GLIMPSES OF REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES

As

THE editorship of the London Quarterly Review passes over from Professor W. T. Davison to Rev. John Telford, well known to our readers for some years as an occasional contributor to the Methodist Review. Last October's issue furnished an interesting list of articles on "Russia in Unrest," "The Fourth Gospel," "Christian Mysticism," "The Old Testament and Babylon," and "The Struggle of Christianity and Mithraism." attractive as they are different from each other are the two papers on "Some Christian Aspects of Evolution" and "Sir M. E. Grant Duff's Reminiscences." Of the idea of evolution in nature Principal P. T. Forsyth says: "To suppose that this idea entered through Darwin, or even Lamarck, is a youthful mistake. Evolution was a philosophic idea long before it was scientific, and it was far more comprehensive. It did not even dawn with Hegel (who has room for Darwin's greatness in a side pocket). It plays a mystic part in the Neoplatonic system of Alexandrian times. It was an intuition of speculative genius (like so much in Lucretius, for instance), before it was a biological theme." It is recognized that the idea of evolution in nature exerts a great imaginative fascination. "No small source of its influence is outside of its scientific utility as an hypothesis. Its popular spell is largely æsthetic; and it is due to the imposing features read into it by the imagination, which quietly elevates it from a physical hypothesis to be a scheme of the world. It seems to bring life from the dead. It represents a kind of evangelical revival, if not indeed a reformation, in the scientific mind. It offers to the mind, in a world which had seemed to antiquity so finished and fixed, the spectacle of a universe in vital movement, a (dov, in movement, too, on a vast scale, and in an overwhelming crescendo. Creation seems at last to be on the march-nay, on the path of victory. It is as if we were lifted to a place where we could safely look down on the whole battlefield of existence and see in rapture the vast deployment of the fight. It replaces the old mechanical conception of the world by the more engaging idea of organic growth. At the same time, it spreads the realm of cause and law to cover the vast region of new knowledge laid open by the explorers in all kinds; so that our growing experience reveals still a universe ordered in all things and sure, controlled, not to say centralized, yet instinct with vitality and promise." Dr. Forsyth says that although its boasted altruism, of which Henry Drummond made so much, has a strange trick of suddenly doubling back into a hard egoism, to fight it or begrudge it is no duty of religion and no service to religion, so long as the theory of evolution is not elevated to be a new religion and a complete guide of life. But he points out that human progress does not look like a mere evolution. "The study of history shows that our evolution does not move forward in an unbroken progress like a mighty stream. What we have there is rather to be described as progress by crises, by catastrophes, or by cataracts. Beyond the steady conflict of

the struggle for existence the course of history gets into tangles and knots at particular periods. Seasons of calm and beauty discharge themselves in thunderstorms, which clear the moral air and open space for new energies and new periods. There are harvests which are the end of an age. Good and evil work together till their intrinsic antipathy refuses any longer to be compressed; then there is an explosion which changes the fact of things. There comes a day of the Lord, and a new world. The appearance of good often has its first effect in aggravating the energy of evil. The revelation of sanctity is at the same time a revelation of sin; and the growth of the one accentuates the antagonism of the other. The one forces the other to show itself plainly, to throw off its mask, and to put forth all its wicked resource. Grace enters to develop sin into transgression, to bring sin to the surface and make it overt. Then comes the encounter, and the prince of the world is judged. These Armageddons are repeated in history, issuing in waves, as it were, from the central and absolute crisis of the Cross. And what we look down on from God's right hand is a great wager and waver of battle, a winning campaign of many swaying battles, progress by judgment, a rising scale of crises, working out in historic detail to an actual kingdom of God, with its strategic center and eternal crisis in the death of Christ. The Scripture idea of history is not a stream of evolution but a series of judgments. It is an idea more revolutionary in its nature than evolutionary. It is a series of conversions rather than educations. The world is redeemed rather than perfected, and it is saved by 'shocks of doom.'" Warning is raised against some moral dangers that border and waylay evolutionary doctrine, the most obvious peril being the evasure of the absolute distinction between good and evil, and the destruction of the idea of sin by the denial of moral freedom. "The real danger, after all, is not the doctrine of evolution, but the doctrine of monism which underlies it for so many, with its wiping out of the essential difference between God and the world, right and wrong. Evil is then something which might possibly have God for its author. Christ is but a phase of life, a flash of history. We have only a less or more, or perhaps a thereabouts. We have only more or less bondage, but no real freedom. And no freedom means no responsibility and no guilt. Man has never fallen; he has only lagged. He has not sinned; he has only erred. He has not chosen the evil and refused the good; he has only been handicapped by the start given to the sensual and selfish impulses at the weak outset of his racial history. There is no need of repentance, and no question of forgiveness-unless it be our forgiveness of the Maker who overloaded the first raw stages of our career, and so stunted our growth and reduced our pace. The distinction between good and evil is easily lost if the mind is turned from what is above and concentrated on the things behind. If we are always looking to our issue from matter, we forget that the goal and distinction of man is the Spirit of God. We forget that the image of God lies nearer our true origin than any cell or simian. And not only so, but we come to regard sin, and especially refined sin, which loses its grossness without parting with its guilt, as no more than our incomplete stage; and so regarding it we become tolerant of it-tolerant, that is, of what is intrinsically bad,

