as men become accustomed to it, and enter into its secrets by familiar and affectionate intercourse with it, that the strangeness wears away, and they are drawn to it and held willing captives by it. Even our Lord's apostles, chosen as they were to be His friends and representatives, were naturally so averse to the higher truths of His doctrine, that, almost at the close of His earthly ministry, He was obliged to treat them as weak bottles which could not stand the inner fermentation of those higher truths which He had come to reveal. "I have many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now." They had not the moral strength which could bear the fulness of His revelations. If He had laid on them the weight of all which He came to make known, their characters, promising though they were, and capable of growing into almost superhuman strength, would have broken down beneath a load which then would have been overwhelming to them. Much He had taught them-His own perfect Divinity; His triumph by means of death; His return as Judge of man; Regeneration through water and the Spirit Whom He would send; the gift of His own Body and Blood as the means of life and union with Him ;-mysteries such as these He had shown to them, and though they had not been able fully to enter into them, they had so far borne them as to admit them to their minds as truths on which they should ponder until they saw all that was involved in them. But these things, not in proverbs and somewhat enigmatic sayings, but in their plainness ; these things in connection with all the other mysteries of the kingdom of God; with the universality of redemption which was so great a stumbling-block even to men so full of insight and love of truth as the apostle Peter; with the nature of the Church as His mystical Body, His kingdom actually set up on earth, the fulness of Him who fills all in all; with the powers and functions of the ministry, as representing Him on earth and exercising powers essentially His though delegated; with the gift of the Blessed Spirit to dwell in man's soul and body,

and to give and maintain that supernatural divine life which Sacraments impart as means of living union with Christ: all, in fact, which goes to make up that whole religious system which is brought before us, genetically and rudimentally, in the Acts and the Epistles, this was not only beyond their comprehension at this time, but was so alien to their present state of mind and feeling, that they would now turn from it as weak eyes from a strong light, or a sickly stomach from food which would be wholesome to it in its strength. He could speak of these things indeed in parables or parabolic sayings even now, because men can bear truth in figure when they cannot bear it in its plainness, but He could hardly yet show the very naked truth itself. For that He must wait until the forty days of His resurrection, when their minds would open in the presence of that new life which they would see, and when He would speak to them of the "things pertaining to the kingdom of God," as men who could then receive His teaching. He must wait even beyond that intervening period until the day of Pentecost when the Comforter would descend from on high to be God within them. Then they would be able to receive the many mysteries of the kingdom, looking at the Sun of truth with eyes which had been trained to see its dazzling brightness.

Such, then, was our Lord's method as a teacher even with His chosen followers; He taught them the truth as they could bear it. Such, too, was still more His method with the unbelievers: He spoke to them "as they were able to hear it." He recognized, that is to say, the natural alienation of man from truth, and He taught truth in such ways as were consistent with that alienation. He did not give strong meat to those who were still infants, much less to those who were not born again and were in a state of active opposition to Him; but He treated each according to actual mental condition and moral state. In the case of those who were in unbelief, He put truth before them in its simplest and most rudimentary forms to test their readiness to taste it. If they tasted it, He

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let them have it. If, having tasted it, they showed such an appetite as indicated the beginnings of life, He treated them as new born babes," who could be fed on pure milk. From milk, when that had become assimilated to the system so as to produce growth, He went on to meat, and from meat to strong meat in those whose spiritual senses were fully exercised to discern both good and evil.

And now we ask, is this the method in our Indian Missions? We are afraid that in many cases it is not; we are afraid that truth is often not put before men as they are able to bear it; but rather that it is often put before all, whether they wish for it or not, as if truth and the unbelieving mind were correlatives; or perhaps, we should rather say, that our religious physicians administer truth to unbelievers as medicine is given to children when they are reluctant to receive it. If a child is ill, we say that he must have the necessary remedy, whether he will or not; get the medicine down and the child will derive good from it; the child's will has nothing to do with the matter; remedies work by laws of matter, not by laws of spirit. Now, do not our missionary physicians often act towards unbelievers in much the same way? We would not wrong them, and if we criticise, we criticise in sympathy, and because we heartily desire the object which they have in view. But do they not often treat spiritual truth as if it was a physical medicine? and do they not often treat the minds of unbelievers as if they were subject to merely physical laws? At any rate we maintain that the mind and truth can be brought together only by the concurrence of the heart and will; and we point out that our great example always proportioned His teaching to the sympathy of the minds which were before Him. We say, too, that if this is not done, and if the alienation of the natural mind is overlooked, the chances of working conviction are destroyed. It is not only that we do not succeed when we attempt that which is unnatural and therefore impossible, but we destroy our very conditions of success. If you put

upon a child a load which only a full-grown man can carry, not only do you fail to get the load carried by him, but you render it impossible that he shall carry that load when he becomes a full-grown man. You break him down prematurely, you cripple him for life, you crush and annihilate those powers which time would gradually have developed. Attempting the impossible, you do not accomplish that which might in time. have been achieved. So, too, if you operate upon a man for a cataract, and shut him up in a darkness which you gradually remove, in a few weeks he will be fit to look upon the light of day; but if you remove the film which covered his eyes and suddenly let in the sun upon him, the very faculty of sight will depart, and the eye itself will become darkness, killed by excess of light. Our Lord's method was of another kind. He taught truth as men could bear it. He veiled it while He showed it, hoping that the sons of truth would lift up the veil, as they could bear to look upon the glory of the mysteries of God.

LETTER II.

Spiritual truth can be discerned only by means of the Spirit of God, which is Christ's greatest gift to those in a state of grace-Even the heathen receive some influences of the Spirit that they may feel after the truth -The nature of the Holy Spirit's influences a guiding, not a compelling force-Man's will must co-operate-Unbelievers cannot be taught by the same methods as believers.

TRUTH must be taught as men are able to bear it; it cannot be taught unless there is a will to receive it, and only gradually when that will is found. For the mind of man moves slowly; by steps, not by bounds and still less by flights; learning like a child first to stand, then to walk, then to run, and then last of all to leap, and each stage is necessary to that which follows it. This we have seen already; and now we go on to state that spiritual truth can be discerned only by means of the Spirit of God. "Howbeit when He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth."

Every kind of Truth, is acquired by a faculty corresponding to itself. That we may learn truth of the intellect we must have gifts of intellect, powers of acquisition, of memory, of deduction, of analysis, of comparison, and so forth. That we may range through that ideal world in which poets have their habitation, and see those things which poets see, we must have some measure of the poetic faculty, something of feeling, fancy, and imagination. That we may know moral truth, we must have, as even the heathen philosophers of Greece perceived, that moral vision which is given by obedience to moral law. And, above all, to see spiritual truths we must have that