,,

existing between the theology of the Lucan writings and that summarized in the Apostles' Creed.* "The most striking similarity with Acts is not offered by any book in the New Testament, but rather by the Apostles' Creed." They then draw a sharp distinction between this" type of Christianity and that which is "represented by the later Epistles of St. Paul, by the Fourth Gospel, and by the Alexandrian School, and found final expression in the Nicene Creed." They give the impression that they think that there existed at the end of the first century a Church which was "especially Lucan." "Find this Church, and you have reason to say that the development of the Creed is likely to have taken place there; or identify the place where the Creed developed, and you have a right to say that Luke and Acts are likely to have been cherished by the Church in that place."

This means that the Apostles' Creed was not a summary of Christian doctrine which had its origin in Christian literature and tradition as a whole, but was drawn up in some particular Church under the influence of the Lucan writings. The Editors cannot find that Church. The truth would seem to be that a specifically Lucan Church is a myth, because all the local Christian Churches were Lucan; one might, however, just as well say Marcan or Matthean. These documents, in fact, represent popular Christianity, and the more personal writings of the New Testament are the result of some form of reflection upon this tradition. The Fourth Gospel presumes it, and so does the Epistle to the Hebrews, and so do the Pauline letters. It would seem, therefore, impossible to draw any clear-cut line between the so-called Synoptic tradition and the Pauline and Johannine theology, because the latter sprang out of the former. The search for a Lucan Church would therefore seem to be a fruitless search.

E. C. HOSKYNS.

* Pages 199-204.

NOTICES

OLD VILLAGE LIFE: OR, GLIMPSES OF VILLAGE LIFE THROUGH ALL AGES. By P. H. Ditchfield, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.S.L., F.R.Hist.S., Oriel College, Oxford; Rector of Barkham, Berkshire. With 40 Illustrations and Plans. Cr. 8vo. Pp. xii+253. London: Methuen and Co., Ltd. 1920. 7s. 6d. net.

Mr. Ditchfield's list of contributions to the literature of English country life is a long one. He has written much, always interestingly, often with illumination, on many aspects of life in our rural parishes, and in his time he must have given a great deal of pleasure to a large number of readers. His present work is worthy to rank, as a highly agreeable volume, with any of its numerous predecessors. But it is a pity, considering how agreeable it is as a piece of reading, that Mr. Ditchfield has not added to its value by avoidance of certain very palpable errorssome of fact, some of faulty opinion. In certain matters Mr. Ditchfield appears to be careless about carelessness. He will not even give us the correct title of Piers Ploughman. He seems to think that the far-famed Cotswold Games were held in the sixteenth century, and he says they were celebrated at Barton-on-the-Heath—a turning-up of the Annalia Dubrensia, or of Graves's Spiritual Quixote, to say nothing of a reference in documented editions of such works as Brand, would have told him that Captain Dover's annual festivals were held at Dover's Hill, near Chipping Campden. These are matters of fact; some of Mr. Ditchfield's opinions require the support of substantiation; it would be difficult for him to prove, for example, that the architecture of Westminster Abbey was the concept, development, and perfected work of our own people. Nor will mere assertion of his great qualities whitewash the Stuart squire; contemporary documents, and the numerous diaries and letters of the period, easily accessible in the reprints of the Surtees and similar societies, make us much more inclined to hold with Macaulay that the seventeenthcentury country gentleman got his chief pleasures from field sports and an unrefined sensuality, than with Mr. Ditchfield that he was publicspirited, courteous, and intellectual. The fact is that when Mr. Ditchfield gets to pure history he becomes prejudiced, inexact, and unreliable. His prejudices lead him to the use of immoderate language; he confuses biassed assertion with plain proof, as in his treatment of the events immediately following the Norman Conquest. Sometimes he contradicts himself-on page 143 he says that the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 proved itself a hopeless failure and accomplished nothing; on page 144 he says that it really accomplished much. Worst of all Mr. Ditchfield's unsupported opinions-which are set forth as if they were ex cathedra utterances are those about the Reformation and the state of the Church in the centuries immediately preceding that momentous event, and one can only hope that some of his readers, at any rate, will turn from him to Gairdner, and to Whitney, and to the second volume of the Cambridge Modern History. To tell the ordinarily fairly educated reader of these days that the Reformation in England arose out of the lust and greed of Henry VIII. and the Machiavellian policy of Thomas Cromwell, and to ignore the reform movement which had been stirring for three centuries, is as ridiculous as it is to hold up the later medieval Church to us as a pattern of perfection.

