CHRISTIAN TRUTH AND MODERN OPINION.

Seven Sermons Preached in New York by Clergymen of the Protestant Episcopal Church. NEW YORK: THOMAS WHITTAKER. 12mo. pp. 229.

What seven picked clergymen can say in a statement of the relations of Christian truth to modern opinion becomes a matter of general interest. If they are bright men, well acquainted with the different lines of modern thought in its bearings upon Christianity, capable of stating the Christian faith in its actual bearings upon present issues, and in real sympathy with the religious anxieties of our own time, they cannot help saying what will do good. And this is the mission of these sermons. They represent the broad Church element in its best phase. They are honest attempts at the solution of difficulties; and if they are not exhaustive discussions of Christian evidences, each Man has contrived to say what most needed saying upon his particular topic. They are pointed, popular, well-reasoned, even brilliant discourses. They consider difficulties with the spirit of men who have felt them themselves. They are not at all brow-beatings of scientific men. They aim to reconcile parties and to speak the real truth. They hit the nail on the head. They are the best recent Christian statement of the questions which honest men, doubting the truth of Christianity, are constantly asking, and they are written, not in the stilted language of theology, but in the common vernacular of every day life. They make a small book but it contains much in little. Two of the authors are perhaps the ablest thinkers, certainly among the very ablest writers, men endowed with the literary instinct, in the Episcopal Church-Bishop Clark, of Rhode Island, and the Rev. Dr Washburn, of this city. Dr, Henry is the author of Dr. Oldham at Greystones; Dr. Thompson is one of the editors of the Church

Journal; Dr. Huntington is the author of The Church Idea; Dr. John Cotton Smith is the editor of Church and State, and Dr. J. H. Rylance, Rector of St. Mark's Church, in this city, has high reputation as a scholarly divine. Seven more competent men could not be found anywhere, and that they exist in the Episcopal Church is proof that an orthodox belief and a fixed liturgy do not repress free thought, or remove men from full sympathy with the best thinking of our own day. Indeed it has seemed to us that our intelligent clergy enjoyed peculiar facilities from the very fixedness of our faith for dealing with the difficulties of modern opinion; and it is a fact full of meaning that our clergy list numbers very many who have tramped the weary round of unbelief in past days and now minister to others through their own experiThe man who reads between the lines of this book may find proof that some of these chosen seven have thus tramped, for they have dealt so frankly with many thoughts that they seem to speak from actual experience. There is nothing hackneyed, no religious twaddle or clap-trap, from cover to cover.

ence.

The opening sermon is on the Christian Doctrine of Providence ; the next is on the Christian Doctrine of Prayer; the next on Moral Responsibility and Physical Law; the next on the Relation of Miracles to the Christian Faith; the next on the Oneness of Scripture; the next is on Immortality; and the volume closes with a Lecture on Evolution and a Personal Creator. The subjects thus follow one another in natural order and deal with fundamental truths. Dr. Henry states with great thoroughness the argument for a Divine Providence and for God's special interference, and does away entirely with the objection that Nature is a law to herself. He shows that God controls not only the laws of the material but also of the spiritual universe, and that there is a "science of God as well as a science of nature," and that the full understanding of the "science of God" includes the Christian doctrine on this subject as its most complete statement. He takes in the whole range of God's dealings with man, "the comprehensive idea of God's Providence in the history of humanity and of the universe, and its all embracing purpose;" and the discourse contains the seed-thoughts on this subject in language easily understood. The Christian Doctrine of Prayer is rather ad populum. It is a fresh and forcible

presentation of the truth that prayer touches God's will in the free realm of spiritual force, and that what man asks of God he constantly illustrates in his dealings with his fellow men. He defines prayer as the asking something for one's self, "subject always to the will of the Moral Governor of the Universe." Dr. Washburn's lecture on Moral Responsibility and Physical Law strikes at the philosophy of necessity. He says that "natural force and moral force are essentially unlike. Natural force acts without choice; moral force in and with it. Natural force compels; moral force persuades. Natural force never fails under given conditions; moral force always depends on the personal man. It does not matter whether the theology of Edwards or the pyschology of Bain affirm that, because we can not act without motives, our will must obey the motive. There is no such thing as a necessary motive. You may as well talk of a square circle. 'Appetite,' in the words of Hooker, 'is the mind's solicitor, the will is the mind's controller.'" "This is the law of responsibility. It is in God that we see the law that is perfect freedom. He is a law unto Himself unfettered in His moral choice. Dr. Washburn shows that even in our sin we recognize this moral capacity. "Sin is the defect of our nature; we are made for the willing choice of holiness, and as we live in obedience to God's law we grow toward the state where our liberty becomes an inward, abiding character." "We are free, but such is our Constitution that our freedom must pass, by degrees, according to our use or abuse, into a settled state of the char acter." Having shown that sin does not take away moral responsibility, he applies his reasoning to the mysteries of life which darken so many minds, to the excuses for crime, and to the history of civilization as explained by physical law. It is a lecture crowded with suggestions, rich in vivid flashes of thought, and so carefully compacted into a glowing argument as almost to defy analysis. It is a statement, an argument, a picture, a poem, all in one. The sermon on the Relation of Miracles to the Christian Faith has some capital points, very well thought out, but wrapped up in a vast number of useless words. Dr. Rylance takes thirty-six pages to say what could have been better stated in ten. are well taken, and his definition of miracles of ordinary to extraordinary causes, provided for in the original

