Those who feel that they have lost their God or their power to pray to Him will find this book to contain the most useful suggestions. It will also prove of great use as an introduction to the study of the theory of mysticism to those whose interest is purely scientific, metaphysical, and theological.

J. B. T.

A THEOLOGY FOR THE SOCIAL GOSPEL. By Walter Rauschenbusch. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1917.

"The body of ideas which we call the social gospels is not the product of a fad or a temporary interest: it is not an alien importation or a novel invention: it is the revival of the most ancient and authentic gospel, and a scientific unfolding of essential elements of Christian doctrine which have remained' undeveloped all too long: the rise of the social gospel is not a matter of choice but of destiny: the digestion of its ideas will excite a quickening and reconstructive influence on every part of theology" (p. 26).

The most serious charge that is commonly made against theology is that it is a speculative system, sufficient unto itself and remote from the concerns of human interest in the present world. Such a charge is plainly justified in certain of the traditional theologies. False ideas about God or the absence of any ideas about Him may lead to the most disastrous calamities to men and nations. Conversely, the widespread recognition of God as a God of justice-as the true Father of the human race-is bound to have a saving influence upon the historic destiny of man. True and saving ideas about God and mankind and their reciprocal relations are developed in this book of prophetic insight, and their acceptance by the bulk of mankind would be the best guarantee for the future security of the world of men. The author has known how to envisage the profounder meanings of theology as the guiding truths that can alone deliver men from the power of the kingdom of evil by making them the co-founders of the Kingdom of God.

Since this review was written, Professor Rauschenbusch has died. The press of the country has accorded to his work and worth the highest recognition.

J. B. T.

GOD AND MR. WELLS. A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF "GOD THE INVISIBLE KING." By William Archer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1917. Pp. vii+156.

GOD THE KNOWN AND GOD THE UNKNOWN. By Samuel Butler, author of Erewhon. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1917. Pp. 91.

THE IDEA OF GOD IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT PHILOSOPHY. The Gifford Lectures for 1912 and 1913. By A. Seth Pringle-Pattison, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. Oxford University Press. 1917. Pp. viii. +425.

"When it was known that Mr. H. G. Wells had set forth to discover God, all amateurs of intellectual adventure were filled with pleasurable excitement and anticipation." Thus Mr. Archer begins his keen and witty analysis of Mr. Wells's God made in the image of man. At the end of his first chapter Mr. Archer tells this little story to illustrate Mr. Wells's airy procedure in relieving God of the Divine Dignities:—

"I talked the other day to a young Australian who had been breaking new land for wheat-growing. 'What do you do,' I asked, 'with the stumps of the trees you fell? It must be a great labour to clear them out.' 'We don't clear them out,' he replied. 'We use ploughs that automatically rise when they come to a stump, and take the earth again on the other side.' I cannot but conjecture," continues Mr. Archer, "that Mr. Wells's thinking apparatus is fitted with some such automatic appliance for soaring gaily over the snags that stud the ploughlands of theology."

However, our author agrees with his victim in a sentiment expressed by Mr. Clutton Brock to this effect: "Satisfaction with existing things is damnation." Mr. Archer adds: "I have always thought that hell was the headquarters of conservatism, and I am delighted to find such influential backing for that pious opinion." If our readers will pardon this very Gallic levity, so fearfully and dangerously alien to the style of Mitteleuropa, we may venture to say that the underlying thought is of wide range, applying to mountain-top as well as seashore!

Now we must not give the impression that the essay of Mr. Archer is flippant; on the contrary, just because the author is not an "orthodox" Christian, one appreciates the more this 16inch shell hurled into the middle of Mr. Wells's fortifications:

"It is not quite clear why Mr. Wells should accept so large a part of the Christian ethic and yet refuse to identify his Invisible King with Christ." Let us all pause for Mr. Wells's reply.

Here is another, which gets "close home": "Your God [divested of metaphysical attributes] is simply a name for your own better instincts and impulses. Many people, perhaps most, share Mr. Wells's tendency to externalize, objectivate, personify these impulses; and there may be no harm in doing so. But when it comes to asserting that your own personification is the only true one, then I am not so sure." So on page 89. Further, on page 129, "For what is idolatry if it be not manufacturing a God, whether out of golden earrings or out of humanitarian sentiments, and then bowing down and worshipping it?"

In many respects, Butler is the antidote to Wells, for he is more logical and has it that we are units in the great World Organism; and hence we can regain from the lilies of the field some of the peace that Wells has stripped us of in his "goodfellow" god that begs us for help.

