the subscribers a share in the management, and we think they would make their work still more complete if they permitted the parents of the children in the schools to add one or two of their number to the committee in whose hands the care of the school was placed.

SHORT NOTICES.

The Teaching of Christ: its Conditions, Secret, and Results. By the Right Rev. J. MOORHOUSE, Bishop of Manchester. (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1891.)

THE first of these sermons is on 'The Nature and Limits of Inspiration.' It is an attempt to show that the surrender of much which is ordinarily associated with the idea of Inspiration does not necessarily imply the abandonment of the doctrine itself. The Bishop of Manchester explains the existence of the earliest Scriptural records in this way. By a comparison of the Biblical and Babylonian accounts of the Deluge, he points out that the distinctive feature in which they differ is that the Babylonian account contains a polytheistic conception of the Divine Power' (p. 6), while the Biblical account proclaims that there is only one God. Regarding Abraham as the first monotheist of whom history speaks' (p. 6), he assumes that he received from tradition the polytheistic account of the Deluge, and modified it so as to correspond with what he himself believed about God. Thus, he made the story speak of one God to the exclusion of every other, and represented the Flood as a judgment upon wickedness, instead of being, as in the Babylonian account, a slaughter of the innocent with the guilty. Similarly Bishop Moorhouse represents the 'institution of sacrifice' as inherited by the Hebrews from their heathen Semitic forefathers' (p. 16), and as being gradually systematized and purified in the times of Samuel, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel. In like manner he asserts that 'the gradual formation of the historical literature of the Israelites' (p. 19) should make us expect that 'an historian like the author of the Books of the Chronicles' should suppose that the completed law was known to the earlier kings,' just as St. Jude, 'who lived in an age of some literary culture, quotes as the prediction of Enoch, the seventh from Adam, words which we know to belong to an apocryphal work written in the second century before Christ' (p. 20). Thus, the accuracy' of the record is of no importance; the Inspiration lies in the historian's interpretation of the religious meaning and tendency of the acts and incidents which he narrates' (pp. 20, 21).

We feel that the position of this sermon is open to very grave objections. Critically it is full of assumptions. It is at least as likely, in the abstract, that a true account of the Flood and other matters was inherited by Abraham and incorporated into the Book of Genesis, and that other accounts existed elsewhere in a corrupted

form, as that Abraham altered the tradition which he received. The theory of the development of sacrifice, and of the dates of the law, is one for which, in anything like the form the Bishop's argument requires, we cannot think there is sufficient evidence. There is no adequate critical reason for regarding Abraham as 'the first monotheist.' The words, 'they served other gods,' while they assert that some before Abraham were idolaters, are in no way inconsistent with such idolatry being a corruption from truth previously known. The words ascribed to Enoch in the Epistle of St. Jude 2 may very likely, speaking merely critically, have been spoken by him and preserved by a true tradition, although not within the Old Testament canon. We see theological objections to the theory which critically we regard as resting on assumptions. If the first part of Genesis had consisted of early myths, revised by Abraham so as to be theologically unobjectionable, but without any special Divine guidance as to any question of fact, we do not think our Lord and the New Testament writers could have used the events recorded as if historically true.3 If the first chapters are not such myths, but are true accounts, the primitive religion was monotheism, and there was sacrifice from very early times in the worship of the one true God. And it would be difficult to reconcile the use by the writer of the Books of the Chronicles of events which did not happen as the substratum of religious truth with the inspiration by the all-holy God of the theology thus taught. A position like that defended by the Bishop of Manchester appears to us to be wholly different from a full recognition of a real human element in the inspired books.

5

One point we have already raised leads us naturally to the subject of the second Sermon-' Limitations of our Lord's Knowledge.' In it the Bishop's high intellectual gifts are put out with great power and effect. Gradually reducing the origin of all sensation to will, he contemplates briefly the theory of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann that

'the will which is in existence is the will to live, the blind, unscrupulous will, taking counsel neither of wisdom nor of pity, deterred neither by misery nor ruin to pass into richer life;'

and noticing

'how difficult it is sometimes to resist the conclusion which seems to be forced upon us, that all the brighter aspects of life are simply an illusion, set up by the will to live, in order to make all creatures its blind instruments' (p. 28),

he points out one definite ground' on which issue can be joined with the conclusion of the pessimists' :

:

'The human will, at any rate, is not simply a blind will to live. It is a will, as we know, instructed by the understanding and inspired by

1

Josh. xxiv. 2.

