Moines, Springfield, and New York, if due weight be given to the facts that at Des Moines there was adopted not a theological proposition, but only a cautionary rule, and that the action at Springfield is controlled by that at New York, and especially if the Committee realizes that the scope of its examination is defined and limited by the phrase of the Manual, "the leading doctrines of Scripture commonly held by the churches sustaining the Board." If it attempts to create a standard of examination and not simply to ascertain what standard the churches recognize and apply, it will commit the error which has compelled the Board to make “a radical change" in the long established method of examination, and protract a controversy which there is opportunity now finally and happily to close.

We may be pardoned for adding a word more personal to ourselves. It was from an intimate knowledge of the facts, and a clear conviction that the best interests of the Board were imperiled, that we entered with others on that criticism of its administration which has brought about the present result. It was a painful task, and has brought its share of reproach and alienation of feeling. We allude to this but for one reason. The result reached by the Investigating Committee rested upon a digest or collection of documents and testimonies which is in existence, though not published, and which compelled the assent of every member of the Committee to such a degree that all saw a change of method to be imperative. We have good reason to affirm that this body of evidence in the hands of the Committee more than justifies the criticism in which we have been compelled to participate. The facts are as we have again and again stated them, only more abundantly and cumulatively. The full knowledge of this evidence brought the Committee to unanimity. Directly or indirectly it revolutionized the action of the Board. Will not those brethren who have censured us in the past for the course we have taken, and to whose good-will we have not been indifferent, though under constraint to a higher law, reconsider their judgments, as we certainly desire to do our own if in any respect we have been led astray? And if in this editorial we have dwelt on matters which give occasion rather for words of serious suggestion than of congratulation, compliment, and easy assurance of peace and good-will, will they not credit us at least with a supreme desire to see the American Board rise to its great opportunity and organize in a large, free, catholic way the missionary spirit of our Congregational churches, and enlist to the full the energies of consecrated young men and women in our higher institutions of learning? It is our assured conviction that an immense expansion of missionary endeavor simply waits for the call of a masterly leadership.

LETTERS AND LIFE.

This Department of the "Review" is under the editorial care of Professor A. S. HARDY.

No student or even reader of the world's literature can afford to despise the world's traditions about its great books. Yet the function of tradition is rather to lead us into a state of mind open to the best influences than to govern our conclusions. For we stand personally, and therefore variously, related to the great inspirers and interpreters of humanity. We do not always derive the pleasure or the benefit we expected from one whom tradition has canonized. Many considerations which go to make up the general estimate of time have little weight with the individual, and on the other hand the individual has moods which the consensus of the ages neglects. The world has finished its childhood, and rates accordingly the nurses who once amused it with rattles and the tutors who first awakened its sense of right and beauty. But the individual, ever passing through experiences which the world has outlived, is in need of what that graybeard who has lost the privilege of being amused often terms "toys." His canons and his verdicts alter with his point of view, that is, with his necessities, running now behind, now ahead, of the slowly changing findings of the race.

Every earnest reader, following out in literature, as he must, the Pauline injunction, “Prove all things," has butted against the stone tablets on which is written the calendar of literary greatness. He finds there the name of one who said wise things to his contemporaries, but who has no wisdom for him; of one who uttered ten great thoughts and ten thousand commonplace ones; of one whose importance is not absolute, but only that of a historical sequence; and he misses another, great in relation to him though not in relation to the ages, who speaks with all the fascination and power due to a common experience or temperament. Discriminations between literature of incidental and permanent value, between that which constitutes the enduring fountains of inspiration and that which affords a passing but real pleasure, between that worth reading and that worth imitating, will not and can not affect the selection of his library, as they must that of the hundred great books of the world. I, the man of leisure, will follow with delight the curious speculations of the Greek physicist; you, the busy practical man, will wonder how what has no bearing upon modern life can detain me. You, in the passage through some spiritual experience, will find sympathy and consolation, where I, in the arrogance of a temporary excess of mental health and vigor, see only morbidity and sentimentalism. In literature, as in food, there are fundamental elements of nutrition; but it does not follow that you and I will thrive on the same compounds or stomach the same sauces, and neither can prescribe a universal bill of fare for his fellows.

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Then again, while we may leave the experiment which establishes the law of falling bodies to another, accepting the result without repeating the experiment, we can no more adopt at second hand an estimate, say of Tolstoi, than we can impose our own upon another. Intelligent affirmation concerning him implies a personal knowledge which is not to be obtained in literature, as in science, by proxy. It is refreshing to hear Professor Max Müller say: "If I were to tell you what I think of the best books, I am afraid you would call me the greatest literary heretic or an utter ignoramus. I know few books, if any, which I would call good from beginning to end. There are long passages even in Homer which seem to me extremely tedious, . . . and again I must confess that not a few of Goethe's writings seem to me not worth a second reading," freshing because such words reaffirm the independence and personality of literary judgments, and assert our right, after actual test, to the principle of selection. There are of course readers who seem to possess no organs of literary taste or digestion, since they are daily seen to swallow a Homer or a Goethe en masse without harm or profit. But to any one who reads in order, as Emerson somewhere says, to be better able to drive his own team, Professor Müller's words come with a fortifying approval. If we do not ourselves dare to utter such, it is not because we waive the right, or fear to be challenged to produce an Iliad, but because we distrust, as Professor Müller evidently did, the value to others of our own conclusions. Much, I take it, of the interest and value of literary criticism depends upon our knowledge of the critic, and of his point of view. We must know something of the mood which he brings to the judgment of the Iliad. Is he interested in it as a record of ancient faith and customs? or is he seeking in this storehouse of things forgotten the eternal laws of right and beauty? Is his vision limited to the strength and purity of a language? or is his ear listening only to the solemn music of the epic? Except as we know whether it is studied as the mirror of an epoch, as the song of a poet, or as the crude but splendid symbolism of eternal verities, the criticism can profit us but little. Short, arbitrary, unsigned dicta about books resemble the "I like it," or, "I don't like it," pronounced over a dish at table. One is ignorant whether the speaker is an epicure or a glutton. Emerson's essay on books is valuable because it is signed by Emerson, and because he is the honest recorder of a personal endeavor to determine what help for him was to be found in the traditionally great helpers of humanity, and is not generalizing individual experience into universal rules. Criticism which, so doing, lapses into dogmatism, may please if we agree with it, is apt to irritate if we dissent from it, and in neither case is very helpful.

