Indeed, the new teachers were often exposed to far rougher handling, and "the male and female beasts of the senatorial order," as an angry monk described them, urged on the Christian mob to open violence. at the funeral of Blæsilla. They interrupted the procession with loud cries-"This young woman has been killed by fasts: let us stone this detestable race of monks,—throw them into the Tiber." The passionate grief of Paulla only excited them the more: "Behold," they cried, "how they have seduced this unhappy matron! It is a plain proof how little she wished to be a monkess, for never woman amongst the heathen has wept thus for her children."

But neither Jerome nor his disciples were of a temper to quail before opposition. During his three years' residence at Rome (from 378 to 381), where he filled the dignified office of secretary to the Pope Damasus, he poured forth letter upon letter, which were in fact so many controversial pamphlets, to his converts, assailing with the bitterest ridicule and invective the licentiousness and feebleness of the clergy, who were not slow to retort upon his own character. "Before I knew the family of the holy Paulla," he says in a bitter letter to Asilla, as he was leaving Rome,

"I was popular with the whole city. They called me a saint, a man of humility and learning. In the judgment of all, I was destined for the Papacy.. . . Now I am a man steeped in every vice. Some attack my bearing, others my looks and my very smile; others suspect that my simplicity is but a cloak for evil. . . . I have lived there for three years, and it is true that numbers of virgins have been my hearers, that I have read and expounded to them the Scriptures, and that they have consulted me as their friend. Has any one ever seen in my conduct anything unbecoming Can they charge me with anything except that I am a man (nisi sexus meus)?—and this insinuation is only made when it is known that Paulla is going to Jerusalem."

a Christian?

In fact, after three years of this bitter polemical war, Jerome was driven from Rome; and though he left behind him many eminent converts, male and female, who chose to remain in their own homes, and set the example of enfranchising their slaves, and founding hospitals and monasteries, his efforts were chiefly directed to induce them to leave "Babylon," as he called it, and follow him to the great monastery which Paulla was about to found at Bethlehem. This work had been already in great measure done for him. The passion for pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to Egypt had already begun : the ardent Spaniard, Melania, had ten years before visited Athanasius at Alexandria in the last year of his life, and in the course of some wild adventures, had spent her large fortune in the support of the Egyptian monks. Paulla, Eustochium, and Fabiola, all followed her footsteps; and the two first rejoined Jerome at Antioch. They passed thence to Jerusalem, and afterward visited together nearly

the whole of Egypt. The remainder of their lives was spent in the monastery of Paulla at Bethlehem, in the immediate neighbourhood of which another was presided over by Jerome.

Here for the present we must pause. A great contemporary movement was going on under St. Martin in Gaul, which afterwards became for many centuries the chief seat of the monastic. system in Christendom. About a hundred years later, a still more powerful impulse was given to the same spirit by Benedict of Nursia, who, almost without intending it, gave a complete organization and unity to efforts which had hitherto been only isolated and transitory. It was not till his time that Western monachism was complete: after him it may be called the form of spiritual life which nearly all the more earnest minds among the clergy adopted, and which for many ages produced the missionaries, thinkers, and preachers of the Church. Our present object has been limited to describing its origin, the causes which led to it, and its first supporters and disciples. We have seen that it began as an honest, though superstitious, reform in a time of general immorality, and that its first advocates were men of genius and practical sagacity, who, feeling its fitness, in some respects, to meet the wants of the time, were slow to discern its errors. further review of M. de Montalembert's new volumes we shall see that the wild times, during which it became the chief Christian power, developed fully both its excellences and its defects.

In a

W. C. LAKE.

ECCE HOMO.

IN

Ecce Homo: a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1866.

N whatever way the fact may be accounted for, it is certain that this book has been read with deep interest by many who are not wont to be readers of theology. Introduced to the world with no preliminary pomp of announcement; bearing no author's name upon its title-page; not attributed even by report to any one well-known writer until all doubt of its success was at an end; it has been eagerly read everywhere, warmly attacked, and still more warmly praised. It has great defects, but we cannot regret the attention it receives. We may well feel that the central truth of Christianity is one so deep and wide in itself, and so capable of infinitely varied application to the changing circumstances of different ages in the Church's history, that its interest can never be exhausted; nor can a view of it, taken from a new point of sight, be put aside as uninstructive because it is confessedly incomplete, nay, even though it should seem to represent, out of their due form and proportion, some of the features of the Divine original.

