the direction of the habits you aspire to gain." These rules, and all rules for the formation of habits drawn from practical experience, will imply that the individual has initiative and spontaneity of his own, that he is not determined entirely from without, or by the accidental conditions of his nervous centres, but in great measure by the activity of his own free will. When philosophers realize that there are physical forces whose activity has not yet been studied, that the mental world has its facts as well as the physical, that we cannot presume that the determinism of the world that is seen must apply also to the mind that sees, perhaps then they will come to some agreement concerning the nature of habit. But in the meantime let those who reject the idea of personal spontaneity and freedom look upon habit as one of the many fictions of the human mind. Let them discard the term with its implication of a philosophy they condemn, and speak rather of the adjustment of mental forces in relation to their environment, or use some terminology in accordance with the meaning they wish to convey. ་ LITERATURE. J. R. Angell: Habit and Attention, Psychol. Rev., 1898, v., 179–183. Maine de Biran: Influence de l'habitude, sur la faculté de penser. Paris, 1841. Bernardus Boedder, S.J.: Psychologia Rationalis. Friburg, 1894, liber i., caput v., art. 2. H. Jaymyn Brooks: The Elements of Mind. New York, 1902, ch. viii. Habits and Reflex Acts, pp. 158–173. Bryom and Hartes: Studies on the Telegraphic Language: the Acquisition of a Hierarchy of Habits. Psychol. Rev., 1899, vi., 345–375. William B. Carpenter: Principles of Mental Physiology. New York, 1874, ch. viii. Of Habit, pp. 337-375. H. Cornelius: Das Gesetz der Übung. Viertelsjahrschrift f. wiss Philos. 1895, xx., pp. 45-54. Léon Dumont: De l'habitude. Revue Philosophique, 1876, i., pp. 321–366. Louis Ferri: La psychologie de l'association. Paris, 1883, pt. iii., ch. iii. William James: The Principles of Psychology. Vol. I., ch. iv. Habit, pp. 104-127. Michael Maher, S.J.: Psychology. London, 1900, pp. 388ff. C. Lloyd Morgan: Comparative Psychology. London, 1902, ch. xi. Automatism and Control, pp. 173-196. Jos. John Murphy: Habit and Intelligence in their Connection with the Paul Radestock: Habit and its Importance in Education. F. Ravaisson: De l'habitude. 8vo, 1838. Translated by (Quoted by Dumont.) Neue Folge, 1881. Ueber das Wesen der Gewohnheit, pp. 149-175. Reden 6 G. F. Stout: Manual of Psychology. Bk. I., ch. ii., § 11-12. St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica. 1. 2. Questiones xlix.-liv. Ragnar Vogt: Über Ablenkbarkeit und Gewöhnungsfähigkeit. Psychologische Arbeiten herausgegeben von Emil Kraepelin. Leipzig, 1901, pp. 62-201. Wilhelm Wundt: Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology. Translated by Creighton and Titchener. New York, 1894. Lectures xxvi.xxvii., pp. 381-410. Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie. 5th ed., vol. iii., Leipzig, 1903, ch. xvii., 2, pp. 258-284. THE BEGINNINGS OF Dr. Shahan, of the Catholic University, is not mistaken in his opinion that "there are not wanting reasons of a modern and immediate nature which make it useful and consoling to reflect on the earliest history of the church."* "Useful" indeed, because in these our days, more than ever before, men are harking back to primitive Christianity as a solution of the dread question "What is religion?" Granting, as all men must, that the revelation of God to man made by Jesus Christ is, not to say the absolute and final, at least the supremest revelation yet vouchsafed us, the problem remained, What essentially is this revelation, what is Christianity? And the answer to that question, it is likewise generally conceded, can come only from history. Dogmatics is now become mostly the study of the history of dogma; biblical theology is concerning itself chiefly with the historical interpretation of the inspired Text; apologetic is almost nothing more than an attempt to unfold the "development" idea, a task which presumes an historical knowledge of the origins of doctrine: for all these reasons, history, the quondam stepdaughter among the sacred sciences, has recently become what it has long been among the profane sciences-magistra et domina. So, as we started to say, any historical light which may be thrown upon early Christianity cannot but be-to use again the modest word of the author of the book in hand-" useful." And "consoling" too, for if there be any comfortable retreat from a multitude of harassing intellectual religious "problems," if there be, after the practice of religion itself, any consolation to a spirit that is weary with many questions, surely that refuge for the soul and balm to the heart are to be sought in an excursion away from the vexations of the present, back to the days when Christianity was young, and fresh, and strong in