Christian armor. "The change which for good or ill has passed over Christian thought during the last hundred years is perhaps best summed up in the saying that Christianity is not a creed but a life.' This is true, although, for the matter of that, John Wesley said it plainly enough a hundred and fifty years ago, and the apostles said so from the outset of their ministry. But, assuming that it is coming to this generation with all the force of a new truth, 'immediately then springs up another question, namely, Where is this Christianity? Where are the higher righteousness and the law of love to be seen in operation?-The type of plain man we are considering wants a more valid proof than has yet been offered that' the Church 'is serious when it professes the Christianity which is a life and not a creed. It is no harder to prove the Pope a successor of the Fisherman, than to prove the average worshiper in a Christian Church to be a true follower of Jesus Christ, assuming always that Christianity is a life. Does the nominally Christian world mean to be Christian in fact?' That is the question of questions to which we are brought, ultimately and necessarily, when all attempts to justify Christianity by evidences have done their utmost." Dr. W. T. Davison condemns Harnack and Loisy as being unfair and unsound in their so-called historical criticism. The following is part of what he says: "The historian is bound to account for the phenomenon which was called the Christian religion, say, in 100 A. D. From what did it spring? Not simply from a belief in the Fatherhood of God, the value of the human soul and the law of love, with Jesus for a lofty example of obedience to it, as Professor Harnack would have us believe. Not from a proclamation of a coming kingdom given by a Jewish Messiah, who did not know the future and cannot be proved to have risen from the dead, as M. Loisy the 'historian' asserts. It was not the teaching of Jesus in his lifetime, but the preaching of the apostles about what Jesus was and had done, which 'founded' the Christian religion. According to the New Testament, that which changed the history of the world was not the prophet Jesus telling men of the value of the human soul, but the preaching of the apostles concerning the Son of God, who died for our sins and rose again for our justification. We are a little impatient of the fashionable modern cant about ‘history,' or the process of analysis which usurps the name. Critics are eager to get behind the evangelists, and behind the documents which the evangelists used, and behind the consciousness of those who handed on the traditions recorded in the documents, to get at-what? The fact which is unquestioned is that the preaching of Christ, the Son of God, crucified and risen again, changed the face of history. As Dr. Fairbairn has said, '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. . . . If the doctrine of the Person of Christ were explicable as the mere mythical apotheosis of Jesus of Nazareth, it would become the most insolent and fateful anomaly in history.' History is little worth if all it can do is to resolve existing documents into their constituent elements and go behind them to hypothetical documents out of which they sprang, in order to reach what is termed the 'genesis' of a belief, while it

cannot give an adequate explanation of the greatest event history has ever known. The rise and progress of the Christian religion as proclaimed by the apostles and their successors is not accounted for by Professor Harnack, who leaves us so little of the Gospel narrative as historical fact, nor by M. Loisy, who leaves us still less. Frank examination of the Gospel records as literary documents is one thing, the skeptical assertions of Rationalist and Romanist 'historians' are quite another. The Evangelical Protestant will cling to his New Testament, both for history and theology, as the groundwork of his faith and the charter of his freedom; and he will be right." An engaging and delightful essay is that upon Edward FitzGerald, translator of the Rubáïyát of Omar Khayyám. Here is one glimpse of the ways and habits of this son of genius and petted darling of leisured affluence: "After seven years' rambling about with friends or staying with relatives, FitzGerald settled in 1837 in a thatched cottage-a single-storied tenement of two apartments-near the gate of Boulge Park, where his father then resided. By April FitzGerald had got the garden in order, put his books on the shelves, . . . set Stothard's Canterbury Pilgrims over the fireplace, Shakespeare's bust in a recess, and begun—with a cat, a dog, and a parrot called 'Beauty Bob'—a very pleasant Robinson Crusoe sort of life. His wants were few. . His bedroom was furnished as simply, as the prophet's chamber at Shunem. Wardrobe he had none-for he could always hang the few clothes he possessed on his own person, and badly hung they were. The study, on the other hand, was crowded. Order not being one of his weaknesses, the books that would not go on his shelves were heaped on the floor. Here were portraits on wall or easel, there large pictures, boots, music, tobacco pipes, walking sticks, mingled in pleasing confusion on table, chair, and piano. With his window open to let in the odor of the cowslips or the garden flowers, FitzGerald sat in dressing gown and slippers, pipe in mouth, and let time slide-troubling about and being troubled by nobody, except the Woodbridge man who brought him his letters and thrice a week shaved him, and the matchman, with his bundles of great sulphurtipped matches, whom you could smell a mile off." About this time Spedding writes: "Fitz is . . . in a state of disgraceful indifference to everything except grass and fresh air." And FitzGerald himself tells W. F. Pollock of the little disasters and miseries under which he labors.— "This all comes of having no occupation or sticking point; so one's thoughts go floating about in a gossamer way." His little disasters prompt him to tell his oft-repeated story from John Wesley's experiences: "A gentleman of large fortune, while we were seriously conversing, ordered a servant to throw some coals on the fire. A puff of smoke came out. He threw himself back in his chair and cried out petulantly, 'O, Mr. Wesley, these are the crosses I meet with every day.'" FitzGerald preferred the dullness of country people to the impudence of Londoners. He said that rustic folk have "a substantial goodness resulting from the funded virtues of many good humble men gone by." FitzGerald thought that if Tennyson had lived an active life, like Scott and Shakespeare, he would have done much more and would have talked about it less. He

