SUMMARY OF THE REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES.

In our last issue there was not room to notice the September number of the Contemporary Review. We revert to it now for the sake of its most valuable article, which is Professor James Orr's discussion of Dr. Fairbairn's important book, The Philosophy of the Christian Religion. The conjunction of the names of Fairbairn and Orr would lend distinction and insure value to any article. The Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, may be reckoned as the ablest Nonconformist theologian now alive in England. The book referred to is in some sense a sequel to and completion of Principal Fairbairn's previous work, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology. Foremost in The Philosophy of the Christian Religion is the question, What precisely is Christianity? What distinctively constitutes its essence? And that is one of the intense questions of to-day. This question lent special interest to Dr. Harnack's argument in his strong Rectoral Address against the proposition to abolish the separate Faculty of Christian Theology in German Universities and to merge it in a faculty of the general science and history of all religions. Harnack strenuously contends for the continuance of a Faculty of Christian Theology partly because of the unique place held by the Bible in religion, partly because of the unbroken duration of the history of the Old and New Testament religion for a period of over three thousand years, and partly because of the fact that Christianity can be studied to-day as a living religion in full vigor. (Speaking of the preeminence of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Harnack asks, "What signifies Homer, what the Vedas, what the Koran, alongside of the Bible?") But the Berlin Professor's main reason for insisting that Christian theology be separately taught by a special Faculty is that "Christianity is not one religion along with others, but is the religion." And he adds:

It is the religion, because Jesus Christ is not a Master along with others, but the Master, and because His Gospel answers to the inborn capacity of man as history discovers it. I have argued above that it is the Bible that is the center of all the studies of the theological Faculties. More correctly, I must say this center is Jesus Christ. What the first disciples received from Him goes far beyond the particular words and the preaching they heard from Him; and therefore what they have said about Him, and their mode of apprehending Him, exceeds His own selfwitness. It could not be otherwise: these disciples were conscious that they possessed in Christ not only a Teacher, . . . they knew themselves as redeemed, new men, redeemed through Him.

Harnack's contention in brief is that Christianity is the one absolute religion, and as such has a supreme preeminence which lifts it above any dependence on the study of other religions. In agreement with

this claim, the independence, self-sufficiency, and transcendent preeminence of Christianity are also set forth with convincing cogency by Dr. Fairbairn, who shows that in the Religion of the Incarnation is the key to all religion and to all history; and that Christianity is not derived from other religions but is a separate divine creation, comprehending in itself the purest ideals of lower and lesser religions and carrying those ideals to their perfection in the Religion of Christ, which alone is fitted to be the really universal religion. Fairbairn shows that "the Son of God holds in His pierced hands the keys of all religions, explains all the factors of their being, and all the persons through whom they have been realized," and that the Incarnation "is the very truth which turns nature and man, and history and religion, into the luminous dwelling place of God." And he conceives of the Incarnation as essentially the same divine mystery which the Church has always believed in, the actual entrance of the Eternal Son of God into humanity and time. Recognizing that in all religion there comes to light an elementary and fundamental relation and craving without which man would not be man, Christianity is the only religion in which this universal human need and craving can find perfect satisfaction. Religion has for its correlative God, and the Perfect Religion reveals and establishes the perfect relation between humanity and God. Dr. Fairbairn subjects Christianity to the test of rational examination, and applies to Faith the criticism of Reason, insisting upon the necessity of intellectual interpretation and doctrinal formulations in Christianity, and holding the philosophy of Christianity to be the most convincing Christian apologetic. Professor Orr thinks it refreshing, in these days of the apotheosis of nebulosity in religion, to find such a great leader of thought as Fairbairn writing thus:

It does not lie in the power of any man or any society to keep the mysteries of the faith out of the hands of reason. The only condition on which reason could have nothing to do with religion would be that it should have nothing to do with truth. Here,

at least, it may be honestly said that there is no desire to build Faith upon the negation of Reason; where both are sons of God it were sin to seek to make the one legitimate at the expense of the other's legitimacy.

Clear and sweet as the Galilean vision may be, it would, apart from the severer speculation which translated it from a history into a creed, have faded from human memory like a dream which delighted the light slumbers of the morning, though only to be so dissolved before the strenuous will of the day as to be impossible of recall. . . . It is a wholesome thing to remember that the men who elaborated our theologies were at least as rational as their critics, and that we owe it to historical truth to look at their beliefs with their eyes. . . . They (the ecumenical formula) may have in many respects done violence to both speculation and logic; but one thing we must confess: if the idea they tried to express as to Christ's Person had not been formulated centuries since, we should have been forced to invent it, or something like it, in order that we might have some reasonable hypothesis explanatory of the course things have taken (cf. pp. 4, 13, 17, 18, 19).

One of the fundamental philosophic problems with which Principal Fairbairn deals is the question as to the relation in which a Supernatural Personality, such as Christ is assumed to be, stands to the philosophy of nature. It is the question that presses on many minds -Is not such a conception as the Incarnation ruled out of court by its radical incompatibility with the scientific doctrine of nature? Dr. Fairbairn meets this by showing, with much wealth of illustration, that natural and supernatural are not opposed ideas-that nature can only be construed in terms of reason, and through relation to a Supreme Personal Intelligence-that it is, therefore, only rationally conceived, when viewed as "standing in and through the supernatural" (p. 56). It is the idealistic argument, by this time tolerably familiar, which Dr. Rashdall also develops in his Essay on Theism in Contentio Veritatis, that "there is such a correspondence between the mind and the universe, between the intelligible we think and the intellect we think by, that their relation can only be explained by identity of source, that is, by both being expressions of a single Supreme Intelligence" (p. 37). With such a postulate, the result of the examination of Darwinism in the succeeding sections, both on the "regressive" and the "aggressive" methods, is already anticipated. Personality is at the end because Personality is at the beginning: "matter cannot be defined save in terms that imply mind" (p. 49). The conclusion thus reached that nature must be conceived through the supernatural is confirmed by the study of man's ethical nature. With Butler and Kant it is established that an ethical man means an ethical universe; and as from evolution was deduced the reasonableness of the appearance of "creative persons" in history (p. 59), so from the fact that the ethical ideal is only real as it is personalized there is inferred the possibility, and the consonance with man's nature and God's method of working, of a perfect Personality as the vehicle of highest good to the race. And when we find the ideal of the Perfect Man realized in Jesus Christ we must conceive Him as supernatural. The person of Christ is a stupendous miracle, indeed, in the proper sense, the sole miracle of time. And the very sinlessness of Christ, argues Fairbairn, implies miracle in His origin. When he reaches the point where he begins to construct his argument for the transcendence of the Personality of Christ, Dr. Fairbairn enters, says Professor Orr, upon