"No man does well so to kick against the pricks as to set himself against tendencies of such depth, strength, and permanence as this [evolutionism]. If he is to be in harmony with the dominant opinion of his own and of many past ages, he will see a single God-impregnate substance as having been the parent from which all living forms have sprung. One spirit, and one form capable of such modification as its directing spirit shall think fit; one soul and one body, one God and one life."

This is perhaps the central thought of Butler, and we may take it as a modern evolutionary comment on the Scriptural phrase,"in whom we live and move and have our being."

The last of our three books is the really great one, too great for brief characterization. It is a noble pronouncement of British pluralism against German monism. Professor Pringle-Pattison, under his old name of Andrew Seith, many years ago, in his little book called Hegelianism and Personality, showed up the empty abstractness of the favorite German idealism-a lack of respect for personal individuality.

The book is too technical for the purposes of literary review;

but one may judge its spirit from two quotations that we may allow ourselves. On page 254 we are told "that there can be no true doctrine of God which is not based on a true doctrine of man." No wonder "Gott" does not attract our plain Entente minds!

Our second quotation, not so popularly expressed, is nevertheless more than well worth pondering: "For art, as for philosophy, the End is inseparable from the process of its accomplishment. The End is not the final stage which succeeds and supplants its predecessors; it is the meaning or spirit of the whole, distilled, as it were, into each individual scene or passage." And each "scene" diplomatic and military, in the present World Tragedy, proves the truth of our author's words.

T. P. B.

STUDIES IN THE SYNTAX OF THE LINDISFARNE GOSPELS. By Morgan Callaway, Professor of English in the University of Texas. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 1918.

TENNYSON'S Use of the BiBLE. By Edna Moore Robinson. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

The first volume, forming No. 5 of Hesperia, Studies in English Philology, edited by James W. Bright, is restricted to an investigation of the Participle and of the Infinitive. Further instalments, dealing with the subjunctive mood and other syntactical problems, are promised by the same author. A good example of the microscopic, German method of counting and tabulating, these present Studies give evidence of that marvelous patience and that painful attention to detail which have contributed so much to modern German efficiency, but which have laid a blighting hand on our scholarship, checking in our graduate students the slightest inclination towards anything like æsthetic literary effort. In most of the graduate departments of our larger universities scholarship is synonymous only with patient drudgery, the ultimate value of the special investigation in hand being altogether secondary. In this particular instance, Professor Callaway tells us that, as the Lindisfarne Gospels is merely an interlinear gloss and in many respects a faulty one, a larger question at once presents itself, whether

or not such a gloss can give any trustworthy evidence as to the normal syntax of the dialect in which it is written. Concluding that, as the glossator adheres strictly to the Latin original, the text can throw no light on the normal order of words in the Northumbrian, the author declares that in the case of idioms or of the syntax of any parts of speech in which the gloss diverges from its original, the text gives invaluable evidence as to native usage. "It is hoped," he adds "that the studies may prove of interest from an absolute standpoint, the more so that they disclose several idioms not known in WestSaxon. Among the more noteworthy of these idoms may be mentioned the Absolute Participle with an Accusative Subject, possibly also with a Nominative Subject; the Infinitive as the Object of a Preposition; the Imperative use of the Infinitive; and that substitute for the Infinitive which I have ventured to nominate the Elliptical Accusative-with-Infinitive Construction. Moreover, certain constructions that are only slightly represented in West-Saxon, are somewhat frequent in the Lindisfarne Gospels, as the Inflected Infinitive with an Accusative Subject in Objective Clauses and Uninflected Infinitive with Accusative Subject in Subjective Clauses."

All honor to Professor Callaway for his splendid faith, courage, persistence, enthusiasm, and accuracy. Let us hope that the few grains of truth he has discovered in this dusty desert of a Northumbrian gloss may prove of value to modern students of a living language.

Although printed at the Johns Hopkins Press, this second brochure bears also the imprint of Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, Göttingen, and is No. 4 of Hesperia, a series of Schriften zur englischen Philologie. In other words, the familiar imprint "Made in Germany" appears on No. 4 of this series and has been removed from No. 5,-a hopeful sign of our future freedom from German domination in the realm of scholarship. Aside, however, from this outward evidence of our growing independence, this particular study of Miss Robinson's is far removed in manner and method from the usual doctor's dissertation. In the first place it is interesting, in the second place it has personality and some charm of style, and in the last place it was