BOOK NOTICES. RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE. The Representative Men of the Bible. By GEORGE MATHESON, D.D., LL.D. 12mo, pp. 369. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son. Price, cloth, $1.75. The eloquent blind minister of St. Bernard's Parish, Edinburgh, has been called "the Schleiermacher of contemporary theological thought." Queen Victoria after hearing him preach said: "Your life has been a sorely tried but a very beautiful one." A singularly spiritualized nature illustrates in Dr. Matheson's writings that the pure in heart see God. Another fact is illustrated in the marvelous intuitions of this blind man, namely, that the loss of physical sight enhances the power of seeing the invisible. But for Milton's sightless eyes he had not seen the wondrous visions of "Paradise Lost." Here is the advantage of disadvantages, so often seen and experienced in life, the power of difficulty and adversity to bring human nature to its strongest and noblest. Reproductions of Bible portraits we have had without end, but none like these in the volume before us. They are by the same spiritual artist who gave us the Portrait of Christ as seen in the four Evangelists, and that rare study of character, The Spiritual Development of St. Paul. Dr. Matheson's mind is of the present age, and views all things in full modern light. This makes ancient subjects bright as this morning's sunrise and fresh as its sparkling dew. Sixteen characters sit for their pictures in George Matheson's studio: "Adam the Child," "Abel the Undeveloped," "Enoch the Immortal," "Noah the Renewer,” “Abraham the Cosmopolitan," "Isaac the Domesticated," "Jacob the Aspiring," "Joseph the Optimist," "Moses the Practical," "Joshua the Prosaic," "Samuel the Seer," "David the Many-sided," "Solomon the Wise," "Elijah the Impulsive," "Elisha the Imitative," and "Job the Patient." All these are treated as typical, and the elements emphasized in them are those which are of no special time or place. Twenty pages of the Introduction, such as were never written before, tell us the how and the why of the author's method. Whoever reads this introduction will read the rest of the book. We are tempted to spread half of it on these pages. The Bible characters, the portraits of the Land of Judah, are the only gallery representative of man as man. Elsewhere we have portraits of man as Greek, as Roman, as philosopher, poet, soldier, or slave, but nowhere else man as man, the universal human nature. Only in the Bible mirror does humanity see itself full length and on all sides. The Bible is the only universal and eternal Book of Man. Dr. Matheson shows this by contrasting with the Bible the picture galleries of several heathen peoples. First he enters the Chinese Gallery, and finds an enormous collection of figures, representing a vast and venerable empire, but not representing humanity. They all show the empire maintaining one attitude, looking back. The stagnancy of the Chinese empire results from the direction of its aspiration, not from want of aspiration. It worships its ancestors. Its heart is in the past. Its eye dwells on the retrospect. A nation keeping its face toward the dead is more likely to go backward than forward. The men in China's gallery are distinctly Chinese and are all looking back. Their Canaan is behind, not on before. Next he enters the Gallery of India, and finds a different phase of Man, all the figures in a very different attitude. The Hindu faces gaze into space and meditate on vacancy. All the world around them is unreality. Time is an illusion. Past, present, future, they take no note of. All is mirage, and life to them is dreaming. Unpractical visionaries they are, presenting only one attitude of humanity, and that one of the weakest and absurdest. Next comes the Gallery of Greece. As the Chinaman looks back, and the Indiaman looks up into space, the Greek looks on a level. He aspires in everything to the middle course. He aims at qualities which hold an even balance between extremes. He prefers friendship to love; it is the middle term between the heat and the coldness of the heart. He shows one phase and attitude of Man. He does not include universals. Next is a look into the Roman Gallery. Geographically speaking, it is a universal gallery; Rome was mistress of the earth; physically the capital of the world, yet mentally and morally only one of the provinces -as provincial, in fact, as China, India, or Greece. She, too, presents only one attitude of Man. As the men in the Chinese gallery look back, and those in the Indian gallery look up, and those in the Greek gallery look on a level, the men in the Roman gallery look down, and not with what Goethe calls Man's reverence for the things beneath him. He keeps his eye on the ground. His education, training, discipline, are designed as a preparation for earthly tasks, burdens, and enterprises. He hardens his heart, cultivates coldness, lops from life the branches which luxuriate, cultivates Stoicism in the presence of calamity. Of the