REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

The Legend of Thomas Didymus. By James Freeman Clarke. Boston: Lee & Shepard. pp. 448. $1.75.

We are indebted to few writers among us more than to the author of this volume for the succession of instructive, readable, and quickening books that he has sent forth to enrich various departments of our religious literature, and to make the discussion of high themes more living, intelligent, and practical. Few authors are more prolific than Mr. Clarke, this being the second book he has given us within a year, the interesting and valuable lectures on Self-Culture having been published but a few months ago. Wide as is the range of topics he treats, his books are never feeble, dry, nor unimportant. His large intelligence, wide reading, genial good-sense, and transparent simplicity of purpose give a fresh, wholesome, and tonic quality to all his literary work as to his public speech. Unlike the majority of those who treat the same themes, his mind is not more critical than creative. Few men have done so much to stir and strengthen, if not to shape, the religious thinking of our time. His early essays on Forgiveness and Prayer have been of unspeakable value to great numbers both of ministers and lay-people, and his later books, on The Ten Great Religions and The Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy, have helped multitudes, not of the Unitarian communion alone, to a new and juster point of view in the study of comparative theology and the history of dogma. With a strong love of antithetic and systematic statement, which sometimes carries him too far, Dr. Clarke joins a love of truth and a passion for catholicity which prevent him from being, on the whole, unfair to any system of thought or its advocates, and make him the sympathetic interpreter and genial critic of widely variant views, as well as the sagacious expounder and trusted teacher of the underlying truth he is very apt to find in greater or less fulness at the heart of each. Partisans and dogmatists and sticklers for logical exactness have sometimes occasion to complain of lack of precision and verbal consistency in Dr. Clarke's discussion of his theme; but there is much more frequent reason to praise the justness and wisdom of his conclusions, the generous

measure of his justice to opposing views, the strong simplicity of his thought, and the fresh and fruitful aspect in which he causes truth to reveal itself to the minds of his readers.

After what we have said of the author, we need do little more to commend his latest book to the attention of our readers. Dr. Clarke belongs to the constructive and properly historical, as distinguished from the mainly critical school of Christian scholars. For this reason, as well as because of his many other qualifications for the task, we are glad to have him attempt a portraiture of that life which, after eighteen hundred years, yet attracts to itself the central regard and admiration of men, and moves the thought and the sacred imagination of so many of the best minds to attempt its delineation. The long study of this theme by Mr. Clarke, and his achievements in closely related work, will lead his readers to expect in this book an intelligent, scholarly, and richly suggestive treatment of the Life of Jesus, and in this they will not be disappointed.

In the style of autobiography, for the most part that of the Apostle Thomas, he sets forth the condition of the Jewish people at the advent of Jesus Christ, the religious parties and systems of thought among them and around them, the Messianic expectation and its unsettling influence in the political status that prevailed, the unrest of the noblest spirits of the time, their discontent with the barren and formal teaching of the leaders of the sects, and the readiness of their welcome to the Baptist and to the earlier instructions of Jesus, the call and following of the disciples, and the events that succeeded, on to their Master's betrayal, death, and resurrection. Through these scenes, this book leads us, the slender thread of story always elastic to the author's purpose of exposition or portrayal of the salient features in the scene or the character he wishes to bring before us. It may be doubted, indeed, whether the book is not much too good for the class of readers for whom it is especially prepared. Those who are drawn to read it because of its legendary form will often be impatient of the long explanations and the much philosophizing which delay the interest of the story. While Mr. Clarke's book will have many more readers of this class than Dr. Abbott's equally able but less interesting Philochristus, we doubt if it will attain any considerable measure of the popularity of such inferior books of the same class as The Prince of the House of David; and this not only because of its lack of orthodox

indorsement, but because the rhetorical disguise of narrative is at once thinner and of soberer, not to say juster, quality.

It may even be a question whether it were worth while to employ this figure of legend at all. Certainly, many would have been better pleased to have the results of Dr. Clarke's studies of the life of Christ in a more systematic and less artificial form. That he has sought in this way to make the lessons he had to teach accessible to a larger number of readers will, however, amply justify his purpose; and we must all be thankful to have this picture of that life and its surroundings from one whose abilities, character, and life-long investigations render him so adequate and helpful an interpreter of them.

Evidences of Christianity. Lectures before the Lowell Institute, 1844. Revised as a text-book, with a supplementary chapter. By Mark Hopkins, D.D., LL.D., late President of Williams College. Fifteenth Edition. Boston: T. R. Marvin & Son. 1880.

