power of reasoning is requisite for the comprehension of that. It has much also that is addressed to the imagination, and these things a mind destitute of imagination, or in which that power is but feebly developed, can never rightly apprehend. There are some things in revelation, as there are some things in nature, and some in art, which reveal themselves in their true meaning and power only to the ideal faculty. It takes a poet or an artist to catch the true significance and feel the full power of some things. Niagara appeals to the sense of the sublime and the beautiful in the soul. A mind in which that sense is wanting, or but imperfectly possessed, cannot understand the scene. The statistician comes with his facts and figures, the logician with his syllogisms, the mathematician with his diagrams and logarithms, the mere man of science, with his chemical analysis, and his fossil remains; and what do all these know or comprehend of the wonderful scene? As little, very likely, as the donkeys that carry them. If their heads are full of their own figures and syllogisms and fossils, if they are mere statisticians, mathematicians, logicians, chemists, and not poets as well, there is to them very little meaning or power in the wonderful vision. It reveals nothing. They have seen only a waterfall, have heard only a noise. There are lofty and glowing passages in the sacred scriptures, the full power and majesty of which are never perceived by any mind that is not itself highly endowed with the power of the ideal. There are themes of sacred oratory,

which no man can properly touch whose soul is not itself elevated, and in a sense inspired, by this superior power.

There are some minds that Nature has formed as dry as summer dust unpoetic, pragmatic; to whom a cowslip on the river's brim, a yellow cowslip is, and nothing more. Devout minds, they may be, and eminently so; learned even, for learning dwelleth ofttimes in dry, and desert places; but hard and stiff and angular and horny, and of cuticle thicker than the rhinoceros; with little perception of the beautiful in nature or art, and lightly esteeming the little they do perceive. Such minds have their sphere. In the stern conflicts of opinion, in the controversies of the time, in the elaboration and defence of dogmas, in the laboratories and dusky mines, where heavy blows are to be struck, they are in place and at home. But in the wide realm of the imagination, the serene firmament of the ideal, they are wholly out of place and utterly lost. To such minds no small part, not of nature merely, but of revelation, must of necessity be essentially a sealed book. They lack that fine perception and quick sense of the beautiful which would fit them to be true interpreters, whether in the realm of nature or of the spiritual. We comprehend only that to which there is something respondent in our own nature; and the greater the correspondence the fuller the sympathy and appreciation. It takes a Goethe to understand a Goethe; it takes a Caesar to do justice to a Caesar; Napoleon III is by position, and career, and character, better fitted to write the life of Caesar, than Guizot, or Thièrs. To view a mountain rightly you must be yourself among the mountains, and not on the plain. One gets the true idea of Mont Blanc, not from the Vale of Chamouni, but on the summit of the Tete Noir, or the Col De Baume. To comprehend the full majesty of the Jungfrau you must take your station on the Great Scheideck.

It has been felt as a serious defect in many of our biblical interpreters that they lack the ideal element. Profoundly versed in the minutiae of verbal and grammatical science, they seem profoundly insensible of anything higher, and fail

to comprehend the majesty and beauty of the loftiest strains of David, and Isaiah, and John. They interpret the song of Miriam at the Red Sea, the psalm of Moses, or that grandest of all dramatic poems, the Apocalypse of John, with as little feeling, as little appreciation of the real beauty and majesty of the work, as if they were expounding the genealogical tables commencing with the names Adam, Seth, Enos. I would by no means be understood as depreciating the science of biblical criticism. Precision and science are necessary in the commentator; but so, also, is some degree of soul. Napoleon placed the leading mathematician of France at the head of an important bureau in his government, but was disappointed in the result. He found him, as he expressed it, always dealing with the infinitely little. It can hardly be denied that the tendency of modern biblical criticism is to minuteness of detail, often to the loss of the spirit and breadth and power of the argument or the passage as a whole. We must have precision and philological acumen; but we must have something more. We must have grammatical science, but let it keep its place. When Isaiah sits down at the grand organ, and its notes come rolling through the centuries, we care not to pause in the midst of some triumphant anthem, to discuss the propriety of a dageshforte; and when the great artist unrolls the mysterious canvas of the future, and describes the New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven, there is something of more importance to be considered, just then, than the accent of an iota, or the necessity of a paulo-post future.

