But if the ministry be charismatic, we should have to depose Christ from His place as Head of the Church, evict Him from His position as immanent in the Church, and hand over His functions to the Holy Ghost, who would become the source of authority and the creator of ministry, instead of being only the energizer of already existing powers and institutions.

Again, on the theory of twofold ministry, we are led to a conclusion to which the mind finds great difficulty in resigning itself. In all the forms of this theory is contained the assertion or supposition that the higher form of ministry and organization, the charismatic, which was directly of God, had in it the seeds of inevitable decay, and was forced-and that at an early period-to give way and go down before the lower form, the institutional, of merely human origin. This is untheological. The divine should surely prevail over the human. It may be in God's plan that the divine should have to struggle and fight, should have even to suffer temporary set-backs or partial eclipse. This we see in every field wherein the two elements are met. But that the higher, nobler, divine power or form should, and in so short a time, be utterly defeated and rooted out of existence by the baser human element, is theologically inconceivable. It is repugnant, too, on lower grounds, on those evolutionary principles which the upholders of this theory are generally fond of invoking. Evolution, if it means anything, means progress, advance from lower to higher. But in this theory it is just the opposite process that takes place.

On the other hand, there is, by no means, that essential opposition between the institutional and all that is spiritual, which is frequently assumed by those who deny the principle of instituted and institutionally transmitted authority. In fact their association and harmony are of the essence of Christianity. The Christian religion is essentially the religion of Incarnation. This is the stamp impressed upon it by its Founder, the Incarnate Word. But Incarnation, taken in the wider sense is nothing but the clothing of the spiritual with a material shape. It is spirit expressing itself in body, using matter as the vehicle of its activity. The Word was made flesh.' So the Spirit of Christ acts in and through the Church, which is the extension of His body, the individual becomes the temple of the Holy Ghost, the sacraments are channels-the

Catholic would say, causes-of grace. All these things are, each in its proper degree, examples of the principle of Incarnation, conjunctions of the spiritual and the material, in which the latter, so far from being opposed to the former, is its helpful and, in a sense, necessary instrument of expression and activity. So, likewise, a ministry which is organized and institutional need no more be a hindrance to the exercise of spiritual powers, than one which is charismatic and free from the restraints of organization. It is only another example of the same principle of Incarnation, and by analogy with all the others, is rather to be expected as a feature of Christianity than viewed with suspicion and distrust.

All this argument Mr. Wotherspoon develops with great skill and effect. But he is still faced by the difficulty, which on his own principles is of a theological character, arising from the cessation of supernatural manifestations in the Church. In the solution of this he shows both ingenuity and originality and sets out some thoughts well worthy of attention. He states the difficulty thus (p. 79) :

Again, one 'would willingly avoid any account of the Church which should begin with Once upon a time-once God was near-in those days the Church's common day gave effective proof of Heavenly Presence; but not now-that which began in the supernatural has subsided into the natural. Such an account is unsatisfactory. . . . We may attempt to rationalize it by the plea that at its first introduction the Gospel required the supernatural to warrant it; but to that plea the answer is only too obvious that the supernatural is as much required to warrant it still, and, since Christianity claims to be supernatural, that only the supernatural can at any time be its warrant. Our natural desire is to be able to think of the Church and to describe the Church throughout its course in the same terms; we have an obstinate persuasion that whatever it is now the Church has in essential character been from the first, and that whatever it was at the first that it continues to be. The supernatural in which it originated ought still to be discoverable in its present, and our account of the Church ought at least to have room for that discovery... Our instinct opposes the idea of the supernatural imported for a sign,' used teratically on an occasion and then dropped.

His solution, which we can only outline, runs as follows. Man's spiritual life had, at that time, sunk to a very low level. His spiritual faculties were well-nigh atrophied from long disuse and abuse. He had lost in great measure the power to react to spiritual influence and energy. Upon such men, whose sluggard dullness of spiritual apprehension the Gospels throughout make manifest, and upon those

multitudes of others, at Antioch, Corinth, Ephesus, and all the centres of primitive Christianity, who had not had even those advantages which were given to the Apostles and all the dwellers in Palestine, at Pentecost and afterwards, the Holy Ghost came down. Upon them all, suddenly, unexpectedly, without their knowing what was to be looked for, came this mighty rush of new life, a divine searching fire of inexhaustible energy. Life must find an outlet. Energy must find expression. And if the medium through which it passes, or the vessel into which it is poured, be by nature or circumstance inelastic, if it cannot react naturally to the new influence pulsating in it, if it cannot accommodate itself to the strivings and stirrings of the incoming force, this must make its presence felt in ways that are abnormal. But when the medium is keyed up and attuned to the right pitch, when it has learnt to give and sway to its new impulses, or, to use the psychological term, to react naturally, then, though the flood of new life and energy be not lowered, but rather deepened, it finds expression in other ways, less spectacular, less sensational, more normal, but fully as effective and real. And so it was in the early Church. Man was not ready for such an inflow of living waters, of divine life; he had not yet learnt to react. But the Holy Spirit had to find expression, and so He manifested His presence and activity in abnormal ways, by the gift of tongues and prophecy, and the other charismata of which we read. But soon the new river of supernatural life carved out for itself in human nature a broad, deep channel, wherein it could flow, calm and smooth, without the surface disturbances that marked its first inrush (p. 97).