devitalizing, and so at last fatal to that life of the soul which is the true progress of man." Dr. Forsyth closes his strong, discriminating, and wellpoised article as follows: "I have admitted the large extent to which evolution must be recognized in the course of history, which has now been changed from a picture book to a great and ordered treatise. Human history becomes the evolution of purpose. And since Christ it appears as the evolution of the redeeming purpose of God. The revelation of this purpose was indeed the first influence that led to the construing of history as a vast historic evolution; and it remains the greatest of such influences. Christ, it was seen, could not be crucified again. When he entered history once for all it gave to all history the unity of his person and work. And a universal history presided over by one purpose must be an organic and an evolutionary history as soon as the catastrophic idea of the parousia in the New Testament had disappeared from practical expectation. All things were moving to the city of God shining upon the far horizon of expanding time. The antique idea vanished in which history was a series of cycles or periods repeating each other without a common aim or progress. All that had gone before had been working up to Christ, and all that followed was to work him out. And to-day this is the theme to which the historical process moves. No doctrine of evolution is sound history, or other than sectional, which does not leave place for the redeeming purpose of God by intervention and revolution, and take its own place under it. No evolutionary order must exclude that moral teleology whose key is not in nature or society but in the kingdom of God. Natural process does not carry with it its own explanation or reveal its own goal. And the crucial point of this issue, the focus of the problem, is the historical appearance of Christ which publicists persist in refusing to assess. It is true that he came in a fullness of time. He was long prepared for, long prophesied by men who did not know all they said. But Christ was not simply the product of the past; he was not merely the flowering of his race, the fruitage of the soul, the genius of goodness. The spiritual life he represents is not another faculty but another self. It is a new order of life, a new kind of reality, and a new test of it (indeed, the final test, as being eternity in action). It is not a new energy in man but man, the whole eternal man, as a new energy, with a new power to give scope and value to every partial and inferior energy which swells the forces of civilization. Not only was his character a divine act, but his gospel was still more so. God not only produced him, but acted finally through him. It is thus that he gives us the fixed point at which we can make stand against the torrent of civilization, and bring our hurried evolution to its moral senses. We get foothold in the eternal. For the spiritual life in Christ is not a mere feature or aspect of man taken by himself, but it is the whole man, as partaker and agent of a higher being than his own, and an eternal. Psychology will not explain Christ—as it cannot explain the inspiration of the prophets whose burden he was. He produced the prophets more than they produced him. They came because he had to come. And we could say this even if we denied that his heavenly personality had been the agent of their inspiration. Again, he himself grew. He grew even in the clearness of his grasp of the