It is more than a generation since Dr. Hopkins first gave these lectures to the public. During that period, they have been very generally used as a text-book in schools and colleges. For this purpose, they are well adapted. The argument is strong and cumulative, fitted to strengthen the faith of those who come to it with a prepossession in favor of Christianity, and a desire to know the grounds on which their belief rests, and at the same time such as to affect and influence those who, though sceptical, are honestly seeking and willing to receive the truth. The book is in no sense sectarian, but presents strongly the reasons for receiving Christianity as of divine authority from the analogy between itself and the constitution of nature, its adaptation to human needs and capacity, and its inherent worthiness of the origin it claims. If there is anything to which some may except, it is the stress laid upon the fulfilment of prophecy, though even here a fair judgment might concede all that is claimed.

The present edition is but little changed from its earliest predecessors. In the first lecture, the argument for miracles against Hume has been stated somewhat more concisely and forcibly; and, in the ninth and tenth lectures, the evidence for the authenticity and credibility of the books of the New Testament has been amplified. That the author has, in the face of modern criticism, found so few and such slight changes necessary, shows how impregnable was his original position.

In a supplementary chapter, the attacks upon Christianity by the modern critical school are shown to arise from an objection to the affirmation of miracles in the Gospels, and to be but a continuation of the deistical attack of the last century, which denied the supernatural, and especially the New Testament miracles. However formidable any one of the critics appears alone, all taken together lose very much of their strength by their failure to agree in their points of attack. The author declares that Christianity would not be a religion without the miracles. If nature is the theatre of, and subordinate to, a moral government, miracles are naturally to be expected; and in nature, as related to man in his present condition, the presumption is in their favor: so that the question of their occurrence is one of fact and evidence, where each must judge the proof for himself. Criticism may foster diversities of opinion about the book which tells us of Christianity, without destroying the evidence of the fundamental fact. We know Christ not merely as represented there, but as the mightiest moral force the world has ever known. The gospel narratives have every appearance of reality. They were put forth in an age critical and sceptical, and not favorable to the formation of myths. No theory of the critical school accounts for Christ's character in connection with his method and object, nor for his teachings and those of his apostles, nor for the closing scenes of his life, nor for the greatest revelation in the convictions and hopes of man known in history. The recent researches in Cyprus and at Ephesus have furnished new evidence to support the Scriptures, and so have the Sinaitic manuscript, the fragment of Muratori on the canon, and various sceptical writings which have lately been found, tending to carry the authorship of the New Testament books back to the period usually assigned to them.

In spite of the efforts made since the first publication of the lectures, to put other religions on the same plane with Christianity, its exclusive traits are shown to give it superiority over all, and make it pre-eminently the religion.

Finally, Jesus' own testimony through his ministry, and when put on oath by the high priest, is opposed to everything that could be imagined, if he was carrying on an imposture; but, on the supposition that he was what he claimed to be, no testimony was ever less likely to be perjured, or deserving of greater credibility. Our alternative is to declare that Christianity rests on

perjury, or that Jesus was what he claimed to be. The author has no hesitation as to what our decision ought to be.

H. F. J.

A History of Classical Greek Literature. By Rev. J. P. Mahaffy, M.A. 2 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers.

If a vote had been had of the great body of readers interested in the subject, who should write a history of Greek literature, an immense majority, we doubt not, would have been thrown for the author of the instructive and entertaining Social Life in Greece. And we firmly believe that, for the great body of readers, nothing else can be had as good, notwithstanding some depreciation of more learned critics. The general reader wants to have his attention directed to the points of interest in a subject of which he knows something more than the name, but not much, and to have his interest well kept up when brought there. These two points are achieved better in this book than in any other history of ancient literature we know, and only critics will need to go behind its very intelligent and vivacious views. Good sense, an independent attitude of mind, a refreshing freedom from conventional ways, with sufficient and loving scholarship, are what the student will find in these two handsome and portly volumes, one embracing poetry and the other prose. It is, as we have just hinted, a relief that "Eschylus and Lycurgus are not disguised from the reader as Aischulos and Lucourgos." The period covered comes down to about 300 B.C., the poetry including Menander, and the prose Aristotle.

We have delayed this notice unconscionably beyond our intention, and still have to look forward to some long vacation for the genial task of reading it. We can only add, therefore, that wherever we have opened it at random, or perused a paragraph or a topic, we have found all the qualities to confirm the general impression just given. And, for an example of the intelligent first-hand view the author takes of the matter in hand, we subjoin this luminous hint on a point which has doubtless struck most readers with an odd sense of incongruity, never (that we have seen) corrected until now: —

There is one passage which has excited much criticism concerning the chorus. When the voice of Agamemnon is heard within, crying that he is fatally wounded, there seems to be a regular deliberation of the chorus, each member offering his opinion, and summed up by the leader at the end of twenty-five lines. This delay seems very absurd, except we