running down his cheeks-" Still alone, and my mother in the next room." When one spoke loudly on a previous day, he had said, "Don't speak so loud, for they might hear you overhead; and I would be sorry they should hear I am ill, it would alarm them." They were his mother and aunt, now dead. On the 8th June, he said to one who showed him some kindness, "Be consoled; I shall not suffer long." This person seeing him stretched out quite motionless and silent, said, "I hope you are not in pain." "Oh yes!" he replied, "still in pain, but less; the music is so fine." There was no music-no sound of any kind reached the room. "Where do you hear the music?" Up there." "How long?" "Since you were on your knees. Don't you hear it? Listen! Listen!" And he raised his hand and opened his great eyes in ecstasy. Gomin continued silent, and after a few moments, the boy gave another start of convulsive joy, and cried, "I hear my mother's voice amongst them!" and directed his eyes to the window with anxiety. Gomin asked once, twice, what he was looking for; he did not seem to hear, and made no answer.

'It was now Lasne's hour to relieve Gomin, who left the room, and Lasne sat down by the bedside. The child lay for a while still and silent: at last he moved, and Lasne asked if he wanted anything? He replied, "Do you think my sister could hear the music? How she would like it!" He then turned to the window with a look of sharp curiosity, and uttered a sound that indicated pleasure; he then (it was just fifteen minutes after two P.M.) said to Lasne-Lasne took his hand and bent over to him-" I have something to tell you." There was no more to be heard― the child was dead.'1

Oh! sublime and pathetic, yet warning voice, with which a kingdom and race passed away for ever!

1 Croker's Essays, p. 296.

233

NOTICES.

MR. GREGORY SMITH'S collection of detached Essays, published in various periodicals, add one, and a valuable, volume to the series which was well commenced by the first Essays and Reviews,' by Mr. Church. A general title, approximately appropriate but somewhat vague, has been selected, Faith and Philosophy' (Longmans), which we like less than the book itself: for it seems to suggest, what Mr. Smith would be the last to accept, a division between the Christian habit of mind and its best instrument. The last Essay, that on Comte's system, is the most sinewy; and we shall look for Mr. Smith's aid in combating that science, falsely so called, which has at least this value, that it clears the field. Comte has done some service in demolishing most of the old idols and jargons, and when he has the field to himself and a single adversary, the Gospel need have no fears for the result. The Church has suffered from the assault not being concentrated. We are told, and by a considerable authority, that modern thought is gathering itself together in the direction of Positivism and of Comte's system alone. So much the better for the Church.

'Scriptural Studies: our Church and our Times' (Saunders and Otley), are in their way a creditable performance; creditable, that is, to a certain uninstructed amiability and good intention on the part of the writer. He -or it may be she-is one of those good people who think that a right judgment on all points ecclesiastical and religious comes as a matter of course to every one who desires to be right. The present writer's temper is one from which we cannot withhold sympathy. But why should he write? He will not instruct, though he will show his readers that he is a writing person. But this is all.

Mr. Ffoulkes's second part of his very able historical work, Christendom's Divisions' (Longmans), has appeared. The work seems to have outgrown its original title, or rather original plan. As we understood Mr. Ffoulkes's object, it was, and with a reference to the present position of the Church, to investigate the isolated schisms, and their isolated teachings or attempts at teaching. In fact, however, and it is a melancholy one, the history of the divisions of the Church is found to be the history of the Church itself; and the present author is embarked on the vast ocean of troubles whose waves and waters spread over some seventeen centuries. In his elaborate treatment of the Council of Florence Mr. Ffoulkes uses for the first time materials new to the Church historian.

Bishop Alexander Forbes has earned an hereditary right to comment on the Articles. His recent work, Explanation of the Thirty-nine Articles' (J. H. Parker), contrasts very favourably with the Bishop of Ely's monograph. We have at present only the first volume; but the first Articles, being more purely theological than occasional, are most suited to the Bishop of Brechin's mind, which is one unusually suited to dogmatidiscussion. He is one of the very few writers of the day possessed of a theological mind of the old and accredited type. Not the least interesting portion of his volume is the Introduction-a letter to Dr. Pusey-in which the Bishop, with great care, points out the exact relation which the Articles of the Church of England have to the various Reformed branches of the

Church Catholic. This promises to be the work on which Bishop Forbes' fame, a growing one, is likely to be grounded.