earth, earthy, are all its ambitions and cravings. All these galleries reveal only accidental features of Man. The Bible Portrait Gallery exhibits not the local, accidental, national, but the universal. Looking at its men, we forget that they were Jews; we forget their vicinity to Mount Zion and the Jordan and the Temple. We forget even their environment by Asia. We find that they have kept pace with Europe and America. Our shifting Western scenery has not made them an anachronism. They are abreast of our varieties. They are as modern as they are ancient. They reveal human nature not only in its eternal sameness, but in its eternal variations. Having said this and much more by way of introduction, Dr. Matheson leads us into the wonderful Bible Gallery of universal Man, and makes the figures in it speak straight to our own time with meanings we never caught before; a sort of seraph guide through the great gallery in which God blazons the eternal laws that condition character and life and destiny. Unique indeed is his ex position of "Adam the Child." Take this: "Adam begins the world with capital. He is the first of his race, yet there is in him a long stream of heredity. Nay, there are two long streams of heredity. The child Adam comes into this world with two worlds already in his breast. He enters life with a double bias-a bias from earth and a bias from heaven. Two elements are in him-not necessarily diverse, but different and capable of conflict-the dust of the ground and the breath of the Father. He does not get his character from the Garden; he gives his character to the Garden. He clothes the ground of Eden in his own attributes—dust and divinity. He looks at the trees and says, "They are good for food, and they are pleasant to the eyes.' There spoke both sides of his heredity-his parentage from the earth and his parentage from the breath of God. The one was the cry of the outer man; the other was a voice of the spirit. The one welcomed the Garden as a means of sustenance; the other hailed it as a source of beauty. The one claimed bread, the support of the physical life; the other expressed its conviction that Man could not live by bread alone. 'Good for food,' 'pleasant to the eyes' -it was the marriage in one mind, in a child's mind, of the lower and the higher. It was the wedding of the Philistine and the Greek, the union of prose and poetry, the bridal morn of two instincts which few nations have united-the pursuit of utilitarian ends and the repose in æsthetic pleasures. . . . The love of beauty is above the dust. Wherever it is found it is the breath of the Father. It is found in the infant. Pass a shining object before the eye of infancy, and the little hand will reach out to grasp it. On the very threshold of human existence there is a gate called Beautiful side by side with a gate unadorned. The unadorned and the beautiful open both together. The one leads to the plain, the other to the mountain. Seen from each, the Tree of Life looks different. From the plain of life I see its fruits; from the mountain I behold its blossoms. The one gives a view of uses, the other a sight of what merchants cannot buy. Young Adam ever beholds both." And then Dr. Matheson follows the development of Adam on from the sense of hunger, and the sense of beauty, to the desire for possession, the craving to appropriate and own the tree and its fruit, and then the sense of sin, and then the sense of fear, and so on to the finale of the tragedy of "Adam the Child." A feature of this book is that each chapter closes with a brief prayer, giving a semidevotional tone. This one, coming after the study of "Joseph the Optimist," will do as a sample: "Lord, teach me the benefit of life's seeming arrests! Often have I felt the grief of Joseph. Often have the bright dreams of youth appeared to fade, and the shadows of the prison-house to close around the growing man. I have cried in my bitterness, "The promise of the morning is broken; I shall never find the treasure for which I have sought so long.' And lo, I have found it in the prison-house, in the dungeon, in a panel of the locked door! I had sought it vainly in all likely places-in the fields, in the woods, in the homes of the rich and mighty; and it has come to me in the one spot where its presence seemed impossible. Thou hast answered me as Thou answeredst Job out of the whirlwind.' I had been looking to all calm places for an answer. I had looked to the gentle dawn; I had gazed on the roseate morning; I had stood in the pensive twilight; I had communed with the still and starry night; I had listened upon my bed when the pulse of life beat low. From none of these did my answer come. Then the whirlwind swept by, and I said, "There will be Divine silence now; I cannot hope for Thy voice any more!' And behold, it was from the whirlwind that Thy voice came! What earth's silence could not give, what earth's zephyrs could not give, was given by the storm. Let me never again fear the shut gate; let me nevermore dread the interrupted journey! Teach me that