intellectual and moral capacities and instincts." Much stress is laid on the reflex benefits of prayer. Pride is humbled: "In the * presence of the Infinite we feel our insignificance." Dignity is conferred: "There can be no greater than to be allowed to hold personal intercourse with God." Sincerity is promoted: "The fallacies we plead at the bar of our own consciousness we dare not utter to God." Holiness is induced: "If the God we worship be the God of the Bible, we shall come from this impressed with such a reverence for his holiness that we must instinctively shrink from contact with its opposite." The other reflex benefits we can simply mention without giving even one of his pithy sentences, by many of which each thought is amplified until it becomes clear as crystal. "Moderation of desire,” “trust and courage," "peace and consolation," and "gratitude" are the other reflex benefits upon which the preacher, in true preacher fashion, expatiates. "Christ's authority for prayer,” "the method of prayer," the "authorship" and the "general scope" of the Lord's Prayer are the other subjects treated in the introductory chapter. The question as to forms of prayer and whether Christ intended that this prayer should be used as a fixed form is intelligently discussed. Against the view that Christ intended to give a fixed form Mr. Hall lays stress upon the two varying recensions of the prayer in Matthew and Luke, and the absence of clear indications of such an employment of it during the first two centuries. It may be of interest to note that in the "Teaching of the Apostles" just discovered and published by Bryennios, a prelate of the Greek Church, and accepted by Harnack, one of the ablest of German patristic scholars as a document from the first half of the second century, the repetition of this prayer three times a day is prescribed. Our impression is that if the document be as early as its editors believe, it is a product of the Montanistic movement. But we agree with Mr. Hall in thinking the prescription of a fixed form of prayer contrary to the Spirit of Christ.

Space fails us even to indicate the divisions and subdivisions of the body of the work. The section on "The Millennial Reign," however, calls for special remark by reason of the importance and difficulty of the subject and the unsatisfactory way in which it is treated. The author seems to be himself at a halt betwixt two opinions. He first sets forth his conviction of the

sufficiency of the means at present operative for bringing the world into subjection to Christ. We are greatly tempted to quote whole paragraphs of his eloquent language. Then he sets forth the pre-millenarian view with its pessimism, its perversion of prophecy and its maintenance of the necessity of the personal coming of Christ to the completion of the triumph of Christ's kingdom. He states the argument in favor of this theory, answers the objections that may be urged to it with as much particularity as if he were its avowed advocate, and concludes with some of the most brilliant paragraphs to be found in the volume in which the glories of the millennial state are portrayed, and in which it is made to appear a matter of minor importance— whether pre-milleniarianism or post-millenarianism he held, in comparison with the belief in the glorious coming of Christ, in which both parties are at one. To our mind the difference is a fundamental one. Pre-millenarianism is not a single detached doctrine, but it forms the basis of what we must regard as one of the most dangerous perversions of the whole system of Christian teaching.

The Life of Christ. By Dr. BERNHARD WEISS.

HOPE, M. A. Vol. I.*

Translated by J. W.

WE risk nothing in saying that in Weiss's "Life of Christ" we have the maturest fruit of German critical labors on the Gospels. For about twenty-five years the author has devoted himself with a rare amount of concentration to the critical study of the Gospels, and has given the results to the public in works of abiding value. He has "not avoided the most irksome labor as regards the details of the comparison of texts," and has "tested in all directions the methods of criticism, which are often so intricate," until he has forced his way to perfect clearness regarding the history and character of our evangelical tradition." The "Life of Christ," of which we have here the first of three volumes in English (the German work consists of only two volumes), he regards as the proper end of the critical researches and "the final test of the correctness of the results of criticism." The preparation of this work has, he declares, "hardly been work" to the author; "rather a gladsome fashioning of the matured fruit of long years

Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1883. New York: Scribner & Welford. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co.

of study; an expression, satisfying an internal want, of something of which the heart is full." Supposing the man who writes thus of his own book to be not a bundle of eccentricities, but one who thinks soberly" of himself, we should expect a work produced after such preparation and with such complete inner satis faction on the part of the author to be peculiarly rich. Dr. Weiss is a level-headed man, and his work will not disappoint any reasonable expectations we may have formed respecting it.

