on spring. "Wood Notes" contains some of the poet's most rapturous, ecstatic strains. "Brahma" and "The Sphinx" represent his philosophical poems, not easy to understand, containing deep thought vaguely hinted at rather than explicitly revealed. They teach that the subtle, ever-present spirit is the absolute life in all things, is the all in all, subject and object, doer and thing done; that nothing can be destroyed, the soul being itself one with the Over-Soul, the Infinite.

"Voluntaries" has many thrilling passages. Among them stand out brightest, perhaps, these two:

So nigh is grandeur to our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.

Stainless soldier on the walls,

Knowing this-and knows no more,-
Whoever fights, whoever falls,

Justice conquers evermore,

Justice after as before,

And he who battles on her side,

God, though he were ten times slain,
Crowns him victor glorified,

Victor over death and pain.

"Freedom" is a noble poem; so is the "Concord Ode" and the "Boston Hymn," from all of which glorious stanzas might be selected. We refrain, however, and content ourselves with the following extracts from other pages, all well fitted for packing away in the memory as food for lasting inspiration:

Life is too short to waste

In critic peep or cynic bark,
Quarrel or reprimand:

"Twill soon be dark;

Up! mind thine own aim, and

God speed the mark!

The hero is not fed on sweets,

Daily his own heart he eats;
Chambers of the great are jails,
And head winds right for royal sails.

Though love repine and reason chafe,
There came a voice without reply,-
"Tis man's perdition to be safe,
When for the truth he ought to die.

As the bird trims her to the gale,

I trim myself to the storm of time,

I man the rudder, reef the sail,

Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime: "Lowly faithful, banish fear,

Right onward drive unharmed,

The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed."

While thus to love he gave his days
In loyal worship, scorning praise,
How spread their lures for him in vain
Thieving Ambition and paltering Gain.
He thought it happier to be dead,

To die for Beauty than live for bread.

James Mudge

EDITORIAL DEPARTMENTS.

NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS.

No foreign mission field is to-day more intensely interesting than China; it is rendered more fascinating than ever by the thrilling and tragic events of the past two or three years. One of our anxious questions is, What of to-morrow in the mighty land so lately baptized with the blood of martyrs? We hope none of our readers will fail to read the article on "The Outlook in China," by Professor C. M. Lacey Sites of Shanghai, in the Arena of this number.

In a certain church is a sensible and refined woman, daughter of one physician and mother of another. A four years' pastorate closed and a new minister came who was simply bent on preaching the Gospel, and preached it freshly, fervently, illustratively, convincingly. At the close of the third Sunday after Conference this susceptible and appreciative woman thought within herself, “I've heard more Gospel in these six sermons than in all the past four years." She went out of church saying to her fellow-members, "Isn't the Gospel fascinating?" And a sense of spiritual exhilaration diffused itself through that congregation. The church heard a voice which said, "Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee!"

EXCESSES OF PSEUDO-CRITICISM.

PROFESSOR ADOLF JÜLICHER of Marburg appears in the Encyclopædia Biblica as author of the articles on "Logos," "Mystery," "Parables," and "Paraclete." Those and his other writings show that he can no more be classed with conservatives than Pfleiderer of Berlin, or Hausrath of Heidelberg, or Holtzmann of Giessen, or Weizsäcker of Tübingen. Indeed, Jülicher is called, by so sane, fair, and exact an authority as Dr. George P. Fisher of Yale, "one of the more extreme of the recent German critics." Jülicher's criticisms of the wild excesses of biblical criticism have, therefore, the more weight. If those excesses seem insane and shocking to such a man, they must indeed

be flagrant. No one can possibly accuse him of narrowness, benightedness, or blind traditionalism. Yet he criticises the most advanced critics in language vigorous enough and indignant enough to satisfy the stoutest conservative. (It is also true that the conservative would apply similar language to some of Jülicher's own views.)

This Marburg Professor has no patience with the excesses of the pseudo-criticism which considers itself called upon simply to upset all previous views-a school whose precursor was Bruno Bauer of Berlin, who taught in 1840 that the two greatest figures of the New Testament, Jesus and Paul, should be considered literary fictions and Christianity regarded as the product of Roman popular philosophy. Similar theories have been put forth more recently by Steck of Berne and Völter of Amsterdam. These skeptics assert that the chief Pauline epistles cannot possibly come from the hand of the historical Paul, but belong to a later time immediately before Marcion. With these skeptics Jülicher refuses to make the least compromise, first, because, as he says, "Epistles like those to the Galatians and the Corinthians are simply beyond the forger's power precisely on account of the many illogical,' 'incongruous' things they contain which would be highly natural in the situations implied;" and, second, because "No room can be found in the second century for the supposed ingenious artist who immediately before the authorityloving Marcion proceeded, with a sovereign disdain for all accepted authorities, to create fictitious authorities to whom the next stage of development might refer."

Jülicher is severe in his condemnation of certain critics for their pretense of universal knowledge, their rejection of longrecorded history and substitution of extemporized history manufactured offhand in the busy mill of conjecture which is now working overtime, as also for their enormous traffic in hypotheses and their mania for piling up details in support of preconceived revolutionary theories. He mercilessly rebukes "the miserable ambition of glibly explaining away historical personages as the invention or product of their age-of calculating them out as if they were a mechanical combination of the factors which determined the intellectual life of their time and their surroundings." The school of criticism which is possessed by that "miserable ambition" he speaks of as "no more than a symptom

of disease, which, however, is the less to be feared because the tendency to find a solution for every difficulty that may confront exegete or critic by a light-hearted [he might have added, light-headed] rejection of venerable documents as spurious, and the kindred tendency to fill up the gaps in our knowledge with piquant conjectures and ingenious ideas-such tendencies,' says Dr. Jülicher, "are becoming weaker and weaker throughout the whole field of historical research." And the Marburg critic adds the hope that the same may soon be said of the passion for robbing the great Pauline epistles of all value by asserting the existence of innumerable interpolations within them, and by busily heaping conjecture on conjecture. Declaring that the numerous schemes for the dismemberment of the New Testament have about reached the climax of absurdity, this extremely modern critic says: "The partition of the Epistles to the Corinthians by H. Hagge and H. Lisco is typical of such absurd methods. According to these gentlemen, the Almighty must have set from ninety to one hundred and twenty hands in motion during the first and second centuries to produce a mutilation, unparalleled elsewhere, of all the New Testament texts, with the sole object of creating a field for the brilliant display of the caprice of modern theologians, who will recognize no other task." It may be added here that such prominent scholars as B. Weiss, F. Godet, and T. Zahn hold that "the authenticity of all the New Testament books (except Hebrews, which, however, does not even profess to be by Paul) is raised above all question;" the negative critics who deny this being characterized by Weiss as "purblind," by Godet as "impious," and by Zahn as “stupid and malignant." Furthermore, Adolf Harnack says that soon "we shall no longer trouble ourselves much about the deciphering of problems of literary history in connection with primitive Christianity, because in general the essential trustworthiness of the traditional view will have attained universal recognition." Harnack holds that in the whole of the New Testament there is probably but a single document which can be called pscudonymous, namely, the Second Epistle of Peter. Dr. Jülicher thinks many of the mistakes of both the Lower and the Higher Criticism are due to faultiness of exegesis, which, he says, "is still very common in spite of the abundance of good commen

taries."