Against this ingenious explanation there is an obvious objection of which Mr. Wotherspoon makes no mention. What of those pagan nations or tribes who have been converted more or less en masse in more recent times ? We have historical records of the marvellous rapidity with which the faith spread among the South American Indians in the sixteenth century, of the wonderful record of St. Francis Xavier, rivalling apparently even the fruitfulness of St. Paul's apostolate, and in quite modern days we have seen something similar in at least one quarter of Africa, namely, in Uganda, where the faith has made conquests almost as striking as those it has won at any period of its history. But in no case do we read of these sensible phenomena of the supernatural, such as distinguished the early

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days of the Church at Jerusalem, Corinth, and elsewhere. And it is not easy to see what answer our author, consistently with his principles, could give to this difficulty. Perhaps we have an indication of the line he would take, where he points out, and rightly, I think, that those supernatural phenomena were by no means so common in the primitive Church as is often supposed. Apart from Jerusalem, at Pentecost-an altogether exceptional occasionand Corinth, we have very little evidence of their occurrence. If the point were pressed on the ground that the rarity or frequency of these phenomena makes no difference, since they do not occur at all nowadays, he might reply that something very similar takes place in modern revivals.' This is not simply a guess on my part. Mr. Wotherspoon himself suggests the idea. But this answer, apart from its inadequacy from the Catholic point of view, would be inconsistent with his own principles, which require, for the appearance of such phenomena, what we may call virgin soil, that is, a receptive medium which should not only be without previous personal experience of the inflow of the Spirit, but also unprepared for it by the experience of others. Conversion, as he points out, is a wonderful and, in many ways, a subversive experience; but in those days and in countries long evangelized, each conversion has a history behind it. The subject knows what to expect. He is not altogether removed from spiritual influence. He is already, to a great extent, reactive. But these considerations exclude all parity between the state of the first converts and the state of those effected by a modern 'revival.'

Possibly, again, our author might invoke the principle of solidarity. Since the Church, he might argue, is one body, the primary unit into which the individual is received and incorporated, and through which he receives all the gifts of supernatural life and grace, the conditions of primitive times are not now realized. The body of the Church is reactive; it forms now, and has done for many ages, a deep and broad channel through which the Spiritlife flows in an even, undisturbed current, and to this even flow the addition to the Church, even of large multitudes of new converts, makes no difference. It causes no surface disturbance. I think this would be the more promising line to take. But the idea needs to be worked out. As it stands it is not satisfactory.

And certainly the difficulty is a real one on any theory

of the Church. Even to the Catholic a complete solution does not seem to be at hand, though, at first sight, we may seem to have a great advantage, in so far as we know that sensible charismatic phenomena, e.g., the power of miracles, have never ceased in the Church. But closer inspection shows that the advantage is but a slight one. For, after all, these phenomena are very rare at any one time, in comparison with the whole number of the faithful, far less frequent than they were in the apostolic age. So far I have seen no serious attempt at an answer to the difficulty on Catholic principles. The usual reply simply comes to this, that thus God willed it. This is all right for believers. But it would be well, if possible, to have something more satisfying to the legitimate curiosity of the inquirer. Perhaps some of our readers may feel stimulated to make the attempt.

I pass now to Mr. Wotherspoon's examination of the documentary evidence. For very good reasons he deals with such matters as provenance, authorship and date at quite an early stage in his book, before much that has already been considered, but it seemed to me better to finish at once with the more speculative questions before passing on to the positive.

Nothing could be clearer than his treatment of the actual and precise meaning of the terms, minister and ministry. It is an excellent example of good, straight thinking and avoidance of all ambiguity. The New Testament word, diakovía, which is rendered by ministry, is itself ambiguous and not technical. Its real meaning is service of any kind, though the concrete diákovos is used by St. Paul in a technical sense, and soon came to be limited to that in Christian speech. The real note of ministry in its proper sense, is not the possession, nor the exercise, nor the continuity of spiritual gift. If it were we should have to include virgins and ascetics and many others, whom no one would think seriously of claiming as members of the Christian ministry. A truer criterion of ministry is the dependence of the Church upon the person for essential service, coupled with the responsibility of the minister before the Church, his own conscience, and God. This is worked out with abundance of documentary proof, and if we prescind from the note of institution by authority, as we must do for the present, since this is the point in dispute, we may take it as a true and adequate statement of our position.