A HISTORY OF Mediæval JewISH PHILOSOPHY. By Isaac Husik, A.M., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the University of Pennsylvania. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1916. Pp. 1+ 462.

Professor Husik has the satisfaction of knowing that this book is a husky pioneer, so far as the English language is concerned. Strange to say, the author is able to say that "the German, French, and Italian languages are no better off in this regard. Strangest of all, the Jewish Encyclopædia and the Encyclopædia Britannica have no articles on the subject, and even Hastings' Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics has only a brief article.

The Macmillans are publishing this book for the Jewish Publication Society of America. The Society made no mistake in giving Professor Husik the task of writing the book. His scholarship is accurate, wide, minute, and his touch is as light as could be expected in a subject seemingly so musty, but really so full of the psychology of history.

Among other useful things in the book is the proof that the celebrated Maimonides, the Jewish precursor and perhaps formal model of Thomas Aquinas, had a predecessor in Abraham Ibn Daud, who thought out pretty well all that the more brilliant Maimonides gets all the credit for. Especially well worth study is the chapter on Levi Ben Gerson (1288-1344 A.D.), who lays a firm basis for much of what is called "pluralism" to-day-the pluralism made famous by William James, but which is seeing sad degenerate days in the hands of H. G. Wells, the Prince of Slapdashery. The reader will get a good sample of Jewish Medieval acuteness, with its touches of originality and genius here and there, by carefully thinking out some of the implications of the following quotation from Professor Husik's characterization of Gerson's Theodicy: "God knows particulars in so far as they are ordered, he does not know them in so far as they are contingent. He knows that they are contingent, and hence it follows that he does not know which of the two possibilities will happen, else they would not be contingent. This is no defect in God's nature, for to know a thing as it is, is no imperfection. . . . . This theory meets all objections, and moreover it is in agreement with the views of the Bible. It is the

only one by which we can harmonize the apparent contradictions in the Scriptures. Thus on the one hand we are told that God sends prophets and commands people to do and forbear. This implies that a person has freedom to choose, and that the contingent is a real category. On the other hand, we find that God foretells the coming of future events respecting human destiny, which signifies determination. And yet again we find that God repents, and that he does not repent. All these contradictions are harmonized on our theory. God foretells the coming of events in so far as they are determined in the universal order of nature. But man's freedom may succeed in counteracting this order, and the events predicted may not come. This is signified by the expression that God repents." Open to criticism as this statement is, William James would have welcomed it, and it contains at least one of the golden threads in the cloth-of-gold of Truth. T. P. BAILEY.

THE OLD WORLD THROUGH OLD EYES. Three Years in Oriental Lands. By Mary S. Ware. New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons. This book contains a collection of letters written by Mrs. Ware to her family during a trip around the world and printed for her grandchildren. At the age of more than seventy, when the average grandmother seated by the fireside gathers her grandchildren about her and recalls incidents of her past life, this particular grandmother sets out in search of new experiences, and absolutely unattended makes a three years' tour through the Orient. In China she secured an interview with Yuan Shi Kai, for whom she felt a profound sympathy on account of his many burdens of office and his unaccustomed responsibilities. In travelling through India she was the guest for days at four native courts and was received everywhere with the greatest courtesy and consideration, which she modestly attributed to her age, but which was due no less to her never-failing self-possession, ready wit, good humor, kindliness, and sympathy. Prompted by no vulgar curiosity and with no inclination for mere tuft-hunting, she was interested chiefly in the results obtained in colonization and in the government of backward peoples by the Americans,

English, French, and Dutch, and she makes many astute observations on what she saw and heard. In China, for example, in speaking of the work of the missionaries, she wisely remarks: "Instead of grafting our teachings on their fine moral code of reverence for their dead and living parents, we force them to abandon this sheet anchor of their morality, and they lose their moral fiber in throwing off their traditions and customs." Of the Chinese again she observes with good sense and caustic humor: "The more I see of the Chinese, the more I think that this people can never be materially improved and uplifted till the principle that a man's first duty is to have offspring is changed."

When at last the good old lady reaches Paris, just before the end of the first year of the war, she visits the hospitals, carrying presents and comforting words to the sick, and is filled both with admiration for the splendid heroism of the French and with bitter indignation at the cowardly atrocities of the Germans. All the proceeds of her book, she tells us in her Introduction, are to go to the wounded French soldiers.

