1874] WHAT TO SEEK IN THE BIBLE 227 



Zwingli, 1 &quot;is God Himself&quot;; or, as Calvin 2 puts it, 

 &quot; He not only teaches His elect to look to God, sed SE 

 quoque exhibet in quern respiciant.&quot; 3 



1 Wevke, i. 70. 



a Institutio, Lib. i. cap. 6., cf. Lib. iii. cap. 2, esp. sect. 6 : &quot; Verbum 

 ipsum, utcunque ad nos deferatur, instar speculi esse dicimus in quo 

 Deum intueatur fides.&quot; 



3 It is, I think, correct to say that the whole of God s redemptive 

 activity, all His saving manifestation of Himself, falls for the Reformers 

 under the head of God s word, just as His creative activity, His natural 

 self-manifestations, are spoken of as His works. Thus to Luther work, 

 word, heart, form an ascending scale. Speech, he says in his Preface 

 to the German Psalter, is the mightiest and noblest activity of man, 

 especially such speech as shows how the heart stands. &quot; I would much 

 rather hear a saint speak than see his works.&quot; A beast can do, only a 

 man can speak. Thus word as opposed to work is personal as opposed 

 to impersonal activity. This way of looking at the word was kept 

 always before the Reformers, by the great stress they laid on the con 

 ception of Christ as the living Word. From this point of view, it is not 

 surprising that faith in Christ the incarnate Word, faith in Christ s work, 

 and faith in the Gospel word, are so readily used as synonymous in the 

 Reformation theology. It is in great measure this identification, com 

 bined with such unguarded statements as could not be wanting among 

 men whose intuition of spiritual truths greatly outran the power of 

 giving them dogmatical precision, that has led some writers and even 

 such a man as Rothe to say that the Reformation Church viewed 

 Revelation simply as a supernatural communication of doctrine (Rothe, 

 Zuv Dogmatik, p. 56). Certainly this view of Revelation did enter the 

 Protestant dogmatic, in proportion as the religious spirit of the Reforma 

 tion declined, and men sank back into the superficial conception of the 

 word as a mere sign of impersonal truth. But this was a decline from 

 the true principles of the Reformation, and one that never obscured 

 altogether the truer insight that found its expression in the doctrine of 

 the Word and of Faith. We must remember that the philosophical and 

 psychological treatment of the subject of personality, which alone can 

 furnish the basis for a complete dogmatical separation between the 

 deeper and shallower conceptions of Word of God and Revelation, is 

 even now a new thing. A certain measure of confusion was thus in 

 evitable ; but while one school of theology (culminating curiously 

 enough in Turretin, whose skill in exposition has brought him into undue 

 favour in Scotland) drifted through this confusion into the error which 

 Rothe condemns, another and deeper school, of which Ames is one of 

 the best representatives, always held fast the personal character of 

 Faith and of Revelation. It is instructive to observe how the want of a 

 sharp distinction between Religion and Theology leads Ames not to con 

 ceive of Christianity as a mere scientific doctrine, but conversely to rescue 

 the personal character of Revelation by the position : &quot; Primum et pro- 

 prium Theologiae subjectumesse voluntatem.&quot; Medulla Theologica, i. 9. 



