offered upon Calvary. Theologians have been glad to rescue the first person of their Trinity from association with the blood-thirsty demons of barbarous ages by describing the sacrifice of Jesus as God himself becoming the victim of eternal law. But whatever may be said of this complex device, it is sufficient evidence that man's primitive demon, which personified Hunger, has ended with being consumed on his own altar."

"It is probable that no more terrific form of the belief in a Devil survives than this Holy Ghost dogma. In right reason the fatal Holy Ghost stands as the type of that feat by which priesthoods have been able to preserve their institutions after the deities around whom they grew have become unpresentable."

These and other similar conclusions are far-fetched, and supported by little but arbitrary conjecture and active fancy.

In the "Diable Boiteux," or "devil on two sticks," whom LeSage has made familiar to the Western World, the crutches are the two sticks which, in Vedic hymns, by being rubbed together produced the sacred flame symbolizing Agni. Speaking of the custom of celebrating the summer solstice by bonfires, still observed in Switzerland and the North of Scotland, after quoting the prohibition of these fires by the Sixth Council of Constantinople (A. D. 680), he still writes as if their continual observance in out of the way places somehow proved that Christianity was originally sun-worship, or Moloch worship. And he adds, with singular naiveté, as if it proved his position: "In my boyhood I have often leaped over a bonfire in a part of the State of Virginia mainly settled by Scotch families, with whom probably the custom migrated thither." What boy has not done so with the spirit of daring which prompts boys to do a hundred other venturesome deeds?

"Pliny says that in his time sulphur was used to keep off evil spirits, and it is not impossible that it first came to be used as a medicine by this route." He adds in a note that the homeopathic principle, "Similia similibus curantur," is very ancient; but what resemblance there is between sulphur and devils is not apparent. "To our sun-worshiping ancestor the new year meant the first faint advantage of the warmer time over winter. . . . . The hovering of day between superiority of light and darkness is now named after doubting Thomas. At Yuletide the dawning victory of the sun is seen as a holy infant amid beasts of the stall.

.. John Wesley, whose noble heart was allied to a mind strangely open to stories of hobgoblins, led the way of churches and sects back into this ancient atmosphere. Nevertheless the rationalism of the age has influenced St. Wesley's feast-watchnight. . . . . Yet what the watchnight really signifies in the antiquarian sense is just that old culminating conflict between the powers of fire and frost, once believed to determine human fates."

"The shudder which some nervous persons feel at sight of a mouse is a survival from the time when it was believed that in this form unshriven souls or unbaptized children haunted their former homes." Speaking of St. Gertrude commanding an army of mice, and of the pied piper of Hamelin, the author says, "my ingenious friend, Mr. John Fiske suggests that this may be the reason why Irish servant-maids often show such frantic terror at sight of a mouse. The care of children is often intrusted to them, and the appearance of mice prognosticated of old the appearance of the præternatural rat-catcher and psychopomp." "Esau was believed to have been changed into a terrible hairy devil.. Hairiness was a pretty general characteristic of devils; hence, possibly, the epithet Old Harry,' i. e. Hairy, applied to the Devil." If assumptions and fancies like these are scholarship and science, we willingly remain unscholarly and unscientific.

FINAL CAUSES.* This work is an elaborate and able vindication of the validity of the argument from Final Causes in proof of the existence of the personal God. The author concedes that the argument does not rest on an a priori intuitive principle like the principle of causality. He admits, however, "with Aristotle that 'nature does nothing in vain ;' with Jouffroy, that 'every being has an end.' . . . But these are only inductive truths, generalizations from experience." The work consists of a preliminary chapter stating the question: Book I. (pp. 17-316), proving that the principle of Final Causes is a law of nature; Book II. (pp. 317-455), proving that the first cause of this law in nature is the personal God; an appendix and index. The author establishes his positions with care, and meets the objections which have been

*Final Causes. By PAUL GANET, Member of the Institute, Professor at the Faculté des Lettres of Paris. Translated from the French by William Affleck, B.D.; with Preface by Robert Flint. D.D., LL.D., Professor of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1878. New York: Scribner & Welford. 8vo, xvi and 508 pp. Price $6.00.

urged with candor and thoroughness. While admitting all that science has established respecting the physical and mechanical causes of the arrangements of nature, he insists that the need of belief in thought or design is not thereby dispensed with, being still demanded by the forms of the molecules and the coördinated action of mechanical laws.

The work is well translated. We are glad that this able and timely investigation of this question is made accessible to English readers.