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.

Professor Orr and Principal Fairbairn are stout and able defenders of such eternal truths as that Christianity is bound up essentially with the divine transcendence of the personality of Christ; that the Incarnation is a Fact, Jesus Christ a truly Divine Person-the Eternal Son of God, manifest in the flesh; that the Gospels, the apostolic Faith, and the history of mankind admit of no lower interpretation; that all history is a verification of the supernatural claims of Christ and of the interpretation given of Him by His apostles; that it is none other than the Divine Christ who has so powerfully entered into human history and been believed, loved, and obeyed as the Saviour of the world; that faith in the Divine Christ works in a miraculous way, making even true men truer when they receive it and building up the world in the love of truth and right; in a word, that Christ is Lord, the Incarnate, the Living, the Exalted Redeemer and Saviour, the Head of all things for His Church and for the world.

In notice of recent books The Contemporary characterizes Professor William James's Gifford Lectures as a "brilliant and fascinating discussion of the psychology of religious feelings, which is not a work of Christian apologetics, though in effect a powerful argument for the reality of the spiritual world. Though Professor James classes himself as a Christian, its value for Christians lies mostly in his reliance on the deep religious instincts of mankind and his absolute and scornful rejection of materialism.

IN a recent issue of the Westminster Review, Francis Grierson, writing of "The Blunders of Matthew Arnold," says that Arnold is the hardest and most flinty of all critics; that he emits sparks but no flame; and that his prose and poetry lack warmth and passion. His judgments are often both harsh and unintelligent.

In speaking of the love letters of Keats he blunders into a brutal criticism of a mere boy for the offense of writing passionate love letters! And again in his remarks on Shelley, he makes the astounding assertion that this poet has no influence on serious minds, and this in spite of the immense influence exerted by Shelley in his two greatest poems! In summing up the work and personality of Heine our critic spoils a fine study of the German poet by turning Philistine at the close through fear, no doubt, of being thought too liberal. Some of his judgments are not only provincial but parochial. No censure is too severe for a critic who places Georges Sand above Lamartine. But Arnold was no seer.

Mr. Grierson's charges against Arnold have four specifications-that he was not a man of the world, that he was no psychologist, that he never knew the meaning of passion, and that he could not reason from cause to effect. Writing of the superficiality and hardness of Arnold's views, the essayist says:

What some critics lack is a long period of physical suffering; what others ought to have is a long period of personal sorrow, to bring them down from that high stool of arch-respectability which is so easy to mount and so difficult to kick from under. For when they are on that stool they sit like Patience smiling with complacent superiority, not at their own grief, but at that of the whole world. A man who has never experienced the discipline of great and prolonged trials is bound to take a hasty and superficial view of life and personality. Arnold himself was ushered in on that tide of Philistinism which arrived on these shores at the passing of the romance spirit in poetry and literature. The great ones were gone there was no Byron or Shelley; there was nothing to do but to sink back in the easy-chair of platitude and introspection, and become so eminently respectable as to be imminently reactive. There were no more social upheavals, no more poetic battles to fight and win, nothing was left but the plain hemming and stitching of the the poetic patterns left by the immortal fashioners of world-ideals. Sometimes the poetic remnant was not only stitched but embroidered, for Tennyson represented one side of the poetic reaction as Matthew Arnold represented the other. People had ceased to travel and think for themselves. They sat still, like Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Arnold, in one place. It became the fashion to stay at home, live in the lap of abundance, take life easy, and weave a web of poetry to suit a plain people living in a plain age. The labor-saving, machine-made thought of the time made a nonchalant pessimist of Tennyson and purblind preacher of Arnold. And there is no escape from the fact that some of Matthew Arnold's criticisms frightened young writers and critics into a shamefaced, halfhearted, hypocritical, hang-dog attitude. Dickens, when he passed away in 1870, left a void in the world of spontaneity and sentiment. But Arnold lived and wrote for many years after the death of the great novelist; and while people were still reading Dickens no one read him for a criticism of life. Now, every young writer was compelled to read Matthew Arnold for his criticism of life. Dickens depicted character as he saw it; Arnold called up some of the brightest and best intellects of the world, and judged them without fear, favor, or common sense. He read them a verdict in the language of the hangman. And Englishmen, who boast of their moral courage and independence, were made to sit in a corner like so many schoolboys, fearing to look up or to claim their souls as their own. It is no wonder that for a period of about twenty years criticism in England was a flinty and soulless thing.

Of Arnold's defects Mr. Grierson further says:

Universality made Shakespeare; imagination and style made Milton; passion and imagination Shelley; beauty and passion Keats; passion and romance Byron; passion and humanity Burns. Matthew Arnold, as a poet, has plenty of brain and muscle, but "the blood is the life;" and his poetry lacks the crimson element. Early in youth he was taught to