ness as the Test, Moral Progress, Faith and Hope, Humility, and Charity. The fourth section, headed "Practical Ethics," discusses the Results of Charity, Judging, and the Power of the Christian Ideal. The fifth and last section, entitled "The Mystery of Evil," gives most of its space to defining and defending Christian Optimism. After this follows an index of the subjects treated, the authors quoted, and the Scripture passages involved in the discussion. Christian ethics holds, as is noted in the closing section, that moral evil originates with man : "It is more than ignorance-more than a mere lack of knowledge or insight and it does not, as many of the Greek philosophers maintained, arise from the soul's contact with the body, as if matter were, in its very nature, impure, and connection with it a disaster; which was Plato's view in the Timaus, and the common view of his successors, the Neo-Platonists. Indeed, so far did Plotinus carry his contempt for the body that he refused to have his picture taken lest there should be handed down to posterity the semblance of that which he so much despised. He also refused to speak of his birthplace or of his birth; regarding his sojourn in the body, with all its accompaniments, as a necessity to be deplored-a kind of disgrace, a curse, something to be ashamed of. Strict asceticism was the logical consequence of this doctrine; and he practiced it. Browning's view in his "Rabbi Ben Ezra," is much juster:

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul."

The conclusion of the author's discussion is that "Chastened optimism is the reasonable and healthy attitude of the soul; while pessimism is essentially morbid, diseased, unhealthy-a nightmare, begotten of melancholy and fear. To the pessimist, Christianity says, 'Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun' (Eccles. xi, 7): 'If any man is in Christ he is a new creature; the old things are passed away; behold, they are become new' (2 Cor. v, 17): 'For, ye received not the spirit of bondage again unto fear; but ye received the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father' (Rom. viii, 15); and then, going farther, it lifts the veil and discloses the final glory-the glory of God's accomplished end and purpose-in the vision of 'the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband' (Rev. xxi, 2). It is the vision of victory completed, when all things are 'made new’— of righteousness triumphant, and its dominion supreme; for, 'The

nations shall walk amid the light thereof; and the kings of the earth do bring their glory into it' (Rev. xxi, 24).”

The Christology of Jesus. Being his Teaching concerning Himself, according to the Synoptic Gospels. By the Rev. JAMES STALKER, M.A., D.D. 12mo, pp. 298. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son. Price, cloth, $1.50.

...

The investigation of the story of Jesus is never finished. Dr. Stalker well writes that the present century has witnessed "the most intense study" of the details of our Lord's earthly life. "Archæology, the exploration of Palestine, the history of the century in which he was born, and many other subsidiary sciences," he declares, "have been pressed into the service; and the Son of man has been made to walk forth in breathing reality before the eyes of men, who have eagerly followed every step of his course from the manger to the cross. But under this close inspection of the records his words could not fail to attract attention. At last the press begins to teem with this new burden; and in the next fifty years the books on the teaching of Jesus will probably be as numerous as in the last fifty have been those on his life." The importance of the Saviour's words Dr. Stalker finds to be lodged in thcmselves, in their contrast with the apostolic writings, and in their relation to dogma; and their external characteristics he discovers to be pregnancy and imaginativeness. "No other words ever uttered possess in the same degree the power of self-authentication. As a painter of the highest genius, like Raphael or Rubens, has a style of his own by which his work may be recognized, so the words of Jesus are full of peculiarities by which they can be identified." Confining his study to Christ's words as given in the synoptic gospels, Dr. Stalker traces, in successive chapters entitled "The Son of Man," "The Son of God," "The Messiah," "The Redeemer," and "The Judge,” the origin and meaning of these designations as applied by Jesus to himself. The treatment is thus as simple as it is valuable. Seeking in every instance to learn the meaning of these separate appellations, the author has given such a long personal study to the phrases and has availed himself of the judgments of so many critical scholars that his resultant volume is rich in suggestion and authoritative in teaching. Without apparently aiming at profound scholarship, he has embodied his discussion in such altogether intelligible language that the ordinary reader will find satisfaction in the volume. It is Christian, Dr. Stalker writes in his closing chapter, to pray to the Son of God. "Even the heathen identified the early Christians by this mark, that they met to sing hymns to Jesus as God; and, in every century since, Christians have been the more distinguished by the same practice the more they have been Christian. Everyone remembers how the heart of Samuel Rutherford pours itself out to the 'sweet Lord Jesus;' but a cavalier like Jeremy Taylor prays directly to Christ with not a whit more of reserve. The finest hymns of Christendom are nothing but prayers to Christ clothed in the forms of poetry; and, in