The book makes no pretension to style, and from this very fact springs much of its charm, for one has to read only a very few pages to catch a distinct flavor of individuality, a quaint simplicity, a whimsical humor, a keen curiosity and self-assertiveness that never become offensive, and a witty garrulousness.

A VISION REALIZED: A LIFE STORY OF REVEREND J. A. OERTEL, D.D., ARTIST, PRIEST, MISSIONARY. By J. F. Oertel. Milwaukee: The Young Churchman Company. 1917. xv, 233 PP.

This book should be of special interest to the readers of the REVIEW, for the vision the realization of which furnished the title for the biography of the Rev. Dr. Oertel, is embodied in a series of four large paintings, in All Saints Chapel, Sewanee, illustrating the Redemption of Mankind. To the painter of those pictures the vision appeared in the winter of 1851-52 when he was but twenty-eight years of age. It was to perpetuate this vision on canvas so that it might teach divine truth to thousands, that the artist endured hardships which remind the reader of the

famous Huguenot potter, Palissy, and toiled for more than fifty years; not, however, without winning other artistic successes. To this series of large paintings, to three other large and a score of smaller paintings of religious subjects by the same artist to be found among the treasured possessions of the University of the South, this volume will serve as an authentic interpretation that has long been in demand and will bring to these wonderful works the wider appreciation that is their due. The book will furthermore correct the too prevalent notion that all of Dr. Oertel's work is in Sewanee, or that Sewanee was made the convenient depository of paintings for which the world outside had no place. For the first of the series the artist refused an offer of ten thousand dollars in order that the "vision" might be realized in its fulness and tell the great story of Redemption in its entirety, in pictures that would be preserved together in one place. Sewanee was selected as that place because it was considered the centre of religious education for a wide region of our country.

In the sixty years of his life after his first exhibited picture Dr. Oertel produced more than one thousand major works, none of them mediocre, and most of them attracting high praise from competent critics. One of the most widely known of modern paintings the "Rock of Ages" was his work. Though he was essentially a religious painter, and consecrated his art to God and His Church, yet he was a versatile genius and painted landscapes and marine views of high merit, animal pictures and still life; executed some steel engravings, and carved some large altars and other work for prominent churches. He was besides a musician, and his letters show him to have possessed literary ability and to have been not devoid of a good sense of humor.

But the book is not a defence of Dr. Oertel's title to a place of honor in the history of American Art in the Nineteenth Century. It is the biography of an exceedingly interesting man, and is an excellent piece of biographical literature. Though inspired by filial affection and written and published as a memorial, it is of far wider interest than that of the family and friends of Dr. Oertel or even of the vast number of people who know him through his work at Sewanee and elsewhere. It is the life story of a good man, consecrated from infancy to God's service; a life

finding its expression in Christian art, having high aims and a great purpose, chiefly that of teaching to future ages God's revelation of Himself to the world.

Dr. Oertel was a native of Bavaria. He studied art in general and steel engraving in particular in Nuremberg. He came to this country in 1848 at the age of twenty-five. His career as a painter began in 1850. His life was a busy one, and he was compelled by circumstances to wander from place to place and set up his studio in many places. In 1862 he was for a while with Burnside's army, and was collecting material for pictures of the war. He received Holy Orders in 1867 and entered upon a useful career as missionary to the mountain people of the South. His ministry was more than a mere incident in the career of the artist. A zealous teacher of religion by word as well as by pen and brush he was until the end of his life. He died in Vienna, Virginia, in 1909. His long life was full of incident. The story of it all is well told and the character of the man is revealed to us in the book in such a manner that it may serve as an inspiration and an encouragement to succeeding generations.

The twenty-four illustrations have been well chosen and the only criticism that might be offered is that the half-tones of the paintings, from the very nature of the case, do scant justice to the great originals. A. H. NOLL.

LONESOME TUNES. Folk Songs from the Kentucky Mountains. The Words Collected by Loraine Wyman; the Pianoforte Accompaniment by Howard Brockway. New York: The H. W. Gray Company.

ENGLISH FOLKs from the SoUTHERN APPALACHIANS. Comprising 122 Songs and Ballads, and 323 Tunes. Collected by Olive Dame Campbell and Cecil J. Sharpe. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. $3.50 net. The first of these books contains twenty-five Folk Songs, with words, melody, and accompaniment, of which less than half are specimens of the traditional ballad. Both the words and music are given without comment or critical apparatus, the object being merely to "reproduce the songs as nearly as possible as they were sung by the people, regardless of their extraneous origin or defects." Although the melody seems in most cases