often widely appreciated though they may be profoundly loved. In the times of discouragement which must sometimes overtake them they may well reflect upon the saying, "The Lord knoweth his own," and take courage. There are better meters of spiritual power than big audiences, great pew-rents, or a bustling ecclesiastical machinery. Is Brotherhood a Heresy? ing to him as a man. In a recent article in the "Missionary Review of the World" Dr. Arthur T. Pierson, in a somewhat pessimistic view of present religious conditions, attributes the "backward current" which in some directions he thinks he discerns to several causes; among others to "the new doctrine of the universal Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man-the more dangerous because it has a half-truth joined to a half-error." The half-truth appears to be that "God is the creator of all;" the half-error that all men are his children. This statement, not attributed to an interview or an address by Dr. Pierson, but printed by him in an evidently well-considered if somewhat pessimistic article, perplexes us. Do we misunderstand him? Or does he misunderstand the doctrine of the Brotherhood of Man? Or does he really think, as he seems to do, that there is no other human brotherhood than that "which Christ himself established upon the foundation of his redemptive work"? It must be confessed that the phrase Brotherhood of Man has sometimes degenerated into a mere unreligious cant; in other cases, like similar phrases, it is used with either little consideration of its real meaning or with a double meaning attached to it. That Dr. Pierson is a conscientious student of the Bible no one who knows him will question; that any such student of the Bible should question that it teaches very explicitly a Brotherhood of Man founded on the universal Fatherhood of God, and that this teaching underlies and is fundamental to all of its ethical and much of its religious teaching, is to us extraordinary. It is for this reason that we cannot but think that Dr. Pierson attributes to the phrase one meaning, and that those whom he criticises attribute to it a different meaning. In the opening chapters of Genesis it is declared that God made man in his own image and breathed into him the breath of life. Surely, if this breathing signifies anything, it is that God breathed into man the breath of his own life. Surely, if the declaration that God made man in his own image means anything, it is that man is like God in some fundamental and essential elements of his nature, elements created in him in his creation and belonging to him as a man. And it is man, not white man or black man, Jew man or Gentile man, wise man or ignorant man, good man or bad man, whom God thus creates in his own image. Call these first chapters of Genesis history, science, poetry, legend, what we will; however we classify them in literature, they indicate the conception of man's nature in the mind of the Hebrew prophet, and this conception is that man in creation was made Godlike and into man was breathed a divine life, and it was and is this divine life, this divine likeness, which distinguishes him from other animals and makes him man. If we turn from this earliest prophetic conception of man's nature to that of the later Hebrew prophets, we find it repeated: "Thou hast made him but little lower than God. . . . Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hand." This citation from the Psalms is sufficient to indicate that the conception of man as created in the divine image, recipient of the divine life, and therefore intrusted with a measure of divine authority over all other created things animate and inanimate, was still the prophetic conception some centuries later than the supposed date of Genesis. Paul repeats this Hebraic conception of man in his address to the Athenians. Before him on Mars Hill was a pagan audience. There is small reason to suppose that any one of them had ever heard of Christ, or of the Bible, or of the Ten Commandments, or even of Jehovah except as a local god of a despised provincial people; and it is to such a pagan and surely unregenerate congregation that Paul says, "We are also his offspring" not his creation-sheep and oxen are his creation--but his "offspring," springing from him, his lineage, his race, his children. If we turn from the text of the Bible to a view of life, we find in this case, as in so many others, life at once confirming and interpreting the ancient prophets. That man is an animal is attested by the study of comparative physiology; that as an individual he has come into his present condition through previous animal stages is demonstrated by the study of embryology; but that he is something more than an animal is avouched by his own consciousness. If he were not, religion could have no message for him, could make no appeal to him, could evoke no response from him. It is because he is made in God's image, because God has breathed into him his own life, because he is made but a little lower than God, that he recognizes divine obligations and is conscious of divine aspirations. His conscience responds to the claims of divine law; his aspirations respond to the example of Christ's life; his affections respond to the manifestations of God's love. If he had not this conscience, the law of God could lay no claim to his allegiance; if he had not these aspirations, the example of Christ would mean no more to him than to his dog; if he had not