SERMONS DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL.*-The first of these volumes, called the first Series, containing twenty-four sermons, is edited by the Very Rev. Thomas Woodward, M.A., Dean of Down, with a memoir of the author's life. The second, of twentysix sermons, is edited by James Amiraux Jeremie, D.D., Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. They are taken from the author's manuscripts, which, we are told, were "written without any view to publication," "often much abbreviated and very difficult to decipher," yet whatever might have been gained from the writer's fine culture, had be revised them, the reader will not be dissatisfied with the result in these pages. The second series was published in 1855 and re-printed in Philadelphia, but the author has not yet been as well known in this country as his accomplishments and worth deserved, nor as might be expected from the admiration he received abroad. He died in 1848, only thirty-four years old, but already distinguished as a poet, metaphysician, orator, and pastor. The memoir before us, besides the few incidents to be expected of so short a professional career, and cordial tributes to his gifts and virtues, is made up largely of extracts from his early poems and addresses, which showed the brilliant promise of his youth. Born and nurtured on the banks of the Suir in Ireland, he combined the warmth and vivacity of his countrymen with academic culture and evangelic zeal. Entering an endowed school at the age of nine, and pursuing the usual course at Dublin University, after only two years longer as a resident scholar, he was appointed to the professorship of Moral Philosophy, then first established there, and at the same time prebend of one large rural parish, and afterwards rector of another.

*Sermons Doctrinal and Practical. By the Rev. WILLIAM ARCHER BUTLER, M.A., late Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Dublin. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers. 1879. Two vols. 474 and 408 pages.

Though his father belonged to the English church, his mother was a zealous Roman Catholic, and he was baptized and reared in that communion. His early religious impressions were very deep and tender. Two years before entering college he found the priest to whom he had disclosed his experiences so indifferent as to shock his convictions, and the result was his conversion to the Protestant faith. Upon entering the ministry he proved himself, as these sermons show, an earnest champion of the church of England, and in 1845 bore an efficient part in the controversy occasioned by Mr. Newman's doctrine of development, still, however, maintaining comprehensive views and liberal sympathies. With his devotion to philosophical studies and literary and social activity, he was no less remarkable for diligence in the pastoral office, visiting the poor in their homes and caring for their wants in a time of famine, so that there were no sincerer mourners than they in the great concourse at his funeral. It was partly through the conviction that the mass of his hearers could be reached most effectively by extempore address that after a time he adopted this method of preaching almost exclusively, for which he was well fitted by temperament, and by his practice in oratory, to which, as to poetry, he was addicted in college and from earlier years. These discourses seem to have been written early in his ministry, or for special occasions. There is sometimes excessive amplification of a thought, and his affluence of language may tend to diffuseness, with some forms of expression that belong to the schools rather than the pulpit, but they have the great merit, even when handling doctrinal or philosophical themes, of being properly sermons instead of essays, really addressed to the audience as if eye to eye. As described on the title-page, they are "Doctrinal and Practical." Though of moderate length, they present a sufficient body of thought, and urge the distinctive truths of Christianity with a due application to the wants of common hearers. His culture, discrimination and fervor, aided, as he is said to have been, by voice and manner in address, must have made him one of the most effective preachers of his time. Besides the interest intelligent readers should take in these sermons as Sunday lessons, they may be commended to candidates for the ministry as desirable homiletic "studies."

THE DOCTRINE OF THE APOCALYPSE.*-In the Introduction to this work Gebhardt maintains that the apostle John was the author of the Apocalypse, and also of the gospel and epistles which bear his name; that the Apocalypse was written in Patmos, A. D. 68; that the gospel and epistles were written a few years later and after the destruction of Jerusalem; that the Apocalypse consisted of scenes or visions presented to the apostle in an ecstatic state "in the Spirit ;" but that, in subsequently writing out what he had seen, "he treated the whole contents of the revelation given to him, in an artistic and independent manner. And here he was bound-which for the most part is not recognized-even more strictly than the poets of ancient or modern times, by the laws of the kind of literature which he employed. As a seer, he had to observe the rules of apocalyptic authorship or art, and to clothe his ideas in apocalyptic language-that is, in Old Testament rabbinical forms of expression." Thus, while it is maintained that the Apocalypse originated as a revelation, and not from the reflective thought or artistic purpose of the apostle, it is denied that "it is a dictation or protocol written in the ecstasy itself, or that it is only a direct reproduction of what was seen and heard in the Spirit."

The examination of the doctrine of the Apocalypse is in three parts. The first exhibits the doctrines taught respecting God, angels, heaven, the devil, the abyss, and the earth and its inhabitants; the second gives the doctrine respecting Christ's person and work, the Spirit, the Gospel, the Christian life and work, and the churches; the third gives the Prophecy of the Apocalypse and a brief summary of what the author conceives to be its meaning. In the remainder of the volume, the presentation of these doctrines in the Apocalypse is compared with the presentation of the same in the gospel and epistles. The conclusion is that the marked differences of form are explained by the different occasion, design, and method of the books, but that there is a close coincidence in the doctrines and the peculiar aspects of doctrine presented. The work is the result of thorough and The author reaches some conclusions

original investigation. peculiar to himself. He contests, throughout, the destructive interpretation, which has made itself ridiculous by enunciating

* Doctrine of the Apocalypse, and its relation to the Doctrine of the Gospel and Epistles of John. By Pastor HERMANN GEBHARDT. Translated from the German by Rev. John Jefferson. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1878. 8vo, 424 pp.