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THE KING’S B JSINESS
M y D ear ,M r . M athews : , I have been interested in you and your writings for nearly twenty years and while I have not been able to agree with, all your positions I have received considerable help from them. Last evening I read your little leaflet “Will Christ Come Again” with keen disap pointment. I cannot, easily conceive how a mart could more effectively misrepresent the position o f the Godly thoughtful scholarly brethren, who because o f their serious and earnest study o f the New Testament are forced to accept the premillenarian view. O f course, I am fully aware, indeed painfully aware, that a great many who are known as premillenarians are extreme, fanatical and ridiculous in some o f the things that they say. But, for a man in your position to take up a discussion o f the subject o f the coming o f Christ and take these fanatical expressions as representative of that school, is a positive outrage. I have no. disposition, at the present, to enter into a discussion o f the “ facts” in question. I have been a student o f eschatology for years and know personally a great number o f men who accept the premillenarian view and some o f them are among the finest Christian scholars that it is my privilege to know. When I remember men like Prof. Macintosh o f New College, Edinburgh and Prof. Griffith Thomas of Wycliffe College it is hard for me ,to understand how a man in. your own position can write “ No man can hold the premillenarian view whose mind haS been really affected by the modern scientific methods and discoveries, one or the other has to be abandoned.” If by the “modern scientific methods” you mean the study o f ancient facts in the light of a modern theory and torturing them to fit them into the theory then I grant that it would be hard for such a mind to accept the premillenarian point o f view. It. is the scientific study* o f the New Testament from-the historical point of view that has driven me to accept the premillenarian position, and the thing about your pamphlet that hurts me is not any fact that you present but the unchristian and intolerant spirit o f it. Indeed I regard it as the rankest kind o f propagandist literature. There is no reason why you should be sensitive regarding any “heavily financed” propaganda because I know of no propaganda that has been so insistent as that which has been carried on by your own Institution the last twenty-five years., I am also amazed to find a man in your position using the term “best modern .scholarship” in the way that you do. I thought that use of the term and kindred terms had been relegated to cheap, superficial saplings who are getting their first glimpse o f the world of- scholarship. It Seems to me that modesty would lead you to grant that it is possible for a man to be scholarly and cultured and quite alive to all that modern scholarship has to say and yet be led to a different conclusion from that which you have reached. Your attitude reminds me o f what Prof. Stengel said not long ago about the Germans, “The whole world, and especially the neutral nations, have only one means o f profitable existenqe and that is to submit themselves to our direction which is superior to all others from every point o f view. No nation surpasses, us in the widest and highest ideals and sentiments, and under our dominion none need concern himself as to the defence o f his rights.” I suppose h^ is welcome to this exalted opinion, but o f course, he will find it hard to get the outside world to believe. You are quite entitled to your idea o f the coming o f Christ but you need not be surprised if the great bulk o f the' rank and file o f the good sane Christian people will find it a little bit hard to accept your estimate o f yourself and your particular school. This is especially true when your ideas conflict with the conclusions o f men like John who saw the Lord and Paul who was one of the first great interpreters of Christianity. I do not see what you mean when you say that the premillenarian interpretation o f the gospel denies that God is capable o f bringing about His victory by spiritual means. I do not know of any other means by which He can secure His purpose. But, if you mean by that that He does not use material agencies your statement is perfectly absurd. I f you had lived before the incarnation and had heard the prophets speaking o f God manifesting Himself in the flesh you.no doubt would have said/ttiat that was contrary to your ideas o f the spiritual and denied that God is capable o i “bringing about His victory by spiritual means.” Nevertheless in the “ fulness o f time” Christ came and it is not a question o f what God can do but o f what He actually did do. I suppose it would be possible for Him to have brought about His victory by spiritual means but He chose to secure it through the incarnation. The question o f the consummation is not a question o f what God can do but a question o f what He chooses to do, and all we know about that comes to us through the revelation that Jesus has given to us and it
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