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kingdom of God. We must, of course, not overlook how clearly Jesus has grasped the fundamental principles, and must be careful not to think that all pictures have taught him new truths. But that they made many a principle clearer to him, will appear as we proceed. He uses illustrations because he is always concrete. He uses no abstract forms of speech, because he is always personal. An abstract, philosophical thinker he has never been, and has never wanted to be; but he has recognized the fundamental principles of true religion with a clearness, and has enunciated them with a simplicity, which evidence unrivaled mastery; so simply and so plainly speaks only he who is a master of thought and expression. And nowhere do we look so deeply into the heart of this simple and yet so great Son of Man as in his parables. He talks here, in the plain language of the people, of those pictures which dwelt in his mind, and out of the inexhaustible fountain of his soul flow those words which reveal his innermost self.Writing of Church History as an aid to Church Unity, A. D. Severance says: "Intolerance is the spirit that would persecute if it had the chance. We do not have to go back to mediæval history for illustrations. Let the self-satisfied denominationalist read the minutes of the last heresy trial in his own Church, and he will bow his head in shame at the vituperation and bad blood displayed by professed disciples of the Master." Reference is made to the way in which Dr. Augustus Jessopp lectures the Church of England, of which he is a priest, for the unwise treatment the Anglican hierarchy gave to Wesley and his people, in contrast with the wise treatment given the Franciscan Friars by the Church of Rome. "St. Francis was the John Wesley of the thirteenth century, whom the Roman Church was wise enough not to cast out. Rome has always known how to utilize her enthusiasts, fired by a new idea. The Church of England has never known how to deal with a man of genius. From Wyclif to Frederick Robertson, from Bishop Peacock to Dr. Rowland Williams, the clergyman who has been in danger of impressing his personality upon Anglicanism, where he has not been the subject of relentless persecution, has at least been regarded with timid suspicion, has been shunned by the prudent men of low degree, and by those of high degree has been forgotten. In the Church of England there has never been a time when the enthusiast has not been treated as a very unsafe man. Rome has found a place for the dreamiest mystic or the noisiest ranterfound a place and found a sphere of useful labor. We, with our insular prejudices, have been sticklers for the narrowest uniformity, and yet we have accepted, as a useful addition to the Creed of Christendom, one article which we have only not formulated because, perhaps, it came to use from a Roman bishop, the great sage Talleyrand-Surtout pas trop de zèle!... Rome absorbed the Franciscans; they became the Church's great army of volunteers, perfectly disciplined, admirably handled; their very jealousies and rivalries turned into good account. When John Wesley offered to the unwise Church of England precisely their successors, we would have no commerce with them; we did our best to turn them into a hostile and invading force." So says Dr. Jessopp, and the same lesson was administered to the Church of England by the great Macaulay in 1840. Speak

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ing on precisely this point, he says: "The enthusiast, whom the Anglican Church makes an enemy, and, whatever the learned and polite may think, a most dangerous enemy, the Catholic Church makes a champion. . Place Ignatius Loyola at Oxford. He is certain to become the head of a formidable secession. Place John Wesley at Rome. He is certain to be the first General of a new society devoted to the interests and honor of the Church. Place Joanna Southcote at Rome. She founds an order of barefooted Carmelites, every one of whom is ready to suffer martyrdom for the Church."

The Expository Times (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons) is a fresh, scholarly, and valuable publication. Noticing, in its November, 1903, issue a sermon on "The Spiritual Vision," by Johnston Ross, of Cambridge, it condenses the gist of the discourse as follows:

Why was it that Paul never had any doubt of the Gospel? Men doubt it to-day after all it has done; in his day it had scarcely done anything. It was because Paul had seen Jesus Christ the Lord ["Have I not seen Jesus Christ the Lord?" 1 Cor. ix, 1]. This was not only Paul's claim to be an apostle; it was also his reason for never doubting the Gospel. He had seen Jesus Christ the Lord. That is his own way of putting the fact on which he staked everything. He meant that he had seen Christ with the bodily eye. This he never doubted nor ceased to affirm. And yet it was not because he had seen him with the bodily eye merely that he believed the Gospel and risked everything on it. It was rather because the vision of the bodily eye had conveyed an impression down into his soul. This is not an inference from the apostle's words; he says so. In the New Testament there are different kinds of "seeing." Our Lord says, "A little while and ye shall not see me, and again a little while and ye shall see me." In reading this sentence we are apt to put the emphasis on the not and on the shall. But the emphasis is properly on the verb see. A little while, says the Master, and you shall no longer see me in the way in which you and all the world see me now (Oewpeire), and again a little while and ye shall see me as the world never can see me (opɛɛ), with the vision of the soul. Paul had seen the risen Christ. That certified to him the resurrection from the dead. But what transformed him was the moral majesty of the risen Christ, judging the moral life of man and claiming lordship over his moral life. "I have seen," says Paul, "I have seen Jesus as Lord." He had had a physicial vision, but it was not of that that he made most account. What he made account of was the fact that the vision had opened the gates of his moral life and given Christ entrance. And when Christ appears before us as both the ideal and the realization of moral goodness, we too can say, "I have seen Christ Jesus the Lord, and I cannot doubt the Gospel."

