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She has been

Franchise in counties for the last thirty years. ready to enter into consideration of the relations between State and Church for certainly the last ten years. On the Licensing Question, the Land Question, the Game Question, she has been equally ready to come to a clear decision, and desirous to have a definite reform. But all these questions have been stifled at the instance of party managers. Is it to be supposed that the President of a Local Government Board will take them up? Is it likely that Lord Rosebery or Lord Dalhousie or any rising young commoner, who may be promoted to the new office, will take Mr. Gladstone by the throat, and say in the name of Scotland, I demand that these questions shall be taken up? On the contrary, we know perfectly well that any such official will use his whole influence with Members of Parliament to get them to abstain from pressing any of these questions.' The ripeness of Scotland for the solution of the questions Mr. Kinnear mentions is a matter of opinion. It may be doubted, too, if his suggestion for the formation of a specially Scottish Party to demand reforms-the Church and State problem is an exceptional one, requiring exceptional treatment—which are as much needed by England as by Scotland, could be given effect to, and in any case it savours of separatism in feeling if in nothing more serious. But Mr. Kinnear is probably quite correct in the view he takes as to the tendency of the appointment of such an official as the President of a Local Government Board to retard genuine reforms. It would result in the supersession of truly national and practical by cliquish and sentimental politics.

The best Scottish politics of the future will proceed on substantially the same lines as the best Scottish politics of the past. British statesmen of eminence, whose mission it has been to head great movements, such as the Free Trade agitation and the Midlothian Campaign, have frequently complimented Scotsmen on their openness to new ideas, and the heartiness and unanimity of the support given to public men who try to give effect to them in legislation. There is not self-conceit, but only self-respect, of race in accepting such compliments thus voluntarily given. English politicians have never

been slow to appreciate aid given them by their Scottish colleagues, for that has been rendered no less quietly than efficiently-and why not? Surely the golden Goethean rule

'Give other's work just share of praise;

Not of thine own the merits raise,'

holds true of nations no less than of individuals that are united in partnership. Surely Scotsmen are better engaged in doing justice to the love of order, the independence, the passion for justice that undoubtedly characterise Englishmen in their capacity as citizens, than in posing before the glass of national vanity. Scotland is frequently styled the knuckle-end of England. But it is still open to her to be in the future as in the past, the advance-guard of British progress, and if politics must be looked at from the party point of view, the Macedonian Phalanx of British Liberalism. In acting such a part she will be more worthily employed, while at the same time she will more effectually promote her special well-being than in playing at Home Rule or dallying with separatism.

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE.

Revelation and Modern Theology Contrasted; or, The Simplicity of the Apostolic Gospel Demonstrated. By the Rev. C. A. Row, M.A. London: F. Norgate, 1883.

Its

The object of this volume is to develope the position which was assumed by its author as the foundation of his excellent Bampton Lectures, the position, viz. : that Christianity, as distinct from the theological systems of the different communities into which Christendom is divided, consists of a few simple principles which constitute its essence as a revelation; and to inquire what is really essential to it, and what are merely human additions. A clearer, more candid, or more timely volume we have seldom read. great merit is that it brings the reader face to face with the principles of Christianity as actually taught by our Lord and His Apostles, and enables him to escape from the meshes of whatever theological system he may be involved in, and to attain to that liberty of thought and action which the first teachers of Christianity inaugurated and proclaimed. Mr. Row has said little or nothing that is new. His book, in fact, is thoroughly conservative. His conservatism, however, is of the best and most enlightened kind. What he pleads for is a reversion to the actual facts of our Lord's teaching and life. This he has done in the most admirable spirit, and has thus earned the thanks of all who have the interests of Christianity at heart. There is nothing more certain, we take it, than that if Christianity is to make any way in the present, the niceties of theological speculations must be set aside, and the simple but pregnant principles inculcated in the New Testament set forth again with Apostolical plainness and sincerity. Nor is this all. As Mr. Row remarks, if Christianity is to retain its hold on thoughtful men, theologians must cease to propound as Christian verities, to be accepted under penalty of exclusion from the fold of Jesus Christ, a mass of dogmas, which are nothing more than the deductions of human reason from the facts of revelation, or super-additions to these facts, introduced into the records of revelation by the aid of the imagination, and then announced as verities resting on the authority of God.' And hence, as he further remarks, 'in the interest both of the believer and of the unbeliever, it is necessary to exhibit Christianity, not as a system elaborated to meet the requirements of the logical intellect, but as a moral and spiritual power, mighty to energise on the heart, and to influence the life.' 'To effect this,' he continues, it must be set forth in the simplicity in which our Lord presented it to His fellow-citizens in Nazareth, viz. as a veritable " message of good tidings to the poor," as a