these affections, the love of God could hope for no response to its summons. It is because he is not like dumb driven cattle, because he is, as Sabatier has said, "incurably religious," that divine law has a moral authority over him and a divine Gospel an inspiration for him. What is meant by the Brotherhood of Man is that in the kinship of all men with the Father in heaven there is a deeper union than any which is furnished by family ties, or agreement in beliefs, or engagement in a common enterprise, or congeniality in temperament. What ever man has a conscience is my brother, because we both recognize right and wrong; whatever man has a reverence or even a timorous awe for the Infinite and Eternal is my brother, because in us both is a capacity to recognize a Power greater than the greatest, and to receive an influence from Him who is higher than the highest. It is because of this brotherhood that we owe mutual duties to each other. Why is it praiseworthy for a man to subdue the wild horse of the prairies and harness him to human service, and not praiseworthy in man to subdue the Atrican. and harness him to the white man's uses? Because the African is a brother and the horse is not; because the one is made in God's image and endowed with the beginnings of a divine life, which it is the white man's first duty with his superior advantages to develop, and the other is a creature made for man's uses and given to man to use; because the first has the possibility of his highest life in himself as one of God's sons, and the other has the possibility of his highest and in truth his happiest life as the harnessed servant of man. To deny this brotherhood of man is to deny the very basis of all human fellowship, of all mutuality of obligation, of all spiritual service; it is to "cut the nerve" of all the higher philanthropies; it is to reduce all service for our fellowmen to the level of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; it is to deprive such great movements as that for the abolition of slavery, and that for improved industrial conditions after slavery is abolished, and that for a universal education, of their chief incentives if not of the just ground and reason for their existence; it is pre-eminently to destroy the logical ground and deaden the spiritual inspiration for any missionary endeavor. Why should we send missionaries to the Zulus in Africa and not to the monkeys in Africa? Because the Zulus are God's children and therefore our brothers; because in them are the divine lineaments and at least the potentiality of a divine life; because, great as is the difference between them in their barbarism and us in our civilization, the likeness, the kinship, the unity, is infinitely deeper, greater, and truer; and because God will have all eternity to finish in them and for them the work which we can begin here and now in bringing them to Him and to the life which is really theirs. To deny this universal Fatherhood of God and this brotherhood of man, based upon and centered in that Fatherhood, is to deny, however unconsciously, the fundamental revelation of Christianity, the basic truth which it makes manifest. Jesus Christ came to earth to manifest the love of God the Father for all mankind; he came to show to all mankind by his own relation to the Father what our relations may become when his prayer is answered and we are one with the Father as he is one with the Father; and he came to show that in the Fatherhood of God is a ground of unity which overleaps all distinctions of society, race, condition, or even character, making the disciple of Christ, like Christ himself, a friend of the rich and the poor, of the Jew and the Gentile, of the orthodox Joseph of Arimathea, the heretical Samaritan, and the woman that was a sinner. It is true that man may wander away from God; may deface and mar the image almost beyond recognition; may pollute the life until it no longer seems divine. But his very sins still bear witness to his divine lineage. If he had not been made of kin to God, it would be no sin for him to wander from God; if he had no divine life to pollute, it would be no sin to pollute it; if he had no sense of right and wrong to recognize divine law, he could not be condemned for not recognizing it; if no affections to recognize divine love, he could not be condemned for refusing to accept that love and give love in return. It is true that just in the measure in which men wander away from God they wander from one another, and in isolation and separation lose that fellowship which is essential to make life worth living; that thus the brotherhood is broken into fragments as the Fatherhood is ignored if not repudiated. It is true also that when man returns to his Father he returns both to himself and to his fellow-men; and that there is in the consciousness of one's kinship with the Father added to duty a new sacredness as well as a new joy; and in the consciousness of human brotherhood there is added a new bond uniting in a new fraternity those who recognize in God their Father and in every man a brother. There is, in other words, not only a brotherhood of men but also a "communion of saints." But the two are not identical, and the second could not exist were it not for the first, out of which it grows as the flower from the stem. There could be no communion of saints if there were not first a brotherhood of man; as there could be no acceptance of Christ as the revelator of God if there were