crepancy, and that, if all the circumstances were known to us, the difficulties would entirely disappear." (Page 3.)

If this "firm persuasion could be established in the minds of the readers, the question of the method of solving apparent discrepancies would become little more than a verbal or historical puzzle. When one knows his answer before he begins, the way in which he is to verify it is of secondary importance. But the effort to make everything square with this conviction will, probably, satisfy no one who does not rest the conviction on other than exegetical grounds.

66

Two examples will illustrate the measure of success gained in the application of this principle. The minute difference between Matthew x. 10 and Mark vi. 8, where the former reads "nor staff," and the latter, save a staff only," is thus made to disappear. "It is a sufficient reconciliation of the two directions, if we suppose that our Lord charged his disciples not to encumber themselves with luggage on this brief tour, and so not to provide money or food or garments, mentioning a staff among the things not necessary to be procured; and yet remarked that, if any one had a staff and was accustomed to use it, he might take it with him" (page 42). He naïvely adds that Peter probably had a staff, and therefore took it with him, while some of his less fortunate or provident companions were forbidden to procure any for themselves.

Again, he finds it possible to adopt the view, said to have originated with Casaubon, of reconciling the different reports of the manner of Judas's death, given in Matthew xxvii. 5, and Acts i. 18. "If Judas hung himself from a tree on the precipitous slope of the valley of Hinnom, the breaking of a cord or of a branch might cause him to fall such a distance as to produce the result described by Luke" (page 71).

Is it not more rational, and safer, too, to admit that an inspired writer may have made mistakes, than thus to force passages into harmony? This more rational principle seems to be suggested when the author says: "We learn that the sacred writers were more concerned to give the general sense of utterances which they record than the exact words.” (Page 75.)

Indeed, except in the Gospels, the author seems to find no difficulty in admitting possible errors in the language of inspired men; for example "Such a mistake [the confounding of the purchase of the cave of Machpelah by Abraham, with the parcel of ground at Shechem by Jacob (Acts vii. 16)], could it be demonstrated, need not in the slightest degree disparage the doctrine of the inspiration of the writings of the New Testament." (Page 121.) A similar admission upon a much more important matter is found in the note upon 1 Thes. iv. 13–17. "That the apostles did not know the time of that coming does not in the least disparage their inspired authority in regard to what they declare had been revealed to them. . . . That the apostles should share in the prevailing impression that the time of the Saviour's second coming was very near is not at all strange." (Page 197.)

It would be interesting to know whether Dr. Riggs would apply the same principle in interpreting our Lord's words, as reported by the Evangelists in Matthew xvi. 28, xxiv. 29-35, and elsewhere. Were they mistaken in attributing this "prevailing impression" to the Lord himself, or did he also share in this impression? The real difficulty at this point is not in the Epistles of Paul, but in the records of the Evangelists. William H. Ryder.

AMERICAN RELIGIOUS LEADERS. DR. MUHLENBERG. By WILLIAM WILBERFORCE NEWTON, D. D. Pp. x, 272. Boston and New York: Houghton,

Mifflin & Co. 1890. $1.25.

It has been charged that this biography borrows a good deal from a fuller biography without sufficiently detailed acknowledgment, and also that it is inaccurate in various particulars. We cannot answer as to either of these charges, for or against. But, having had an intimate acquaintance of eleven years with the illustrious subject of the biography (continuing until interrupted by an irreconcilable opposition of judgment on a purely personal question), we can testify that we have here a genuine picture of the noble-hearted man. The scale of presentation is no farther enlarged than is within the right and duty of the biographer of such a man, and the proportions of different parts of the character are, so far as we can judge, well preserved. At least this is true of the three things which may be called the central enterprises of his life, the establishment of the Church of the Holy Communion, the foundation of St. Luke's Hospital, and the authorship of the Memorial for a wider interpretation of the office of the Anglican Episcopate, the fruits of which are ripening fast in England and America. Dr. Muhlenberg's influence on the education of boys, which was strictly confined within the limits of the Episcopal Church, can only be judged by one who has an interior sense of the course of things in this church. In the power which he had of attracting young men to him in an unwavering filial devotion, he reminds one of St. Philip Neri. As with Neri, there flowed through his whole life the winning gladness of a single heart. His circle of discipleship, as well as Philip's, might have been not inappropriately called 66 a school of Christian mirth."

