both. Under this head would fall his Contemplations, which fill two octavo volumes, and are a sort of practical exposition of many of the leading incidents in the Old and New Testaments; his paraphrases of Hard Texts, which fill one large volume; but neither of these works, though they cost the writer a vast amount of time and labour, can be placed on at all the same level with his purely devotional works.

Again, Hall had the courage, long after he had passed the allotted age of man (1650), to appear in quite a new phase, viz., as a casuist. The mere rarity of this species of writing in the Anglican Church would draw attention to Hall's attempts; but in themselves they are exceedingly good, showing both shrewdness and sound Christian judgment, and are quite worthy to be classed with the admirable casuistical treatises of Bishop Sanderson and Bishop Barlow.

Least of all must we omit to notice Hall's polemical works. His numerous treatises against the Romanists on the one side and the sectaries on the other are quite masterpieces in their way. It is probably the former, combined with his leaning towards Calvinism, which have rendered him so great a favourite with the Evangelical school; hence we have the odd spectacle of a decided High Churchman edited-and very well edited too-by a prominent leader of the Low Churchmen, the excellent Josiah Pratt. If we had to select one out of so many works, all of which are admirable, it would perhaps be The Old Religion, in which Hall deals in a most exhaustive and masterly way with the important question, which is the old religion-that of the Church of Rome as she now stands, or that of the Church of England as she now stands?

On the other side, Hall by his defence of Episcopacy, a Liturgy, and other points in dispute between Churchmen and Dissenters, raised up, not one, but a combination of five antagonists-the famous 'Smectymnuus '-that is, Stephen Marshall, Edmund Calamy, Thomas Young, Matthew Newcomen, and William Spurstow; and also a greater than all five put together, John Milton. The brave old man (he was seventy years old) was quite equal to standing up against them all; the abuse which Smectymnuus, and the still fouler abuse which John Milton heaped upon him, daunted him not; he had the spirit of a lion, no less than the wisdom of a serpent, and the gentleness of a dove. In fact, this phase of his character does not appear to be sufficiently known; and Mr. Lewis hardly brings it out as prominently as he might have done. It is necessary, therefore, to justify the assertion by giving a few specimens of the wonderful fire and vigour which

characterised his writings. Every cultured man has admired the effectiveness of Cicero's exordium in one of his Catiline orations, where, with the true spirit of an orator, he plunges at once into the middle of his subject, 'Quousque tandem abutere patientiâ nostrâ?' No less effective is Hall's exordium to Episcopacy by Divine Right :—

'Good God! what is this that I have lived to hear? That a Bishop, in a Christian Assembly, should renounce his Episcopal Function, and cry mercy for his now-abandoned calling! Brother that was, whoever you be, I must have leave awhile to contest seriously with you. The act was yours; the concernment, the whole Church's. You could not think so foul a deed could escape unquestioned. The world never heard of such a penance; you cannot blame us if we receive it both with wonder and expostulation; and tell you, it had been much better to have been unborn, than to live to give so heinous a scandal to God's Church, and so deep a wound to His holy truth and ordinance. If Tweed, that runs between us, were an ocean, it could not either drown or wash off our interest or your offence.'

The recreant prelate who gave occasion for this scathing protest was Bishop Grahame, of Orkney. And what a grand appeal is this, at the close of the treatise :

'For you, my northern brethren (for such you shall be when you have done your worst), if there were any foul personal faults found in any of our Church Governors, as there never wanted aspersions where an extermination is intended, alas ! why should not your wisdom and charity have taught you to distinguish betwixt the calling and the crime? Were the person vicious, yet the function is holy. Why should God and His cause be stricken because man hath offended; and yet to this day no offence proved? Your Church hath been anciently famous for a holy and memorable Prelacy,' &c., &c.

In fact, one hardly knows which to admire most, the learning, the earnestness, or the wonderful vigour of the whole of this admirable treatise. Another gift which Hall knew how to use with great effect was that of sarcasm. Witness the following passage in his Apology against the Brownists:

'This, your separation, in the nature and causes of it, you say, is no less ancient than the first institution of enmity between the two seeds. You might have gone a little higher, and have said, than our first parents running from God in the garden, or their separation from God by their sin.'

Again

""As ancient as the Gospel." What! so ancient, and never known till Bolton, Barrow, and Brown! Could it escape all the holy Prophets, Apostles, Doctors of the old, middle, and later world; and

light only upon these, your three patriarchs? Perhaps Novatus or Donatus, those Saints, with their schools, had some little glimpse of it; but this perfection of knowledge is but late and new; so, many rich mines have lain long unknown; and great parts of the world have been discovered by late venturers.'

As

There is yet another point to be noted in estimating the intellectual resources of Bishop Hall. If he wrote good English, he wrote still better Latin. Treatise after treatise, in a style worthy of Cicero, poured forth from his facile pen. one reads with astonishment and admiration the exquisitely polished periods, one is inclined to ask, Have we really so much improved in mental culture, as optimists tell us that we have, since the seventeenth century? And is it not a misfortune that what was once the lingua franca of all educated Europe has now become, in very truth, a dead language? We must end, as we began, by thanking Mr. Lewis for calling the attention of the public to one whose life, character, and, above all, writings none can study without pleasure and profit.