named his yacht The Scandal because scandal was the swiftest thing he knew. He had an eccentric elder brother, John FitzGerald, the rich country squire, the generous philanthropist, and the earnest evangelical preacher, who in his preaching would occasionally take off not only his boots but his socks, holding these at arm's length, and examining them critically through his eyeglasses, while still continuing his discourse, but whose heart was right, and who, when hoping and waiting for death at the last, could see and hear, as he himself said, in every pang of his agonized sufferings, the voice of his Beloved saying, "Come along." Edward FitzGerald was by some rated as an agnostic or a pagan. This charge his friends deny. Professor Cowell says, "He was in no sense a pagan-he was a man of sincere religious feeling, but full of doubts and difficulties." Mr. Aldis Wright says, "Though he was a man of most reverent mind, dogmatic theology had no attraction for him." Dr. Thompson, Master of Trinity College, wrote, "Two of the purest-living men among my intimates, FitzGerald and Spedding, were prisoners in Doubting Castle all their lives. This to me is a mysterious problem-not to be solved by any ordinary expedient, nor on this side the Veil, I think." On FitzGerald's gravestone is the inscription selected by himself, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves." This recalls the words on Matthew Arnold's tombstone, “Light is sown for the righteous and gladness for the upright in heart;" and of that on Daniel Webster's monument, by his own direction, "Lord I believe. Help thou mine unbelief!" One of the books Fitz-Gerald valued most was Wesley's Journal. In his own wellthumbed copy two passages were conspicuously marked by him. The first is: "Shall we not have more and more cause to say:

Names, and sects, and parties fall;

Thou, O Christ, art all in all!"

The second is part of a remarkable letter received by Mr. Wesley: "I was formerly apt to mention my skepticism both to clergymen and laymen, with a view of lessening the evil; but they rather increased it. Few clergymen cared to discourse on the subject; and if they did, they generally expected that a few weak reasons should eradicate, at once, strong and deep-rooted prejudices; and most laymen discovered an utter ignorance of the religion they pretended to believe, and looked upon me as if I had the plague for owning I did not believe it. What method could I take? I long avoided speaking of religion to any but its great Author." With these passages we place the significant statement made by FitzGerald's biographer-that one day when a friend came suddenly upon FitzGerald he heard him saying quietly to himself: "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool."

BOOK NOTICES.

RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE.

Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit. By AUGUSTE SABATIER, late Dean of the Protestant Faculty of Theology in the University of Paris. Translated by LOUISE SEYMOUR HOUGHTON. 8vo, pp. xxxii, 410. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co. Price, cloth, $3.50.