After quoting the above words of Professor Müller, Mr. Howells expresses a hope for an edition of the British classics "reduced and exalted by the rejection of what is dull and indecent in them," the reading of

which will justify the feeling that one "knows English literature and is none the worse for it." Whereas it seems to us that Professor Müller's whole contention is for the right of personal test, and that while after reading such an edition as Mr. Howells suggests one might be none the worse, one could not be much the better. It is not necessary to drink all the dregs of life in order to attain a vigorous manhood; yet, as Sydney says, "all is but lip-wisdom which wants experience." Dullness and indecency is to be eschewed in literature as in life; but after allowing all due weight to the counsel and guidance of those who have gone before us, the winnowing must be done chiefly by ourselves and not altogether for us. The evolution of character is a process which we watch with solicitude; yet not even our solicitude will drive us to a system of education which seeks to remove from life all its temptations and regrets, all the sources of strength found in self-endeavor. So the formation of a sturdy literary judgment follows the same lines of self-selection. If Professor Müller's words mean anything, they mean that no one can finally separate the true from the false, or even the interesting from the tedious. As long as one may rightfully occupy so many different points of view in estimating an author, as long as we must come to him with such various needs, so long unity of thinking in criticism will be as far off as in speculative theology, and is not to be secured by bulls prescribing what is worth a second reading, or auto-da-fés of what is not. For if, in its literature, as in all else, our world is one of good and evil, ever since the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of it was first tasted, our salvation is worked out by the help of this very knowledge, that is by self-experiA literary Eden is a pleasant dream, but under the conditions of life as it now is, we must read the pages not worth reading in order to know rightly those which are. The digestion of Goethe is like that of a food whose nutritive elements are secreted simultaneously with the process of elimination. It would not be difficult to frame an argument for such food-preparations as would save our organs all trouble, and in diseased conditions such preparations have their value. But for a daily diet under normal conditions, collections of " gems of thought" are apt to prove as nauseating as concentrated essences. Something of the vitalizing principle is found in the very correlation of the nutritious and the worthless, and growth in every direction is conditioned by the actual exercise of our faculties of selection and discrimination. Mr. Howells cannot certainly be serious in saying that "the time will come when an ultimate Sir John Lubbock will set down for us a list of the best hundred pieces instead of the best hundred books." The Standard Readers may subserve some good ends for the children we are so often reminded we once were, but the grown people we are now certified to be will continue to prefer the unabridged though "unwieldy immortals " to the reduced and exalted edition of them, for much the same reason that they prefer a steak to a concentrated beef extract. Helpful as criticism has often

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been to us, we are quite sure, from the dismal failures of past effort in this direction, that the rejection of what is dull and indecent in literature would not leave us all that is worth reading, or, more exactly, would not find us in a condition to appreciate it. When we all respond to the same call, swim in the same currents, and obey the same winds, standards of universal application may appear for what is true and beautiful and interesting in literature. Meanwhile the ultimate Sir John Lubbock is a long way off, and the hundred pieces, even more than the hundred books, affront our power of choice and belittle our judgment.

The suggestion of a "reduced and exalted" edition of our authors reminds us also that books, like men, are instinct with personality. We may often wish that both were better, and there are cases where the elimination of a passage from one or a trait from the other would improve the original. But the use of the editorial scissors is generally as disastrous in its results as the moulding of a nature to our pattern. When A. has been made over and adjusted to B.'s standard, A. has disappeared. We love our favorite authors and friends as they are, not because we cannot discover room for improvement, not because we do not desire improvement, but because such must come from within as the voluntary response to external influences, and not vi et armis. The critic may use the pen to our profit; give him free use of the knife and he kills the subject. A shelf of expurgated and amended volumes would be the grave of our friends.

Literature is a life. We must know it face to face, else it is but a pale shadow. The sense of superiority which would dictate our reading, if genuine, owes its genuineness to that from which it seeks to with

THE most obviously important event in the history of Protestant missions in China for the last year is the Shanghai Conference. There had been but one previous general conference of Protestant missionaries in China. This was held in 1877, and was attended by 129 missionaries. The Shanghai Conference, which met in May last, from the 6th to the 20th, was composed of 432 missionaries, male and female, both sexes enjoying equal rights of deliberation and suffrage. Forty-two of the fortythree missionary organizations were represented in the Conference, besides the attendance of some independent missionaries, and of some. twenty delegates from England and America. On account of this hetero