The Master of the Magicians. By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and Herbert D. Ward.

"The man the son of his God,

Like heaven may he be pure!

Like the midst of heaven may he shine!"

BABYLONIAN INCANTATION.

Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Company. 1890. Pp. 324. This book is bathed in the sun of Babylon. The characters are defined with an answering distinctness. They have classic self-restraint of delineation, without classic coldness. The book is a singular delight to read, from beginning to end. The view of Babylonian life is, we know, as good as drawn at first-hand, so that we repose in confidence as we read. The narrative, it is true, does not give us the impression of bringing us very near to Babylonian thought, but that could not be expected. Even Ebers hardly gives us that confidence with regard to Egypt. And coming through what may be called an apocryphal book of the Canon, and treating its statements as strictly historical, it probably lands us a good way off from the actual events. But it is a beautiful and noble work of perfect art, its religion and its love alike of the finest grain.

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Myths and Folk-lore of Ireland. By Jeremiah Curtin. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. 1890. — This is deliciously Irish. The old Aryan stories are differentiated so completely in it that, like the Irish language itself, they hardly seem Aryan. But they are most unmistakably Hibernian, and a good many of them, so far as our scant knowledge of folk-lore goes, Hibernian only. Here we have Cinderella as completely reaccommodated to Erin as if she had never set that delicate foot of hers in any coracle that should convey her beyond it. And all the other Cinderellas seem very commonplace alongside of her. The subtle and fantastic Celtic idealism is poured over all the stories. Is that now really Celtic, or does it belong to the douce petite race escuarienne among which, Professor Sayce declares, the great blond Celts were merely a conquering colony? It appears equally in the Welsh legends, but is there more delicate, and less humorous, which complicates the inquiry.

The titles alone are as good as a story: "The King of Erin and the Queen of the Lonesome Island"; "The Three Daughters of the King of the East and the Son of a King in Erin"; "The Three Daughters of King O'Hara "; and above all, "The Shee an Gannon and the Gruagach Gaire"! The localizations, as Mr. Curtin remarks, are very distinctive of these Irish myths.

The extended introduction is very interesting, and might well have been longer. The author attacks the "disease of language" theory as mistaking an eddy for the current.

The double hues of green in the binding look much better in place there than when flaunting on American public buildings, where only our sneaking cowardice before the Irish vote suffers this alien color to be.

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Articles on Romanism. Monsignor Capel: Dr. Littledale. By the Reverend John Henry Hopkins, S. T. D. New York: Thomas Whittaker, 2 & 3 Bible House. 1890. Pp. 200. $1.00. This little book is not of much use to Protestants, but will doubtless be very acceptable to Episcopalian sacerdotalists. As we understand the author, he holds that our Lord's prohibitions of the assumption of dominion and superior

ity are not addressed to his disciples at large, but only mean that the Apostles are to acknowledge each other as brethren. He says expressly, that the kingdom was given to the Apostles. We have therefore from Christ no precepts against unbrotherly lordliness in his church, but merely a political constitution, that the Kingdom is to be under the delegated dominion of a Collegiate Aristocracy, and not of a Viceroyalty. A very important matter, truly, for the body of believers! But sacerdotalists, of course, scorn the Christian consciousness where it would abate the pretensions of their system. If they were Congregational divines, slashing away against the disciples of John Robinson, they could not have a greater horror of it.

The learning is of the cheap and easy kind, as is the American fashion when Roman Catholic matters are in question. The author, on two vital points, falls into grief rather funnily, the mortification appertaining, of course, to him, and the enjoyment of it to those that are wicked enough to take it. One occasion is when he quotes Thomas Aquinas in triumph to prove that the secession of a bishop from Rome takes away none of his attributes, and afterwards discovers that Aquinas makes a profoundly important exception. One would think that a churchman of the author's pretensions might at least have picked up enough knowledge of the system which he is pommeling to be aware that of the seven sacraments jurisdiction is held to be a condition of validity with two, but above all with the great sacrament of Penance. And it will never do to assume a divergence from Aquinas without verifying it. The other instance is where he talks as if Monsignor Capel did not know what he was saying in conceding the abstract possibility of Anglican orders and denying that of an Anglican mission, discovering afterwards that mission is merely another side of jurisdiction. But in both cases he is man enough to give the retraction alongside of the blunder.

The writer's quotations from the Fathers cut up Ultramontanism pretty thoroughly by the roots. Some are specially valuable, those which show other bishops receiving the very predicates which we are accustomed to think of as peculiar to Rome. But they leave it none the less true, that the logical development of ancient Catholicism is modern Romanism. Rome is the mother of Catholicism, and Rome, like Saturn, is fated to devour her own offspring, and to devour it for good. If these sacerdotalists imagine that they can overthrow the Papal despotism and then restore the Cyprianic despotism, let them try the experiment. Many a one has tried it before them, and has at last been only too glad to become a learner under the great mistress of priestcraft, the Woman of the Seven Hills.

The author's dapper confidence that bishops are apostles is very entertaining. Also his certainty that never in the church was a presbyter competent to ordain. Compare with this the candor of the profound ecclesiastical scholar, Principal Gore, who is content to say, "that it is not proved-nay, it is not even perhaps probable that any presbyter had in any age the power to ordain." But knowledge, it is true, is often a very inconvenient thing, in clipping the wings of a saucy confidence.