And, first of all, let us try to get at the author's standpoint. The following sentences will help us to this: "Religious faith, as regards certainty of itself, is and must remain independent of the results of historical investigation. But these results are not, on this account, by any means indifferent." He admits that the German people have lost interest in real evangelical preaching, owing to the widely diffused belief that the Gospel narratives have been proved to be unreliable and untrustworthy. "That onesided critical school in theology which claims for itself alone the glory of being scientific has, in recent times, asserted its ability to erect a genuine historical structure upon the ruins it has left behind; but the meagerness of the materials which remain can only be concealed by the gaudy tinseling of the fruits of historical studies, and by very dubious additions in the shape of private hypotheses; their conclusions also must necessarily be very different from the presuppositions on which the evangelical Church rests." 66 Christianity, as it exists as an historical fact, and is defended by the evangelical Church on the ground of its historical records, is not a sum of new religious or ethical ideas, but a belief in the religious significance of historical facts which, because God himself revealed by them salvation to the world, are in a position to awaken a new religious life, and to make it fruitful in the moral reformation of humanity." The author refuses to identify himself with any one of the critical schools, or to regard himself as a mediator between. "It will be easy," he writes, "to characterize my book as a production of the mediation school of theology, the very name of which, in the case of many both on the right and left, means condemnation." Such a characterization he declares to be "utterly misleading." "Between a supranaturalism which believes in the actuality of an objective divine revelation and of miracle in the proper sense, and the standpoint which regards both as inadmissible,

there can be as little historical mediation as between the conception of Christ as a mere man—although the greatest and most unattainable, who possessed clearer ideas of God and of divine things, and lived a new and typical religious life—and the Christ worshiped by the Christian Church from the beginning as her divine Mediator and Redeemer. In respect to this alternative there is no doubt as to my position, either in this book or the others." His scientific labors, he declares, have only confirmed him afresh in joyous assurance of the faith which he did not gain for them, and to which no one can attain by scientific demonstration. He hopes to prove "that honorable scientific endeavor can go hand in hand with orthodox faith." He never wearies of reiterating his conviction that the question as to how far the details in the tradition regarding the earthly life of Christ may or may not be credible, in no way affects religious belief in Christ's person and work. "The fundamental facts in Christ's Gospel can neither be contested nor established from the facts of the life of Jesus." Again, "Nowhere . . in the apostolic preaching is the assertion of Christ's divine existence based upon his miracles or on his miraculous birth, which is never even referred to, or on his miraculous acts, which are only employed to prove his divine commission and his preparation by the Spirit, or on his resurrection, which appears exclusively as proof of his Messiahship and of the significance for salvation of his death as a stage in the performance of his Messianic functions." Again, "The Christian faith would have remained just as it is, and lost no part of what is its deepest foundation, had it pleased God to leave us only the apostolic teaching as it lies before us in the epistles of the New Testament, and along with the Gospels to deprive us of all information from which we might have wrought out for ourselves a detailed picture of Jesus's earthly life." We understand Dr. Weiss's position to be that the preaching and the writings of the apostles presuppose the main facts of the life of Christ, and that if we believe the apostles to have been honest in their teachings and acts we need not be troubled about the details of the evan. gelical narratives. "Our concern," he writes, "is not with individual discrepancies in the representation which admit of being reconciled in one way or another, or with certain perfectly unimportant differences in the accounts of the sayings of Jesus or the details of the events, but with this, that these facts, however

industriously the attempt may be made to minimize them, irresistibly eliminate the old view of the origin of the Gospels; because the most insignificant of these facts, in respect of matter and form, stands in contradiction with any such direct inspiration, and because even after the suppositious solution of this kind of difficulty there always remains, as has been shown, phenomena enough plainly to exclude that idea."

The greater part of the volume is taken up with an elaborate discussion of the origin of the four Gospels and their mutual relations. He regards it as established beyond all doubt "that the first Gospel is dependent upon the second, and that the third is independent of the first. This he has tried to show in his earlier works by a detailed comparison of the synoptic Gospels. We have not space to follow him in this most interesting discussion. It is worthy of special mention that the historical character of John's Gospel is vindicated in the most complete manner from the doubts in which the Tübingen critics have sought to involve it. In fact, he goes to the opposite extreme of depreciating the synoptics in comparison. "In almost every place where actual differences between John and the synoptists fall to be dealt with the representation of the first has every historical probability in its favor; that in the most striking differences, such as the chronological extent of the public activity of Jesus, the repeated visits to the feasts, the early date of the last Supper, undesigned indications in the synoptic tradition itself establish the statements of John; that, finally, it is not seldom that through the adjustments and the peculiar contributions of our Gospel that events related by the older Gospels, and their connection with each other, first become intelligible to us." The long chapters on John's Gospel are among the most valuable in the volume. It is remarkable that with all of his radicalism in the treatment of the Gospels Weiss concludes, after minutely considering all that has been said against the historical character of the miraculous conception of Christ, that "historical reasons compel us to regard these narratives as historical."

Notwithstanding Weiss's free manner of dealing with the inspired books, we regard him as, on the whole, a most important defender of Christianity. By the freest critical methods he usually arrives at orthodox conclusions, and so far establishes his claim to be himself orthodox. Yet, if he is orthodox, he represents an