the bloom of her youth. We have never met, either by personal contact or through *The Beginnings of Christianity. By Very Rev. Thomas J. Shahan, S.T.D., J.U.L., professor of Church History in the Catholic University, Washington. New York: Benziger the medium of the written page, any one who can conduct such an excursion back to Christian antiquity better than Dr. Shahan. He has many of the gifts proper to a professor of history, but none more attractive than the power to reproduce, by means of the historical imagination, the atmosphere of epochs that are past, the setting of scenes that have been changed. And this, his chief gift, is most patent in his volume of essays on The Beginnings of Christianity. Presiding over all the array of facts, or rather infusing them, vivifying them, is a delightful spirit of sympathy with the days of which he writes. The effect of rendering the past near and palpable is not wrought by any mere elaboration of style, any deliberate word-painting, but by a habit, long since acquired, of clothing the bare data of the books and the monuments with sense and an appreciation that are possible only to the ripened scholar. We dare not begin to quote extracts from these essays in proof of the justice of the praise we give them. But if we know anything of the power of genuine scholarliness, or of the graces and beauties of literary composition, we are safe in leaving the justification to the reader of such essays as those on "St. Paul," or "St. Agnes," or "The Church and the Empire," or the abundantly learned and sometimes rather startling monograph on "Woman in Pagan Antiquity." In all, Dr. Shahan has grouped some fourteen or fifteen essays in this volume, all having to do with the early period of Church History, and all more or less united by subjectmatter and by spirit of treatment. We await the day when the professor of Church History in the Catholic University will give us not a series of essays but sustained historical narrative of Early Church History. EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE. * The second volume of Dr. Bardenhewer's great work on early Christian literature possesses the eminent qualities for which the Munich savant has for years been celebrated. An exhaustive knowledge of his sources, a wide acquaintance with modern critical history, a notably conserva By Dr. Bardenhewer. *Geschichte der Altkirchlichen Literatur. Von Otto Bardenhewer. Zweiter Band: vom Ende des Zweiten Jahrhunderts bis zum Beginn des Vierten Jahrhunderts. Freiburg im tive temperament, and uncompromising Catholic convictions are sure to be conspicuous in every work he publishes. His critics. have charged him with ecclesiastical and theological preoccupations; and to some extent they are right. It is impossible for a man so thoroughly penetrated with the conviction that Patrology is ex radice a Catholic science, and whose historical imagination is so taken up with the idea of the church as the unified and permanent body of believers which gives coherence to Christian history,-it is impossible, we say, for such a man not at times to build his critical theories upon the framework of his prepossessions. This is to offend the critics who profess to be isolated from such attachments, it is true, but to offend them in such a manner may by no means be unwarranted or wrong. Very often to write sound history requires enthusiasm as well as sagacity; and many a great institution has been inadequately estimated because the mind which has studied it has viewed it from the cold distance of bloodless criticism, and has never beheld it in the vivid proximity of personal interest and beneath the warm sunlight of sympathy. In the period covered by this volume-from the end of the second to the beginning of the fourth century-Dr. Bardenhewer has to discuss some of the very greatest names in the history of the early church. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Hippolytus, move through this mighty epoch, which is so truly magna parens virûm. Each writer is given a brief biographical notice; and is then studied from the point of view of Christian literature, history, and dogma. Every dispute which divides the learned concerning patrological criticism is noticed at least, and some are investigated with a good deal of detail. We regret that Dr. Bardenhewer did not give a page or two to Dom Chapman's recent articles in the Revue Bénédictine, on the alleged interpolations in St. Cyprian's De Unitate Ecclesia. Our author refers to the discussion, but gives us no definite account or estimate of it. We would wish, too, for a somewhat fuller treatment of St. Cyprian's controversy with Pope Stephen. Likewise some important questions associated with the names of Origen and Hippolytus are rather summarily dealt with, in our judgment. For although to enter thoroughly into such controverted or obscure problems would |