proclamation of "release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; a setting at liberty of them that are bruised, and a proclamation of the acceptable year of the Lord." As might be expected, Mr. Row draws a sharp distinction between Christianity as a revelation and Christianity as a theology. His opinion as to what it is as a theology, the sentences we have already cited sufficiently indicate. As a divine revelation, it consists, he tells us, of two factors, viz.: the portraiture of our Lord's person and the record of His teaching, as they are presented to us in the Gospels, and the various communications of truth made to Apostolic men, of which the remaining books of the New Testament constitute our sole existing record. The central idea of our Lord's teaching is, as Mr. Row justly maintains, the Kingdom of God. It may be doubted, however, whether he has fully realized the significance which this phrase bore in the mouth of our Lord. According to Mr. Row, the kingdom of heaven is the Church of Jesus Christ, from the time of its first erection as a visible community, until it has fully realized the purpose of its institution.' That this often was our Lord's idea there can be no question; but it seems to us that both He and His disciples had often a much larger idea of the divine kingdom, the idea, viz. of a great divine order working in men and at the heart of society, and of which the Church is but one of the outward forms and manifestations. The proof of this lies in several of our Lord's parables, in the general drift of His teaching, and in many of the sayings of the writers of the Epistles. We point to this, however, not as invalidating Mr. Row's argument, but as confirming it. His volume is a really masterly one, and to those who wish to understand the genuine nature of Christianity, or to be in a position to expound it to their fellow-men, we cordially commend it. Our regret is that we cannot here deal with it at greater length, and show our readers how admirably the argument is carried on, and with what wealth of illustration.

:

Natural Law in the Spiritual World. By N. DRUMMOND,

F.R.S.E.; F.G.S. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1883.

The

Mr. Drummond's volume marks a decided advance in scientific and theological studies. Were it widely read and pondered, it would prove one of those books which the Germans have called epoch-making. idea it expounds is not exactly new; but to Mr. Drummond belongs the no small credit of being the first who has ventured to apply it and to work it out in terms of modern thought; and this he has done with great skill and ability. His idea cannot be better described than in the following words from his introductory chapter.

'The position we have taken up, is not that the Spiritual Laws are analogous to the Natural Laws, but that they are the same Laws. It is not a question of analogy, but of Identity. The Natural Laws are not the shadows or images of the Spiritual in the same sense as autumn is emblematical of Decay, or the falling leaf of Death. The Natural Laws, as the Law of Continuity might well warn us, do not stop with the visible and then give place to a new set of

Laws bearing a strong similitude to them. The Laws of the invisible are the same Laws, projections of the natural not supernatural. Analogous Phenomena are not the fruit of parallel Laws, but of the same Laws-Laws which at one end, as it were, may be dealing with Matter, at the other end with Spirit.'

It is impossible to overrate the importance of the doctrine which is here so clearly enunciated, or to foresee the immense influence it is likely to have on the progress of theological studies. Nor is it possible within the compass of a short notice to show how admirably Mr. Drummond here develops it in connection with some of the principal facts of the religious life. Perhaps we cannot do better than cite one or two short passages. The first we take is from the exceedingly able chapter on Biogenesis, or as it is termed in theology Regeneration. Having argued that just as there is no such thing in the Physical world as spontaneous generation, so there is not in the Spiritual, Mr. Drummond goes on to say—

"The words of Scripture contain an explicit and original statement of the Law of Biogenesis for the Spiritual Life, "He that hath the Son hath Life, and he that hath not the Son hath not Life." Life, that is to say, depends upon contact with Life. It cannot spring up of itself. It cannot develop out of anything that is not Life. There is no Spontaneous Generation in religion any more than in Nature. Christ is the source of Life in the Spiritual World; and he that hath the Son hath Life, and he that hath not the Son, whatever else he may have, hath not Life. Here, in short, is the categorical denial of Abiogenesis and the establishment in this high field of the classical formula Omne vivum ex vivo-no Life without antecedent Life. In this mystical theory of the Origin of Life the whole of the New Testament writers are agreed. And, as we have already seen, Christ Himself founds Christianity upon Biogenesis stated in its most literal form, "Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit he cannot enter into the Kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit, Marvel not that I said unto you, ye must be born again. And again: It is clear that a remarkable harmony exists here between the Organic World as arranged by Science and the Spiritual World as arranged by Scripture. We find one great Law guarding the thresholds of both worlds, securing that entrance from a lower sphere shall only take place by a direct regenerating act, and that emanating from the world next in order above. There are not two Laws of Biogenesis, one for the natural, the other for the spiritual; one law is for both. Wherever there is life, life of any kind, this same law holds. The analogy is only among the phenomena: between laws there is no analogy-there is Continuity."

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In the chapter on Death, again, we have a singular justification of the Pauline anthropology, all the more remarkable as it is based on thoroughly scientific grounds. In the same chapter also Mr. Drummond reads both the Christian apologist and the Agnostic a pretty sharp, and, as many will think, a merited lesson.

'The Christian apologist,' he remarks, 'never further misses the mark than when he refuses the testimony of the Agnostic to himself. When the Agnostic tells me he is blind and deaf, dumb, torpid and dead to the spiritual world, I must believe him. Jesus tells me that. Paul tells me that. Science tells me that. He knows nothing of the

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