2 St. Jude, 14, 15.

St. Matt. xxiv. 37-39; St. Luke, xvii. 26, 27; Rom. v. 12; I Ep. to Tim. ii. 13, 14; Heb. xi. 4-7; 1 St. Pet. iii. 19, 20.

4 Gen. i.-iv.

5 Gen. iv. 3-5, viii. 20.

the conscience. How, then, can we believe that the will which evolved or created man is so far inferior to that which it created? Surely there cannot be more in the effect than there was, at least implicitly, in the cause' (pp. 28, 29);

but passes on to acknowledge that such an argument still leaves much undetermined :

'Say, however, what we will in answer to the contention of the pessimist, it must be acknowledged that the problem of being will ever present difficulties, not only to man, but to every creature in God's intelligent universe, who knows only as man knows, by means of limitation. To all, then, the question must be of profoundest interest-to angels as well as to men-what is the nature of God's will. Is it a will to live or a will to love?' (p. 29).

We doubt whether what is said about the angels is rightly expressed; but, with this exception, the statement is valuable. Bishop Moorhouse goes on to show how in the Incarnation of Him Who is the true and eternal God the problem is solved by the manifestation that the will, which is God, is a will to love' (p. 30). A good deal follows which we cannot accept. The reality of our Lord's human nature is regarded as necessitating its being subject to limitations. These limitations are asserted to exist in His knowledge as Man. His ignorance is taken to imply fallibility. If it is asked,' How can the fallible dwell with the infallible, ignorance with omniscience, in the same personality ?' (p. 32), it is answered that it is a mystery, but a mystery which may rightly be compared with the truth that as regards man,—

'while holding fast the immanency of the Divine will, we must recog nise that this will has subjected itself in the personal life of man to such limitations, that we can freely direct the portion of Divine volition lent to us, either to the service of the selfish will to live or of the Divine will to love' (p. 34).

And

It is true that it is of the essence of our human nature to be limited in faculty' (p. 31). But as regards knowledge, it is at least a tenable opinion that the limitation in our Lord's Humanity was only of such a kind as to withhold from it knowledge which it is impossible for the human mind to grasp. Consequently, it may be held that there was in Him as Man no ignorance of anything which the finite mind of man is capable of knowing. even if this opinion is wrong, and if there was in our Lord's human nature ignorance of some matters within the range of the powers of human minds, such a conclusion would afford no ground for a further statement that as Man He was in any respect fallible. We can no more think that He Who never ceased to be God, and whose Manhood was indissolubly united with His Deity in one Divine Person, could be mistaken and a teacher of error, than we can suppose that He could have sinned. Bishop Moorhouse seems to

This opinion is explained in, e.g., St. Thom. Aq., Summa Theologica, III. x. I−3.

us to fail to have a real grasp on the truth of the single Personality of our Lord, not only because of the passages to which we have already referred, but also because when he is speaking of His 'infallible intuition of spiritual truth' (p. 39, cf. p. 38), he bases that 'intuition' not on the personal union of the human nature with the Divine nature, but on the supernatural aid of the Spirit' (p. 37), parallel to, though more complete than, that given to the inspired writers of the Bible. Surely such a mode of treating the question is to ignore the most important factor in the case.

It is fair to notice that Bishop Moorhouse adds: 'Had He pronounced His decision' (i.e. on critical questions) 'I would have believed Him' (p. 41), and argues that no ascription of authorship is implied in any reference of our Lord to passages of Scripture, including the 110th Psalm. Yet if our Lord in His Humanity was fallible as regards everything but directly spiritual truth, as is in one place (p. 32) asserted and in other places implied, it is difficult to see what ground there is for this confidence in His judgment. We may not here discuss the bearing of our Lord's references to particular writers except to say that we cannot doubt that our Lord frames an argument and bases his claim on the Davidic authorship of Psalm cx.,1 and therefore makes it certain that that Psalm is by David.

