studies-fresh, strong, full of individual flavour-and now she presents us with a tale of the London poor, with such humour, pathos, and realistic truthfulness as makes us recall the very best work of Hesba Stretton, or of the Author of 'Episodes in an Obscure Life.' Whoever has once read her description of Peter's Court is not likely to forget it; the squalor, the vice, and the crime, so persistent and all-pervading, are such that the innocent and the pure are involved in it, and cannot help being to some extent drawn down by the mere fact of their proximity to it. Poor Bessy and her adventure-which turned out so blissful for her at the last-will appeal strongly to the sentiment both of old and young, and we are sure that if the public are stirred to any renewed interest in the dense populations of our lanes and courts and alleys, Mrs. Wood's purpose will be all the more fully gained.

THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, AND PHILOLOGY.

Godet's Biblical Studies on the Old Testament. Edited by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. LYTTLETON, Rector of Hagley, &c. Oxford and London: Jas. Parker and Co.

M. Godet's Essays, of which two series have appeared, one on Old Testament subjects and the other on New, have long been among the class of small books on great subjects of which there are too few in any language. If M. Godet were a Professor Ordinarius of Heidelberg or Berlin, instead of a plain pastor of the Free Church of Neufchatel, these essays would long since have made a stir in that workshop of books, and we should have had a call on all sides for their translation. But French Switzerland is too often overlooked by translators in search of a subject. They forget that this little corner of Europe, the only remaining fragment of the old Kingdom of Burgundy which has escaped absorption in the great military monarchies of modern Europe, has also been a seedplot of intelligence, a sort of reservoir of intellect for those French-speaking provinces whose intelligence has been stunted by the conscription and withered by the breath of Roman superstition. What Geneva has been to France, and how splendidly she has repaid with interest the loan of Calvin and other French refugees, who shared the hospitality she offered to them at the time of the Reformation, is matter of history. The Calvins, the Casaubons, the Turretins, and others too numerous to mention, were the descendants of French refugees, who repaid the hospitality of Geneva by rendering her good service in every department of letters. Lausanne and Neufchatel are second only to Geneva in this respect. There is a long list of eminent men of whom Neufchatel has been the birth-place, from Farel to Godet, of whom we have here to make a few remarks.

It is now more than twelve years ago since a thoughtful commentary on John's Gospel fell into our hands, which at once impressed us with the sense of the writer's power as an exegete. We have since then looked out for everything which came from the same pen. He was

Theology, Philosophy, and Philology.

571 known to be a writer in the Revue Chrétienne,' and some of the most thoughtful essays in that serial were from his pen. These have been since collected and published, and may now be left to speak for themselves. Of these essays, the first, on the Nature of Angels, is a most original argument, from analogy, for the existence of an intelligent order of beings higher than man. Put into the fewest possible words, the argument amounts to this: In the scale of creation as we know it at present there are these three stages: the plant, the animal, the man. In the plant, the species is everything and the individual life is nothing. As we rise to the animal, the species is still the essential thing, but the individual has already now become an independent reality by the side of and above it. Individuality begins to show itself above ground; but, nevertheless, the animal is governed by instinct. Hence the absence of responsibility, and hence also the want of progress in the animal world. The lion of our day does exactly what his ancestors did, and what his descendants will do in the remotest future. The individual lives, but is the slave of the species. His gaoler does indeed (to borrow M. Godet's expressive metaphor) allow him to take a few steps in his prison-yard, but never to leap its wall.

Now if we were to see no farther into the days of creation than the animal, would not analogy suggest a nature as much above the animal as the animal is the above the plant? We know that this is actually the case. Creation on this earth did not stop with the work of the fifth and the early part of the sixth day. Man was created on the sixth day. He was the crown and completion of all the lower works of God. But we cannot suppose that the series ends there. Analogy suggests that there is a fourth term to the scale. As the first term is the plant, in which the individual does not exist at all, so there must be something corresponding in the opposite extreme in which the species disappears and the individual is everything. That fourth term in an ascending scale is the angel. Animals and men are thus the two middle terms, by the help of which we can rise from the first term of the series, the plant, to another and still unknown one, the very opposite and complement of the first, the angel.