work given him to do. It may be that the cross was not in his first purview. But when all such things have been admitted, he is not explained. He is not explained when we have made all due concessions to the historical treatment of his religious environment. The connection between him and his antecedents is not causal, but teleological. He was the inspiration of prophecy, as its end more even than as its immediate source. He was, as Hegel would say, the 'truth' of prophecy. He was not a product of the past so much as of the future. He was the reaction of all eternity upon time, an invasion of us by that Eternal of whom the future and the unseen is a part so much greater than all we see in the past. Always the best is yet to be; but also the best is the God who always is. Christ was the product of the final divine plan and the absolute divine purpose, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. He was more of a miracle than a product, the intervention of the Great Final Cause more than the Great First Cause, a miracle of grace more than a miracle of power. He was not the expression of latent law, but the incarnation of unique Grace, utterly and forever miraculous, however we read his birth, and however we treat his wonderful works. And the like applies to the history of his church. Much has been done, and much is to do, in the application to the church's history of the evolutionary principle. Doctrine especially has been powerfully shown to be an evolution of the thought of faith, faith's progressive consciousness of itself. But let no such fascination blind us to the miraculous, the revolutionary nature of the faith itself thus evolved. That is the product of no psychical process. We believe in the Holy Ghost. We believe in the essentially miraculous nature of the spiritual life. With and beneath all the historic evolution of the church is the perpetual selfreformation of the gospel, the new creative action of the Spirit, his inspiring and guiding presence by the supernatural power of a real effectual communion with the miraculous Christ. It is the very nature of the church to be supernatural, as it was the nature of the church's indwelling Lord-supernatural in his soul and work, however we regard his actual entrance on the world. History, indeed, does not give destiny, but in Christ destiny is given in the midst of history, by the way of history, and under historic conditions. Revelation is an historic fact, but with a value much more than historic. It is the decisive, absolute incarnation in a soul of that eternity which each moment only represents-but does represent, if it is viewed scientifically, viewed in relation to the whole of reality." -Eighteen pages of the same Review are filled by Mr. T. A. Seed with extracts from the fourteen volumes of Sir Grant Duff's Reminiscences, which are said to be the most variously delightsome of the memorabilia of the Victorian age. They contain the literary bric-a-brac of a lifetimestories, witticisms, curious facts and incidents, riddles, malaprops, and many unconsidered trifles picked up on the way. With those of Pepys, and Evelyn, and Burton, and Boswell, they are "like a lucky-tub into which you never dip without bringing up a prize." The first bit brought up is this: "Colonel Saint Leger, who dined here to-day, told me that his motherin-law once bought a most charming lap dog on the Pont Neuf. When she took it home the little creature, to her extreme horror, proceeded to run

up the curtains. It was a large rat carefully dressed up. I had heard a similar story of a lady in Dresden, but was glad to hear that this case had actually occurred within the narrator's knowledge. So I was the other day to find that the famous story of the New Zealand chief, who, being informed that he could not be received as a Christian while he had two wives, got out of the difficulty by eating one of them, was no fiction. Bishop Selwyn told Sir George Bowen that it was he to whom the promising convert applied, stating what he had done." For some years Sir Grant Duff held a governorship in India. One day he found on his table a petition from some market people who were dissatisfied over some small matter. The petition was addressed to "The Almighty God, Care of the Right Honorable Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Governor of Madras." A Hindu baker in Poona, favored with the governor's patronage, put over his shop door this inscription: "Best English Loafer to His Excellency." In a written examination one Hindu student in answer to the question, Who was Cardinal Wolsey? wrote that he was "Bishop of York, but died of disentry in a church on his way to be blockheaded"; while another answered that "He was said to be the spiritual guide of the Methodists." Once, in an Oxford examination, a young man being asked, What is a final cause? replied, "It is the last straw that breaks the camel's back." Another student, to the question, Can you tell anything about Alexander the Great? said, "Yes, he was educated at Aristotle." A Hindu being asked how far it was to a certain place, answered, "Thirty miles as the cock crows." A stormy meeting in the West Indies was described by a newspaper as having been adjourned sine deo. An Englishman, who had not been overfond of his wife, put on her tombstone, "Tears cannot restore her; therefore I weep." A clergyman chided his congregation for their coldness but admitted that there was just a spark of spiritual life among them, and then exclaimed, "O Lord, water that spark!" An orator in a Balliol College Debating Club denounced those pessimistic persons who think of man as "a vain shadow which to-day is and to-morrow is cast into the oven." An Irish speaker alluded to "those currents of opinion which grease the wheels of time." A furious German socialist exclaimed, "The chariots of revolution roll on, gnashing their teeth as they go." A bishop said in a sermon, "Many people have one eye on heaven, while with the other they are listening to the gossip of earth." A friend of Professor Jowett had a dog whose favorite amusement was chasing his own tail, which he would do for ten minutes together. One day when the dog was going through this performance Jowett said to his friend, "What is your dog about?" "Studying metaphysics," was the reply. Dr. Thompson, Master of Trinity College, said with facetious severity of a young clergyman: "All the time that he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the systematic neglect of his duties." A Miss Stephens, speaking in a letter of a highminded friend, wrote, "He may be narrow, but he always reminds me of the monk who, when somebody called him narrow, said, 'Yes, I have but one window; still, that one looks toward heaven.'" A good lady in Gloucestershire used to read the Bible to a poor old woman whom she visited and looked after. One day she chanced on the passage which speaks