The third sermon opens with a very able comparison and contrast of Buddhism and Christianity, an essential point of difference being noticed in the central purpose' of the Buddha' being 'simply to deliver men from suffering' (p. 51), while the master-thought of the teaching of Christ was to show man his true relation to the God of love. In this master-thought of the Fatherhood of God is to be found, we are told, the 'measure and explanation' (p. 57) of all Christian teaching and the 'nature and extent' (p. 60) of all Christian duty. And the strength for the fulfilment of the obligations which will thus become known may be received through the knowledge of and union with the 'one person' in whom human nature has proved itself capable of the patient purity which is needed' (p. 61), our Lord Himself. Thus, the Bishop passes to some very noble words :

'Then to us, too, labour shall become a necessity and sacrifice a joy. No squalor of the slums and no horror of the crime that haunts them shall repel us; for under the foul forms of the very vilest life we shall recognize the infinite value and eternal destiny of our Father's children. Depraved they may be, and sunken they may be into the depths of an almost bestial vice, but with His spirit glowing within us who found apostles among publicans and disciples among abandoned women, nothing will daunt our courage or quell our confidence. The heart of God's child, we shall tell ourselves, beats beneath the coarsest brutality or the foulest rags, and it is for us to speak to it, to wake it up, to thrill it with the electric touch of our own Christ-quickened souls, and to bring it home again to the Father's bosom' (pp. 61, 62).

In the discourses which follow on 'The Law' and 'The Kingdom' the independence of our Lord of His surroundings is shown with a good deal of detail, and the conclusion drawn that His 'will 1 St. Matt. xxii. 41, 45; St. Mark, xii. 35–7; St. Luke, xx. 41-4.

to love' shows He has His 'wisdom,' His 'power,' His 'superabounding life,'' from those infinite depths of the Deity in which He dwells, in the communion of the Father' (p. 113). We have noticed a striking passage on the Agony in the Garden. We do not think the Bishop is right in putting aside the interpretations of this, according to which our Lord shrank from 'the tortures of His approaching death,' and was bearing 'the burden of the universal guilt' (p. 110). The Gospels seem to represent Him as feeling by anticipation in that most terrible struggle all the agonies of His Passion. But into the complex whole there may well have entered also the strain of conflicting desires that were possible to His Humanity, as in the wilderness the human desire for food would rise up in opposition to the determination to do the will of God; and, if so, there may be much truth in the description 2 which culminates in the words :

'It was a conflict of love against love-of that vaster love, which is Divine, against the human love, which is intense in proportion to the nearness of its object. . . . Could the mother love the whole human family more dearly than her own child? Could the patriot love the whole world so well as to provoke the enmity of his fatherland? And can Christ love so well the image of His Father in the universal human heart as to brave the hatred, the scorn, the murderous frenzy of His own Israel?' (p. 111).

We do not like some passages 3 in 'The Unseen World,' but it is satisfactory to find the Bishop teaching on the subject of demoniacal possession that a belief in the truthfulness of our Lord compels us to think that He believed in the existence of a kingdom of darkness' (p. 128), while the confident assertion of some that all men must eventually be saved is set aside by the consideration :

'If all men are to be saved at the last, this, at least, is certain—that they cannot be saved by that method of force which, robbing them of

1 'Jesus could feel no inward inclinableness to any act which was not in itself good, pure, and honest, but He could feel an inward desire for food, and yet that desire be in opposition to the demands of the Divine Will. In the Agony there is the same sort of struggle, the craving of the will of sense to be delivered from the awful sufferings of the Passion; the collision between the pure instincts of a nature which shrank from pain and death, and "the commandment" which He had "received of the Father." On the one side there is a struggle which Christ could not know because of His sinlessness, the struggle of an evil nature with the temptations which are homogeneous with it; on the other, there is a struggle which was possible to him, and which we cannot fully know, which arose from His perfect knowledge and acceptance of all that His Mission involved according to the Divine Appointment. . . . The Human Will of Jesus braved the storm of Temptation, and, though unable to be overwhelmed, yet suffered the tension, the toil, and the weariness of the conflict to bring us relief.' (Hutchings, The Mystery of the Temptation, pp. 126, 127, 135.)

3

There are one or two phrases we would gladly see slightly altered. E.g. the ignoring on p. 121 of the bearing of such passages as I Sam. xvi. 14 on the Old Testament beliefs about evil spirits, the comments on Dr. Martensen's theory about Satan on pp. 128-130, and the discussion of the meaning of the word alwvios on pp. 139–143.