in his lectures before Vanderbilt University. Admirable in their interpretation of modern religious thought to a community into which modern religious thinking has not yet found much entrance; admirable as an interpretation of a Catholic faith far broader than any sect and given in a lectureship under the auspices of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, a denomination which cannot be accused of excessive latitudinarianism, they yet halt when they come to the consideration of the suffering Messiah. We agree with him that "the secret spring of that vast dynamic-the Saviour of the World-was the resurrection of Christ as the consummation of his Incarnate Sacrifice rather than distinctively and separately the Act of Death." Yet that resurrection itself gets much of its significance from the preceding Passion. And it appears to us that the interpretation of this Passion. is greatly needed at the present time, and, though for different reasons, is an equally pre-eminent need in the Occidental and the Oriental world. It is needed in the Occidental world because the fundamental remedy for greed, selfindulgence, and the accompanying vices of appetite and corruption is the life of self-sacrifice inspired by faith in a selfsacrificing Lord and Leader. It is needed in the Orient because fundamental in the conception of the Brahman is the notion that pain is evil, a notion that vitiates not only sound thinking but sound living, and one which can be corrected only by the teaching that suffering is divine, and that, as the supreme act in the life of Christ is his Passion, so the supremest attribute in God is his ability to suffer.

Doubtless this also is the view of Dr. Hall. No one could put more clearly than does he, in his lectures before the Vanderbilt University, that the philosophy which" defines the essence of Christianity as consisting of the teachings and example of Jesus as recorded in the first three Gospels, rather than that view of the Person of Christ as the Image of the invisible God, and the Work of Christ as the suffering and triumphant Saviour of the world, which is set forth in the Fourth Gospel and the Apostolic Epis

tles is inadequate as the basis for a reinterpretation of the idea of the Church that can satisfy the religious. consciousness of the present time." But why the suffering was necessary to the triumph, or what its relation is to the world's redemption, Dr. Hall does not attempt to consider. To the consideration of this question Dr. Stevens devotes his volume. That volume is not suffused with feeling. It is without sentiment. The problem of suffering culminating in the suffering of Jesus Christ is discussed as a purely intellectual problem. In .this, to our thinking, is the chief defect of the volume. The problem of suffering is not purely an intellectual problem, and its intellectual aspects can never be understood except as they are viewed through the atmosphere of feeling and interpreted in the terms of feeling. The aroma of Dr. Stevens's book is that of the class-room, as the aroma of Dr. Hall's book is that of the pastorate. It must also be said of Dr. Stevens's volume that it has the appearance of having been delivered as successive lectures, and therefore is weighted with what, for the reader, seems to us needless repetition. The excuse for this repetition is found in the fact that the author approaches his subject from different points of view, interpreting the doctrine of salvation in successive chapters, as taught by the Hebrew prophets, by Jesus Christ, by Paul, by John, and by later ecclesiastical writers. Such a method of approach, or rather of approaches, necessarily involves repetition. For scholastic purposes it is also probably necessary to compare the view which the author wishes to present with the views which have been presented by previous writers.

But though, to our thinking, the critical, not to say the scholastic, element necessarily preponderates, the view to which the author finally conducts the reader is stated with great clearness. On his walk to Emmaus, Jesus said to his disciples: "Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?" The doctrine of the Atonement, so called, is the answer which philosophy makes to the question, "Why ought Christ to have suffered in order to enter into his glory?" It is

difficult to compact Dr. Stevens's answer to this question into a few words; but if a sentence could contain it, that sentence would perhaps be this: Jesus Christ came to earth to manifest God; that he could not do without manifest suffering for the sins of men, for God suffers in and for the sins of his children. Thus it was that the sufferings of Christ" satisfied" the Father. "God never needed to be atoned into love, nor did he ever require from his perfectly holy Son the endurance of unspeakable suffering as a substitute for sin's penalty, for the vindication of his honor or his government. God was satisfied in the work of Christ because it is the nature of the divine love to give, to serve, and to suffer with and for its objects."

