veals, and man beholds, a new vision of the Eternal. And men look into the face of Jesus Christ, and say with a conviction that transcends all argument that they have seen God.

Of the physiological determinism which declares man's character, mental and moral, to be unchangeably determined and fixed by his physical organism, a fatalism to which a rationalistic philosophy delivers man over, it is made plain that this notion reckons without the spiritual forces which operate effectually upon man, and that the whole reasoning of the physiological determinists is contradicted by plain, notorious, undeniable facts. The savages of Terra del Fuego had sustained no perceptible modifications of physical structure during the period of missionary labors among them, yet even Charles Darwin observed and bore witness to the complete moral transformation which the Gospel had wrought in them. An enormous volume of testimony proves that a central fact of man's nature is its susceptibility to change under the impact and invasion of a higher spiritual Power. Ovid knew no metamorphoses so marvelous as those which Christian history exhibits. Brierley says truly that the effects produced by the Gospel in the labors of the earliest Methodist preachers alone are enough to offset and overturn all the fatalistic physiological theorizings of a Schopenhauer and a Bichat. The final and complete word concerning man cannot be spoken by physiology. Psychology is a higher part of the science of human nature, and a true psychology must take account of man's susceptibility to spiritual influences which work in him the most astonishing and momentous changes.

An interesting essay is one on "Religious Vocabulary," in which it is recalled that Max Müller, in Chips from a German Workshop, shows how a study of the language of the primitive Aryans gives a clear idea of the height to which that early civilization had risen. So the language which religion uses, in any place or period, is evidence and index of the height to which man has climbed and exposes to view the richness or the poverty, the simplicity or the complexity of his inner life. The words he coins to express his thought and feeling register the stature and attainment of his soul. Especially does Christianity's language attest its place in the upward and onward progress of humanity. To get a proper sense of the wondrous character and significance of the Christian vocabulary, Brierley says, one needs a course of reading in the classic literature of the old pagan world. When, after a study of the writings of its poets, philosophers, and

moralists, we come to the literature of the Christian centuries, we find something altogether new in the sphere of words. Christianity, in its development, added to the human vocabulary something so startlingly fresh that the grace and beauty of Christian speech rise like a temple above the ground-level of common human expression. A new and higher range of words had to be created to express new and higher facts, and old phrases put into fresh combinations to express new meanings. Apostles and saints, when they talked of conversion, regeneration, baptism, fruits of the Spirit, sanctification, oneness with Christ, divine assurance, and the heavenly life, were compelled to remake or enlarge language in order that it might contain and carry the new treasures of knowledge and experience. The great new vocabulary which Christianity has given to mankind represents the moral and spiritual height to which millions of human beings have risen in all the Christian ages under the Christian revelation and inspiration. An incalculable diffusion of spiritual riches and a consequent visible elevation, refinement, purification, and gentilizing of life, took place in Europe when the great religious vocabulary of the Bible first filtered down and flowed out to the common people through the labors of Wyclif and Luther, whose translations of the Scriptures put the Word of God within general reach and poured the riches of Gospel truth into the public mind; so that the desire of Erasmus moved toward fulfillment. "I wish," said he, of the Epistles and Gospels, "that they were translated into all languages of the people. I wish the husbandman might sing parts of them at his plow and the weaver at his shuttle, and the traveler beguile with them the weariness of his way." And the common people, when these riches were put within their reach, were not slow to grasp them. "After Wyclif's time," says Foxe, "some gave a load of hay for a few chapters of St. James or St. Paul." For us and for all men the religious vocabulary created by Christianity is a magnificent inheritance; it is a ladder by which human souls may "mount from the lowly earth to the lofty skies." Aloft in our spiritual firmament shine those great light-giving New Testament words which stand for Revelation's central truths and the soul's highest possibilities. Apart from the wealth to which they light the way no man can be rich; and no life is blessed upon which they have not shed their mighty meaning. Such, in part, is our essayist's setting forth of the immeasurable worth and clear significance of the new vocabulary which Christ has furnished to men. Akin to this is what he says of religion's higher energies:

