faith, eloquent enough to attract attention, and thus won his martyr's crown, explains traditions and chronicles otherwise meaningless. Philip is the fifth name in all the catalogue. Da Vinci painted him a beardless youth, in harmony with the tradition which represented him as a young doctor of the law. The traits of a school-teacher, calculation and liberalism, are written in the two gospel incidents reported of Philip. Before the feeding of the five thousand Jesus asked Philip how and where bread enough could be obtained to feed the multitude. Philip, forgetting the miraculous power of his Master, immediately entered into a calculation and determined that they only had two hundred pence, which would not buy bread enough for so many; besides there was no place to buy it. Again, at the last supper, Jesus discoursing to his disciples said that if they knew him they knew his Father. Philip, utterly unconscious of his meaning and blind to everything but his bodily presence, said, "Show us the Father, and it sufficeth us." Disappointed in his spiritual capacity Jesus returned the sad answer, containing the reproach upon all intellectual believers, formalists, and ritualists, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me?" In Thomas we discern the moral courage absolutely requisite to a great teacher. When Jesus had escaped from the hands of the Jews and turned back to Judea again for the raising of Lazarus the apostles hesitated; but Thomas -faithful and bold, determined to make the journey at all hazards -breaks out with the exhortation, "Let us also go, that we may die with him." Rather than forsake Christ he would walk straight into the jaws of death with him. Such utmost sacrifice truth has often required of its teachers. A teacher is never a coward. Thomas, by virtue of his calling a debater and thinker, shows his argumentative proclivity at the last supper by saying, “Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way?" Christ is in the midst of a new revelation, yet Thomas, like many a rationalist, in the sunlight of spiritual illumination was searching for the dimmer luminaries of cause and relation with which to direct his steps. The strong tendencies of a character like his, which showed itself when Christ appeared to the apostles on the second Sabbath evening, are too frequently discussed to need men

tion here. There was on that occasion a dogmatic narrowness on the rules of evidence which would satisfy him that is too common among teachers.

Great representatives of this apostolic group have been numerous in our century. Farrar and Spurgeon are fit successors to Pope Benedict XIV and John Bunyan. Neither justice nor affection will permit me to pass in silence the name of James M. Thoburn, who, as a preacher to a handful of white English soldiers, or stammering in broken words the glad story of salvation to Hindus contaminated by the very attention he commanded, or by rousing his native land to missionary teaching, has built himself a garlanded pillar in the temple of God.

Of all the offices of the Church the diaconate was the oldest, the most important, and subject to the most extreme change. It took its rise in the opposition between the Jewish and Hellenist converts in the primitive Church and has the only warrant for its existence that any Church office can have, namely, the pressure of circumstances. To extraordinary gifts as preachers, illustrated by both Stephen and Philip, the first deacons added executive and administrative qualities. The diaconate is the first of the holy orders, and though later it becomes subordinate to the office of presbyter yet in all its history the fundamental principle of its institution and the name remained. In administrative and temporal matters the deacon has always been the superior officer, and in its lowest estate the deacon was second only to the bishop. The diaconate was filled by men like Laurentius, Athanasius, and Hildebrand, all the equals of their bishops. The diaconate underlies all the modern ideas of service as distinguished from religious experience. Laymen have obtruded themselves into this office, among them St. Francis. His work, like that of Wesley, gives social questions a prominent place with which religious instruction has to deal. Political economy is a part of knowledge. Trade, tariff, commerce, and communication all concern the religion of Christ. The study of their laws, the proclamation of their influence, and the declaration of their spheres rest largely with the deacons or stewards. The office of deacon also is concerned with the financial support and endowment of all the ministries which

