XV.

BY THE LATE A. J. B. BERESFORD HOPE.

IT is without doubt laudable to be angry in the cause of that which appears to be truth and mercy; but the preacher who engages in a voluntary controversy, and who elects to conduct it with the weapons of invective, is bound to regulate his most impassioned flights by the spirit of forethought and moderation. I cannot quite allow that Canon Farrar's Eternal Hope complies with this counsel of prudence. The Canon, it seems, had for all his thinking life borne the burden of a fierce indignation against the "coarse terrorism" of the "popular" view of man's hereafter, especially on the punitive side; and at last, having the opportunity of a commanding position, he flashed his protest upon the world in a course of sermons cast in his characteristic style of torrent-like eloquence. This was a mistake when the subject-matter of his polemics was a question at once so momentous and so myster

ious. The politician must deal with the changeful vicissitudes of the day, however pregnant of permanent results, by way of speeches, and the preacher who is called upon to draw the passing lesson from the tempest of events will naturally seek his pulpit; but when he is the originator of his own question, that being a question of speculative thought— with eternity for its subject-matter-he will most wisely consult not only for being immediately understood, but for the ultimate success of his views supposing them to have vital energy -by thinking his theory out in all its extent, and under all its aspects, and then embodying his conclusions in the calm and logical language of a scientific treatise. When he has done this, he has qualified himself as the champion of a principle, and he may then without fear offer battle for his conclusions in the pulpit or the rostrum, with a perpetual appeal to the enduring record of his formalised system. Canon Farrar has chosen the less excellent way of marshalling his rhetoric in the foreground, while he slowly and, as I shall attempt to show, imperfectly brings up his reserves of reasoning. The result is a failure on his part to deal with one element of the question which must, under any theory of the Christian dispensation which

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recognises its historical presentment, be of transcendent importance. I take Canon Farrar's own definition of his intentions. main scope of his sermons is to array the religious sympathies of his countrymen against what he terms the "common" idea (1) that the future of the soul is immediately and irreversibly settled at the moment of death, and (2) that for the majority of souls this future will be one of endless torment. I must in passing observe that it seems a little arbitrary on his part to couple the beliefs in the immediateness: and irreversibility of the doom with the statistics, so to speak, of salvation, as if there were a necessary connection between the two opinions, although no doubt they are, practically speaking, very much held together. Canon Farrar is not so precise in explaining what he does as what he does not hold. However, we have some statements of a positive character. In the first rank is his confession-which might with advantage have been somewhat amplified

"I am not a Universalist." It is beyond controversy, that while the debates over the comparative numbers of the saved and of the lost, and over the lowest limits of eternal happiness or eternal pain, are such as do not necessarily appeal to first principles, the

distinction between Universalist and nonUniversalist is fundamental. Each appellation respectively excludes the other. When, therefore, Canon Farrar, in a very solemn treatise, makes the unequivocal statement, "I am not a Universalist," I am bound to take him as meaning what he says, and thereby ranking himself-however idiosyncratic he may be upon special points-among the believers in the older and more generally accepted system of the hereafter. The phrase in the mouth of a less self-respecting man might mean, “I do not know whether I am a Universalist or not;" but it is impossible to suppose Canon Farrar can have put his pen to paper in the controversy until he had ascertained his own mind on a question which lies at its threshold. On the other hand, he repudiates the fancy of "Conditional Immortality," and, in distinctly rejecting the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, he makes the progressive discipline of the soul in the after-life the pivot upon which he bids his only half-developed theory to revolve. I pass over the vehement pages in which he argues that the pains of "Gehenna" must be moral and not material, for in spite of the stress which he lays upon the consideration, it is surely but a detail by the side of what he