ART. V.-CUR DEUS HOMO? OR THE PURPOSE OF THE INCARNATION.

1. S. Anselmi Archiepiscopi Cantuariensis Cur Deus Homo? Libri Duo. 12mo. (London, 1886.)

2. The Doctrine of the Incarnation of Our Lord Jesus Christ, in its Relation to mankind and to the Church.. By the late Archdeacon WILBERFORCE. New edition. (London, 1885.)

THE answer of S. Anselm to the inquiry Why was God made Man? illustrates with great force the necessity of a Divine Incarnation in order to an effective Redemption. He assumes that God must needs carry out His purpose and perfect His work, commenced in the creation of man; and argues that as this requires a previous satisfaction due from man to God, which man ought to make but God only can make, therefore the Incarnation of our Lord was planned of Adam's race and of a virgin mother, that the God-man might make it, and merit an eternal reward by His obedience. And he establishes the consistency of the Atonement with reason, and confirms it by Revelation.

In face of the Socinianism latent in human nature, and assuming various forms in various ages, such treatment of the subject, though abstract and partial, can never be out of season. But the circumstances of our own day-the jejune tone of popular theology, the antinomianism fostered by reaction from Romanism and by a long abeyance of spiritual discipline, together with a degraded Calvinism outside the Church, unfavourable to sanctification—all these things demand an extension of the reply; and this in a subjective rather than an objective direction. We propose to suggest the form which such extension should take; and in doing so, to insist on a view of the Incarnation, which, though far from escaping the late Archdeacon Wilberforce (nay, rather underlying his whole argument, and specifically treated at its close), may yet be presented with more distinctness apart from other issues, and forced into immediate prominence with advantage. We allude to its having for its revealed object one pre-eminent result, whereby the ruin wrought by the 'first man' should be cancelled by the 'second man,' and our gains by the 'last Adam' should more than compensate our losses by the 'first.'

And we are the more moved to press this view because, whilst it seems to us to furnish the strongest ground of appeal for progressive sanctification, and also tends to the glory of God, and to the ' satisfaction' of our Lord Jesus Christ, beyond all other interpretations of the mystery, it is largely neglected by our preachers and devotional writers.

1

To begin at the beginning. It will not, we presume, be questioned that the Incarnation is the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. The whole Faith turns upon the fact that 'the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us;' that the Son of God became the Son of Man; or, as it is otherwise expressed, that 'when the fulness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman, made under the law, to redeem them that were under the law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.'

But the question has sometimes arisen, Why such humiliation? What ends could justify such means? What object could clear such infinite condescension from the charge of disproportion and excess?

Are we prepared to answer this inquiry on any broader ground than that occupied by S. Anselm, viz., the impossibility of an atonement, reconciliation, and salvation for man,

1 Isaiah liii. II; Heb. xii. 2.

without a Divine intervention in human form? That answer is altogether à priori. Is there nothing in the intended method and character of the salvation itself which would furnish an additional answer, at once less abstract and more practical, an answer from results? Our very familiarity with the mystery in question, its place in our creeds and holy offices, and the fact that all our hopes of eternal life are based on it, have probably prevented our realizing the desirableness of such further reply, or studying the subject with a view to it. That 'the Word was God,' and that 'the Word was made flesh,' being truths accepted by us from infancy, they may have caused us no serious questioning, no anxious thought. But it has been otherwise, unless we strangely err, with many a gifted mind in Christendom, and far otherwise with many a heathen hearer of our evangelists; of whom some have deemed so great condescension excessive, if not impossible; whilst others (with truer conceptions both of sin and of God) have felt the reasons commonly assigned for it insufficient, though still wishing it were true. It was not, perhaps, that they doubted the infinity of God's love, or the just demands of His law; but that they failed to see in the popular statements of the ends of the Incarnation any due proportion between the Divine humiliation and its intended effects; and from such misconception of its objects, they were tempted to doubt the fact. And though we ourselves may have escaped the wreck of faith which they have suffered, who felt the full force of the maxim,

'Nec Deus intersit nisi dignus vindice nodus,'

and were unable to harmonize the asserted Incarnation with it, it by no means follows that we have escaped unharmed by what proved their stumbling-block. For unless we can answer the supposed inquiry, or meet the alleged objection, as Scripture rightly interpreted would enable us, we can neither understand the will of the Creator nor the destiny of the creature, the proper aim of life nor the highest object of prayer.1 For the same reason we shall remain ignorant of the extent of the Divine compassion, ignorant of God's loving foresight and preparation for man's recovery, and ignorant of the sublimest work of God the Holy Ghost in carrying Redemption to its proper issue.

Yet neither they nor we are the chief sufferers by the

1 See, e.g., Bishop Kettlewell's Prayer for Renewal,' being the third in Nelson's Prayers for Ash-Wednesday, the Proper Preface for Christmasday in our Office for Holy Communion, and the Collect for the sixth Sunday after Epiphany.