the priority of this or that intellectual conception, and the difficulty of the reading. Passing these lightly by, he proceeds to the consideration of certain "directives" or "norms" applied by critics in more recent times; and it is in the discussion of these that the value of his book lies. The first of these pertains to the emphasis on style as a means of determining the authorship of a text or a document. König regards this criterion as exceedingly precarious, since style is so largely a subtle quality which is incapable of being estimated. This judgment will probably be accepted by the majority of students of the Bible in a general way; though each critic who uses arguments drawn from style thinks that it is not his own subjective feeling that determines his judgment, but plain objective facts. Another norm much applied of late is the metrical and strophic construction of certain parts of the Old Testament. König does not believe that the rhythm of ancient Hebrew poetry is not so much based on the sound as it is upon the sense of the passage, and that when the sense is rhythmic the rhythm of sound might be ignored. Very certain it is that the effort to complete the rhythm of sound leads to many grotesque attempts to emend the text. But these principles of criticism pertain to the form of literature; so, passing to its subjectmatter, König finds fault with what he calls the comparing (not comparative) method, according to which the history of each nation is supposed to conform to a general type and any variation from it is regarded as of doubtful reality. König finds serious difficulties in another critical procedure, namely, that of personification according to which facts which are true only of tribes are attributed to an individual. It is well known that by this method the patriarchs generally are declared to be unhistorical characters. Finally, König objects to the critical procedure which reduces so much of the Old Testament to myth or legend. He claims that it is one of the most prominent characteristics of the Israelitish religion that it claims to rest upon objective facts. And in opposition to those who say that the objective facts upon which the Israelitish religion rests are the works of Moses, not of Abraham, Isaac, or even of Jacob, König affirms that the Israelites did recognize a pre-Mosaic period in their religious history. The book is certainly interesting, and illustrates the fact that the strength of the argument is by no means all on one side in the contest between the radicals and the conservatives in biblical criticism.

RELIGIOUS AND EDUCATIONAL.

The Evangelical Sunday School Convention. To Americans the condition of the Sunday school in Germany is almost unaccountable. In fact, there are large numbers of the most thoughtful Germans who almost hate the name Sunday school and all that it signifies; while they believe in what they call the Kindergottesdienst, that is, the religious service planned and conducted for

the benefit of children. Nevertheless the Sunday school is making progress in Germany, as the recent convention at Düsseldorf shows. According to the reports, there were in February, 1898, 1,647 schools in which the group (class) system was maintained, with 385,467 children, of whom 154,146 were boys and 231,321 were girls, with 18,279 male and female teachers. Besides these there were 4,261 schools not divided into classes, attended by 335,845 children. The growth was especially marked in the Rhine provinces, where in 1873 there were only 81 schools, with 370 teachers and 7,661 children, while in 1898 there were 435 schools, with 67,719 children. An indication of the lack of interest in the Sunday school in Germany will be discovered in the fact that in 1902 the latest statistics were those of 1898.

Aggressive Ethical Culture in Berne. The devotees of ethical culture in Berne, headed by Professor Netter, some time ago made a demand for the use of the cathedral or minster for their meetings. That this created much excitement goes without saying. The Church authorities refused the request, whereupon the appeal was made to the secular government, who refused them the use of the minster but granted them the use of the French church. The principle upon which the grant was made appears to be that churches are public buildings which should be available for all right purposes to all citizens. The ecclesiastical establishment now complains that the sects with their private chapels are better protected by the State than is the established Church.

The Circuit System in Lorraine. One effect of the German occupation of Alsace and Lorraine has been the spread of Protestantism in those provinces, especially of the latter, partly by immigration, partly by conversions. Still, the Protestants are very weak in many localities, and in order to enjoy religious services according to their own convictions they are obliged to have preachers who travel from place to place in circuits, traveling in summer on the bicycle, in winter by carriage. Religious instruction, being mostly in the hands of Roman Catholics, can be enjoyed by Protestant children in the public schools for the most part only by the employment of a teacher who goes from place to place, teaching mostly but four or five children in a school, one of these teachers having eighteen "appointments" with but one hundred children in all.

