writer. Many of his articles have appeared anonymously in the French periodicals. Some of his works have been condemned by the Inquisition and placed upon the Index. It is needless to say that such procedure has simply served to secure a wider dissemination of his liberal views. Forbidden fruit is, after all, so desirable! Professor Loisy does not call himself an advanced critic. His friends believe that he is a chosen instrument to counteract the erroneous teachings of Harnack, and the pronounced rationalism of the destructive biblical critics of Germany and Great Britain. Some of the views expressed in his Religion d'Israel, and his Etudes Bibliques are: The Pentateuch in its present form is not of Mosaic origin; the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not historical; the story of creation, the fall of man and the flood are legendary and of Assyrian origin; the books of Daniel and Ezra were not products of the age when those two persons lived, but are of much later origin and apocryphal; we must not look for equal inspiration in all the books of the Bible, either in the Old or in the New Testament; the fourth Gospel cannot be from the pen of John, the beloved disciple, nor, indeed, was it written during his lifetime, much less by an eyewitness of the events therein narrated. This accounts for the non-historical character of much that is in the Gospel of John, for example, the resurrection of Lazarus.

Though such views found ready acceptance among many students and the younger clergy, it is needless to say that they were bitterly fought by some of the most learned and influential ecclesiastics. No one was more bitter in his opposition to the theories of Loisy and his school than Cardinal Richard, Archbishop of Paris. This scholarly prelate had great influence in Rome, whither he carried the fight, and succeeded in placing the matter before Pope Leo XIII who, however, was too diplomatic to interfere directly and thus precipitate a conflict, which might prove disastrous to the entire Catholic Church. Leo did, nevertheless, accede so far to the wishes of the Cardinal as to appoint a commission with power to investigate the entire subject in a scholarly and dispassionate way. To the credit of the Pope, it must be admitted that the commission was selected with great care and fairness-the principal qualification being sound judgment and thorough scholarship. Several of the commissioners were specialists in biblical criticism, and, indeed, some of them had been reproved for holding views contrary to the teachings of the Church. The commission has been correctly named, "The International Pontifical Commission," for of the fifteen persons of whom it is composed, six are Italians, two Germans and the other seven represent as many different countries: Belgium, England, France, Holland, Ireland, Spain and the United States. The greatest freedom was allowed this learned group. No stated time was designated for holding conferences or within which the result of their findings had to be made known. It was their duty to study the question submitted to them in an unbiased, scholarly, scientific manner, and after due deliberation submit their report to the Vatican. This was done on June 27, 1906.

An exact translation of this document was printed in the Arena department of the METHODIST REVIEW for September, 1906.

FOREIGN OUTLOOK

SOME LEADERS OF THOUGHT

Erich Schaeder. He is an example of the many German theologians who, while not slavishly adhering to the older theology, still maintain all its essentials. Recently he has attempted to state and defend the true doctrine of the Person of Christ. He is quite severe in his characterization of what he calls the adherents of the new Christian faith, a new religion, a new Christianity, which does not deserve to be called by the name of Christianity. To these men he says Christ is no longer the object of faith, but only the first one who held the Christian religion. This touches the vital point-the theology of the Church. If we give up subjection to him and trust in him, we give up the vital fact in Christianity. Schaeder maintains that our New Testament documents, including the synoptic Gospels, reveal the doctrine of the deity of Christ, and that not alone as the faith of the first Christian, but as an element in the conviction and self-consciousness of Jesus himself. No historical criticism of our first three Gospels can banish from the world the fact that Jesus knew himself as the Lord of the world and that he was looked upon as such by his immediate disciples; and this in two directions: as Lord of personal spirits, and as Lord of nature. That he regarded himself as Lord over personal spirits appears in the facts that he claimed and exercised the right to forgive sin, that he laid upon men a moral law, as though his authority was unquestionable in this realm, and that he regarded himself as the Judge of the human race. As to his rulership over nature, it is betokened by his power over the course of nature. Here is a personality who deals with the course of nature as he will. Schaeder regards the passage Matt. 11. 27 as comprehensively and in principle giving expression to the deity of Christ as the self-consciousness of Jesus. This passage, he says, teaches that this power of his over nature and history is given, lent to him by the Father. But he says that this fact does not detract from the full deity of Christ. In maintaining this point he appeals to the divine Sonship of Jesus. The Gospels know the deity of Jesus only in the form of his divine Sonship. The Son of God is he to whom God gives participation in all that he is and has. Nevertheless, the divine Sonship is something that belongs to his very nature. So much for his argument. On the whole it is sound and irrefragable. That part of it that refers to his lordship over men is without question impregnable. It is doubtful, however, whether his miracles prove that he has absolute power over nature. They strongly suggest, but they probably do not demonstrate it. And he is undoubtedly correct in appealing to the divine Sonship in support of the assertion that nothing in Matt. 11. 27 interferes with the doctrine of his full deity. The usual attack is made along the line of denial that those passages which make Jesus the Son of God mean any

