idea is certainly a novel and remarkable one. The founder, it is held, has a twofold value for the religion, an historical and an ideal (p. 264). As historical, he must be a "person of creative genius"; and "creative" means here "such a transcendence of local conditions as cannot be explained by the completest inheritance of the past, a personality that so embodies a new ideal as to awaken in man the imitative passion and the interpretative imagination" (p. 263). But it is not enough that the founder be historical; he must be ideally interpreted. It is this that changes, in fact, the reformer into the founder. "What changes the reformer into the founder is not so much his own act as his people's, the creative action of his personality on their imagination forcing them to invest him with attributes and functions expressive of the authority and worship of the ancient gods" (p. 263). "A founded religion, then, may be defined as a religion whose ultimate truth is an historical person speculatively construed" (p. 265). Buddha, for instance, is historically simply an enlightened teacher. But imagination lays hold on him, and speculative reason transforms him into "the eldest and noblest of beings"-a kind of deity. "And it was this transcendental interpretation of its founder, his apotheosis as we have termed it, which made Buddhism a religion" (p. 276). Similarly, it is not simply as an historical person who lived, taught, and died, that Jesus became the founder of His religion. The law applies to Him also that, while an historical person and his creative acts were pre-supposed in the religion, yet it could not in any sense begin to be without some form of apotheosis by the community" (p. 294). As it is put earlier, what divides Christianity from Hebraism "is not the historical Jesus, the Man who was a Son of Israel and lived in time,

but the theological Christ, the Person who has been construed into the Son of God, whose Deity is equal to the Father's" (p. 261). Here we may begin to feel that we are getting on very slippery ground indeed. There must be interpretation and apotheosis by the community, but in the case of Buddha, at any rate, that apotheosis is purely imaginative-fictional. Is it to be presumed that it is the same with Christ? Dr. Fairbairn would repel that inference with his whole soul; but in some of his parallels he comes perilously near suggesting it. There is nothing he insists on more earnestly than that history is the ultimate verification of the claims of Christ, and of the interpretation given of Him by His apostles. The indisputable fact, he tells us, is that "it is not Jesus of Nazareth who has so powerfully entered into history; it is the deified Christ who has been believed, loved, and obeyed as the Saviour of the world" (pp. 14, 15). But if this has been illusion, then illusion, it is argued, works as truth, and for it, in a most miraculous way. "True men receive it, are made truer by it, so use it as to build the world up in the love and pursuit of the truth as it has never been built up before" (p. 15). And such a working of error as truth is held to be inconceivable. But one cannot help asking, Might not the same argument, mutatis mutandis, be urged as establishing the truth of the conception of the idealized Buddha?

There need be no dubiety, however, as to the real trend of Dr. Fairbairn's argument for the transcendence of the Personality of Christ. It is for him no question of imagination or speculative construction without basis. Here Dr. Fairbairn has reached a subject in the highest degree congenial to him, and he throws his whole marvelous force of exposition and illustration into it. What he sets himself to show is that,

if the Apostles put this transcendent meaning and value on the Person of Christ, they were justified in doing it by the history that preceded (cf. p. 475). Nothing could be more attractive than the way in which this thesis is worked out in detail. The history in the Gospels is that of a supernatural Person. It is the supernatural set in a history, the sobriety and minute realism of which prove it to be true. No ingenuity of criticism can eliminate this quality of the supernatural from it, or give verisimilitude to the hypothesis that the sublime, stainless, most universal yet most concrete, most natural yet most divine figure it presents to us, is the creation of imagination. Christ's witness to His own Personality bears out the impression produced by the impression of His character, religion, and life. This is what we have in the case of Christ that fails us in the case of Buddha; a history which supports the divine claims made for Him by His Apostles. Next to the testimony to the Person of Christ, Dr. Fairbairn enters at great length into the significance of the death of Christ, as interpreted by Him. self and by the apostolic writers, and here also he finds a fundamental harmony. He discards juridical theories and seeks to give an interpretation of the great Sacrifice which is spiritual throughout. The consideration of his positions would involve discussions of a theological character unsuitable for these pages; space besides forbids;

but we may state the conviction that certain of the author's constructions at least (as on the Rabbinical Law) are of doubtful legitimacy. Finally, as before noticed, the closing sections show how in the religion of Christ are realized the highest ideal of all religion. Weight is specially laid on the spiritual, non-institutional, universal character of the religion; on its ideas of the Fatherhood of God, and sonship

of man, and of the kingdom of God, defined as "perfect obedience towards God, embodied in perfect duty towards man" (p. 524, "Christ's Social Ideal"); above all, on Christ's own Person as the embodied ideal of His religion. We miss somehow in this picture an adequate carrying forward of the idea of redemption and of the forgiveness of sins, for which the previous sections had prepared us.