But, mistakes or no mistakes, Mr. Ditchfield will find many readersthere always are readers of this sort of book, folk who are not very particular about points of history or archæology, but who love to be entertained with pleasant, chatty gossip about an England which is vanishing before our very eyes. And Mr. Ditchfield, apart from his bias, is a good companion, and all the better because in addition to liberal draughts on his own balances he knows how to borrow from the stores of others. He is a master of well-chosen extract; he knows, too, how to add to the charm of his book in the matter of illustrating its text. In plain fact, he is an accomplished book-maker, and it would be well if the managers of all our village libraries would see to it that their shelves contain such books as this, many others by the same hand, some similar volumes by Mr. Baring Gould-any works, in short, written in plain English, which would help the villager to learn something about village history and its meanings and values. There may come a day when, in that collection of books which ought to be found just within the porch of every parish church, not one village in England will be without at any rate an abstract, even in mere pamphlet form, of the story of its own fortunes. As things are, few villagers know anything of the history of the parish to which they belong-there are, indeed, comparatively few incumbents who can tell anything of the past of the place in which they have a present interest. One cannot help wishing that the clergy who are so deeply concerned about the value of tithe and the rights of the parson's freehold would give some little attention to the riches which lie hidden in parish registers and in damp-spoiled papers, too often lying neglected in muniment chests. How people-and especially young people can possibly be expected to take an interest in the affairs of a parish when all its past, always interesting, often full of historical importance, is a sealed book to them, is a question which a very considerable number of our country clergy steadfastly ignore. Yet what a field !— one for which the country parson, with his many hours of leisure, is eminently fitted. Does it never strike those village clergy who complain that their folk will not go to church that they might go much more readily if they knew what a glorious heritage they have, not only in the faith that has come down to them through long ages, but in the mere fabric of the church wherein it has been preached age after age? Let a man get it firmly into his mind that his faith and his church are priceless possessions, and that he should be proud of sharing them with his forefathers, and he will value both more than he does at present in too many instances. Books like this of Mr. Ditchfield's are a great help in this direction. If there are things in it to which historian and archeologist may rightly take exception, there is also far more which each must welcome gladly as helpful in making the villager curious to learn still further of his parish and its past.

J. S. FLETCHER.

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. By G. P. Gooch. Cr. 8vo. Pp. 47. (Helps for Students of History, No. 29.) London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 1920. 8d. net.

Mr. Gooch's little handbook is the latest addition to one of the most admirable series of historical primers ever put at the disposal of students. Like its predecessors, it is both concise and full, brief yet packed with knowledge. As an indication of sources it leaves nothing to be desired, and whoever reads one-half of the literature to which it serves as guide

post will find himself extremely well acquainted with the causes and effects of what the Preface rightly calls "the most important event in the life of modern Europe," compared by Hender to the Reformation and the rise of Christianity. "It deserves to be ranked with those two great movements in history," continues the Preface, "because, with them, it destroyed the landmarks of the world in which generations of men had passed their lives, because it was a movement towards a completer humanity, and because it too was a religion, with its doctrines, its apostles, and its martyrs. . . . As Christianity taught that man was a spiritual being, and the Reformation proclaimed that no barrier should stand between the soul and God, so the Revolution asserted the equality of men, and declared each one of them, regardless of birth, colour, or religion, to be possessed of inalienable rights." And so much are we of this period, and especially at the present troublous time, still influenced by the doings of the days wherein "France performed the work of the human race at the price of her own blood," that it is almost a positive duty of all thinking men to acquaint themselves fully with the true history of the Revolution in order to get at its values in human history. Such will not find anywhere a better guide than Mr. Gooch in the allimportant matter of what to read on this great subject.

J. S. FLETCHER. CHRISTIAN MONASTICISM IN EGYPT TO THE CLOSE OF THE FOURTH CENTURY. By the Rev. W. H. Mackean. S.P.C.K., London. 1920. Pp. 160. 8s. net.

ST. BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX'S LIFE OF ST. MALACHY OF ARMAGH. By H. J. Lawlor, D.D., Litt.D. S.P.C.K., London. 1920. Pp. lxvi +183. Price 12s. net.