Decidedly this is a book to be reckoned with. It is great in the theme discussed, which is nothing less than the true nature of religion, and great in the research and meditation which have been bestowed upon the theme. It is full of learning and of light. It is, to be sure, somewhat confused in arrangement, often vague and inconsistent in statement, and characterized by many infelicities of language, some of which are plainly due to the translator. And although there are touches of imagination and vivacity, occasional evidences of a rare gift for striking phrases, and some passages of moving beauty and eloquence, the style as a whole is rather repetitious, obscure, and heavy. The need of the final revision planned by the author, whose lamented death occurred three years ago, just after the writing was finished, is sadly evident. Moreover, the full table of contents does not atone for the absence of an index. The references are almost wholly to ancient or to French publications, and the author seems to have known little of the newer thinking in England and America. Yet when these defects have been pointed out the fact still remains that here is a notable book. It is suggestive and stimulating in its thought, comprehensive in its treatment, reverent in its tone, and uplifting in its influence. It may at once be added that it is great both in virtue and in fault. The fault is of such a sort that Methodism is peculiarly qualified to deal with it; for the reason that the virtue consists in the statement of the truth upon which Methodism was based. The truth is the spiritual, inward, vital nature of religion, as distinct from its institutions, its creeds, its rites, its sects; and this from the beginning has constituted the message of Methodism. The fault is in the exaltation of the individual reason without due regard to the historic factor in Christianity; and for this excessive individualism Methodism, which has balanced the historic and the personal, should furnish the corrective. Dean Sabatier was properly placed, where for twenty-five years he remained, at the head of a Protestant faculty. His ability qualified him for leadership, and while he claimed for himself liberty to accept whatever in Romanism seemed to him true, he was Protestant to the heart. This volume, indeed, is an elaborate defense of the central principle of the Reformation-salvation by faith alone. Primarily it may appear to be destructive to be one long protest against any authoritative standard in religion. The complaint is here set forth that while all other sciences have adopted the experimental method, theology alone moves by the method of authority—that religion is regarded as an extra-human truth delivered in some ancient super

natural way by God, certified by external evidences such as miracles, rather than "an inner inspiration upspringing in human consciences," and verified by experience of its intrinsic value. To understand the earnestness with which this notion is stated and disputed we must remember that M. Sabatier was a Parisian,' and that it is in his city that the Abbe Loisy, a young Roman Catholic priest, has within a very few months, at the bidding of the new Pope, who was moved by the archbishop of Paris, renounced the critical positions which as a scholar he had reached, consenting, as La Siecle put it, "to kill his reason and to choke in him the cry of the truth." And it was a Frenchman, M. Brunetière, editor of Le Revue des Deux Mondes, who in combating this very work asserted that "there is no such thing as a personal religion, and that there is no religion without authority." Asked what he believed, he made answer: "What do I believe? Go and inquire in Rome!" In a land where Catholicism is still medieval and Protestantism is feeble and timid it is not strange that the need of a polemic like this should be felt. Here is call for a firm and rational Protestantism like that for which M. Sabatier contends. Book I undertakes to justify the Reformation by refuting the Roman Catholic dogma of the Church's right to stand between the individual and God. This dogma was based on the conception of the Church as the embodiment of the divine life, the Word still made flesh, and therefore infallible and necessary for salvation, being, in fact, identical with the kingdom of God; of Church tradition consequently as of equal authority with the Scriptures; of the episcopate, transformed from the mere presidency of a presbytery (though even then the office of an ecclesiastic as against the free, Spirit-taught apostles), its authority growing with the decline of original fervor and freedom, taking on priestly functions, until it comes to its logical fulfillment in the papacy. The long development is traced from the democracy of early Christian days to the absolute mon-archy which made its claim to infallibility in the Vatican Council of 1870. Here at last was theological, moral, and ecclesiastical absolutism. Romanism, in its full development, is nothing if not exclusive. To stand for tolerance, for free discussion, is simply to abdicate. The principles of liberty and equality in social and political life are fatal to a Church so organized and maintained. But such conceptions of the Church and of priestly authority the author shows to be unfounded in history and contradictory in logic. Books II and III undertake to show the error of Protestantism in its attempt to substitute the Bible for the Church as an authoritative standard, to really base itself on a formal principle (the divine authority of Holy Scripture) as well as on a material principlejustification by faith. That the latter alone should stand as the guiding principle of Protestantism, as the one central truth of Christianity, is the purpose of the author's argument. He shows, as to the New Testament, that with the writers themselves there was no assumption of infallibility. Luke puts his gospel on no different plane from those records which had preceded it, except such as it reaches by reason of the greater fullness and accuracy which he tried to secure. Paul "supposes the possibility of an error of memory from his pen; he declares that he is constantly making