not first the fact that he is a Father whose love is to be revealed. The Real Poe The publication of the Virginia Edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Professor James A. Harrison, of the University of Virginia, and bearing the imprint of Messrs. T. Y. Crowell & Co., is an event of importance because it presents the text of one of the foremost American writers with a precision and in an order which no earlier editors, however thorough and intelligent, have been able to command. Poe has suffered more than any other writer of his prominence and of his time from uncertainties and impurities in the text of his work. This has been due to his confused and wandering life, to his own lack of care in collecting what he had written and putting it in final form, and to the indifference and carelessness of some of his earlier editors. The Virginia Edition presents an authentic text based on Poe's own copy of the "Broadway Journal," in which he reprinted all his work up to December, 1845, which he considered worth preserving, including nearly all the tales and poems, and many of the criticisms; his own copy of "The Raven" and other poems published in the same year, and annotated and corrected on the margin in Poe's own hand, the changes to be incorporated in a future edition; Poe's own copy of the "Tales," also corrected in numerous places in his own writing; Poe's own copy of "Eureka," containing a number of autographs and corrections; and original files of "The Southern Literary Messenger," of Burton's "Gentleman's "Gentleman's Magazine," "Graham's Magazine," and "Godey's Magazine." Professor Harrison has wisely ignored Griswold, who has done more than any one else to throw the Poe text into confusion, and to foment the long Poe discussion. Having as nearly as possible recovered. the text in the form in which Poe meant it to remain, Professor Harrison has arranged the material in chronological order, in order that the evolution of Poe's art might be clearly traceable and that the edition might present in a logical and vital way the history of his mind. He has also followed carefully Poe's long and intricate revision of the text of his works, and has kept the record in a series of full notes, reporting all the changes made by the poet in his text-a very laborious piece of work, involving the comparison of the original text with the text of five or six editors; and nearly a hundred pages are filled with comparative and explanatory notes. Professor Harrison has also succeeded in straightening out several perplexities and clearing up several mysteries connected with the Poe text. He has uncovered Griswold's iniquities as an editor in several instances, has separated Poe's real work from the work with which Griswold had connected it, and in more than one instance has dissipated very disagreeable impressions of the poet's relation to his contemporaries. Poe, for instance, had written on three different occasions three different reviews of Hawthorne. Griswold took the latest of these reviews, divided it and inserted another review written for another periodical, which he also mutilated, and then added to this composite composition a fragment of a third review. The "Marginalia" have been increased by about forty pages, and notable additions have been made to papers on autography, secret writing, and cryptography. Additional features of the Virginia Edition are valuable appendices and bibliographical aids, including most notable comments upon Poe by his contemporaries, and several papers which have long been lost. The edition is greatly enriched by all Poe's correspondence.. About two-thirds of the volume in which the correspondence appears will be new even to those who are most familiar with Poe. A very important feature of the "Virginia" Poe is Professor Harrison's biography of the poet, which is the fruit of long and patient investigation, and bears evidence throughout of first-hand knowledge of all the material relating to Poe in every form, and of careful investigation of all possible sources of information. Many minor and some major points in the poet's career are cleared up for the first time; new light is thrown on some obscure passages in his life; and, while the determining facts remain unchanged, they are seen in truer perspective and more intelligible relations. Professor Harrison is in profound sympathy with Poe's character and genius; in no other spirit can the poet be really understood; but he has concealed nothing and held nothing back. Indeed, one feels as if he had given too great a prominence to Poe's faults; never before have they been exhibited in such detail and with such frankness and fullness of statement. The most unsympathetic critic of the author of "Ulalume" could not have dealt with his failings more freely. Professor Harrison has understood that nothing so soon wins or so long holds confidence as frankness; and we finish his record of Poe with a feeling that the long and, for the most part, needless and confusing discussion which has raged about Poe since the publication of Griswold's unpardonable misrepresentations can now become a thing of the past, that Poe can be clearly seen in his strength and his weakness, and that henceforth attention may be fastened upon his work and its significance. The story is told in all its tragedy by Professor Harrison and in Poe's letters. Professor Harrison brings out clearly the characteristics of Poe's work-its unique quality of imagination, its