to answer this question: the original teachers of Christianity were not in a position to be eclectic. Here we have no case of many men of learning in a busy city contributing to a common store their several opinions or traditions. The Founder of this religion was a Peasant, who (if He was not also God) certainly had no opportunity of learning about religions remote in place and time, and no sympathy with other forms of worship than those which were accepted as Divine in His quiet corner of Palestine. Eclecticism belongs to cities and universities, not to Galilee and a carpenter with a following of fishermen. If Christianity, then, sums up and perfects all that was good in earlier forms of religion, it is not because assiduous hands gathered various gems out of their mire, but because God had in all those religions been drawing men to seek after Him; and because the same God now gave to be heard, seen, handled, that which was from the beginning the Word of Life.

Into the latter part of Mr. Scott's book we do not purpose to enter with so much detail. He proceeds (pp. 101 sq.) to consider the history of religious progress and corruption in the chief races of antiquity which have left the literary remains which are necessary for the inquiry; and he argues that progress has been associated with organized pastoral clergies, and decay with the growth of democracy. As to the latter position, we venture to think that he misses the real point. Growth of civilization necessarily leads to democracy, because an everwidening class takes an interest, and therefore demands a share, in the government; and growth of civilization is (as he shows well on p. 103) quite compatible with religious corruption, both because it enlarges the possible sphere of transgression, and because by its increased luxury it increases the number of those who are unwilling to submit to the restraints of religion-itself concurrently, in consequence of mental progress, continually rendered more exacting. He is more happy, we think, in his attempt to prove that religion as it develops is more and more in need of a pastoral clergy to preserve it; and his argument will perhaps be commended to some sensitive persons by the fact that his name does not occur in the Clergy List. The primitive priesthood of the head of the family yields step by step to the prophetic order, which provides for the conduct of religion men who are called and trained for the purpose, and thus unite the conservation in an organized body of ancient tradition, the absence of preoccupation which might hinder mystical contemplation, and

the credit which belongs to authoritative teaching. This fact ought to give pause to those who think that the nineteenth century is so advanced that it no longer needs a priesthood, but each man can manage his affairs of religion for himself. The most interesting passage in these later pages is that (pp. 166–172) in which (after M. Boissier and the charming romance of Mr. Pater, Marius, the Epicurean) he traces the revival at Rome from the atheistic tone of the Ciceronian age to the deeply religious spirit which we find in M. Aurelius and in Epictetus, which he ascribes in great measure to the organized school of Stoicism, not without an infiltration from despised Christianity. He observes sagaciously that this reformed paganism not only prepared 'the highest class of Roman society for Christianity,' but prevented it from accepting the same prematurely' (p. 170). We think he is rash in concluding that Boethius was a pagan (p. 171); it is true his 'Consolations' have no distinctly Christian element in them, but it is far from certain that the theological works ascribed to him are spurious.

Finally, Mr. Scott draws three conclusions from his investigations:

1. That Christians need not fear to be called fetishists and the like; for the Christian religion finds the proper place for the vital truths of all the religions which have preceded it.

'2. That, the more spiritually advanced a religion is, "the more necessary are the doctrines, complementary to each other, of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, to secure its metaphysical system from contradiction either with facts or with itself."

3. That the Incarnation was delayed until the "fulness of the times," for its apprehension was come' (p. 200).

It will be seen that his purpose is not so much to convince the unbeliever as to enable the Christian to appreciate his faith more highly when he sees it, in detail, the fulfilment of ages of expectation, and the conciliation of many surmises. The purpose is at once modest and ambitious: there is no profession of a short and ready way with unbelievers, and yet there is the high aim of setting, however concisely, the religious history of the world in its true light. We are of opinion that many Christians will be indebted to Mr. Scott for a deeper and fuller understanding of their faith, and of the way in which it meets the cravings of humanity; and we venture to hope for his work a success somewhat beyond his purpose.

For- we have in mind a candid unbeliever, of whom we ask the question-can anything be more striking than this

fact that among a set of uneducated Jews there should have risen a religion which so sums up and completes all that was best in earlier religions? It is, as we have seen, eminently not an eclectic religion, but a simple and self-consistent proclamation of a few central articles of faith; it neither possesses the learned complexity and delicate balancing which usually characterize eclectic creeds, nor has it experienced that tendency to disproportion, inadequate amalgamation, and disruption which usually attend them. Nor can it be maintained that its earliest teachers regarded it as the conciliation of earlier religions: they maintained that it was a gift from God, not a compilation of human skill; if they perceive in it the fulfilment of Judaism, they hardly hint that it is the fulfilment of paganism as well. Is it not reasonable to regard the apparently fortuitous relation between the earlier religions and the religion of Christ as really indicating a Divine purpose? Is it not the case with theology as with other sciences, that teleology, far from dying before the face of evolution, springs up in a new birth? And when, after gazing at the panorama of developing religions, we contrast with them the permanence of the Christian faith, not assuredly rising from want of vitality, but from a conviction of possessing the truth, does not the contrast go far to indicate the Divine fulfilment of a gracious plan, and the coming of the 'Desire of all nations' from His right hand who gave the nations the power to desire?

