never be satisfied. . . . Negative philosophies may for a time prevail; but they cannot ultimately suppress the soul, or stifle vivid intuitions which flash up from its depth and witness to its celestial origin' (pp. 87, 90f). He asks whether Wordsworth's poetry 'would have been possible if he had not apprehended behind the natural and moral universe the ever-during power' of a Divine presence (p. 89). Once more, after referring to types of poetry which represent inadequate ideals, he says that no devotion to friendship, to country, to humanity, can by itself withstand the shock of circumstance, unless it is secured on a spiritual anchorage.' But the poet who has himself laid hold on the spiritual world' can 'set before men . . . an ideal which is real, an object . . . for the affections, the conscience, the spirit, for the whole of man. . . . His voice is a continual reminder that, whether we think of it or not, the celestial mountains are before us, and thither lies our true destiny. And he is the highest poet who keeps this view most steadily before himself, and by the beauty of his singing, wakens others to a sense of it' (p. 92). The same moral estimate of his subject appears in the lecture on Shelley : 'Was Shelley's revolt only against the conventional morality of his own time, and not rather against the fundamental morality of all time? . . . Shelley may be the prophet of a new morality; but it is one which never can be realized till moral law has been obliterated from the universe, and conscience from the heart of man. . . . It has been said' (by Arnold) 'that before an insoluble mystery clearly seen to be insoluble, the soul bows down and is at rest . . . Shelley knew nothing of this. . . . Before nothing would his soul bow down. . . . There is in him a profane audacity, an utter awelessness. While a soul owns no law, is without awe, lives wholly by impulse, what rest, what central peace, is possible for it? when the ardours of emotion have died down, what remains for it, but weakness, exhaustion, despair? The feeling of his weakness awoke in Shelley no brokenness of spirit, no self-abasement, no reverence Such a belief, or rather no belief, as his can engender only infinite sadness, infinite despair; and this is the deep undertone of all Shelley's poetry' (pp. 231, 234, 254). It is characteristic of Professor Shairp to dwell affectionately and sympathizingly on Virgil as a man of tender and devout soul, retaining his faith in a supernatural world amid surroundings and influences which made other men worldlings or atheists. We are made to see him clinging, for his soul's sake, to old religious traditions, making the best use he VOL. XIV.NO. XXVIII. X could of them, although he felt that their strength was dying out; softening the roughness of the old mythology, stretching out his hands to whatever varied forms of religious language might give him a little support, or witness at all for the one supreme Pronoia;' humbly accepting the severer aspect of life as disciplinary in its intention; content to let his hero seem vapid and spiritless if he can make him represent a many-sided 'piety;' sternly enforcing the awful idea of judgment in the next world for deeds done in the present; singularly pure in feeling when society was steeped in foulness; loathing 'the guilty madness of battle;' exceptionally indifferent to pomps and vanities; mournfully sensitive as to what another great rural poet calls 'man's inhumanity to man;' unique among ancient singers in his 'tender expression' of the pathos of human life, and of the most humane sentiment of the old world which Christianity took up and carried on into the new.' 'Taking all these qualities of Virgil together, . . . in him it may be said that the ancient civilization reached its moral culmination. Here was at least one spirit who lived and died in faith, and kept himself unspotted from the world' (p. 191). In this lecture, also, a passage on the natural and the human mediums for approaching the idea of God is a condensation of about six magnificent pages in Dr. Mozley's essay on Blanco White,1 a few words of which are quoted, as the Professor's manner is, within inverted commas, but without reference (p. 174). Although Scott cannot be called, as Principal Shairp in the Studies calls Wordsworth, a 'native champion of spiritual truth,' he is claimed by Mr. Keble as exhibiting tendencies, which were never fully developed, towards Church religion,2 and by Mr. Keble's present successor as having ‘turned the tide' against the Illuminism of the eighteenth century, and 'poured in full flood on the heart of European society' the reviving sentiment of affection for the past' (p. 105). A whole lecture is devoted to 'the Homeric spirit' in Scott; Wordsworth's beautiful description of him as 'the whole world's darling' is twice quoted (p. 108, 325), and his ‘wonderful human-heartedness and winsome naturalness' are touched upon with the warmth of such love as few poets have so widely inspired (pp. 108, 127). We must pass by several interesting chapters as furnishing 1 Mozley's Essays, ii. 112 ff. 2 Keble's Occasional Papers, p. 68. less illustration of those characteristics of Principal Shairp's writings on which we have thought it opportune to dwell. He devotes two lectures to two prose poets,' Thomas Carlyle and Cardinal Newman; and in regard to the former, he shows how that idolatry of 'strong men,' apart from all questions as to their moral standing, which is the moral blot of Carlylism, resulted from the pantheism which scorned to associate character, in the full sense, with the unnameable centre of things,' conceived as an inscrutable, inexorable Power. One who had given up, if he ever deliberately held, the faith in a living, personal, and all-good God, and practically substituted for Him a mere Will or Force, would naturally take a one-sided estimate of the heroic' in man, and dispense with goodness where he could admire intensity. On this view, 'the strong intellect and the strong will are an emanation from the central force of the universe, and as such have a right to rule' (p. 430). Yet, withal, Carlyle was 'a prophet of the soul in man. He asserted, with all the strength that was in him, and in every variety of form, the reality of man's spiritual nature in opposition to all the materialisms that threatened to crush it. . . . He maintained the spiritual and dynamic forces in man as against the mechanical. While so many, listening to the host of materializing teachers, are always succumbing to the visible, and selling their birthright for the mess of pottage which this world offers, Carlyle's voice appealed from these to a higher tribunal' (p. 422). We have already quoted one of several passages in which Professor Shairp draws out and interprets the deep sweet force of Dr. Newman's sermons. In the fifteenth chapter he speaks of the Cardinal as 'still remaining among us, in beautiful and revered old age.' He refers to some of the poems in the Lyra Apostolica, e.g. the 'few impressive lines on the "Call of David," rendering in a brief page of verse the whole outline of that wonderful life;' and points out the 'condensed severity of the lines entitled "Deeds, not Words.”