I have seen ploughs made in Ontario and soap made in British Columbia by the help of a protective duty. These articles were manufactured for the same price as that formerly given for them to the American producer. The quality was as good, and a short interval only was needed to build up the factories. Should such an experiment be asked for, it might be tried at first for a term of years. Canadian and American experience proves that industries may be started where none have existed, by fiscal encouragement; but in adopting any interior customs lines we should be giving more than is given by the Federal Governments among our cousins. The experiment would be justified only if the demand should come from a large population asking for it, for the reason that local industries have not been possible of establishment on any other system.

Special favours to special religious denominations have accentuated Irish troubles, The Canadians do not concern themselves to interfere in regard to the endowment of religious institutions, and the property of the Catholic Church as well as the property of other churches is exempted from taxation. The endowments are often large, and it is difficult to see why we should grudge to any Irish governing bodies the power to make arrangements as they may deem best in respect to church and educational endowments. The rights and status of the minority would be guaranteed by a proviso against unjust taxation or confiscatory enactments.

In land legislation the only Canadian exemplar is the case of the purchase by the Parliament of the united provinces of the seignorial rights in Lower Canada. In this case the Treasury paid compensation for the abolition of limited feudal rights. In Ireland the prevention of harsh evictions among the poorer tenantry could be effected by the expenditure of a sum small in comparison with that proposed to be spent under the Government Bills. Were harsh evictions rendered impossible among the Irish poor by the installation of the poorer tenants as owners, the bottom would be knocked out of much of the trouble with which Ireland has been cursed. The investment, in a provincial or other authority, of the management of lands so redeemed, would prevent the evils of subdivision, if such local authority were made responsible for expenses which might be incurred by a laxity of supervision in such matters.

Whether American precedent should be followed in the separation of legislative from executive functions is another matter of great importance requiring ample consideration.

The conclusions to which the examination of Transatlantic experience leads us are

That a Federal Central Power is a weak power.

That it is important to proceed gradually in the delegation of power to local bodies.

That the judicature must be kept impartial by nomination and payment by the Supreme Government.

That a Supreme Government must have the presence in its Legislature of representatives of the whole people over whom it is to exercise control.

That justice is best secured by a Supreme Government. That the falsehood of extremes has been notably exemplified by too great local license and by over-centralization; and experience proves that limited and delegated powers to areas which cannot become powerful enough to resist the central Government, is the best solution of the most difficult question of our day.

LORNE.

CONTEMPORARY RECORDS.

NOW!

I. APOLOGETIC THEOLOGY.

TOWHERE is the distinction between the minds that see likenesses and those that see differences more apparent than in the region of Religious Apology. There always have been, and there always will be, apologists who concentrate their attention upon the opinions that are most alien and hostile to their creed, and are content to spend their labour in strengthening ramparts and deepening ditches, like the defenders of a camp; and for certain minds in every age such work needs doing. But there is a higher view of Christianity, which regards it as an organism, whose vital energy must needs assimilate whatever is lovely and of good report in the thoughts and systems and culture of each succeeding age. Such a view naturally issues in constructive rather than defensive apology; in the exhibition, that is, of the latent capacities, the unsuspected affinities, the prophetic previsions, the versatile adaptability, the comprehensiveness, the sympathy, the adequacy of Christian truth. And it is needless to add that this latter mode of teaching, even apart from its greater reasonableness, is far more congenial to a generation like our own, which owes so much to the persistent use of the comparative method, as well as to the appreciative temper which that method has induced. It is a welcome fact, therefore, to find this constructive tendency on the increase among our modern apologists. There is a ring in it of the buoyant hopefulness of earlier ages, and of the confidence that the future is on their side. Professor Allen's "Continuity of Christian Thought" is a good introduction to such ways of thinking. It is a study of the successive modes in which the central doctrines of Christianity have been presented by the Greek Fathers, the Latin Fathers, the Schoolmen, the Mystics, the Reformers, and the various schools of the present day; written clearly and forcibly, and with a wealth of illustration from the collateral movements of secular thought and art, which often recalls the charm of F. D. Maurice's "Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy." The fundamental thought of the book is the antithesis between the Alexandrian and Augustinian tendencies in theology, and the superior applicability of the former to the needs of our own day. Students of theology will always differ as to the extent of this antithesis, and some may think that in the present volume it is pressed too far; but it must be borne in mind that the general readers of current controversy and criticism are hardly, if at all, aware of its existence; and the importance therefore of its revival can scarcely be over-estimated. Nor does our author's enthusiasm for its wider recognition prevent his

*

"The Continuity of Christian Thought: a Study of Modern Theology in the Light of its History." By Alexander V. G. Allen. London and New York: Ward, Lock & Co.

seeing in Latin theology "a providential adaptation of Christianity to a lower environment," and in the Papacy "a dispensation divinely appointed for the races of Europe; a schoolmaster, like the Jewish theocracy, which it so closely resembled, to bring them to Christ."