Commenting on a volume of sermons to young men by Rev. Walter A. Mursell, entitled The Wagon and the Star, the Times says: "It is easier to preach to young men than to any other class. They have lost the intuition by which children detect the least false ring in the offer of the truth, and they have not gained the experience by which old men judge the preacher's very principles. It is so easy to preach to young men that very few preachers can do it. They fail by not being natural. They pass by the

natural, which is the easy; and they strain after imaginative effects. Young men are not imaginative; they are actual, and they are nothing more." Rev. W. R. Webster, writing on Spanish Mysticism, the mysticism of Valdes and Molinos, says: "True mysticism may often be found among the rude and illiterate, who can hardly express their ideas in speech. 'Can you tell me what particular thing led to your conversion?' asked a clergyman of a humble member of his congregation. 'Why, sir, it was hearing Mr. Blank read one morning in church, As the Lord liveth before whom I stand.' 'Those are striking words,' replied the minister, 'but I do not quite see how they led to your conversion.' 'Don't you see, sir? Before whom I stand. I felt myself standing before my God.' This unlettered man was a far truer mystic than many who have tried to write themselves as such." John A. Hutton, M.A., in his new book, Guidance from Robert Browning in Matters of Faith, speaking of this poet's teaching on the conversion of the soul or the soul's discovery of God, says: "I regard Browning's teaching on conversion as his supreme message to our time. It is that teaching, as it seems to me, which ranks him with the prophets. Valuable as is the light which he sheds upon those problems of life and experience which are as old as man, or at least as old as the days of reflection; splendid as is the courage with which he girds his loins, and faces the darkness and the doubt; yet more solitary and distinguished is his teaching on the soul of man, his impassioned confidence that the soul may, in one grand moment, leap sheer out of any depth of shame, and leap to the breast of God." The Times quotes from Rev. Maclean Watt, of Alloa, these fine lines:

Carry me over the long, last mile,

Man of Nazareth, Christ for me!

Weary I wait by Death's dark stile,

In the wild and the waste where the wind blows free:

And the shadows and sorrows, come out of my past,

Look keen through my heart,

And will not depart,

Now that my poor world has come to its last.

Lord, is it long that my spirit must wait,

Man of Nazareth, Christ for me!

Deep is the stream, and the night is late,

And grief blinds my soul that I cannot see

Speak to me, out of the silences, Lord,

That my spirit may know,

As forward I go,

That thy pierced hands are lifting me over the ford!

BOOK NOTICES.

RELIGION, THEOLOGY, AND BIBLICAL LITERATURE.

Sunrise. By Rev. G. H. MORRISON, M.A. Crown 8vo, pp. 310. New York: A. C. Armstrong & Son, Price, cloth, $1.50.