these, every day, tens of thousands confide the secrets of their hearts to what they believe to be a comprehending and sympathetic ear. Does he hear these prayers? Does he know his worshipers? Is he acquainted with the griefs they lay before him, and with the raptures occasioned by his love? The very existence of Christianity depends on the answer given to this question; and nowhere is it answered more convincingly than in those sayings in which, by calling himself the Judge of men, Jesus claims to have a perfect acquaintance with the secrets of every human heart." Valuable appendices to the volume are entitled "Wendt's Untranslated Volume on the Teaching of Christ" and "The Book of Enoch." Dr. Stalker tells us in his Preface that for more than twenty years the teaching of Christ has been his favorite study. The invitation of the trustees of the Cunningham Lectures to him was the immediate occasion for his giving the partial results of these long meditations to the Christian world, and in the possession of these mature deliberations the Church may well be glad.

The Message of Christ to Manhood. 12mo, pp. 209. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, cloth, $1.25.

These are the William Belden Noble Lectures for 1898. They are as follows: "The Message of Christ to the Individual Man," by Professor A. V. G. Allen, of the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Mass.; "The Message of Christ to Human Society," by Professor Francis G. Peabody, of Harvard University; "The Message of Christ to the Will," by Dr. T. T. Munger, of New Haven, Conn.; "The Message of Christ to the Scholar," by President Hyde, of Bowdoin College; "The Message of Christ to the Inner Life," by Dr. Henry Van Dyke, of New York; and "The Message of Christ to the Family," by Bishop H. C. Potter, of New York. William Belden Noble, in whose memory the lectureship has been founded by his wife, was a young man of wealth and of beautiful character, who graduated at Harvard in 1885, and who died a few years after. The strongest religious influence that inspired his life was Phillips Brooks, and to help fill the world with the spirit of Christ as manifest in Phillips Brooks was his supreme desire. For years he struggled against failing health. Facing in his own experience the problem of human suffering and how to reconcile it with the divine goodness and love, he only clung more closely to God. His prayers for deliverance and for power to endure always culminated and rested in one petition, "Make me conscious of thy presence." His one simple rule of obedience and faith was, "Do the best you know how, and leave results with God." The last year of his life was spent on a ranch in the distant West, in a valley surrounded by snow-peaks. The last words of his last letter to his wife were, "I live in the ever-present consciousness of my God, so near, so loving, so great." Soon after, the end came to him suddenly, out-of-doors, beside a clear, sparkling stream. The first of these lectures is a study and portraiture of Christlikeness as seen in Phillips Brooks

and William Belden Noble. Amid much that is quotable in this volume, the closing words of Dr. Munger's lectures tempt us irresistibly: "We have dwelt long enough on the maxim that occasions call out powers. It is but a half truth. It is powers that make occasions. The trained will creates a field for action wherever it is. Put conscience behind it, and the field is defined. Add a strong sense of humanity, and you have a man who cannot be held back from attacking any evil thing, nor from doing any good thing within his horizon. This is the need to-day in public life-not any vivid picturing of the evils; we know them well enough. The need is of hardened and tempered wills that can die but will not yield; wills so intervoven with conscience, and so tender with humanity, that the man is restless unless he is putting himself against the evils he sees, and with the good he craves. It is a splendid thing— this central faculty trained to its full, buttressed by intelligence, inspired by those angel qualities that are feet and wings to its purpose— conscience, love, humility-ready for any task that humanity lays before it; a will that can stand and stay with majority or minority, it matters not which, if it is on the side of right; but standing and never yielding. This is the victory that overcomes the world and saves the world-that makes the man and saves the man." The lectures of President Hyde and Dr. Van Dyke are fullest of quoted poetry; the latter speaks with a tongue of fire and burns with soul-kindling power.