How this book may meet the difficulties of unbelievers must be left for God to show. For ourselves, we can but thank the author for enabling us to grasp more coherently the fulfilment of all hopes in Christ, and to see the goodness of God, who, in the times of man's ignorance, left him not without such witness as might enable him to hope.

ART. XI.-WILLIAM LAW.

1. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. By WILLIAM LAW, M.A. ('The Ancient and Modern Library of Theological Literature.') (London, 1888, and again in another form in 1892.)

2. The Spirit of Prayer; or, the Soul Rising out of the Vanity of Time into the Riches of Eternity. By WILLIAM LAW. (Republished by a Member of the Society of Friends in 1888, and again by Griffith, Farran, and Co. in 1892.) 3. The Spirit of Love. In Dialogues. By WILLIAM LAW. (London, 1892.)

4. William Law's Defence of Church Principles: Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, 1717-1719. Edited by J. O. NASH and CHARLES GORE. (London, 1892.)

5. The Works of the Rev. William Law. Nine Volumes. Now being privately reprinted in their original form by G. MORETON.

6. Character and Characteristics of William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic. Selected and arranged, with an Introduction, by ALEXANDER WHYTE, D.D., of St. George's Free Church, Edinburgh. (London, 1893.)

THERE has been of late years a remarkable revival of interest both in the life and writings of William Law. Indeed, 'revival' is not a strong enough term; for there seems to be growing up a wider interest in him now than there was even in his own day. In his lifetime he never had more than a little coterie of disciples-one might almost call them worshippers-who really sympathized with him; while, with the exception of the Three Letters to the Bishop of Bangor, The Serious Call, and its predecessor, The Christian Perfection, we doubt whether his writings ever had a very extensive circulation. He never made anything like the sensation which his quondam disciple John Wesley-who was incomparably inferior to him in point of intellectual power, and not a man of so high a type of saintliness-made. And no wonder; for Law was altogether out of sympathy with the spirit of his age. It was the sæculum rationalisticum-the age which derived its philosophy from Locke and its theology from Tillotson. It was the age when Methodism rose among the lower classes, and Evangelicalism was beginning to rise among the higher; an age distinguished by its worldliness and also by its 'otherworldliness,' to adopt an expressive term first used, we believe, VOL. XXXVII.-NO. LXXIII.

by George Eliot. Both its religion and its irreligion had a certain grossness and coarseness about them. Wesley and Whitefield in the religious world were really the counterparts of Walpole and Chesterfield in the secular; and the Georges were the ideal sovereigns for such an age. It had its good points, as they had theirs; there was a certain robustness about the time which is refreshing; but there was an utter want of refinement and delicacy of touch in its dealings with sacred as with secular matters. You recognize this want quite as distinctly in the furious abuse which the Calvinists and anti-Calvinists poured upon one another, and in the defence of Christianity by such writers as Warburton, with his 'crews of scoundrels' and his determination to trim the rogue's jacket for him,' as you do in the unblushing venality, cynicism, and worldliness of the men who were certainly not 'professors.' Law was hardly more in sympathy with the religious than with the irreligious world of his own time.

And again, it is not in the least surprising that he should have remained practically unknown for more than a century after his death; for the whole period during which he lived, and its writers, were under a cloud. Bishop Ewing, indeed, republished the second dialogue of The Spirit of Love in his Present Day Papers on Theology, and Mr. F. D. Maurice the Remarks on Mandeville's Fable of the Bees in 1844; but these republications took no great hold on the public mind. It was not until the present generation that the history of the eighteenth century, and especially of the Church of the eighteenth century, at all became a subject of general interest ; but when it did it was inevitable that appreciative minds would at once recognize the merits of William Law. One of the first to do so was a man of singularly different views, Mr. Leslie Stephen. His vivid account both of Law's life and writings, in his English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, shows that he was evidently fascinated both by the man and the writer; as is also indicated by the fact that, though the biographer of Law was one of the earliest and most regular contributors to the Dictionary of National Biography, Mr. Stephen undertook the article on Law himself, and wrote it remarkably well. After Mr. Stephen's work on the eighteenth century followed that of Mr. Lecky; and here again we have an equally full and able account of Law, though the writer does not give us the impression that he was personally so fascinated by Law as his predecessor had been. Then came Messrs. Abbey and Overton's English Church in the Eighteenth Century, where Law appears prominently in connexion with