Dr. Muhlenberg used to say that, except one sixteenth of Indian blood (which sometimes, on occasion, would come sharply to the front, giving him very much the look of a high-bred sagamore), he had no blood in his veins but German Lutheran blood, as befitted the great-grandson of the venerable man who organized American Lutheranism. This descent ensured him that sound Protestant heart, which underlay all the ritual, and for awhile the ascetic peculiarities, that were so commonly misinterpreted, but the former of which in fact, as he himself has said, were Lutheran more than Episcopalian, and the latter of which he laid aside. "High Churchman, indeed!" he once scornfully exclaimed. "I own I was once a bit of a Puseyite, but I never was a High Churchman. How could I be, when I did not even accept the foundation doctrine of baptismal regeneration?" Dr. Newton has well interpreted and coördinated these various elements of descent and later connection, which gave Muhlenberg that true irenical influence that enabled him to appropriate all that is best in Catholicism, without ever sounding a doubtful note as to his inmost fidelity to the Reformation, and that in its central sense and in its central seat of Wittenberg. He was ready to drop anything Catholic, were it the Episcopate itself, rather than imperil the credit and power of that great work of 1517, whereby the apostolate of Paul first came to its true interpretation in the Church. And greatly as he valued the Anglican liturgy, he often lamented that it was in such a measure only a purified mass, "that it was not more thoroughly penetrated with the positive influences of the Reformation, with the spirit of Paul," acknowledging, however, that it had crystallized so perfectly in its kind, that a refusion was not to be thought of.

Dr. Muhlenberg valued the weekly celebration of the Eucharist, as is sufficiently attested by the Church of the Holy Communion. But as he grew older, he became more zealous for deeper things. He once remarked that, in an interview with Dr. Pusey, who was then getting old, the latter said that he himself had come to be sorry that what he now conceived to be a disproportionate stress had been laid upon weekly celebrations. Indeed, all these externals came to subtend a smaller angle of vision with Dr. Muhlenberg towards the end. On his return from his last visit to Europe, he spoke pleasantly of an interview he had had with Archbishop Tait, and other church dignitaries. Then, pausing a moment, he added emphatically: "But after all, the man that is doing by far the most good in London is Charles Spurgeon. People have made a great deal more out of some pulpit peculiarities than these deserve, and have exaggerated them besides. Why, to say nothing of all the rest, think of two hundred Bible readers in London maintained by him!" No wonder that a man, who so saw to the heart of things, can be doing so much, after his translation, for Christian union.

His

Dr. Muhlenberg has been called crotchety and fanciful in particular plans. There is something of truth in this. But, a few things apart, which he more or less perfectly accomplished, he was not inordinately attached to his individual schemes. If the great end was realized, he stood quite ready to see his idealizations melt into a better fact. desire was that all the Lord's people might be prophets, and if anything should be revealed to another, he would have been quite ready at any time to hold his peace. Indeed, he was sometimes only too ready to see a prophet or a prophetess where other people saw something very different.

1

Particular schemes and views of Dr. Muhlenberg were often regarded by associates with distaste, but he himself never had occasion to complain of being undervalued. Belonging by birth and descent to the most eminent rank of society, a minister of that church whose social predominance is peculiarly marked in New York, he was never in any serious danger of losing his acknowledged position. Once, indeed, in 1865, after he had read prayers on Easter evening, in the Church of the Ascension, even then draped in mourning for the murder of Abraham Lincoln, while his friend Dr. William Adams preached, as he himself had preached on a Good Friday in his friend's church, there were some mutterings which led him to say: "If I, in my old age, after a life not wholly unserviceable to the Protestant Episcopal Church, am to be thrust out of it, I shall join the Moravians. They are an ancient branch of the Catholic Church, and I could be happy in my last days with them." But of course such mutterings soon died down. Dr. Muhlenberg was never called to go without the camp, except in inward readiness. His vocation, of character and circumstances, was that of broadening the fellowship and raising the aims of the church in which he was baptized and died. He was interested in Christian movements that entailed upon their adherents a breach with old associations, and obloquy from the men of common sense. was interested in the Reformed Episcopal movement, and much more in its antipodes, the Catholic Apostolic movement. Dr. Newton's ungracious and scornful description of the devout and pure-minded men and women, on both sides of the Atlantic, who adhere to this, as "great black insects," 1 If I remember right, Dr. Muhlenberg's sermon in Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church was preached two years previously.

He

burrowing in the dry spring of Edward Irving's genius, is as far as possible from expressing Dr. Muhlenberg's opinion of them. He greatly admired the Catholic Apostolic liturgy, and was disposed to regard it as the noblest in the world. But he had no call, and disobeyed no call, to go beyond the bounds of his birth. In other words, his cast of character was not the apostolic, but a very nobly exalted form of the pastoral, in the breadth of its application closely bordering on the apostolic. The ground-tone of his personal piety was the filial confidence of Lutheranism and the deep reverence of the school of Ken. He loved to recall the words and gesture of noble humility with which a pious monk of Paris, in talking with him, smote upon his breast, exclaiming: "Sum parvulus Christus.' Too broad-minded to have been made, in the day of his prime, a bishop, he is such a saint as would have been at home with Bernard. And of the men of his own day, though he failed to appreciate Frederick Robertson, he exceedingly loved Frederick Maurice, whom he told, after hearing him give a lecture on the fourth Gospel, that he seemed to himself to have been hearing John expounded by John.