have so multiplied under the genius of Christianity. It is not always agreeable to turn solicitor for even a religious enterprise, and devote time, strength, and prayer to raising money, but the advancement of the Kingdom requires that somebody shall do it. University endowments, hospital benefactions, missionary and temperance reform agencies wait upon the penetrating, enthusiastic, charitable appeals of the deacons who sound out the message of the Church to men of wealth. Of the three members who represent finance, administration, and the sociology of Christianity in the apostolic cabinet, Matthew and Simon will at once come to the mind of the Bible student. The rightfulness of placing Thaddeus in the group is not so evident, though consideration will show conclusively that this is the only place to which he can be assigned. We know little of him. It is to this group that Judas Iscariot would be assigned. We long ago gave the traitor's place to St. Paul, but by native endowment and influence among the twelve Judas was fully the equal of the foremost in the diaconate. Matthew is an ideal man for such a position. Da Vinci pictures him as young, with refinement and culture indicated in the contour of his face as though he belonged to a better educated class. Following the tradition that Thaddeus and Simon were the sons of Joseph by a former marriage, Da Vinci pictured these latter as old men, and put them alongside of each other at the last supper. One fourth of the whole apostolic band seem to have been called into the circle of Christ because of their business aptitude. Matthew, by virtue of his preeminent ability, is chief of these three, and under cover of his name all the financial responsibilities which belong to the ministry may be enumerated. He stands in the diaconate for that large class of men so essential to the wellbeing of the Church. As the centuries pass by they become the constructors of the most solid and enduring institutions of Christianity, namely, its agencies of charity and beneficence. They bear a great burden for the Church, and if their services are not always appreciated-as plainly they were not among the twelveit may stand chargeable to pride, prejudice, or jealousy, each of which it often seems impossible for grace to exorcise. It is vain to attempt to learn anything about Thaddeus from the fathers.

From their contradictory stories it is evident they knew next to nothing about him. There is a passage in Hegesippus, as quoted by Eusebius, from which it appears he may have been a peasant farmer. He appears as one of the interlocutors in the farewell conversation between Jesus and his disciples; and there pains is taken to distinguish him from Judas Iscariot. Besides this incident we have the Epistle which bears his name and which has been so generally ascribed to him that it was admitted into the canon of the New Testament. His question put to Jesus was prompted by the views he entertained in common with the others about the great pomp and secular power of the Kingdom, and the letter may be interpreted to show the same spirit. "Earnestly contend for the faith," shows the temper of the deacons from Thaddeus to Hildebrand. Luke calls Simon a zealot. This connects him with a famous party that rose in rebellion under another Judas against the payment of taxes, some twenty years before the ministry of Jesus. There is a tradition that it was he who persuaded Peter to question Christ about paying tribute to Cæsar. The supposition is easily credible of this fiery, untamed zealot. It is almost unpleasant to those who follow the injunction of St. Paul and pay taxes to the civil power to find Simon among the twelve. Matthew is welcome, whose business it was to collect taxes, but Simon, who evaded their payment even to the point of rebellion, must embody another lesson. We would now call his one of the "dangerous classes." Extremes meet in the Church of Christ. But Simon is needed still. That fiery, wrathful German, Luther by name, who flung down the challenge of financial sin to Tetzel was the Simon Zelotes of the Reformation. All who chafe at the ease that finds its way into Zion, at the appointments of an elegant worship which serve only to turn from their doors the common people who cannot afford to attend, all church edifices ostentatiously built and burdened by debt rouse the spirit of Simon the deacon.

Edwin A. Schell

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ART. III-THE INDIVIDUAL IN A SOCIAL AGE.

THAT our age is social is assumed. The increased enlargement of social interests and activities has gone on until "the parliament of man" is not wholly a poet's happy phrase. In contrast, too, with the rudimentary social life of the generations next preceding our own, the present is a social age. The tendency is practically to force us to think of the many rather than of the one, and to regard the many as one. It is not strange, therefore, that the passion for magnitudes is strong. Big systems, big combinations-industrial and commercial-big expositions, big conventions, are the order of the day. Synthesis is in the ascendant. A late citizen of Connecticut professed to have "the biggest show on earth," and he made money and reputation out of his claim. He was a pioneer in the loud assertion of size and exclusiveness, and he has had a host of imitators. Certain political and religious leaders, even, as well as the industrial, systematically trade upon the prevalent craze for bulk, and so the big convention, now happily regarded with less favor than formerly, has bestrode America like a Colossus. Railroad systems have been reduced in number and increased in power. Combinations and mergers are the staple of newspaper reports of business and form the texts of magazine homilies on the industrial situation. Federations of labor organizations, of churches, and of women's clubs are constantly forming, department stores are more numerous and more complete, and even the university listens to the clamorous demand that everything known and unknowable be included in its courses of study.

One result of this widespread and perhaps desirable tendency has been to leave the impression that the individual is a safely negligible quantity; that the mass has a certain intelligence, power of initiative and self-direction, beside which that of the individual is unimportant. So it has come to pass that if one is somewhat disposed to stand upon his own feet, to do his own thinking, and to some extent to live his own life, he is dubbed an individualist, as though that were the sum of all villainies. Much