thing but Messiahship. But while it is a fact that in the language of the Gospels the Son of God is the Messiah, and vice versa, yet it does not follow that the term "Son of God" is to be reduced in its meaning to that of a human Messiah. The term "Father" and "Son" are used so frequently in the sense of a personal relation that we are compelled by a fair exegesis to hold that the Father is no more absolutely Father to the Son than the Son is absolutely Son to the Father. In other words, to deny the deity of the Son in this set of correlations would be to deny also the deity of the Father. Rightly does Schaeder say that while the Father gives the Son what he himself is and has, yet it is the nature of the Son of God to be deity. This is true in human relationships, and we cannot attach any meaning to the term "Son" in those cases where Jesus speaks of the Father and the Son in the same connection unless we attach to it the meaning that he is as truly divine as the Father is. The argument halts only at the point where he makes the miracles prove his lordship over the course of nature. His miracles no more prove that in the case of Jesus than the miracles of the disciples prove them to be lords over nature. But his miracles taken in connection with his self-consciousness strongly suggest that the lordship, though not proved, was actual.

Julius Wellhausen. To the majority his name is associated with the Old Testament, and in the Old Testament with a particularly extreme form of the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch. In this field he has succeeded in attracting attention, much of it favorable, much unfavorable. But for some time past he has been turning to the New Testament and to New Testament subjects. Within a very few years he has written commentaries on Matthew, Mark and Luke; and a little later an introduction to the First Three Gospels (Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, Berlin, Druck und Verlog von Georg Reimer, 1905). Wellhausen thinks we have by no means gotten back to the original form of the documents of the New Testament as they left the hands of the writers. Nor does he trace the variations between the manuscripts down to errors of copyists. On the contrary, he thinks many of the variations were due to intentional changes in the earliest copies made for the purpose of harmonizing one Gospel with another, or to make certain passages teach doctrines which the copyist had, but which were not clearly, if at all, taught in the passages in question. However, he admits that there are few passages in which changes or variations affect the sense at all seriously. He is a firm believer in the theory of a primitive Aramaic gospel, and thinks unmistakable evidences of this are found in the gospel Greek. He holds the usual theory of the priority of Mark among the synoptics, and of the relation of Matthew and Luke to Mark. But he thinks there was another source for the writers of the Gospels, which source he calls Z (the initial letter of the word Zuelle, German for source). This source he regards as older than Mark and he thinks it was used in the composition of Mark. Nevertheless, he would not deny to Mark enough originality to give him a high standing as a source for us.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Wellhausen's views is that he regards the passage beginning with Mark 8. 27 and ending with the close of chapter 10, as the real gospel of Jesus Christ, spoken by himself concerning himself. He thinks that prior to this time Peter had neither confessed nor recognized Jesus as the Messiah. But Jesus did not preach this gospel openly to all the people but secretly to his disciples only. In order to reveal himself to them he took the confession of Peter as the occasion, but went much farther than Peter's words would have carried him. Peter was still thinking of Jesus as the Messiah in the Jewish sense who would triumph in Jerusalem. He did not call himself Messiah but Son of man. And by this expression he meant to indicate a glorified and heavenly Messiah instead of the earthly Messiah of the Jews. He used this strange term only and always instead of the first personal pronoun whenever reference was made to his suffering, death and resurrection. He placed his own person in the center, but it was his future, true person-the crucified-who, according to him, was the true Christ. Only those who believe in him can hope to be saved. The fulfilling of the Jewish law is not sufficient. For the sake of the gospel and for his sake who is the gospel they must forsake the world and suffer persecution and death. Jesus died as a martyr, not as their representative and redeemer; but so only did he and can they enter into life, glory and the kingdom of God. Besides suffering they must also serve one another; and they must not seek peace or power.

