be long and through a desert, but milk and honey were to flow in the oasis beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental, or revulsion from nature complete, there would have been no much-trumpeted last judgment and no material kingdom of heaven. The renunciation was only temporary and partial; the revulsion was only against incidental evils. Despair touched nothing but the present order of the world, though at first it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate destruction. This was the sort of despair and renunciation that lay at the bottom of Christian repentance; while hope in a new order of this world, or of one very like it, lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice, it was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spirit miraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature had grudged or punished, grace was to offer as a reward for faith and patience. The earthly life which was vain as an experience was to be profitable as a trial. Normal experience, appropriate exercise for the spirit, would thereafter begin. Christianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism, a rationalism intercepted by a supernatural version of the conditions of happiness. Its moral principle is reason-the only moral principle there is; its motive power is the impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy. Christianity merely renews and reinstates these universal principles after a first disappointment and a first assault of despair, by opening up new vistas of accomplishment, new qualities, and measures of success. The Christian field of action being a world of grace enveloping the world of nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values may take place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility, obedience, self-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may all acquire a religious worth which reason, in its direct application, might scarcely have found in them; yet these reversed appreciations are merely incidental to a secret rationality, and are justified on the ground that human nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged and transformed before it can safely manifest its congenital instincts and become again an authoritative criterion of values. In the kingdom of God men would no longer need to do penance, for life there would be truly natural and there the soul would be at last in her native sphere. This submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being a heritage from the Jews; and those Protestant communities that have rejected the pagan and Platonic elements that overlaid it have little difficulty in restoring it to prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul of the gospel; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed in the language of Messianic hopes, is really postrational. It was not to marry and be given in marriage, or to sit on thrones, or to unravel metaphysical mysteries, or to enjoy any of the natural delights renounced in this life, that Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and to follow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his self-surrender. It was not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises of their exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; and the change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh excitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporary austerity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all human desires, so that a perfect

charity and contemplative justice, falling like the Father's gifts ungrudgingly on the whole creation, might take the place of ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was a renunciation which, at least in Christ himself, and in his more spiritual disciples, did not spring from disappointed illusions or lead to other unregenerate illusions even more sure to be dispelled by events. It sprang rather from a native speculative depth, a natural affinity to the divine fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was the spirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure soul can fetch from contemplation. This mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged old Jewish optimism, gave Christianity a double aspect, and had some curious consequence in later times. Those who were inwardly convinced-as most religious minds were under the Roman Empire-that all earthly things were vanity, and that they plunged the soul into an abyss of nothingness if not of torment, could, in view of brighter possibilities in another world, carry their asceticism and their cult of suffering farther than a purely negative system, like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For a discipline that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict nature more boldly than one intended to take nature's place. The hope of unimaginable benefits to ensue could drive religion to greater frenzies than it could have fallen into if its object had been merely to silence the will. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism, extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and much more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with anæsthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire."

HISTORY, BIOGRAPHY, AND TOPOGRAPHY

About Hebrew Manuscripts. BY ELKAN NATHAN ADLER. SVO, pp. 177. London and New York: Oxford University Press. Price, cloth, $2.50.

This is a splendid specimen of a privately published book, though printed by the Oxford University Press and issued through them. The author, Mr. Elkan Nathan Adler, is a son of the chief rabbi of Great Britain, and has devoted himself for years to the collection of Hebrew manuscripts, traveling in many out-of-the-way parts of the world in pursuit of his fascinating hobby. This book describes some of his greatest finds. The first chapter in it is entitled, "Some Missing Chapters of Ben Sira." It will be remembered that Professor Taylor, of Cambridge, and Professor Schechter, formerly of Cambridge but now of New York city, had the good fortune to discover in the Cairo Genizah, fragments of the

long-lost Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus. Mr. Adler in January, 1896, acquired a pair of leaves from the same manuscript from which Taylor and Schechter had secured their treasure. Adler's fragment comprises chapter 7, verse 29, to chapter 12, verse 1, and in this volume we have beautiful facsimiles of the Hebrew text with transliteration and translation. If the book contained nothing else, this precious fragment would alone make it notable. But it goes much beyond this. Here, for example, is a chapter on the "Bible as a Book," in which Mr. Adler has given a most valuable synopsis of the great seminary "program," by Professor Dr. Ludwig Blau, of Budapest, entitled, "Studien zum althebraischen Buchwesen und zur biblischen Literaturgeschichte." The whole elaborate discussion of the inner form of old Hebrew books and of their preservation and distribution is here brought within reasonable compass and made readily accessible. A chapter on the "Humors of Hebrew Manuscripts," gives some account of Mr. Adler's successful pursuit of manuscripts and makes one wish that he had told more of his experiences. Here is a fair sample of the style of the book and of Mr. Adler's experiences in the East: "It is, of course, quite hopeless to choose one out of several books that are brought to you; the cheapest method is to buy the lot; nor must you let it appear which is the book you really want when you make the purchase. At Bokhara, I had a lesson in that. It was 1897, and I was full of Apocrypha. People were very kind, and I had been lucky enough to gain the reputation of being a hakim. A scientific nephew had supplied me with opium, and others of the specialities of Burroughs and Wellcome. I had met a well-to-do Jewish merchant on his way home from the fair at Nijni Novgorod on the Transcaspian Railway. He was traveling with his wives and favorite children and servants; but he was very thirsty and had drunk much water, and was like to die of dysentery. My opium pills worked like magic and made my reputation. When I got to Bokhara I had to visit him, and others. I was even called in to prescribe for an interesting young lady who was delirious with typhoid fever. The merchant may have been what a writer of brilliant imagination in the Standard calls the Rothschild of Central Asia, but he was certainly not a Cræsus in our sense of the word. I was credibly informed that there was not a Jew in the whole of the Transcaspian that owned as much as fifty thousand roubles, and I am afraid that I have sufficient respect for money to have endeavored to make the acquaintance of such a Rothschild had there been one. However, this has nothing to do with our subject. To return to the books: I asked for a Judith or a Tobit. 'I have a Tobit,' said one of the bystanders, and immediately demanded a hundred roubles for it without looking! And from that day to this I have been unable to buy or even see his manuscript." Perhaps one might be pardoned for quoting also a little specimen of Mr. Adler's sense of humor: "All through the Mediterranean the natives know that the traveler is on the pounce for antiques. They do not know what antique means, but they attach considerable importance to the word. So in Corfu I am offered a little manuscript and am told that it is a very fine antique indeed. I say, 'But it is dated 1830, quite modern,' and the unblushing answer is, 'Yes, certainly it is modern, but very antique,' where