The Autobiography of John Brown' (well, it is not the John Brown whose name is so unpleasantly familiar to most of us) is a very readable little book; something in Mr. Paget's way, a way which did good in its time. It professes to be a sort of exposition of Church principles as held and believed by a common man. No doubt in dialogues the Churchman and his arguments have the best of it, and somewhat lame and stupid objections come from the Dissenters. But this is one of the fairest of these books, and deserves to be, as it aims to be, popular.

'Modern Culture; its Aims, &c.' (Macmillan), is a series of Lectures, some of them of many years' standing, by professors and doctors of the physical and exact sciences. They are, as a collection, somewhat like the famous one of Martial's Epigrams: sunt bona, &c.; and if a cynic wanted to know how little natural science even could be trusted for uniformity, he might extract a catena of diversity from this volume. But it is worth studying, though it hardly brings science and its practice up to the present day.

There is an interest in the Life and Opinions of a Fifth Monarchy Man (John Rogers),' which has been edited by his descendant, Mr. Edward Rogers, of Christ Church, but it is not a great interest. These fanatics are better in the lump; that is, more picturesque as well as more effective in mass than as individuals. Rogers was a foremost man of his sect, but insufferably tedious and prosy. But he tells his own tale, and any contemporaneous and authentic portrait of those times, even if not valuable in itself, has in it the stuff of which history is made. The volume is a handsome one, and does the editor credit, whose work in even reading the voluminous productions of his very long-winded ancestor is something frightful to contemplate. We lighted upon one saying which Rogers commemorates, which has something of wit in it: Some compare Queen Elizabeth to a sluttish housewife, who swept the house, but left the dust behind the door.'-P, 55.

Hurst's History of Rationalism' (Trübner) is the reprint of an American work. Apparently it is the writing out in full of some lectures delivered in a theological college. Sketchy and unoriginal as the volume is, it yet contains the results of a good deal of reading, not very artificially or successfully woven up, but still useful. The use is, that it may send students to the sources to which Dr. Hurst has had access. If we were only to judge the lectures from that portion of them which is occupied with the present condition of the Church of England, we should have to set down the author as scandalously deficient either in the tact or labour which is necessary to get at sound information. But it is generally the case that a second-rate writer gets on much better when he has only to compile from books than when he has to trust to his own powers to select his guides, or to use them when he has found them. The late Mr. Conybeare, Miss Cobbe, and some long-forgotten, if ever remembered, Tracts for Priests and People,' are his chief authorities. Merely as a specimen of the sort of authority which Dr. Hurst is, it may be enough to state that 'twelve years ago' the Broad Church Bishops on the English and Irish Bench were reckoned at twelve. He seems to think it quite a new thing that the Prayer-book has been translated into Latin.

Archbishop Trecnh's three Sermons, Shipwrecks of Faith' (Macmillan), were delivered before the University of Cambridge. They are on the characters of Balaam, Saul, and Judas Iscariot. Graceful, beautifully expressed, and becoming in tone, they strike us as being somewhat deficient in pith. But to write on the character of Balaam after Butler would try any man; while to write on Judas after Rénan ought to have fired a preacher into indignation after severity. Can the Archbishop sustain his argument that the peculiar relations of God with Balaam would have been impossible after the Jewish theocracy was fully established? And what are the grounds for settling the time at which that establishment took place? Was it at the crossing of the Jordan, or the settlement of Jerusalem, or the death of Joshua? Does Scripture anywhere fix the era ?

6

We do not want to be disrespectful, but Mr. Ernest De Bunsen has what the Scotch call a bee in his bonnet, and it buzzes the strangest of hums. In his Keys of S. Peter' (Longman), Mr. De Bunsen's task is this. From the very little that Scripture says of the Kenites he constructs from the depth of his own consciousness a long and interesting history of them. Throughout the whole history of Israel there were Kenites and Hebrews. The Kenites were the real representatives of truth: the Hebrew is the Elohist, the Kenite the Jehovist element of the Bible. Our Lord was a Kenite, and came to destroy the narrowness of the Hebrew community. If we understand Mr. De Bunsen rightly, the Roman branch of the Church really does possess a 'gnosis,' or hidden knowledge, which is symbolically connected in Scripture, and which is a crypto-Kenism; and the keys of this mystery Mr. De Bunsen summons the Pope to surrender. As far as we can make out this writer's view, all religions have this common nature, that they possess in various ways, but most of them unconsciously, the germ of Kenism.