We need not follow the argument into further detail. The author has made out his case that there is antecedent probability for the existence of a higher order of beings. At this stage we take down our Bible, and its hints, which we admit are only incidental, fill up the gap, and fall in with, and corroborate, these anticipations of reason, that there must be beings possessed of free will and entirely exempt from the law of species, whereas man is only partially so. The argument is an admirable piece of analogical reasoning in the strict sense of analogy-i.e., a reasoning upward from the known to the unknown.

One of the best essays in the volume is a series of sketches of the four greater prophets. They are short but clear summaries of their mission and work, given with a good deal of freshness. Occasionally we detect, as often in men of a highly imaginative nature, that they are truer to the idea than to the details. For instance, in his account of Ezekiel's vision of the second

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Temple, the author imagines a greater contrast than the text warrants between the temple of Solomon and that which Ezekiel saw in vision. 'This sanctuary,' he remarks, 'is not a servile reproduction of Solomon's 'temple, now destroyed. It is distinguished from that by very significant 'differences: the ark and the mercy-seat are no longer seen in the holy ' of holies and the holy place. There is no golden altar in the latter; a 'simple table, like that around which a father gathers his children, has ' replaced the altar and incense.' This is a reference to Ezek. xli. 22; but it is easy to see that it is fanciful. We are aware that the old commentators tried to introduce the thought that we have an 'intimation that, under the New Testament dispensation, a table would be substi'tuted for an altar in the ordinance of the Lord's Supper.' But this is so obviously uncritical, that we need not take up space in exploding it. The whole vision is intensely Levitical. It is minute and precise as to the altar, ritual, animal sacrifices, and the dress and deportment of the priests. We may allegorize these things or not, but to say that Ezekiel anticipated in his vision the simple and unadorned ritual of the Reformed Churches, is mere fancy. But this is a blemish which scarcely detracts from the pleasure with which we have read these essays through, with almost as much freshness in their English dress as in their French original. We may say of the translation that it is fairly well done. There are few instances, if any, in which we feel we are reading only a translation, and not the original. We may express, in conclusion, our hope that it may reach a wide circle of readers in its Eglish dress, and that Mr. Lyttleton may be encouraged to go on and prepare a translation of the second series.

The Unseen Universe. A Physical Speculation on a Future State. Macmillan and Co.

This is an able book; so able, indeed, that our chief regret is that we can devote to it only a brief notice. It deserves a lengthy and careful examination, and if the argument is faulty, and rests in one particular, as we think it does, on an erroneous assumption, we should like space to point out that assumption, and where the argument in consequence breaks down. We hope soon to return to the volume.

The principle on which the writers base their argument for existence after death, and seek to reconcile religion and science, is by the law of continuity. Of this law there are fresh illustrations springing up every day, and in every department of science. Mr. Justice Grove's theory of the correlation of forces is only one illustration out of many of the law of continuity. The conservation of momentum of the vis viva, and, in fact, the whole science of thermo-dynamics, has been built up out of this one prolific principle. If, then, as these writers argue, all force and all life are continuous, reaching forward in one endless chain of vibrations or of atoms acting each on the other, can we think of intelligent and rational life as a mere function of our animal organism, a mere note of music struck off by the instrument in the player's hands, to die out of existence as soon as this cunning instrument has fallen to pieces? It is strange,

Theology, Philosophy, and Philology.

573 indeed, that this 'harp of a thousand strings' should be hushed in death; and philosophy has tried to get over the contradiction by one theory after another. But, according to these writers (for it is an open secret that the work is the joint production of Professors Tait and Balfour), there is no contradiction whatever if we can get rid of our materialism, and think of forces and spirits as they really are. They would say, in the words of the poet,—

'There is no death, what seems so is transition.

This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life Elysian,

Whose portal we call death.'

Swedenborg, as is well known, stood out against the conceptions of a mortal body joined to an immortal soul, which were current everywhere in the last century. He was the first, from a theological point of view, to reject this popular dualism; and he maintained that death and the resurrection were identical moments. Death was not the disembodiment of an immortal soul, waiting, as the old Church teachers held, in the disembodied state for a resurrection body: but death was itself the resurrection. At death the form of flesh falls away, and the true spiritual form which underlies it, and makes it what it is, stands out froe and immortal.