An inspired and prophetic element belongs to the highest kind of religious speech. No true Christian teacher or preacher but in his most uplifted moments finds himself yielding to a kind of inspiration which shapes his utterance for him. He has, in such moments, a tense and awful consciousness that he is in some degree the instrument of a higher Power; that the message he speaks is far more than his own and more authoritative; that even his limitations, weaknesses, defects, and sense of personal nothingness are but factors of a movement in which he, indeed, is taking part, but not as an originator. This was the note of the marvelous preaching of Père Vianney, the apostle of France, preaching which produced its mighty effects with no special preparation except his "constant occupation with God." It was this which Madame Guyon meant when, detailing her Grenoble experiences, she speaks of being "invested with the Apostolic state," and of perceiving and revealing the inmost condition of the souls to whom she spoke or who spoke to her. In order to make connection with the channels of religion's higher energies we need to recover the almost lost art of prayer. That the newer concepts of the universe and of the uniformity of law have affected in any way the reasons for prayer is one of those superstitions which every self-respecting thinker should by this time have seen through. Prayer is one of the functions and forces of the spiritual nature as surely as gravitation is a force of the physical world. It is indeed of itself a gravitation. It is the soul's impulse towards its Center and Source. The author of Exploratio Evangelica, who discusses the religious problem in a spirit of the severest science, finds prayer irremovably grounded in the structure of the moral nature. Its practice is its own vindication. Beginning in a semblance of egotism, it ends ever in self-surrender. "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt!" Observing that the higher the tone of his request the more sure it is to be granted, there slowly dawns upon the suppliant the perception of a divine Will which wills what is best. To subject self to It is the ultimate of prayer. And the nature of things decrees a mighty force to self-renunciation. Bishop Westcott said, "A life of absolute and calculated sacrifice is a spring of immeasurable power;" and St. Columba, who knew whereof he spoke, "Whoever overcomes himself treads the world under foot." . . Sir Walter Scott, in his Heart of Midlothian, has a passage which gives but half the truth about prayer: "Without entering into an abstruse point of Divinity, one thing is plain, namely, that the person who lays open his doubts and distresses in prayer, with feeling and sincerity, must necessarily in that act purify his mind from the dross of worldly passions and interests, and bring it into that state where the resolutions adopted are likely to be selected rather from a sense of duty than from any inferior motive." Sir Walter gives here only the under side of the truth. In its higher aspect prayer is the soul's receptivity, the spreading out of its upper surface to receive the rain of that light and heat whose source is beyond the stars. Professor James speaks of it as a voluntary union of man's higher part "with a Move of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside him, and which he can keep in touch with, and in a fashion get on board of." What this union, invited by the Divine Spirit and acquiesced in by the soul, can effect for man's remaking, and that in every department of his nature, is writ large in the history of mankind wherever the Christian religion has gone. In the sense of that union, made vivid in a certain hour, Russell Lowell once wrote: "I never before so clearly felt the Spirit of God in me and around me. The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to hover to and fro with the presence of Something, I know not what." With or without such a vivid sense of the presence of God prayer is, as Tennyson said, an interflow, between man's spirit and the Father of spirits, of spiritual currents which bring life and power to the moral nature of man. . . . The secret of great revivals is that a single soul filled with and stirred by consciousness of the Divine will communicate its feeling to innumerable other souls, without diminution of its own store of energy. A voice for God charged with intensity of conviction, a personality saturated with sympathy and love, may spread its mystic power over thousands of souls, filling them, while not emptying but rather increasing its own original stock and store. This is proof that while the body has to do with