upon, of course, the precious volume is purchased." A chapter on the "Romance of Hebrew Printing" gives a very useful account of the early issues of Hebrew presses on the Continent, and the book concludes with a contribution in German by Professor Bacher on "Jewish Persian Literature." Altogether it is an interesting book that Mr. Adler has written and compiled. We commend it to scholars and to the curious and wish him yet further success in the securing of manuscripts and early printed books, for he clearly is able to make good use of them.

The Life of John Wesley. By C. T. WINCHESTER. Professor of English Literature in Wesleyan University. Crown 8vo, pp. 301. New York: The Macmillan Company. Price, cloth, with portraits, $1.50 net.

Proof of the real greatness of John Wesley is seen in the continual coming of new studies of his character and work by men of varied training and point of view. This not only proves the subject a fascinating and fruitful one, but evinces the many-sidedness and lasting significance of his personality and influence. Evidence accumulates that he was one of the most potent factors of progress in modern civilization. In England a new Life of Wesley by Dr. Fitchell, author of The Unrealized Logic of Religion, aims especially to show Wesley's career in historical perspective and its relations to three centuries-a study of great spiritual forces and their effect on secular history. In America the latest contribution to our Wesley bibliography is the rare volume now before us, which is beyond dispute a distinct, racy, elegant, and captivating addition to all previous lives of the founder of Methodism. Professor Winchester's volume has its warrant and its assured acceptability in several peculiarities. One is in its being the work not of a clergyman but of a highly accomplished man of letters, practiced in the analysis of character, and a master of word por traiture; in which respect it reminds us of the writings of Augustine Birrell on the same subject. Another peculiarity is, as might be expected from such an author, that Wesley is studied and presented not merely as a religious reformer and leader, but as a man-a marked and striking personality, energetic, scholarly, alive to all moral, social, and political questions, and for some thirty years probably exerting a greater influence than any other man in England. The charm of Professor Winchester's style, the shrewd insight into Wesley's human nature, the sane and finelybalanced comments, the lifelike realism of the historic pictures, together with other distinguishing qualities combine to make the story of as much interest to the general reader as to the student of religious history and progress. This is the raciest record of Wesley's life, and the most independent sketch of the real Wesley known to us; while as a piece of literature it is above criticism. In his analysis and portraiture Professor Winchester gives prominence to the genuinely human elements which give flavor to the delightful nature of John Wesley; with candor and artistic fidelity to fact, he nothing extenuates nor sets down aught in vague or vapid eulogy. This admirable book is a fresh, rich, permanent contribution to Wesleyan literature.

METHODIST REVIEW

SEPTEMBER, 1906

ART. I.-WHEN JESUS COMES

ESCHATOLOGY, the doctrine of the Last Things, is by no means the most important element in theology or in religion. The Hebrews got on, religiously, much better with very little eschatology than the Egyptians with very much. It is not wholesome to make too much of the curious and difficult questions which hover around the deathbed and the grave; to give too much of one's energies and attention to the problems of destiny; to interrogate perpetually the silent sphinx that guards the approach to the other world; to speculate eagerly as to the times and seasons, or to allow the expectation of the speedy end of all things to distract us from present duties. Second advent excitement is apt to lead to fanaticism, if not to insanity. Even in the New Testament excessive interest in such questions is vigorously rebuked. Jesus said to his own apostles, eager to know God's plans for the kingdom, "It is not for you to know times or seasons, which the Father hath set within his own authority" (Acts 1. 6-8), sufficient for them that they should receive divine equipment for their own immediate work, and Paul found it necessary to quiet down excessive Adventist anxiety and agitation and to exhort restless spirits to think a little less of the coming of the Lord and a little more of their own duty-"That with quietness they work and eat their own bread" (2 Thess. 3. 12.) Yet, after all, every thoughtful man and every self-respecting Theology is constrained to "look before and after"; to grapple with the questions of Predestination on the one side and of Eschatology on the other; to ask "Whence came I, whence came the world, and whither are we bound?" Every consistent theory of the universe involves