Still, the positions "as a subordination.

scheme and constitution of the universe," "as links in a chain which runs all along the steps and stages of that sublime evolution of the divine counsels of which history is a fragmentary record, and an installment of the final interpretation," is satisfactory and

correct.

Dr. Huntington treats the Oneness of Scripture freshly, concisely, intelligently, under the two heads of unity of subject and of authorship. He "does not believe that any thoughtful person whose doubts have been once awakened, will ever acknowledge that the Scripture cannot be broken, unless he has first become persuaded that the claim of Jesus Christ to be the Saviour of the world is true." He also "believes that when a man has honestly and from the heart confessed this faith, it is then easy for him to see how the various parts of Scripture group themselves about one common centre." He commends the Anglican Church for having no theory of inspiration, and for resting on the statement that the Scriptures contain "all things necessary to salvation," and calls his own statement very accurately, "the providential theory of the growth and completion of the Scriptures." The sermon generously allows much breadth of view and rises above the necessity of treating the details of the subject.

Bishop Clark enjoys the honor of writing the best lecture in the book. He gives a sketch of the objections to Immortality and refutes them briefly as he goes along. It is the model of a discussion of this kind, clear, forciblė, pointed, logical, generous in its concessions, showing a complete mastery of the subject and especially of the difficulties which perplex many minds, and handled with the literary skill and grace which is so rare in a theologian. There are few who will not respond to this statement: "I have much more sympathy with those earnest but doubting souls, who are crying out of the darkness, and looking in vain for some gleam of light to illumine the pathway of the eternal future, but still looking with anxious hope and trying to live as they think God would have them live, whether they are to die as the beast dieth or not, than I have with that great multitude who passively accept the fact that they are to live forever, and then go about their work and play, as if nothing concerned them beyond the gains and amusements of the day." "Better to doubt honestly than to believe

stupidly. It is one thing to accept the fact of immortality as a part of one's creed, and another thing to receive it into the soul as a living power, so that we actually enter into our eternal life this side of the grave." The whole discourse is in an equally manly strain. Dr. Smith boldly takes up the relations of the doctrine of the Evolution to the belief in a Personal Creator and attempts to reconcile and harmonize the one with the other. It is the most scientific lecture in the book, thought out clearly, and is perhaps as satisfactory as anything which has yet been written on this subject from the Christian point of view. It is necessarily a tentative argument, and to some extent a speculation, because the full evidence on the side of Evolution is not yet in. It is not the place here to go into a statement of all the points made by Dr. Smith, but it is truth to say that his parallelism between the Evolutionist and the Theist is admirably sustained, that he carries it up to a point where it is more reasonable to accept than to deny the belief in a Personal Creator, and that with his explanation the doctrine of Evolution bids fair to become a valuable aid in unfolding the order of the creation. The critical point is where he shows the possibility of intelligent life germinating from unintelligent matter, and again where he finds a parallel to the fall of man as a Moral Being in the failures and positive degenerations in Nature. His position is the boldest yet taken by a Christian teacher, and is sure to challenge attention. His statement, taking his stand upon the higher spiritual philosophy of Plato, and Leibnitz, and Kart, and Coleridge, that the Evolution of man in the moral world reaches its full consummation in the union with the God-man, is the higher counterpart to the lower evolution from nature to man; and his belief that the materialism "which indissolubly associates life and force with what we call matter, and which is as ready to express the facts of nature in terms of spirit as of matter, is not a dangerous materialism, and is, just as much as the idealism of Bishop Berkeley, consistent with the Christian faith," shows a courage of opinion which it is refreshing to see. The lecture itself is a brilliant example of the friendly discussion which should characterize all researches for the truth and must advance Dr. Smith's already high reputation as a thinker.

This little volume thus covers largely the ground of those evi、