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND GENERAL LITERATURE.

A Century of Science, and Other Essays. By JOHN FISKE. Crown 8vo, pp. 477. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Price, cloth, gilt top, $2.

There is no more remarkably fertile and, considering his subjects, surprisingly popular authorship in America to-day than that of Professor Fiske. The list of his works runs up to twenty-four volumes and is constantly growing. Whether it is as historian or as essayist that he most excels, his large public is puzzled to decide, for in both it enjoys a style which is scholarly without being pedantic and a genius for perspective and for orderly arrangement of facts which is truly artistic. The paper from which this volume takes its title reviews the most important scientific discoveries of the century and aims to bring out their broad psychological effect in all departments, and to show where we stand in the light thereof. Besides the title-essay there are thirteen others on a variety of subjects, four of them biographical on Sir Harry Vane, Francis Parkman, Edward Augustus Freeman, and Edward Livingston Youmans; two on "The Doctrine of Evolution " and "The Part Played by Infancy in the Evolution of Man; two " on Cambridge as Village and City" and "A Harvest of Irish Folk-Lore." The essay entitled Guessing at Half and Multiplying by Two" is a severe scoring of Joseph Cook for his methods as a champion of orthodoxy against science and scientific

men in his Monday Lectures, methods which provoked Asa Gray, one of the world's greatest naturalists, and soundly orthodox, to declare at once in print that such championship is something of which orthodoxy has no reason to feel proud. Professor Fiske says that the average notion of the doctrine of evolution possessed by Mr. Cook's audiences would no doubt seem to Darwin or Spencer something quite fearful and wonderful; and that Mr. Cook, playing with those crude notions, puts together a series of numbered propositions which remind us of "those interminable auction catalogues of Walt Whitman, which some of our British cousins, more ardent than discriminating, mistake for a truly American species of inspired verse." In Joseph Cook's lectures the author finds "little else but misrepresentations of facts, misconceptions of principles, and floods of tawdry rhetoric." The essay on "Origin of Liberal Thought in America" begins by noting the awakening effect of the discovery of America on the European mind: "The sudden and unprecedented widening of the environment soon set up a general fermentation of ideas. There was nothing accidental in Martin Luther's coming in the next generation after Columbus. Nor was it strange that in the following age the English mind, wrought to its highest tension under the combined influences of Renaissance, Reformation, and maritime adventure, should have put forth a literature the boldest and grandest that had ever appeared; that the era of Raleigh and Frobisher and the early Puritans should have seen even the highest mark of Greek achievement surpassed by Shakespeare. The gigantic revolution set on foot by Copernicus was already in full progress, the era of Descartes was just arriving, and the next century was to see modern scientific method receive its supreme illustration at the hands of Newton, while the principles of freedom in thought and speech were to find invincible champions in Milton and Locke." But in Spain the new spirit was repressed by "an ecclesiastical organization that had been growing in power since the Visigothic times. The higher intellectual life of Spain perished in the fires of the Inquisition; no Spanish Locke or Newton rose; and so lately as 1771 the University of Salamanca prohibited the teaching of the law of gravitation as discordant with revealed religion." From the British islands and the Netherlands there came to America the kind of public policy that allowed freedom of thought and research to take deep root and send up a thrifty and many-branched tree of liberty; while Roger Williams and William Penn laid down the principles of genuine toleration in the century which saw the beginnings of an English-speaking America. It seems that "by the constitutions of Pennsylvania and Tennessee no man can hold office unless he believes in God and a future state of rewards and punishments; in Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, the two Carolinas, and Maryland belief in God is required; and in Arkansas and Maryland a man who does not believe in God and a future state of retribution is deemed incompetent as a witness or juror." Of one gigantic personality the author writes: "Few figures in history