The author boasts that Protestants. from whom, of course, he proudly distinguishes himself are evidently drawing towards the Church. If he imagines that because a greater favor than in contentious times is now shown towards the historic episcopate, there is the slight

est approach of Protestants to his theories, he is woefully at fault. But, as Dr. J. Macbride Sterrett, in his admirable tractate on Christian unity, says, unity will never come to the universal church in its true sense of all believers at the hands of a party which encourages the "suspicion that the office and its work are hopelessly connected with a theology and an ecclesiastical tendency which is out of all sympathy with the current intellectual, social, and religious life of our Protestant Christianity."

The style of the book is as undignified as its scholarship is light and loose, its conception of the Church unworthy of the depth of Christian franchises, and its object unworthy the attention of thoughtful men.

Christian Unity. Being the Appendix to "Studies in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion." By J. Macbride Sterrett, D. D., Professor of Ethics and Apologetics in the Seabury Divinity School. D. Appleton & Co., Publishers, New York. 1890. Pp. 348 (in paper).· Reverse everything said in the last notice, and we need no better indication of the character of this little treatise. The author goes frankly back to Hooker's plea for Episcopacy, as being (what it undoubtedly is) "an ancient, decent, and convenient polity," and treats it with a breadth and brotherliness impossible to Hooker, and perhaps to his times, but now, thank God, daily more thoroughly feasible, and nowhere more completely so than under the Diocesan whose name gives its special lustre to the see of Minnesota. The type of Christianity illustrated in this, in being at once heartily Catholic and heartily Protestant, marks an essential advance over both these names, in the sense which they have borne from of old. The author quotes, to admirable purpose, the following extract from a sermon of the Rev. E. S. Ffoulkes, after his return from the Roman Catholics: "We are impatient that the Roman Church refuses to admit our orders; let us now observe that attitude toward Lutherans, Calvinists, and Wesleyans, that we should wish Rome hereafter to observe toward us; let us not be too stiff in our requirements, too captious in our criticisms, too certain that our views are not founded on prejudice, and do not require modifying to be consistent with truth. We have a great fight to wage, but not with Christians."

Charles C. Starbuck.

THE

ANDOVER REVIEW:

A RELIGIOUS AND THEOLOGICAL MONTHLY.

VOL. XIV.-SEPTEMBER, 1890.-No. LXXXI.

MODERN RECONSTRUCTIONS OF ETHICS.

Of these reconstructions there are three forms: one given by Mr. Darwin, one by Mr. Spencer, and one by Leslie Stephen.

I name the reconstructions forms because they are, in reality, but varying modes of the same undertaking, namely, to present ethics as a product of evolution.

That we may estimate this undertaking rightly it will be of service to consider what should be understood by ethics and what by evolution.

Science, it is said, deals with what is, history with what has been, ethics with what ought to be. This statement indicates obligation as the root-idea with which ethics has to deal. "You ought to love the Lord your God," that is, the Best Being, “with all your mind, might, and strength. You ought not to steal. You ought not to kill." In presence of obligation thus affirmatively and negatively stated, all ethical schools have divided into two broad classes, both schools, be it observed, concerned with an answer to the same question. The question is this, "Why ought I to love the Best Being? Why ought I not to steal or to kill?" The answers are noteworthy: "You ought to love the Best Being, because you ought." "You ought not to lieto kill, because you ought not." The second answer, "You ought to love the Best Being because of consequences to yourself and others; these consequences being utility, happiness, or the welfare of the social tissue." "You ought not to steal or to kill because of consequences to yourself and others; these consequences being hindrance, pain, or weakening of the social tissue."

Copyright, 1890, by HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & Co.

It is at once seen that, by one school, no end is given as the ground of obligation, while by the other there are stated the apparently varied ends of utility, happiness, social welfare.

The ethical side of our problem is, perhaps, not yet sufficiently distinct. What are we to understand by conscience for which evolution must give account or fail as an interpretation of man?

Permit me to say here what, doubtless, would have found a more fitting place at the beginning of this discussion. The space limits necessarily attaching to an article such as the present one, force many of my statements to a brevity and directness which will, I fear, give them the appearance of dogmatism. I can, however, honestly ask the reader to accept my assurance that I write in no dogmatic spirit, but, on the contrary, with much fear and trembling lest I conceal or mispresent the truth.

To return. What are we to understand by conscience? Conscience is the crystal-clear knowledge of a distinction between right and wrong, together with the knowledge of obligation to do the right and avoid the wrong. The perception of this distinction between right and wrong is, in its radical character, precisely like the perception of distinction between affirmative and negative, plus and minus, round and square.

It is important to observe, in this connection, that these mathematical distinctions cannot, in the first instance, be made, without direct, sensation experience of things greater or less, round or square. If one is blind from birth, and also without sense of touch, such distinctions cannot be known. Yet it nowise follows that when, under medical treatment, the sensations are restored and the distinctions made, they are produced by some psychical evolution from a consciousness where they did not and could not exist. In like manner the moral distinction, the distinction be. tween right and wrong, is seen directly and instantaneously when certain courses of conduct appear. My language should not be taken to mean that conscience classifies actions as right or wrong; that conscience determines whether it is right to play cards or wrong to play cards, right to drink a glass of wine or wrong to drink a glass of wine.

The power to know mathematically does not determine whether a given building is perpendicular or inclined. If, by my own sight or the sight of another, I learn that the building has certain characteristics, I declare at once that it is inclined. If, by my own sight or that of church or party, I am led to believe that card playing and wine drinking have certain characteristics, I pronounce them wrong without a moment's delay.