ANDOVER.

Charles C. Starbuck.

Edward Burton.

By Henry Woods, author of "Natural Law in the Business World," and Various Ethical and Economic Essays.

"With an early introversion,

Boston, MDCCCXC.

Through the forms of outward things,

Seeking for the subtle essence,

And the hidden springs."

Lee and Shepard, Publishers, 10 Milk Street, next "The Old South Meeting House." New York, Chas. T. Dillingham, 718 and 720 Broadway. Pp. 299. Very agreeably written. The descriptions of natural scenes are fine, and cause us to breathe their very air, whether of the seashore or the mountain. The tone of the novel is really that of a romance, clothed in familiar incidents. And as such a romance lies at the soul of things, the future of the decaying novel, as Justin McCarthy well suggests, is to be sought in this direction. The heroine, Helen Bonbright, by indefinable touches is a nobly idealized but individual type of spiritual womanhood. The other characters (except Lord Percival, who is perfectly drawn) though not without distinctiveness, are mainly person for long, and rather heavy, disquisitions, representing the extravagances of Christian Science. Evil, in spite of all experience, is not real; all disease and suffering are but the externalizations of spirit sinking below its proper level; all attempts to amend the institutions of society are futile, since if you give the spirit a sufficient stimulus these evils will fall off of themselves. All suggestions of economic amendment, from Nihilism to the Single Tax (and logically all legislation that interferes with unbounded selfishness) are merely different aspects of one pernicious Anarchism. Thus, as often before, extravagant Quietism is the ally of Tyranny and Corporate Selfishness. The religion of the book bears the same relation to Christianity as the fantastic fancies of early Gnosticism. God is not a person (though now and again he is spoken of as the Designing Artist) but the environment of Impersonal Good; Love is a natural force, not, in God and Man, the

highest embodiment of consummate Personal Agency; Disease (and apparently Death) is an offense against the supremacy of Spirit: for a reverent trust in a wise Providence we have a quasi-magical incantation of silence and concentration of will, bringing down an impersonal force of Spirit for healing of body and mind: all, after the fashion of Gnostic extravagances, intermixing profound and elevating truths with essentially pagan deformations of them. The spirit of the book is mild and benevolent, and it protests with force against much of our materialistic Christianity, our compromises of worldliness with the gospel, which in form are nearer but in fact are farther from Christianity than the most fantastic theories that keep spiritual interests uppermost.

Marion Graham, or "Higher than Happiness." By Meta Lander, author of "The Broken Bud," "Light on the Dark River," "The Tobacco Problem," etc. Boston, MDCCCXC. Lee and Shepard, Publishers, 10 Milk Street, next "The Old South Meeting House." New York, Chas. T. Dillingham, 718 and 720 Broadway. Pp. 486. — This not being a first publication, but a revision, we have only occasion to speak of the purpose of this, which the author explains as being "without impairing its unity, to bring it into closer touch with modern thinking and feeling." Her conception of modern thinking is shown by the additions to be this, that theories which cross the uniqueness of Christ's place in God's universe must be allowed to shrivel up and shrink away in the light of his redemptive presence. Therefore the distinguished daughter of Dr. Leonard Woods takes her place (believing, as she has a right, that she does this in a legitimate development of thought) by the side of those who hold that there is but one canon of final judgment for all men, the apprehended character and office of Jesus Christ, known in this world or first revealed in the next. She thus firmly, and through the medium of a powerfully written story, very effectively opposes herself to the present ravages of rationalism among the Congregational churches.

author of

Memoirs of a Millionaire. By Lucie True Ames, "Great Thoughts for Little Thinkers." Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company, 1889. Pp. 325. $1.25. -The numerous plans which the heroine of this book put in motion for disposing of the thirty millions that a rejected admirer is supposed to have left her, are admirably various, and seem to be admirably judicious, and studied out into effective elaborations of detail. The story is mainly the framework of this, but is romantic and noble and the opposite of mawkish. The theology is heterodox, and shows a decided inclination to drift, until it anchors to the solid rock of Dr. William T. Harris's admirable philosophy.

To one point we take exception. The heroine declares herself to be an adherent of "The New Theology." Now this name has been, by endless discussions over Andover, which she has not provoked, so united to her theology, that, as Mildred certainly diverges incompatibly from this, we are of opinion that the Seminary might go into court and maintain a suit for violation of its trade-mark. Therefore, unless the heroine has left the author one or two of her millions, let the latter tremble and make amends.