This, says the critic, involves the notion that God can suffer, and that is heresy. That this doctrine was once labeled heresy Dr. Stevens frankly concedes, but he affirms that this label was due to imperfect experience and crude. thinking. In short, he is heretic enough to believe that men in the twentieth century may also think, and on some subjects may think to better purpose than did the men of the sub-apostolic Church. At all events, his faith in the Passion of Jesus Christ conducts him to faith in what he well calls "eternal atonement."

To me the words "eternal atonement" denote the dateless passion of God on account of sin; they mean that God is, by his very nature, a sin-bearer that sin grieves and wounds his heart, and that he sorrows and suffers in consequence of it. It results from the divine love-alike from its holiness and

from its sympathy-that" in our affliction he is afflicted." Atonement on its "Godward side" is a name for the grief and pain inflicted by sin upon the paternal heart of God. Of this divine sorrow for sin the afflictions of Christ are a revelation. In the bitter grief and anguish which he experienced on account of sin we see reflected the pain and sorrow which sin brings to the divine love.

The old forms of the doctrine of the atonement—that the suffering of Christ was necessary to appease the wrath of God and induce him to forgive; or to satisfy the law of God and enable him to forgive; or to move upon the heart of man and induce him to accept forgiveness-have all proved inadequate and in

some forms of their presentation ethically abhorrent; yet should the Church follow those thinkers who reject from their teaching the passion of Christ altogether, and regard it as a mere incident in a faithful life, it would throw away the chiefest element of spiritual power in Christianity. It must learn that the suffering of Christ is the method by which God forgives sin, and Dr. Stevens's book is to be warmly welcomed and cordially commended because, with perhaps too great erudition, it sets forth this fundamental truth with discriminating clearness and lucid frankness.

The spirit of Dr. Curtis's lectures on the "Christian Faith" is the newer spirit, but the method is a combination of the old and the new methods, the old predominating, and the system of doctrine in no particular differs from the old. The Bible is treated as one book, of practically equal validity in all its parts, and as authority, and apparently final authority, in all matters pertaining to redemption; in miracles God breaks the universal order to contribute to righteousness; the story of the Fall in the third chapter of Genesis is history, though history somewhat poetically portrayed; death is a penalty for sin, and characterizes the whole animate creation because the world is set apart as the habitation of sinful beings-an explanation which makes no account of the fact that death as a phenomenon is not confined to this world; the object of the death of Christ was to propitiate God and was as effectual in changing his attitude toward man as it has been effectual in changing man's attitude toward God. The author's prefatory note leads us to expect a new, unscholastic, human method of dealing with theology: "I want to see, and then help you to see, a real man's real life-not to be caught and held fast by the conventional estimate, not to be swept away by the scientific tendency, but to see myself a real man's real life." But the promise of this sentence is not fulfilled. There is but little analysis or interpretation of human experience. After the First Part the method of the author is largely textual, and when not that, then metaphysical, It is true that

there are suggestive attempts to pour into the old dogmas a more human and vital meaning, or to give to them a more human and vital interpretation, than formerly belonged to them: as in the definition of the Bible "as a sort of Christian memory to hold, and keep real to us, all that has taken place in our inner life;" or in the fine description of death as God taking man at his word by imposing on him the isolation of that hour: "Death says to the sinner, 'You would not obey God, you would not love your fellow-men, you lived for self, you wanted only self—THEN TAKE IT!" But these attempts leave on our mind the increased conviction that the experience of the world has outgrown the philosophy of the schools, and that he who follows the clue which Dr. Curtis puts into the hand of his reader but does not follow, the clue of a real man's

real life, will inevitably be led by it away from belief in an infallible Bible, in a series of breaks in the physical order for moral purposes, in incarnation as an episode, stupendous but still an episode, and in a propitiatory sacrifice to change the heart of God, and toward a philosophy which will make the Bible the type of a universal but always and necessarily fragmentary revelation; miracle as an extraordinary manifestation of an always manifested God; incarnation as the supreme type of man's true relation to his Father and therefore the supreme revelation of the Father to his children ; and the sacrifice of Christ as an interpretation in history of what Dr. Stevens has well called an Eternal Atonement, an atonement not made by a sacrifice offered by man or for man to propitiate God, but by God and for God to save, ransom, redeem, and perfect man.