striking individuality, its almost magical resources of melody, its lonely isolation of feeling, its distinction of manner and tone, its unblemished purity. He gives a fresh impression of Poe's extraordinary industry, his pathetic patience with himself, his passion for perfection of form; he explains Poe's habit of retouching and reprinting his work; he makes us aware of the extraordinary difficulties amid which the poet's work was done. It is, indeed, one of the most tragic stories in the history of literature, and it is told with a sympathetic insight which gives order and intelligibility to a singularly confused career. Professor Harrison's biography would have gained by more definite indication of Poe's limitations and less emphasis on his genius, and by restraint of style in some passages. These are very minor defects in a biography which marks a definite point in the wearisome controversy about Poe, and gives us an adequate impression of the poet's circumstances, temperament, genius, and career. It is time for a sane, non-provincial judgment of Poe. He was neither a great poet like Shakespeare, nor a "jingle man;" he was a singer of unique genius, individual, distinctive, original, and an exquisite artist. The Spectator The Spectator used to cherish a fond belief in formal education, which, alas ! as the years go by, has become dimmed and shorn of many of its glories. It would be hard to say when this disillusion first began for the Spectator, or when he first appreciated the fact that one may know the right educationally and still the very wrong pursue, but he is under the impression that the first trailing cloud of glory which he saw float away was cut off by the shears of a remark dropped from the lips of a man who most unquestionably knew better. "When I was down to home-" said this learned one in easy mood to the Spectator, and the Spectator almost fainted with the shock-he was younger then. What is it to be educated? The Spectator, in an earlier stage of conviction, would have said that to have graduated from a representative college would be education sufficient for all of the ordinary purposes of life. To-day he knows that while the ordinary purposes of life demand that a man shall be at home in place of to home, a college education sometimes falls short of supplying what is required. Not long ago the Spectator heard the small daughter of most cultivated and delight ful parents remarking to her mother, “Mamma, dear, I don't think Mrs. is quite a lady. She asked me to-day, 'Was you coming up the road?" The little daughter received an instant, if gentle, lesson on the wrong of calling any creature common or unclean." you see one may be a very lovely lady and yet speak the poorest English," was the summary of the discourse. "So "Then what should I have said?" the little maid insisted, and the mother hesitated. "You might say she was uneducated," was the final answer. Mistaken statement! Utterly mistaken, as the Spectator knew. Uneducated! Had he not heard slips in English, before which this one small error paled, from graduates of the first colleges in the land? And did he not know that the poor lady in question was an educated woman-so called? It was not at all a question of ignorance with her. She knew better. It was simply the absence of the habit of cultivated usage in common speech. So far as her personal and known standards had taught her, the little lady was right. Her charming, sensitive, and cultivated mother was her set standard of a "lady," and if the definition was narrow, the ideal was high. As a matter of fact, the whole situation resolved itself, in the Spectator's mind, into this query: Can one well educated be still most uncultivated? The Spectator is very sure that a positive line can be drawn between education and cultivation, and that one may travel very far along the road with the one, lacking almost wholly the other. The ideal condition is, however, the possession of both. The Spectator has a friend who is to him a ceaseless source of wonder. What are you to think of a man who can pass through the first preparatory schools in the country, one of the first colleges, one of the most scholarly universities for graduate work, and come out of that mill a man of essentially common mind, unable to apply-in any cultivated sense or for his own growth-any of all that he has learned? The Spectator has such a one as friend, and is attached to him, too. He is a thoroughly good fellow, and no fool either. It is to the Spectator a wonder of the ages how that same man can have learned so much, and passed examinations as proof of his learning, and know so little and continue to be so small a man in culture. How did he contrive to slough off so successfully, as he emerged from school after school, all of the best that should have clung to him? What is it to be educated? The Spectator likes to think of the word as a greater, finer, richer word than its popular use implies. He would even like to say that the great schools of learning, primary or collegiate, that cannot even give a man fair English in spite of himself, have very little to do with the matter, save as possible means to an end. Is it not all a question of atmosphere-and assimilation of that atmosphere? Atmosphere is one of those priceless things that, like heaven, is given away-to be had only for the asking. But this matter of asking, of really wanting so earnestly that the prayer holds the spirit perfectly receptive-there |