In great part, no doubt, the interest of the book is that of its subject. The title appears to promise an attempt to conceive historically the Person of our Lord as revealed to us in his work on earth. Το succeed in this attempt would be to bestow upon the Church the greatest possible boon. If it should ever be given to any man to conceive truly the story of our Lord's life; to trace out the order and

meaning of each part of his disclosure of Himself to men; to expound his teaching, in word and work, as one connected whole; to discover the relation of that teaching to the state of the world as it was in Palestine eighteen hundred years ago, and to human nature as it is always and everywhere; to trace to its sources the opposition, the enmity, the malignant ferocity with which those who did not receive the teaching pursued the Teacher to a violent death; and, finally, to expound the connection between our Lord's Person and the Church gathered in his name after He was removed from earth, and subsisting now in the Christendom which rules over, and gives moral and intellectual life to the world, that man will have done more to instruct Christians and convince unbelievers than the whole mass of theologians and apologists of former days, or of our own. To have done even a little toward the accomplishment of so inestimable a result would entitle any writer to our warmest gratitude. In fact, the need of attempting the work is becoming felt and confessed. is seen more and more distinctly, both by enemies and by friends, that all other questions are governed by the one master question, whether the Son of God did indeed come in the flesh or no. All who believe, or desire to believe, feel the craving for a fuller and distincter knowledge of Him whom (if Christianity be true) it is everlasting life truly to know. Thinking men are agreed that all other issues raised are indecisive, and that all attacks on Christianity must fail, until the existence and triumph of the Church can be accounted for, at least plausibly, by those who deny the reality of the Founder's history, his person and his work.

It

Most readers will, we think, have opened "Ecce Homo" with an expectation that it was intended to attempt the solution of the problem which we have just now stated. The very title suggests to us an endeavour to paint to our mental eye the character and history of Christ as He was once made known to men on earth. The object in view might, as far as the title goes, be merely historical; it might be theological; it might be apologetic; it might be devotional;-but that the primary aim of the author must be to trace out the development of our Lord's character and teaching in connection with the history of his life would have been, we think, the only natural inference from the name which he has selected. A reader opening the volume with this anticipation would be confirmed in it by the first paragraph of the author's Preface, which seems to sketch a plan not very different from the one we have tried to indicate above. He says,―

"Those who feel dissatisfied with the current conceptions of Christ may find it necessary. . . to trace his biography from point to point, and accept those conclusions about Him . . . which the facts, critically weighed, appear to warrant. This is what the present writer undertook to do for the

satisfaction of his own mind, and because, after reading a good many books on Christ, he felt still constrained to confess that there was no historical character whose motives, objects, and feelings remained so incomprehensible to him. The inquiry which proved serviceable to himself may chance to be useful to others."

The last paragraph of the Preface will, however, prepare the reader for what he soon finds to be the fact; namely, first, that whatever the writer's ulterior hopes may be, the present work deals only with one part of the subject as he himself conceives it; and secondly, that his own conception of the subject differs considerably from that which the title-page will naturally suggest to his readers. The point may seem one of little consequence, yet we regret that anything should interfere (as we think the choice of a title, inappropriate though striking, does) with the distinct conception of the author's purpose. It seems to us that a reader may well complain that he is kept, until he comes almost to the end of the book, in expectation of something which he does not find in it,—a more or less complete review of our Lord's life and character in connection with his work as the Founder and Legislator of the Church.

The real scope of the book is more correctly, though still but partially, described by the last words of the Preface. It is "to furnish an answer to the question, What was Christ's object in founding the Society which is called by his name, and how is it adapted to attain that object?"" Ostensibly the work is intended to answer, from a general view of the historic evidence in our hands, three questions; namely, first, What must be supposed to have been our Lord's object in founding his Church? secondly, By what power, and through what means, and against what hindrances, did He achieve his object? and thirdly, What was the true intention of his legislation for the Church so founded and perpetuated? The author puts aside for the present every other question connected with our Lord's work on earth. He promises, at some future time, a volume on our Lord "as the creator of modern theology and religion." But except in the way of incidental notice in connection with one or other of the above questions, he declines to enter as yet into the deeper and more inward questions which lie around his subject. Moreover, in answering the questions with which he attempts to deal, the author avails himself almost exclusively of the first three Gospels, the Acts, and those Epistles of St. Paul which the rashest criticism has scarcely ventured to assail. And (at least in the earlier part of the investigation) he declines to assume anything more, with regard to these portions of the Canon, than their general truthfulness, as almost contemporary records of a history substantially real. He says,— "In defining as above the position which Christ assumed, we have