my Calvary may be my crown! Tell me that my Patmos may be my promotion! Show me that my Damascus darkness may be my dazzling daylight! Reveal to me that there may be progress through life's pauses, voices in life's valley, symmetry in life's sighs, music in life's maladies, beauty in life's burdens, work in life's wilderness! Then shall I know why the great Portrait of Joseph has been placed in God's Bible gallery of deathless souls." And one other prayer we are tempted to quote the one after the study of Joshua: "Lord, there are times when I get work to do whose good I cannot see. Sometimes before the walls of Jericho there is put into my hand a trumpet when I think it should be a sword. Sometimes I am sent a long circuitous march when I expect to be retained for the assault. These moments are very hard for me. It is not the work that is hard; it is the want of vision. It is easy enough to blow the trumpets; it is a light thing to walk around the city. The hard thing is to see the good of it, to believe that I am not shunted from the race. Help me at such moments, O Lord, to say, 'One step enough for me!' When the distant scene is denied me, when the gloom encircles me, when the things of to-morrow are veiled from me, help me to say, 'One step enough for me!' When the voice of Moses is heard no more on the hill, when the song of Miriam has been drowned by the roaring wind, when the fire of the bush has been hid, help me to say, 'One step enough for me!' Let the one step be the ordered step, the commanded step. Let me not ask how the sound of my trumpet can aid the fall of Jericho. Let me not ask why I am to go round about when there is a short and easy way. If I am not to be Moses, let me be Joshua; if I am not to see the whole, let me see nothing-let me leave all to Thee! I would have no half-vision, O my Father, for half-vision is a misleading thing. Either let me see the promised land with Moses, or with Joshua let me be led blindfold by Thee! When I see not the Promised Land, let me feel the Promised Hand! When I behold not thine Ararat, let me touch thine Arm! When I view not thy Glory, let me have thy Guidance! When there is no dove from heaven, let there be a duty of the hour! When I have lost sight of thy coming, let me strain the ear for thy command! I shall not weep the want of a wing if only I can say, 'One step enough for me!'" The Keys of the Kingdom. By R. J. CAMPBELL, M.A. 12mo, pp. 121. New York and Chicago: Fleming H. Revell Company. Price, cloth, 50 cents. The son of a minister of the Free Methodist Church stands in Joseph Parker's place as pastor of the City Temple, London. He is thirty-seven years old, and was selected after the English-speaking world had been searched to find a competent successor to the striking and powerful preacher of the City Temple. Reginald J. Campbell is an Oxford University man, who has made his reputation as a remarkable preacher in a Brighton pulpit. Less sensational, egoistic, and dogmatic than Dr. Parker, he is yet magnetic, and masters men by sterling qualities of mind and manhood. It is generally believed that he is fully equal to the difficult place he is called to fill. He has the elements that wear and grow. He comes to America this summer, and is to be at Northfield at the Students' Conference in late June and early July. The seven discourses in the little volume before us enable us to judge of the matter, method, and manner of his sermonizing. Perhaps the thing we notice most is the absence of all meretriciousness or ambition for display, and the straightforward sincerity and earnestness which reaches for, and reaches, men. The passion for helping men beats in every utterance, the passion of one who rises to the light and the work of each new day in the spirit of the words, The sun comes over the mountain's rim, The first of these sermons is from Christ's words to Peter, "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven." Passing by the various ecclesiastical interpretations of the meaning of this passage, the preacher goes to the spiritual meaning, taking the verse as a true statement of Peter's own spiritual experience as it had been and was to be a statement descriptive also of our own experience. To show what he means, Mr. Campbell says: "I went in company with some one else to see Mrs. Spurgeon's Home of Rest at East Brighton, and in giving you a description of what I saw there I will give it as through the mind of a little child. The little one was surprised as we entered into the hall. She had no idea the entrance was so grand. The house did not look like anything great outside. When we got into the vestibule we saw that it was spacious, lofty, and beautiful. To some people that would have been a house by itself. However, we were not permitted to stay in the entrance hall. We were shown into another room on the ground floor, and, though we had not forgotten the hall, in a few moments our interest was centered in the new room. From its windows we could see a certain part of the landscape and part of the sea. But |