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Now, we need not discuss the amount of truth or error in this opinion of Swedenborg's. Our object here is to point out that this work sets out with a theory of man's immortality which is substantially the same as Swedenborg's, and then attempts to give it scientific consistency by describing it as another instance of the law of continuity. Now, whether the Swedenborgian theory of the identity of death and the resurrection be Scriptural or not, we cannot help thinking it is an enormous leap in the argument for our authors to connect it, as they do, with the law of continuity. There is a point where religion and science may, and must ultimately, be reconciled; but continuity, or the conservation of force, is not as yet the meeting-point of the two systems. For, granted that there is continuity everywhere, and that nothing perishes, but only suffers a sad change into something rare and 'strange,' how does this prove personal identity after death, which is the only immortality worth discussing here? We cannot help thinking that these ingenious and able writers have deceived themselves with the old fallacy of confounding indestructibility with immortality. Matter, according to the old school, was indestructible; hence, if the soul was an atom, one and indivisible, it was, according to Plato and Phædrus, consequently immortal. This sophism has been long since blown to the winds. Kant has shown that, even granted that this atomic and indivisible hypothesis of the soul has any worth, a thing may be destroyed intensively as well as extensively. The atom may not be destroyed by division, but it may be destroyed by ceasing to act as a centre of force. Discarding the old atomic theory, the new school speak of forces, and they tell us that forces are indestructible, in the same way that Lucretius described atoms

as indestructible. But does it follow, by any law of continuity, that man's life must last beyond the grave because the forces set in motion during life must go on vibrating ad infinitum? It may be so; but science does not here come to our help. The law of continuity, or the correla tion of forces, is a poor prop for our hopes of conscious existence after death. Ingenious as are the analogies of these writers, they are not analogies in the strictly logical sense of the word. We dare not reason upward from them. Even if the conservation of force is most exact in the physical world, nothing forbids but that the trooping fancies of a Shakespeare, or the amazing erudition of a Casaubon or a Bentley, may all burst at death like a soap bubble. Science, in one word, with her physical analogies, can only bring us to the brink of the grave. If she lets down a candle into the cold, damp vault, it is instantly quenched. The moral argument for personal identity carries the question a stage further, and the spiritual brings it to the brink of conviction; but as for physical science, she has nothing to say for or against it. As a moral agent, I feel it is rational that after death should be the judgment. As a spiritual being, I feel it reasonable that when I awake up in God's image, I should be satisfied therewith. But neither of these arguments are of the class on which these writers lay stress.

On this account we conclude that they have failed to find the reconciling point of the future between science and religion. We have no fault to find with their religious views, which are deep and sincere. Their science is of course unimpeachable, but the two harmonize only in an arbitrary system of the writers' own, which any disbeliever in angel or spirit, any Sadducee of the school of Huxley and Tyndall, could easily blow to the winds. Leviathan is not drawn out by a hook, nor modern materialism crushed by a Swedenborgian spiritualism.

The Doctrine of Annihilation in the Light of the Gospel of Love. By JAMES BALDWIN BROWN, B.A. Henry S. King and Co. Mr. Brown's five sermons on theories of annihilation-more specifically on the theory of life in the sense of spiritual existence only in Christ, of which Mr. Edward White may be taken as the modern representative -were preached by special advertisement to his own congregation, and published in the 'Christian World' newspaper. We confess to some little shrinking from both methods of seeking special publicity for the discussion of such a theme. But this is a matter of taste. There can be no doubt concerning the great wisdom and the great ability with which the discussion itself is conducted. We have read the discourses with almost unqualified approbation, and with an enhanced estimate of the literary and oratorical power of the preacher. They are a model of controversy, both in their courtesy, their pertinence, and their power. Here and there we might except to a little rhetorical exaggeration, and we have an occasional consciousness of weakness; as, for instance, the term 'eternity' is represented as equivalent to through what is to them as eternity' (p. 121); and as when theories of universalism are represented as 'hateful to mul'titudes who call themselves disciples.' But on the whole the discussion