A

RCHBISHOP LEIGHTON'S remark that the best knowledge of things lies in a knowledge of their causes has a special application to historical knowledge. To know what events have occurred is not enough to make experience instructive; one needs to know why they occurred. But the causes of historical events are sometimes long in coming to light: hence the writing of contemporary history in its true. sequence of cause and effect is a work of peculiar difficulty even for so well informed a writer as Dr. J. Holland Rose. When luminously done, as by him, it yields peculiar satisfaction to the reader who finds in it an interpretation of events that have passed before his eyes. The making of the more important States of Continental Europe what they are to-day is Dr. Rose's theme.

In this

process the motor forces were supplied by the twin spirits of Democracy and Nationalism, born in revolution and war a century before. The greatest triumph of the latter, indeed the greatest political

The Development of the European Nations. By John Holland Rose. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. vols. $5.

event of the century, was the unification of Germany, secured at the psychological moment by the war of 1870 with France. Among the causes of that momentous conflict, whose stages are here critically studied and illustrated, the most effective appear to have been the inflammatory journalists of Paris and Berlin-a sobering caution to us against the use of red ink in international discussions. As to Bismarck's responsibility, Dr. Rose absolves him. He certainly desired the war as the means to give birth to the Empire. But his claim to have fired the mine by giving to the press an "edited" version of the King's telegram is not borne out by a comparison of the two versions, and Dr. Rose, who differs here from most writers, sets it aside as "the offspring of senile vanity."

The thirty years' story of the German Empire and of the founding of the French Republic, both born in the same collision of folly with statesmanship, occupies several chapters with a luminous sketch of the prominent features of each, in which the protectionism and State Socialism of Germany possess a special interest for us.

The scene then

shifts to the Eastern question, and its diplomatic, military, and political developments. How the Turk's intolerable treatment of his Christian subjects has ever found a serviceable shield in the timorous and cynical selfishness of the Christian Powers, and how this has even strengthened his throne, is clearly exhibited. Dr. Rose cites the highest authority for attributing to the British Cabinet the Sultan's venturing on war with Russia in 1877 rather than yield to pacific pressure on behalf of his outraged Christian subjects. Both for British and for broadly human interests Lord Beaconsfield's policy during the critical years 1875-77 appears now to have been unfortunate. The RussoTurkish war in 1877, to whose strategic movements Dr. Rose devotes a chapter, brought the Russian army and the British fleet into menacing nearness at Constantinople, and Europe trembled on the brink of a great conflict. The Treaty of Berlin, then forced upon Russia by the European Concert, gave promise of substantial relief to the Christian sub

jects of the Sultan. How far the prom

ise was fulfilled the hideous massacres in Armenia and the atrocious misgovernment of Macedonia have shown to the disgrace of Christian Europe. Deeper shame, as Dr. Rose affirms, falls upon Great Britain, who assumed, together with dominion over Cyprus, responsibility for securing justice to Christians in Turkish Asia. The chapter on "The Making of Bulgaria" shows Turkey rather than Russia to have been the

gainer in the end through the creation of the buffer States of Bulgaria and Rumania between her and the colossus of the north.

But for Russia "the outcome of the war was Nihilism." The misery inflicted on her armies by incompetence and fraud, and the exasperation of the national spirit by the humiliating Treaty of Berlin, found vengeful vent in the beginnings of that revolutionary movement which the disastrous war with Japan has brought to its frightful culmination. To this subject Dr. Rose devotes his final chapter, "Nihilism and Absolutism in Russia,' pausing on the verge of the catastrophe to show the operation of the reactionary forces that delayed it, and, as we now see, intensified it.