The crucial question, probably, on which a final judgment on Dr. Fairbairn's book will depend is the correctness of his interpretation of Christianity as bound up essentially with the divine transcendence of the Personality of Christ. Is the Incarnation truly a fact? Is Jesus Christ truly a Divine Person-the Eternal Son of God-manifest in the flesh? We have ourselves no quarrel with Dr. Fairbairn on this head; we think with him that the Gospels, the apostolic faith, and the history of mankind, admit of no lower interpretation. Though, if this is admitted, all the old problems come back again, on which Dr. Fairbairn has hardly touched. His faith is that of the historic Church; but he must be well aware that in circles of culture and enlightenment-in philosophy, in literature, among scholars, critics, students of religions, liberal theologians-the currents are strongly against him. Many will accept almost to the letter his delineation of Christianity in the concluding sections of his work, who will deny that the miraculous interpretation of the Person of Christ-the Incarnation proper -is essential to it. Mr. T. H. Green, e.g., were he living, or the Master of Balliol, would not assent to his view of the essence of Christianity; as little would it find favor with writers like the late A. Sabatier, or with Prof. Harnack and his enthusiastic following in and out of the Church. The

pre-eminent value of Principal Fairbairn's book, in fact, is, in our opinion, just this, that it brings us face to face with the ultimate alternative as to what the true essence of Christianity is. On the one hand, a Universal Father-God, whose presence fills the world and all human spirits; Jesus, the soul of the race in whom the consciousness of the Father, and the corresponding spirit of filial love, first came to full realization: the spirit of divine sonship learned from Jesus as the essence of religion and salvationhere, in sum, is the Christianity of the "modern" spirit. All else is dressThe Contemporary Review.

ing, religious disguise, Aberglaube, symbolism, inheritance of the effete Will dogmatisms. this suffice for Christianity? Or is the Apostolic confession still to be held fast, that Christ is Lord: the Incarnate, the Living, the Exalted, the Redeemer and Saviour, the Head of all things for His Church and for the World? It is this question the Church of the immediate future will have to face, and meet with a very distinct answer, "Yes" or "No." The service of Principal Fairbairn's book is that it is a contribution on so grand a scale to the answer which we take to be the right one. James Orr.

The House of Commons has many a rigid rule for the methodical regulation of its proceedings. The most trivial breach of these ordinances, any little incident, or even casual remark, which tends to distract the attention of Members from the subject under consideration, is met with a reproving cry of "order, order," from the Speaker. It is, therefore, surprising to find that on one occasion the House interrupted its proceedings, and laid aside for a while its habitual sense of order, decorousness, and solemnity, to settle a dispute between the Prime Minister and the leader of the Opposition as to the correctness of a Latin quotation. What is still more amazing is that the wager of a guinea was staked on the issue by these eminent statesmen, and that when the question was decided one of these gold coins (issued for the last time in 1813) was tossed to the leader of the Opposition by the Prime Minister across the floor of the House, without a hair even in the wig of the

Speaker being ruffled. Nevertheless, these strange things did happen in the House of Commons, though it is over a century and a half ago. We recently held in our hand, in the Medal Room of the British Museum, the identical guinea which Pulteney, leader of the Opposition, won of Sir Robert Walpole, Prime Minister, in 1741, for an incorrect quotation from Horace. Pulteney's Guinea, as this coin is called, shows on the obverse a bust of George the Second, with laurel in his hair, and on the reverse there is a shield in which not only the arms of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Electorate of Hanover are quartered, but also the lilies of France. On its being deposited in the British Museum it was accompanied by the following account of the wager, in the handwriting of Pulteney:

This guinea I desire may be kept as an heir-loom. It was won of Sir Robert Walpole in the House of Commons, he

asserting the verse in Horace to be nulli pallescere culpæ, whereas I laid the wager of a guinea that it was nullâ pallescere culpâ. He sent for the book, and being convinced that he had lost, gave me this guinea. I told him I could take the money without any blush on my side, but I believed it was the only money he ever gave in the House where the giver and receiver ought not equally to blush. This guinea, I hope, will prove to my posterity the use of knowing Latin, and encourage them in their learning.