SUMMARY OF THE REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES.

THE Princeton Theological Review (Philadelphia) appears as the successor of the Presbyterian and Reformed Review, which is discontinued. An interesting study of Edward Irving by Meade C. Williams opens the first number. Irving was a brilliant genius but an impractical visionary, a good man with grievous infirmities. His London fame was suddenly made when Canning told the House of Commons that he had heard from a Scotch preacher in the Caledonian Chapel the most eloquent sermon he had ever listened to. Then the city flocked to hear the wonderful Scotchman who sprang at once from obscurity and despondency to the giddiest height of popularity. His phraseology was rich, flowing, and redundant. His manner is described by Carlyle as "an unconscious play-actorism." Peter Parley saw in him "a strange mixture of saintliness and dandyism." He was handsome in all physical features, except in being violently cross-eyed, like Whitefield, whom the godless wits of London nicknamed "Rev. Dr. Squintum." Irving became inflated with his popularity, filled with overweening self-conceit, which grew into presumption, arrogance, and a feeling of personal infallibility. He cultivated eccentricities as if they were cardinal Christian virtues, so that Carlyle wrote: "He has swallowed the intoxicating poison. To walk in quiet paths is now impossible to him. Henceforth singularity must succeed upon singularity." And later Carlyle lamented thus: "How are the mighty fallen! My own high Irving come to this by paltry popularities and cockney admirations puddling and muddling such a head!" Rejecting and resenting all friendly counsel, Irving passed on into fanaticism until all sane and sober hearers forsook him and he was left with "a coterie of charlatans and moonshiny mystics, visionary men and hysterical women," whose blasphemous absurdities made his chapel a bedlam and carried the mighty genius down into irretrievable wreck. His career ended in sad, woeful, heart-sickening failure, and stands as a warning forever. One of his deficiencies was that fatal lack concerning which John Brown, of Haddington, used to speak to his students: "If ye lack grace ye may get it by praying for it; if ye lack learning ye may get it by working for it; but if ye lack common sense I dinna ken where ye are to get it." Professor Swing, of Oberlin, in his volume on The Theology of Albrecht Ritschl charged Dr. James Orr, of Glasgow, with misleading the public as to the real nature of Ritschl's teaching, saying, "Professor Orr has done more than any other critic to discredit Ritschl. . . . His persistent attempts to explain away everything objectively real from the theology of Ritschl render him, in spite of his scholarly accomplishments, a misleading guide to the understanding of the Ritschlian theology." To this

charge Dr. Orr makes answer in the January number of the Princeton Theological Review, reiterating and reinforcing his assertion that the interpretations given to evangelical doctrines by the Ritschlian theology render that theology forever impossible for the purposes of the evangelical Churches; and declaring that Ritschl's statements are often tantalizingly obscure, frequently incoherent, and even when evangelical in sound are essentially something very different. Even Professor Swing admits that Ritschl's followers "have had less to say publicly in direct praise of his theology than they have in the way of modifying his individual statements." On the subject of our Lord's resurrection Professor Orr says, "It is difficult to catch Ritschl's own attitude; his whole position is extremely vague." And as to the Ritschlian school, while there is a positive wing, represented by Kaftan and Loofs and Häring, which does give unequivocal expression to its faith in the resurrection, yet the majority of Ritschlians either (1) reject the bodily resurrection (the physical miracle) while holding as "a thought of faith" that Christ still lives and rules; or (2) admit supernatural “appearances" of Christ to the disciples, though not a bodily rising; while (3) practically all hold that the historical question is unimportant to faith. Dr. Orr holds also that Ritschl weakens the idea of sin in its scriptural aspect by bringing it largely under the category of "ignorance" and by regarding it as "an apparently inevitable product of the human will under the given conditions of development." At one time Ritschl strongly expressed the doctrine of guilt as involving the necessity of punishment, but in his later writings he parts company with the whole idea of retributive punishment and the idea of justice connected therewith, and denies the existence of a punitive will in God. Even Mr. Garvie, Ritschl's friendly expounder, says: "If there is no wrath of God against sin there can be no punishment by God of sin. This conclusion Ritschl expressly draws." While Dorner says that "no clear, connected doctrine respecting punishment, God's punitive judgment, moral freedom, or guilt is to be found in Ritschl." Professor Orr charges Ritschl's theology with excessive subjectivity and contends (1) that Ritschl bases the knowledge of God, and with it the whole religious view, on purely subjective grounds; (2) that his theology is bound up with a theory of knowledge and of judgments of value which makes an unwarranted divorce between theoretic and religious knowledge, and imperils the objective character of the latter; (3) that even objective religious realities are held to be apprehended only in subjective relations, or as "mirrored in the subject;" and (4) that the modes of apprehension of these realities are not limited by the strictly objective state of the case, but are molded, heightened, colored by religious feeling and imagination, in the way that best suits subjective (religious) needs. Dr. Orr's article criticises the doctrine of “value-judgments" of which Ritschl makes so much, and also the Ritschlian view of the Person of Christ and of Redemption, about which he says:

The question is not so much as to what Ritschl taught as to the adequacy of his teaching. It is very well to speak of what Professor Swing calls the "Godhood" of Christ; but is this predicate satisfied by saying that Christ, as the perfect revelation of God in humanity, and as exercising spiritual supremacy over the world, has to us the "religious value” of God? The question recurs, Ought any being to have the religious value of God to us who is not personally and essentially God? The whole doctrine of a real incarnation is here involved. And Ritschl's system, it must be reaffirmed, has no such doctrine. Similarly it is not "misleading" to say that Ritschl's theology has no vicarious atonement, or provision for the expiation of guilt of any kind. Professor Swing himself affirms as much. The question is, Is such a theology satisfactory as an interpretation of the Gospel? There is nothing "misleading" in denying it, if possibly there is a danger of misleading in affirming it. Perhaps, however, enough has been advanced to show that Ritschl's theology is not all such smooth sailing as Professor Swing seems to imagine, and to enable the reader to judge of such a resounding sentence as the following: "These world-transforming views which inspired the teaching of Albrecht Ritschl, and which have been obscured by the wood, hay, and stubble of so many of Ritschl's critics, we are now, I trust, in a better condition to estimate for ourselves at something of their true worth for constructive theology."

IN its eightieth year, the Westminster Review (London) shows something less than its old-time keenness, force, and sparkle. The January issue contains more variety than interest. "The Skeleton at the Feast" is the increase of insanity in Great Britain, nearly twenty-five thousand fresh cases of lunacy having been admitted to asylums in 1901. "A Country without Strikes" is New Zealand, whose example is held up to other lands by Henry Demarest Lloyd in a small octavo volume. "Religion and Morality" is an unsatisfactory article by Alexander Mackendrick. Karl Blind has a rather meager paper on "The Germans in the United States." J. G. Alger writes of various things as they were in England in the Fifties. Spurgeon, when in the exuberance of youth, sometimes startled the proprieties. Once, when a guest at the house of a zealous teetotaler, he horrified his host by throwing down his knife and fork at dinner and declaring that he could not go on without beer; and shocked his host still more by lighting a cigar at the grate fire before rising from his knees at family prayer. Reading Phil. iv, 4, "Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice," Spurgeon remarked, "Some Christians seem to read this, 'Groan in the Lord alway: and again I say, Groan.'" A Methodist was once tried and fined in the Court of Petty Sessions for singing a hymn at a grave after the Church of England clergyman had concluded the burial service and gone away. In the Fifties Wesleyan ministers and the wealthy Methodist laymen were generally with the Conservatives in politics, and politically friendly to the Establishment. In those days novel-reading was discountenanced among the "middle class." Tupper in poetry