'The Story of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa' (Saunders and Otley), by Mr. Rowley, one of the noble band-and only two survive-who accompanied Bishop Mackenzie on his great Missionary work, is not only a touching record of a great work, but a contribution to literature. There is truth in the tone and manner of the book. It is curious to contrast it with the Lettres Edifiantes, which are often more curious than edifying. Here we have no rose-coloured writing: no attempt to disguise, and not often to palliate, mistakes. Missionary work must be full of errors, and a Mission is from its nature tentative and experimental. Annual Reports and platform speeches are one thing: but a Missionary's genuine diary is another; a diary with its hopes and fears, the record of life, with its advances and falls, its strength and weakness. This is all that Mr. Rowley pretends to give, and it is given as fully as faithfully. One thing we must criticise. The volume is decorated, or rather its cover is decorated, with a hippopotamus hunt. Have the publishers borrowed this from a sporting source?

Dr. Preuss, a Berlin professor, has published a treatise on the history of the new dogma of the Immaculate Conception. A translation has been produced by those indefatigable publishers, the Messrs. Clark, of Ediuburgh. The learned German-for he is learned-writes with a good deal of what he would call 'unction,' which is now and then out of place in an historical essay. But he indicates very fully the sources from which this turbid stream originated, and has grown into its present volume. Some of

the details connected with the famous bull Ineffabilis are given with a picturesque vivacity which we do not often find in a Teutonic pen.

Frederick Seebohm is a name new if not to our literature at least to ourselves. But if Mr. Seebohm is a foreigner, he is no stranger to English composition, and he is a student of unwearied industry and research. In his Oxford Reformers of 1498' (Longmans), he gives the lives and conjoint labours of Colet, More, and Erasmus. The date, we may as well observe, is the initial of the first great Oxford movement, and the history is carried on only to Colet's death, 1519. In fact, it is not the biography of either or of all of this famous triad, but only a history of their conjoint labours. It closes with the date of More resigning his humble sphere as under-sheriff of London on embarking on the perilous sea of Court favour, the last wave of which left him on the scaffold. There is a great deal in Mr. Seebohm's own views with which we do not possess any sympathy. But he has given us, and we thank him for it, a volume of rare research and immense interest. The Reformers before the Reformation are among the most important factors in Church history.

We have already mentioned the plan and scope of Messrs. Clark's 'Ante-Nicene Christian Library.' Among the many excellences of the Sosii of the North is their unswerving punctuality and the faith they keep with the public. Here are already two new volumes, four in all, of an undertaking not a year old. It is surely significant sign of the times that Patristic translations, announced and carried on under difficulties at Oxford, and carried on moreover under such auspices as those of Dr. Pusey and Mr. Newman, only lingered. That great scheme was never realized; but now, such is the taste of the age that it is found to be a profitable scheme by the trade. Not that Messrs. Clark are mere trades

men,

One of the present issue of volumes is of a miscellaneous character, containing, as it does, the Apology of Tatian,' and that strangest of early Christian, or pseudo-Christian documents, the Clementine Recognitions. The other is of a more solid and valuable character, the Exhortation and part of the Stromata of Clement. No doubt there is but little in any of these works which has now much more than an archæological and literary value. But this value is considerable; and, considering what exaggerated importance the extreme Rationalists attribute to these documents, it is as well to have them in an accessible form. The translators seem to have done their work with fairness and general precision. Amongst other very odd and certainly untrue things to be found in the Recognitions, is the assertion that polyandry was a British custom.

'Symbols of Christendom' (Longmans), by Mr. Radford Thomson, is an elementary Durandus, compiled with care and research, and useful for students. This manual avoids some of the faults of Anglican treatises on iconography and similar matters, which often have a tendency to sentimentalism. It is deficient in its notices of Oriental ritual and symbol.

'Studies for the Restoration of the Plans of the Sacred Edifices of the Bible.' By C. Jones. (Trübner.) This is the strangest book we ever saw. If we are to treat it seriously, or if we are not to quote the tribus Anticyris caput insanabile, we must say that we Reviewers are hardly used by C. Jones. He begins by 'addressing Reviewers.' He tells us roundly that to understand him and his views, or rather his authoritative teaching,