Doctor Foster's book has brought to the attention of scholars the entire movement of the New England theology in its genesis, development, culmination, and collapse. The book is conspicuous for learning, ability, fairness, and sincerity. For the thorough apprehension of this school of theology the volume is the best that we possess. When we reflect that an entire generation has risen up since the last great master of the New England divinity closed his labors, at Andover, in 1881, and that students of theology today can nowhere hear the old system expounded as it was wont to be expounded, Doctor Foster's book is at once seen to answer an essential need of the time.

The long period of helpless infancy through which the human being who is to survive in the struggle for existence must pass is proof conclusive that from the time when first men were men—and from an even earlier time—they must have lived together in groups. Whether those groups were, as in the case of the gorilla, patriarchal in kind, or matriarchal, as they are seen to be, or may be conjectured to have been, in the case of some tribes very low in the social scale, is still a disputed question. The tendency of those groups, however, was in the patriarchal direction; this tendency strengthens even in times when the tribe is still migratory, and is fully established by the time when the tribe settles down in a fixed habitation as a village-community. From the village-community the city-state develops; an amalgamation of city-states may produce a national state; a national state may become a world-power, and even seek to establish itself as a world-empire.

Systematic theology in its classic form is at once a philosophy of religion, a philosophy of history, and a world-view. It sums up in its master mind, St. Thomas Aquinas, the knowledge of its age. A great picture it is—none greater was ever conceived; indeed, for completeness, for dramatic movement, and for religious interest, none has ever remotely rivalled it. The great epics of Hinduism and the world-views of Buddhism and Islam fall far short in power and unity, in scientific grasp and form, in philosophic insight and in moral purpose; while the modern world has nothing which can be put in comparison, for our world-view is incomplete, discordant, perplexed with doubts, nor has it come to an understanding with the religious and ethical nature of man.

A favourite argument of the neo-Hegelian apologists for the appearance of evil in a perfect world is the contention that without evil good could not exist. By this we are to understand, not that evil is a sine qua non of the existence of the good, unavoidably incidental to its production and maintenance, but rather, indeed, that it is an indispensable factor in the very essence of perfection and positively contributive to its value. Unaltered in accidents yet changed in substance, it is, as it were, transubstantiated by an eternal act of consecration in the mind and purpose of God. That we neither perceive nor comprehend the miracle is due to our human limitations. Could we see things as God sees them, “under the aspect of eternity,” we should then understand how what we call sin and suffering and defeat and shame have their place in the economy of the whole, and provide, along with the other oppositions and conflicts in the world, the indispensable condition of that victorious battle with obstacles and limitations and that triumphant resolution of contradictories in higher syntheses in which the life and happiness of the absolute consists. So, though our partial and superficial experiences do not enjoy the triumph (and indeed cannot, since were we conquerors or indifferent to defeat there would be no evil to transcend), we may yet have faith that in our deepest and total self the victory has been won and peace attained. Thus God's ways are justified to man; and though the world is apparently full of evil, we are still entitled to believe it really good, and are able intelligently to account for and defend our belief.

The Faculty of the Harvard Divinity School provided for their students in 1883 six lectures by oflBcers of the University representing other departments of government and instruction, as follows:

The Minister and the People: Phillips Brooks, D.D., of the Board of Overseers.

The Evolution of a Christian Minister: J. F. Clarke, D.D., of the Board of Overseers.

One Word more about Free-Will: William James, M.D., Assistant Professor of Philosophy.

Plato's Idea of Immortality: W. W. Goodwin, LL.D., Professor of Greek.

The Natural History of Altruism: N. S. Shaler, S.D., Professor of Palaeontology.

Vivisection: H. P. Bowditch, M.D., Professor of Physiology, and Dean of the Medical Faculty.

I think it safe to assume—and I shall assume—that every college student has a certain amount of religious conviction and belief—more than we sometimes think—-more perhaps than he is himself conscious of having. I am emboldened to say this because I believe that religion—that is, the relation of the human in us to the divine in us and above us—is a part of the essential nature of man, potential even though latent in every man, and because the Christian environment in which most college students have passed their early days must have called these potentialities into more or less distinct consciousness.

But what I recall in myself as a young man, and what I see in others, tells me that when this religious consciousness is made the object of appeal and of summons to expression and action it is very much inclined to withdraw within itself, and to fold itself about with reserve, and even to take on a kind of resistance. And when I examine this state of mind in myself and others, I think I can see that in a certain stage of spiritual immaturity, and perhaps more or less always, this reserve in religious expression is justifiable and even normal.

Periodical articles on religion are like the plague of frogs in Egypt not only in number but in the fact that they appear in the most unlikely, not to say unsuitable, places. A special apparatus is indispensable to all who have any reason to try to keep track of them. Mr. Ernest Richardson, formerly librarian of Hartford Theological Seminary, now of Princeton University, an experienced hand, with the co-operation of several other bibliographers, has undertaken the laborious task of preparing a special index to this literature on the general plan of Poole's Index. The volume before us includes articles on religion published in the ten years, 1890 to 1899 inclusive, in not far from fifteen hundred periodicals. At a rough estimate, making no subtraction for repetition, the whole number of entries is between 60,000 and 70,000.