Such is a fair sample of the New Testament work of Wellhausen. It betrays none of the constructive ability of his work in the field of the Old Testament, and it leaves the impression that he desired to do something in the New that would give him the leadership he has gained in the Old Testament, but that unlike his Old Testament work he here strained after effects and consequently wholly failed.

RECENT THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE

Grundriss der Geographie und Geschichte des Alten Orients. Erste Healfte: Ethnologie des Alten Orients. Babylonia und Chaldaa. (Outline of the Geography and History of the Ancient Orient. First Half: The Ethnology of the Ancient Orient. Babylonia and Chaldea.) By Fritz Hammel. Munich, C. H. Beck, 1904. This is a part of a great work on the general subject of the geography and history of the ancient East, under the editorship of Swan von Müller. Hammel was chosen for this particular part of the work because of his intimate knowledge of Assyriology and Egyptology. Unfortunately his work suffers as the work of every specialist suffers. The close acquaintance with his chosen field makes it impossible for him to see the subject in its larger relations. The book is a mine of learning. It is Hammel's opinion that the oldest genealogies of Babylonian and Egyptian gods are identical, and only when this is recognized will we have a true beginning of a valid science of comparative religions. This he thinks he has finally and forever established. But other investigators decidedly oppose his view.

For example, Jeremias holds that not the identity of the genealogies of the Babylonian and Egyptian gods but the recognition of the cosmological system with its corresponding astral system in the ancient Orient is the key to a true science of religion. In fact, Hammel seems to have accepted this doctrine of the astral system in some measure, and although he is a strong opponent of the modern critical school of Old Testament students, speaks of astral scheme of the twelve tribes and affirms that there is no longer any doubt that the primitive biblical history is to some extent clothed in the form of astral myths. Still, he holds back when it comes to a full acceptance of the astral system as the basis of the ancient Oriental religions. The astral character of the religions of the ancient East makes them calendar religions; but every calendar which has to do with annually recurring events must of necessity take into account both sun and moon. Hammel distinguishes between religions that have to do with the sun and those that have to do with the moon. And there may be here an emphasis on the sun and there an emphasis on the moon in given religions, arising from nomadic or agricultural causes; but it is impossible that there can be any religion which notes the recurrence of certain periods or events which does not at the same time include reference both to sun and moon. Hammel offers in this book a special, and to him peculiar, solution of the locality of the Paradise of the Bible. He finds the four rivers of Paradise in Arabia. The difficulty with this theory is, not that Arabia had no idea of a Paradise within its bounds, but that every land had a Paradise as the antitype of the heavenly seat of the highest god. Damascus and Tyre had their sacred rivers, and in ancient Canaan the region of Sodom and Gomorrah was regarded as Paradise. Hammel's well-known antagonism and the results of the Wellhausen school are briefly summed up in this book on its later pages. And in fact in many respects he treats biblical themes with considerable illumination. The error that those make who claim him for the strongly conservative side is that they take his opposition to Wellhausen for opposition to all the results of the so-called higher criticism. To do this is at once to misunderstand and to misrepresent him. While he opposes the dates assigned by Wellhausen to the documents entering into the composition of the Pentateuch, and in some degree the grounds upon which the argumentation of Wellhausen proceeds, he is quite as radical in other respects. If there is anything the strict conservative hates it is the doctrine that there is any mythical element in any part of the Bible. But Hammel admits the mythical element. It is high time that we cease to be anxious about such questions, and to contend that the truth in the Bible is truth whether clothed in mythical garb or in the sober garb of actual history. His is not a plea for any form of Biblical criticism, but for Christian faith regardless of Biblical criticism.

Die Profeten Israels in sozialer Beizielung. (The Prophets of Israel in Relation to Social Problems.) By Paul Kleinert, Leipzig, F. C. Hinrichs'shu Buchhandlung, 1905. This book, as its title suggests,