These thirty addresses from a Scottish city pulpit are among the freshest and most fertile sermons of the day. Their spirit and temper are indicated in the title given to the volume, and also by the words placed as a motto on the title-leaf, "Unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings." In the light of that sunrise these bright, clear addresses are written. The titles like the treatment are unhackneyed: "The Wonder and Bloom of the World," "Mistaken Magnitudes,” “The Pagan Duty of Disdain,” “Near-Cuts not God's,” "Seeming to Have," "After that, the Dark," "When the Child-Spirit Dies," "The Leisure of Faith," "The Glory and the Gate," "A Soul to Let," "The Irksomeness of Religion," "The Note of the Heroic," "The Touchstone of Fact." The sermon on "The Homesickness of the Soul" begins thus: "A delightful American writer, John Burroughs, has given in one of his books a most illuminative paper on Carlyle. Burroughs visited Carlyle in London and has recorded his impressions in an essay entitled 'A Sunday in Cheyne Row.' One phrase in that essay seemed to me memorable; it was the phrase 'homesickness of the soul.' 'A kind of homesickness of the soul was on Carlyle,' says Burroughs, and it deepened with age. And that is my subject to-night-the soul is homesick. I want to make that thought shed a little light on some dark places: notably two, the unrest of sin and the craving for God. Jesus viewed the unrest of sin as homesickness. The prodigal son was away in a far country. It was not terror and fear of punishment that smote his heart deepest. It was home, home, home, for which his poor soul was crying. He saw the homestead bosomed among the hills, and the cattle coming home at eventide, and the family circle gathered around the fire, and his father crying to Heaven for the poor, foolish, erring boy. He came to himself and he was homesick. By this Jesus would teach us that wickedness is not the homeland of the soul, and that the sinner's unrest is just the craving of his heart for home. We were not meant to feel at home in sin. The soul's native air is obedience and love and purity and joy. . . . Few pages are more enthralling in Charlotte Yonge's history of The Moors in Spain, than those in which she tells the story of Abderraman. He was the first Moorish Khalif in Spain. He was an Oriental, bred by the river Euphrates. Superior in beauty as was his Spanish home, nevertheless Abderraman was miserable amid all the groves and gardens, palaces and fountain, of the fair city of Cordova. He longed for his native East, and felt himself an exile. And an Arabian ballad tells us that when he had a palm tree brought from the Euphrates' bank and planted in his Spanish garden, he never could look on it without tears. The sight of it

made the Khalif homesick. And my point is that the soul's unrest and discontentment, amid all the pleasures of sin and sense, are its hungering for life in another country, as Abderraman hungered for his native Orient. It is not facts, it is mysteries, that keep me from materialism. I believe in the cravings of the human heart, and they overturn a score of demonstrations. If I were a creature of nerves and fibers only I could be happy in my Cordova, in the pleasure-gardens of fleshly indulgence and ease. But we were made for higher and purer things; the native air of the soul is righteousness and love and truth, and the favor and fellowship of God, and we shall always be dissatisfied and homesick, if we are trying to live in any other climate or region. . . . And this homesickness of the soul for God is one of our surest proofs of God. It is an argument more powerful than any philosophy to convince me that there is a God." The sermon ends by quoting one of the most pathetic letters in all literature, a letter written by David Gray, the Scottish poet. He was born eight miles from Glasgow. His father would have made a preacher of him, but he chose to be a poet. David grew weary of home, and there came a day when nothing would satisfy him, but he must go to London. So to London he went, but his health failed there, and he fell into consumption, and after long and great suffering he wrote to his parents: "I am coming home, homesick. I cannot stay away any longer. What's the good of me being so far from home when I am weak and ill? O God! I wish I were home never to leave it more! Tell everybody that I am coming home-no better; worse, worse. What matters climate-frost or snow or harsh weather-when one is at home? I wish I had never left it. . . . I have no money, and I want to get home, home, home. What shall I do, O God! Father, I shall come back to you because I did not use you rightly. Will you forgive me? I have come through things that would make your heart ache for me-things that I shall never tell to anybody but you, and you must keep them as secret as the grave. Get my own little room ready quick, quick; have it all clean and tidy and cozy, against my home-coming. I wish to die there, and nobody shall ever nurse me again but my own dear mother. O home, home, home!" And then the preacher says: "I will arise and go to my Father. Thank God, we need no money for that journey. Is there no one here who has been far away and who is going to come home, home to God-this very hour?" Speaking of the Pagan spirit of disdain, Mr. Morrison says: "The Gospel insists on human brotherhood. Its prayer is to 'Our Father.' Did the cultured Greek look down on the barbarian? Did the elect and covenanted Jew despise the Gentile? Did the free man look with an infinite disdain upon the slave? Clear as a trumpet, strong as the voice of God, there rang this message on a selfish, proud, and dying world: There is neither Jew nor Greek, barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but all are one in Christ. Yes, and when that word of command was obeyed, and the Gospel of Jesus was carried to the heathen, and when the peace and joy and comfort of it were offered in all their fullness to the slave, then, like a dark sullen cloud, the contemptuous spirit of paganism broke away and scattered, and the bright star of brotherhood rose in a clear

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