For this reason we should prefer the comments of a Goethe, a Milton, a Burns, on some passages of scripture, to those of a DeWette, or a Meyer; Sir Walter Scott might hit the sense, we doubt not, in some cases, where his namesake misses it; Tennyson, and Bryant, and Whittier might tell us some things that Robinson, Ellicott, and Alford have failed to see. It was the rare charm of that accomplished biblical scholar, the late Bela B. Edwards, that his soul was in sympathy with the beauty and majesty of the inspired word. He sat at the

feet of the old prophets and singers of Israel, as the young artist at the feet of Michael Angelo. Nor was this the least excellence of the noble Stuart, that prince of biblical schol

ars.

To peruse with him the pages of inspiration was like wandering with Church among the Andes, or with Ruskin among the stones of Venice.

What has been said of the biblical interpreter may with perhaps equal truth be affirmed of the theologian. Something of the ideal faculty is needed, something of the creative power, something of the quick sense of the fit, the harmoni ous, the symmetrical, in order to adjust the truth in its right proportions, and grasp in thought the completeness and grandeur of the Christian system. For lack of this there is something defective about many of our systems of theology. They are one-sided, disjointed, inharmonious; or they are narrow and incomplete. They fasten upon some one truth in some one of its many aspects, and make it stand for the whole; as if a fly, alighting on some one of the ten thousand pinnacles of the Milan cathedral, should say: This then is the celebrated temple - this marble statue on which I stand, though I do not see that there is anything so very wonderful about it; it looks to me very much like the figure of a man. Poor fly, so it does; but if you could only see the temple itself!

Of all theologians Calvin is perhaps the least imaginative. Dwelling on the shores of that most beautiful of lakes, beneath the shadows of the Jura, and in full view of the snowy summit of Mont Blanc, neither the grandeur nor the beauty of nature seems to have touched any corresponding chord in his bosom. We find in his pages no allusions to external nature, no illustrations borrowed from the magnificent scenes around him. With Luther it is quite otherwise. He has a poet's heart in his bosom, and, with a poet's sensitive nature and quick eye for the beautiful, responds at once to whatever is fitted to awaken aesthetic emotion. The system of the former stands like the rocky cliffs of Sinai in the desert, grand in outline, and stable in its eternal foundations, but

frowning and sterile. That of the latter, while not less lofty and profound, is clothed with verdure and vocal with songs.

The complete theologian would be one who should unite in himself many and various qualities. He must be many men in one logician, metaphysician, psychologist, linguist, student of law, student of natural science, student of history, student of men and manners; these he must be, and, not least of all, there must be in him something of that ideal power which inspires the poet and the artist, and which elevates the mind to its highest and purest quality of action. Augustine, with that beautiful simplicity which characterizes his Confessions, makes penitent admission of the fact that in his youthful days he found more delight in the Aeneid of Virgil, than in the multiplication table; a sin, if it be one, in which, I doubt not, many of us have participated. 'One and one,

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two'; 'two and two, four'; this was to me a hateful singsong; the wooden horse lined with armed men,' and 'the burning of Troy, and Creusa's shade and sad similitude,' were the choice spectacle of my vanity." But had it been otherwise with the boy, we should have missed something that now charms us in the man; something of that mingled. strength and grace, those bold and fervid utterances, those life-like delineations which command the listening ear of centuries, and which are due in no small degree to the existence and activity of the ideal faculty in that remarkable mind. He was not the worse, but the better theologian in his maturer years, for that poetic sensibility which led him, when a boy, to weep over the sad story of the Carthagenian queen.

I have mentioned certain respects in which imagination may be of service to the preacher. If I mistake not, these considerations derive additional force from the character of the present time. Our religion, as was said at the outset, deals largely with the invisible and intangible. It looks not chiefly at the things that are seen and temporal; its grand realities lie beyond the horizon of the present; it walks by faith, not by sight. It belongs to the spiritual, and not to