It was on February 11th, 1741, that this curious incident occurred in the House of Commons. Sandys on that day gave notice that on the ensuing Friday, February 13th, he would move an address to the King to dismiss Sir Robert Walpole from his councils and presence for ever. The Prime Minister at once declared he would be present to meet the motion, as he was not aware that he had committed any crime deserving of censure. Walpole was not a classical scholar, and, indeed, he never concealed his contempt for learning; but, no doubt, he felt, on this occasion, that he must follow the prevailing fashion of classical quotation, especially when questions of personal honor were being discussed, and so, laying his hand on his breast he said with some emotion,

Nil conscire sibi, nulli pallescere culpæ,

meaning that he was conscious in himself of no guilt, and need turn pale at the memory of no crime. "I am certain," said Pulteney, "that the Right Hon. gentleman's defence will prove as weak as his quotation is inaccurate, for what Horace wrote was nullâ pallescere culpâ." Walpole defended his quotation, and agreed to Pulteney's wager of a guinea that his rendering of the passage was correct, the Speaker seeing nothing unseemly in the proceedings. The decision of the dispute

was left to the Clerk of the House, Nicholas Hardinge, a distinguished classical scholar, who decided that Walpole was wrong, and produced a Horace to prove it. The Prime Minister tossed the guinea across the floor to Pulteney who caught it, and holding it up to the house exclaimed (with a hint at the corrupt and profligate expenditure ascribed to Walpole): “It is the only honest money that has come from the Treasury for many years!"

Its

"Don't quote Latin; say what you have to say, and then sit down." This was the advice which the Duke of Wellington gave to a new Member who asked him how to get on in the House of Commons. Perhaps the first part of the injunction is now obsolete, for classical quotation has for many years fallen into disuse in Parliament. decline began about the middle of the nineteenth century; and we doubt that if even Pulteney's Guinea were placed in a case conspicuously on the table of the House of Commons, as evidence of the value of knowing Latin and quoting it correctly, it would tend to its revival. Knowledge of the Classics is not as common among our representatives as it was in the times of Walpole and Pulteney, Fox and Pitt, or even of Peel and Russell; and the cultured scholars in the House are, perhaps, restrained from giving point to an argument with a quotation from Horace or Virgil by the feeling that classical quotation would be regarded in these days as rather pedantic, and above all that its force and applicability would be lost on most of those who heard it. On the other hand, it would seem as if the quotations so common in the House years ago were not always noted for their point. Lord Iddesleigh relates in his diary that Disraeli and he once lamented the decline of classical quotation in Parliament. Disraeli stated that he was in the habit of using Latin passages in his speeches; but

Speaker Denison advised him to give it up. "Do you think Members don't like it?" "Oh no, the House rather likes it," replied the Speaker, "but you are making John Russell restless, and I am afraid of his taking to it too. He gave us six or seven lines of Virgil the other night, which had not the smallest connection with his speech or with the subject."

"Why," asked Disraeli.

There was once a Parliament known as the Unlearned Parliament. It assembled as far back as 1404; and is described in text-books on the Constitution as Parliamentum Indoctum. It was regarded as unlearned not because its members never quoted from the Classics, but because no lawyer sat in it. In our times lawyers are numerous in the House of Commons, and to them is due the little Latin that is now heard in that assembly. They do not treat the House to the ponderous classic lore with which statesmen at the beginning of the nineteenth century loaded their speeches, but they keep in constant circulation such illuminating phrases as de facto, in extenso, inter alia, nolens volens, pari passu, and brutum fulmen. The average Member, however, when he quotes at all, quotes from English literature, and, as at all times in its history, the House of Commons thoroughly enjoys a happy and witty quotation in a language it understands.

In debate there is hardly anything more rhetorically effective than turning what appears to be an apt quotation in the mouth of the person using it to the discomfiture of his argument. On March 22nd, 1770, George Grenville, as leader of the Opposition, brought forward a motion to alter the procedure in the trying of election petitions, which was opposed by Lord North's Government. DeGrey, the AttorneyGeneral, concluded his speech against what he called "the dangerous innova

ing the line from Hamlet's soliloquy that it was better to

Bear those ills we have Than to fly to others that we know not of.

Wedderburn (subsequently Lord Chancellor Loughborough) rose instantly, and made a happy reply to the quotations by continuing Hamlet's reflections:

Thus conscience does make cowards

of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and mo

ment

With this regard their currents turn

awry,

And lose the name of action.

the

Edmund Burke, after his quarrel with his Whig colleagues over French Revolution, crossed the floor of the House of Commons, and, though he held no office, took his seat on the Treasury Bench with William Pitt, the Prime Minister, and the other members of the Government. During a debate on the Volunteer Corps Bill, April 1st, 1794, Burke, Fox, and Sheridan spoke, and the conflict of opinion which separated Burke from his old companionsin-arms, broke out afresh. In the course of the discussion Philip Francis complained of the practice of three or four Members, by long speeches, occupying most of the attention of the House. Burke maintained that this charge was directed mainly against Sheridan, and he recommended to the consideration of the hon. gentleman the lines of an American writer:

Solid men of Boston make no long potations,

Solid men of Boston make no long orations,

Bow, wow, wow!