Until the private papers of great personages and state documents now locked up shall come to light, the sources of history used by Dr. Rose can hardly be enlarged. The reader cannot fail to see in his work the hand of a careful and sympathetic student of the struggle of nations toward the realization of their ideals. Nor will any American dissent from his conviction that "it is the special glory of the nineteenth century that races which had hitherto lain helpless and well-nigh dead rose to manhood as if by magic, and shed their blood like water in the effort to secure a free and unfettered existence both for the individual and the nation." But the effort is still short of the goal, and the twentieth century looks forward with mingled fear and hope.

biographical. The author, Mr. John T. Hume, was one of the Garrisonian Abolitionists. In his boyhood he served as conductor on the "underground railroad." During the Civil War he was a leader among the Missouri radicals, and chairman of their delegation which opposed Mr. Lincoln's renomination by the Convention of 1864. Mr. Hume still entertains the dissatisfaction which the radical wing of the Unionists, East and West, felt with Mr. Lincoln's cautious attitude toward emancipation. His long life includes the early history of the great struggle for human rights, when abolitionists were accounted lawful game for mobs. names of its heroes and heroines, and the tribulations they fought through, find record in his pages. (G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. $1.25, net.)

The

This volume by Charles Gibson Among is an informal story, with abunFrench Inns dant illustration, of a pilgrimage to localities in rural France which the pilgrims selected because of their representative historical or picturesque aspects. They devoted several summers or portions of summers to excursions and visits, and not only looked at the country with the eyes, but studied its history and worked up its legends. Special attention was naturally given to the Inns as the centers from which interesting excursions were made, and residence in these hostelries made it possible to acquire something of the atmosphere of the different localities. The result is a substantial volume which might well serve as a guide to travelers eager to get off the beaten tracks and to see France in its most characteristic features; and is also a very readable and interesting volume, taking one through parts of Normandy, Brittany, Touraine, sections of southern France, and ending in the Forest of Fontainebleau. Fact and fancy in the shape of observation, history, and legend are happily interwoven with personal incidents and experiences; while the illustrations are well chosen to present both the architecture and the scenery of the localities visited. (L. C. Page & Co., Boston. $1.60, net.)

The publishers are strictly withThe Basses in the facts in saying of this work that from an artistic standpoint the book is a notable contribution to the literature of sport, and the authors' names are an

abundant guarantee of the accuracy and interest of the text. The volume is edited and illustrated by Louis Rhead, and contains chapters by the editor as well as by William C. Harris, Tarleton H. Bean, and others. Marine and fresh-water basses are discussed in all their varieties, and while the volume is mainly intended for the fisherman, the natural history side has not been forgotten. There are both colored and black-and-white pictures in abundance.

Among all the great composers Brahms none is more worth knowing than J. Laurence Erb affords an admirable introJohannes Brahms. This volume by Mr. duction to him. Indeed, it is useful to those who already have made acquaintance with this towering figure among modern musicians. Although it is written without any great distinction of style, it is decidedly readable. Like other volumes in this series of "The Master Musicians," it is divided into three parts, Biographical, The Man, and The Musician. The first part is characterized by straightforward narrative, which, though brief, is evidently not dependent on secondary sources; the second is characterized by anecdotes as well as by descriptions of Brahms, and is a good bit of portraiture; the third, a critical estimate of Brahms's music and his artistic ideals, is sane and fair, freely according space to Brahms's severest critics as well as to his most appreciative advocates. In the midst of the turmoil and restlessness of the present prevailing school of music and the self-consciousness of most modern composers it is refreshing to turn to this great personality whose modest wholesomeness stamped every note of his compositions, even the most dramatic, with sincerity and partly explains their serene majesty. (E. P. Dutton & Co., New York. $1.25.)