We have here two notable examples of the scholarly activity of the S.P.C.K. Mr. Mackean's monograph forms one of the Society's series of Studies in Church History, Dr. Lawlor's being a volume in Series V., which is devoted to the lives of the Celtic saints. Both are works which will take their place in the permanent literature of their subjects, though the latter opens up a less-trodden tract for the general student. Both are occupied with monasticism, the one summarizing in a convenient form the mass of knowledge which is now available of the origin and early history of the monks and eremites of Egypt, the latter telling the story, in the main clear but built on some acute guesses, how the longdelayed transformation of the abnormal monastic system of the Irish Church into normal Western diocesan form was contributed to by a great ascetic personality in the period of change, the twelfth century.

The root-problem of Mr. Mackean's inquiry is, of course, "Whence and why did monasticism arise in the fourth century?" He clears the ground by rejecting Hilgenfeld's theory that it was borrowed from Buddhism, Weingarten's that it was a development of something pagan and Egyptian, and other suppositions which derive it directly from Greek or Jewish sources. Except in so far as such influences formed the atmosphere in which nascent Christianity developed, and generally contributed to the formation of a mystical and ascetic type of mind, we agree with Mr. Mackean that they are insufficient causes for so vast a phenomenon.

Students are fairly well agreed about the conditions that made Egyptian Christianity energize in the way it did, and Mr. Mackean

details them with balance and judgment, leaving none out: the asceticism in the air of Alexandria in the third century, Eastern, Hellenistic, pagan, Christian, Origenic, the Neo-Platonic mysticism, the need of an outlet for lay devotion, the secularization of the Church in the fourth century and the cessation of persecution, the lawless condition of Egypt and the pressing burden of taxation, admirably illustrated from the papyri, and the call of the wild with its vast distances and temperate climate. "This may be said to form the fuel of the monastic movement. The match was supplied by the example and influence of the great St. Anthony." The development of monasticism in its eremitic, collective, and cœnobitic forms is well given, and the important matter of its connection with official Christianity and the influence of Athanasius sufficiently dealt with. The writer, of course, acknowledges his indebtedness to Dom C. Butler, P. Ladeuze, and H. B. Workman, and uses Cassian liberally, but does not refer to Dr. Wallis Budge.

Dr. Lawlor's Introduction is a very scholarly piece of work, and gives a thorough account of how the Irish Church in the course of the eleventh century abolished its early Celtic features, unparalleled elsewhere in Christendom, and became by 1200 a faithful daughter of Rome. "In default of a better word we may call the movement a Reformation, though it might perhaps be more accurately described as an ecclesiastical revolution." The central point of the movement was the substitution of a diocesan organization under the Pope for the loose system of monastic foundation under lay-abbots or "coarbs," who had become hereditary. Combined with the entire subordination of the bishops to the abbots was a low state of morality, a disregard of the rites of Confession, Confirmation, and Matrimony, and the lack of a system of tithe-paying. St. Bernard's Life is one authority for the low state of the Irish Church, and we must with Dr. Lawlor not be prepared to acquit him altogether of exaggeration.

St. Malachy was the leading spirit in the second generation of Reformers. Dr. Lawlor gives an admirable picture of his predecessors, Gilbert of Limerick, whom he succeeded as Papal Legate; Cellach, whom be followed at Armagh; O'Dunan of Meath, and the O'Briens of Munster. He took up their views and built on the foundation they had laid; his saintly personality, the miraculous powers ascribed to him, his unfaltering purpose and spirit of asceticism, made the triumph of Roman Christianity quite assured when he died at Clairvaux in 1148.

The Life, which from internal evidence was penned by St. Bernard only three months after Malachy's death, when the pathos of it was still fresh in his mind, is a document that not only records what Malachy had done in Ireland, but reveals to no small extent the charm of its great writer's mind, and the whole attitude of the religious men of his day. The account of the miracles of Malachy, being contemporary and uncoloured, gives useful data for the study of these phenomena from a psychological standpoint. There is little in them that, given an extraordinary personality and the expectation of abnormal events, cannot be normally explained.

To the Life are appended two letters of St. Bernard to St. Malachy, and two sermons that he preached--one immediately after his death, and one on its anniversary. The careful and full notes are in themselves evidence of the translator's exhaustive knowledge of this period of Irish Church History. W. J. FERRAR.

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