› We can well suppose that he would agree with us in regard to the high poetic power of 'Chastisement,'' Hidden Saints,' 'the Course of Truth,' and 'Patriarchal Faith.' He just alludes to the 'Dream of Gerontius,' but hastens on to the Parochial Sermons in which their author 'spoke out the truths which were within him with the fervour of a prophet and the severe beauty of a poet;' even as he had said in his Studies, High poems they were, as of an inspired singer, or outpourings of a prophet, rapt yet self-possessed.' He describes Newman as 'laying the most gentle yet penetrating finger on the very core of things, reading to men their own most secret thoughts better than they knew them themselves' (p. 444), as he had said before that 'the sermons and other writings of Dr. Newman have shown what capacities the English language possesses of insinuating its tendrils into the deepest and most recondite veins of thought, as well as into the tenderest sentiment by which any spirit of man is visited' (p. 143). He notices the 'intense idealism' which persisted in looking beyond the visible to the invisible, and believed that in the latter was truest reality; the sense of a mystery brooding over human life, and over the life of dumb animals; the resolution to 'introduce some iron into the blood' of a popular and easy-going religion; the momentary pathetic glimpses of a 'very tender heart that had a burden of its own;' and in connection with them he says most truly that the passages which thus hint or indicate such secrets are 'what all high poetry is said to be, at once a revelation and a veil' (p. 455). Well This is enough, and more than enough, to illustrate what we said at the beginning as to the stores of timely teaching which the reader will find in the writings of Professor Shairp. We hope that he will give us more of the same kind. The age wants all that it can get from teachers like him. would it be if many of the young minds to which he has spoken at Oxford or at St. Andrews would retain unimpaired, through the strife of tongues and the stress of engrossing occupation, and amid all the materializing influences which are in the air that they must breathe, an impression of that grave, gentle, yet urgent testimony for the reality of man's spiritual being, for the supremacy of the moral over the material order, for the belief,' as he himself words it, 'that this world is but the vestibule of an eternal state,' for 'the thought of Him in whom man lives here, and shall live for ever.' 1 Probably some of his hearers may for a time become agnostics, or mere culturists, or mere scientists; and yet this may not be the end. The Eternal Lover of souls is mercifully active in 'devising means whereby His banished be not expelled from Him.' Life is a great teacher, and some of its lessons may, all unexpectedly, make dreams and realities change places. Old lights may be rekindled, old truths reassert their vitality; and a learner in this school, having found what this world can do for him and what it cannot, may bethink himself of what he heard, long years before, from one who was no 'clerical zealot,' no 'hard dogmatist,' no 'conventional moralizer,' but knew how to speak from largeness of heart Aspects of Poetry, p. 78. 1 a word in season to him that was weary, and help him to recognize the heights and depths, the needs and the capacities, of his own mysterious being, to believe effectively in man, and so to believe adoringly in God. ART. IV. DR. CYRIACUS' ECCLESIASTICAL Ἐκκλησιαστικὴ Ἱστορία ἀπὸ τῆς ἱδρύσεως τῆς Ἐκκλησίας μέχρι τῶν καθ ̓ ἡμᾶς χρόνων. Ἐκ διαφόρων πηγῶν ἐρανισθεῖσα ὑπὸ 'Α. Διομήδους Κυριακού, Δ. Φ. καὶ καθηγητοῦ τῆς Θεολογίας ἐν τῷ ἐθνικῷ Πανεπιστημίῳ. [Εν Αθήναις ἐκ τοῦ τυπογραφείου Χ. Ν. Φιλαδελφέως, 1881. τόμος πρῶτος, pp. 400 ; τόμος δεύτερος, pp. 584]. THIS is the most important book that has appeared in the Oriental Church for the last thousand years. It is important as a sign and as a means: as a sign because it indicates that life-literary life, ecclesiastical life, theological life, religious life has come back to the Church which was so nearly crushed to death under the pitiless heel of Mohammedan oppression; as a means, because it is the historical method above all others that is needed by Oriental Churchmen in order to show them what was, and what was not, the doctrine taught and held, and the discipline exercised, in those primitive ages to which they, as we, look back as the best guide and interpreter of revelation when revelation requires interpretation. sors. The vast gap which intervenes between the early Greek historians and Professor Cyriacus is most significant. Eusebius, Socrates, Sozomen, Theodoret, Theodore, Evagrius are household names with us. They lived in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries; and even in the sixth century Theodore had begun the system of epitomizing the works of his predecesAfter Evagrius twelve hundred years pass away without the appearance of one Greek ecclesiastical historian worthy of the name, unless we should except Nicephorus Callistus, whose probable date is the fourteenth century. It is true that ecclesiastical history may be gathered from the Byzantine historians, who wrote from the year 500 to 1500; but their works are primarily political or civil, and only touch on Church matters because the Church was so closely bound up with the later Byzantine Empire. From Nicephorus Callistus to the |