aith, Salvation and Inspiration, Redemption and Atonement,
Judgment and Retribution,--all these themes are now presented in
orthodox pulpits far more conformably to ethical principles, though in
degrees varying with educated intelligence, than was customary in the
sermons of half a century ago. "One great source and spring of
theological progress," says Professor Bowne, in his recent work on
_Theism_, "has been the need of finding a conception of God which the
moral nature could accept. The necessity of moralizing theology has
produced vast changes in that field; and the end is not yet."

The ethical character of the theological change will perhaps be most
obvious in the field of Biblical study, to which the present subject
belongs. The traditional solution of such moral difficulties in the Old
Testament as commands, ostensibly divine, to massacre idolaters has
been quite discarded. It is no longer the mode to say that deeds
seemingly atrocious were not atrocious, because God commanded them.
Writers of orthodox repute now say that the _Thus saith the Lord_, with
which Samuel prefaced his order to exterminate the Amalekites, must be
understood subjectively, as an expression of the prophet's belief, not
objectively, as a divine command communicated to him. This great change
is a quite recent change. If a personal reference may be indulged, it is
not twenty years since the present writer's published protest against
"The Anti-Christian Use of the Bible in the Sunday School,"[4] the
exhibition to children of some vestiges of heathen superstition embedded
in the Old Testament narratives as true illustrations of God's ways
toward men, drew forth from a religious journal a bitter editorial on
"The Old Testament and its New Enemies." But a great light has since
dawned in that quarter. It is no longer deemed subversive of faith in a
divine Revelation to hold that the prophet Gad was not infallible in
regarding the plague which scourged Jerusalem as sent to punish David's
pride in his census of the nation.

A significant fact is presented in the comparison of these two aspects
of the theological change that has come to pass,--the growing importance
of the ethical, and the dwindling importance of the miraculous in the
religious thought of to-day. This may reassure those who fear whereto
such change may grow. The inner significance of such a change is most
auspicious. It portends the displacement of a false by the true
conception o