"The resemblance between our own age and the early Church is a striking one. Once more in history we are confronted by the same problem with which the Greek fathers were occupied, and in substantially the same form. Like the Greek philosophers of the Neo-Platonic school, they aimed to reconcile the idea of the divine immanence, which had been the groundwork of all their culture, with the idea which was then invading the sphere of thought as well as of religion, that God was outside of the world, existing in solitude, and passively apart from the creation. The process of reconciliation between these two conceptions of Deity, neither of which would give way to the other, was begun by Origen, and completed by Athanasius in the doctrine of the Trinity, according to which transcendent Deity, as the eternal Father, the mysterious background or abyss of all existence, is united by a holy and infinite spirit with immanent Deity-the eternal Son, by whom and for whom all things were made, and in whom all things consist; who in the fulness of time became flesh, and dwelt amongst us, the glory of the invisible Father, full of grace and truth. The problem is the same for us, but we approach it in history in our own way. Then the idea of immanent Deity was already beginning to fade out of the consciousness; now it is slowly returning after centuries of abeyance. We bring with us a conviction of the Divine transcendence, which has been the basis of thought and experience through so many generations, both in Latin and Protestant Christendom, that to escape from it is impossible, and we seek to reconcile with it the conviction of the immanence of God, which is enforced upon us by the deeper utterances of the consciousness, by all that is highest in the researches of modern life, whether in history, in science, in art, in philosophy, or in religion."

"Mechanics and Faith; a Study of Spiritual Truths in Nature," * travels by a different road to remarkably similar conclusions. It is an ingenious and powerful presentation of the analogies between mechanical and spiritual knowledge, or, in the author's words, of the "essential unity of these varied modes of expression of universal truth," the peculiar character of mechanical science being that it "brings us into immediate contact with the omnipresent reality of force," and so "operates to familiarize the mind with the reality and controlling nature of unseen things;" whereas "in the other physical sciences, in which observation terminates on material forms, it is possible for the thought of spiritual realities to be avoided."

"The recognition of force, as a spiritual reality, manifested through the medium of physical forms, which is the characteristic of mechanics, required a certain degree of spiritual insight, and constituted the first advance made by men from that primitive perceptive condition in which thought is limited to the material forms themselves, as these are disclosed to us through our organs of sense. Thus the recognition of force was the first step toward the scientific recognition of all spiritual realities, which are manifested to us through the same physical medium, and of the Infinite Being in whom all these consist. . . . . Thus by mechanical science a wide door has been opened into the realm of the unseen. At present scientific thinkers generally

....

"Mechanics and Faith; a Study of Spiritual Truths in Nature." Porter. New York and London: Putman & Sons.

By C. T.

are accustomed to stop with the contemplation of force. In point of fact, as will be shown, force is not to be generically distinguished from the other spiritual realities of truth, beauty, and love, which are equally manifested to us through the same universal medium of the physical creation, and of whose existence we are made aware through a similar mode of revelation."

Force, it is argued, is only recognized by us from the consciousness of our own ability to employ it, and such ability rests ultimately, not in the will, which is only a secondary agent, but in the central seat of our personality, the Ego. Hence we are compelled to regard its manifestations in the outer world as due to the will of a Being whose will, like ours, is determined by His character, and whose character, in its ultimate relation to us, is Love. "But our only possible revelation of God that is true, in the degree that we are able to form it, is the apprehension which is formed by the recognition of love alone." It is only therefore when God's character as Love has been recognized by the appropriately trained faculty-viz., the disciplined and loving heart-that the probability to which the lower analogies have pointed becomes a certainty," and the thought can no longer stop nor be arrested until it has penetrated into the universal presence of God, and contemplates in all things the working of His infinite love." Even for minds to which this mystic certitude is as yet impossible, the book cannot fail to be fruitful in suggestion; the more so for the remarkable counteraction which, with equal scientific reason, it presents to a work which it must frequently recall to the reader's mind-"Natural Law in the Spiritual World."

"Scientific Theism," by F. E. Abbot, is an essay in the theological application of the modern scientific realism. In an introduction which briefly summarizes the history of Nominalism and Realism, the Kantian philosophy, and with it all forms of subjective idealism, are shown to be descendants of the former, whose temporary triumph was due to the inadequate form in which realism had long been presented; and we are recalled to the "theory of knowledge, which underlies the practical procedure of modern science"-i.e., scientific realism, or Relationism (by which is meant the belief in the objectivity of relations), and which it is hoped "will bring about the greatly needed identification of science and philosophy." The various forms in which the Kantian separation of phenomena and noumena has tended to the confusion of thought are then criticized, and the fundamental identity of the two, in the light of science, exhibited. The progress of knowledge shows the universe to be infinitely intelligible, and therefore likewise infinitely intelligent, since "the infinitely intelligible universe is the self-existent totality of all Being. . . . . But that which is self-existent must be self-determined in all its attributes; and it could not possibly determine itself to be intelligible, unless it were likewise intelligent; or that which intelligibly exists through itself must be intelligible to itself, and therefore intelligible in itself." Hence, Scientific Theism rejects "the Dualism which posits spirit and matter as two incomprehensibly related substances, eternally alien to each other and mutually hostile in their essential nature," and issues in a Monism, which, however, "if Pantheism is the denial of all real personality, whether finite or infinite, . . emphatically is not Pantheism, but its diametrical opposite," and "Scientific Theism." By Francis Ellingwood Abbot, Ph.D. London: Macmillan & Co.

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