the finite, the measurable, and the exhaustible, the soul's transactions are, by right of its inherent nature, with the imperishable, the inexhaustible, the infinite. If Churches have lost their hold upon the masses, their only way to regain it is by regaining their hold of the sources and forces of the spiritual life, by prayer, by self-renouncing consecration, by what Brother Lawrence called "the practice of the Presence of God." What is the psychology of a revival? The laws of it are as sure as those of electricity, as the laws of Leyden jars and storage batteries and telephones. Men ought not in this age of the world to be groping about for the right way of winning souls. It is as old as the hills. What is the meaning of the statement that great spiritual revivals have always been preceded by earnest, importunate, believing prayer? It is the formula of the soul's dynamic. It means that a few disciplined spirits, humbled, purified, and incandescent by communion with the Highest, have become recipients and reservoirs of the higher energies; and from them these forces pass out upon their fellows with resistless power. This is the secret and science of revivals. .. While great awakenings and quickenings, rebirths of faith and feeling are usually traceable to the influence of spiritual leaders whose souls are surcharged with power from above, the unseen genesis of these leaders often lies far back. The natural history of a prophet opens deep questions of heredity, and of the strange interplay of body and spirit, of natural endowments and spiritual gifts. We think of the doctrine he preaches, of his fervor of spirit, of his passion for souls, of his spiritual vision, of his searching and saving power. But the basis and vehicle for all this were preparing by long processes, through generations of ancestors, who developed sturdy qualities, high conscience, spiritual intrepidity, force of will, persistency and power of attack, transmitting to our prophet his red blood, his vibrant and moving voice, his melting sympathy, his endurance, and his flashing eye. God often begins to build, or at least lays the foundations for, His prophet generations before he is born. The ancestors of John Wesley-the fine old non-juring clergyman on the one side and the Puritans who suffered for conscience' sake on the other-were shaping, all unwittingly, the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual constitution of the great evangelist who was to come. Our Christian homes to-day are making, or failing to make, by the qualities they most cultivate and the level upon which they live, the great spiritual leaders who will be needed by the Church in future generations.

In conclusion we gather from this preacher's essayist a few significant quotations. This from Methodius concerning the Cross: "For the Word suffered, being in the flesh affixed to the Cross, that He might bring man, who had been deceived by error, to His supreme and godlike majesty, restoring him to that Divine life from which he had become alienated." This from Hazlitt's description of some Dissenting ministers of his day: "They were true priests. They set up an image in their minds-it was Truth. They worshiped an idol there-it was Justice. They looked on men as their brothers, and only bowed the knee to the Highest. Separating from the world, they walked humbly with their God, and in thought with those who had borne testimony of a good conscience, with the spirits of just men of all ages." This from Huxley's pathetic letter to Charles Kingsley in which, after the death of his firstborn, he says: "Sartor Resartus led me to know that a deep sense of religion is compatible with an entire absence of theology." Louis Stevenson's phrase, "the

kindness of the scheme of things and the goodness of our veiled God," recalls Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes's saying, "I think we have over us a Being infinitely robust and grandly magnanimous." This sentence is fresh from the lips of the young emperor of Germany, "The man whose life is not founded on religion is lost." This British essayist does not attempt to fill the chair of systematic theology or of biblical interpretation; not all his views are to be accepted; but his pages are fresh, illuminating, stimulating, and provocative of further thought.

"A MEMORANDUM OF MODERN PRINCIPLES."*

WE cannot join certain surprisingly incontinent eulogists in ranking the author of The Religion of Democracy, who calls his book a Memorandum of Modern Principles, "among the greatest philosophers of the world," nor agree that "he probes as deep as Carlyle and smites with the strength of Ruskin," or that his "splendid literary style suggests the better elements of Emerson, Ruskin, and Hugo,' or that "since Emerson nobody has gone so straight to the point in a manner so free from personal prejudice or vanity," or, with Edwin Markham, that this is "a great book of a great epoch." It will probably prove ephemeral and not perceptibly influential. Yet, because of qualities in it which move such readers as Charles H. Parkhurst, T. T. Munger, and Philip Moxom to call it "a stimulating, startling, and, all in all, wonderful book," "a brilliant, searching book that reminds one of Sartor Resartus," a book that "clearly belongs to the prophetic literature of the world," it may be admitted to exhibit in these pages something of its essence, spirit, and scope. Although revolutionary in a degree, its audacity is serene and devout. Rhapsody plays some part in its prophetic strains, and while reality is what it is after with tense and strenuous clutch, it is more oracular and paradoxical than convincing. It will not revolutionize anything, nor even "make a profound sensation" among experienced men; but it is passionate, penetrating, and peculiar, as will be seen from extracts here presented. The book opens in this fashion:

The spirit of the age is saying to its children: Have faith. Make yourself at home. This is your own house. The laws were made for you, gravitation and the chemical affinities, not you for them. No one can put you out of the house. Stand up; the ceiling is high. If you should act with simplicity and boldness, do you think that you would have to stand alone and take the consequences? Have you no idea that God would back you up? That is as if you thought this world were mainly bones and the soul a pale prisoner, looking wist

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• The Religion of Democracy. By Charles Ferguson. 12mo, pp. 170. New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company. Price, cloth, $1.