His liberality was unbounded. His gifts to University College and School amount to more than seventy-five thousand dollars. He paid also the school fees of many boys, and he helped in a private way numerous persons in gaining an education. He was always a liberal supporter of the Unitarian denomination, and gave largely to other schools and chapels. His mind was active up to the last year of his life, and he was constantly contributing articles to papers and periodicals.

When we contemplate such a life, we turn away sick of the strife for honors and places, the mean ambitions and contentions of the world. It makes us value our human race when we see a man like this, beginning life under such flattering, worldly circumstances, in the banking-house of a distinguished man like Samuel Rogers, the poet, with the dangers of money-making around him, the temptations to extravagance and show, and the weakness and selfishness of luxury and ease. How few men could retire from such a life, with a fortune at their disposal, and be so simple and uncorrupted as he! What a transition from the excitement, the risks, the wear and tear to the nerves of a great banking establishment, to the calm domain of critical thought, the dreamy atmosphere of Egyptian relics and inscriptions, the grave pursuits of religion with its researches into the ancient Scriptures and their early text! The youth had these aspirations in him at the beginning, we may say; but with how many would these early tastes have been extinguished by the allurements of money or the prose of life. There he lived in his simple suburban home, as we might call it, at Highbury Place; for although in London he had his garden, and was free from the noise of the city, strangers who visited London, especially those of the Unitarian faith, counted it a privilege to be conducted to his hospitable home, where with his daughters he was ready at any hour to welcome a guest with that oldfashioned cordiality which we remember in our New England country homes. He would sit down over his Egyptian hieroglyphics, in his old age, with the eagerness of a boy, and decipher them with unwearied patience for his guest. Mr. Sharpe lost his wife about thirty years ago. He had six children: two alone survive him. He was buried in the Abney Park Cemetery, London, a spot consecrated as being the last resting-place of many distinguished and excellent non-conformists.

If there are any among us, as there doubtless are on this side

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the water, who have visited in that hospitable home in Highbury Place, where father and daughters presided, and where both were so earnestly working for humanity, they will join surely with the writer in this imperfect tribute to a noble man, whose place can never be filled in England.

MARTHA P. Lowe.

REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

Faith and Freedom is the title of a very handsome and characteristic volume of sermons by Stopford Brooke just published by Mr. Ellis.* The title is apparently not of Mr. Brooke's choosing or the volume of his selecting. The selection and the name are due to Mr. Edwin D. Mead, who has prefixed to the sermons a very instructive and valuable introduction. That the volume well deserves the notice of all who are interested in religious thought, and that it shows some of the very best qualities of sermonizing, will be recognized at once. Mr. Brooke has long been known as a preacher - sometimes called the best of living English preachers who united the widest intellectual liberty with the most definite religious faith. So that this title (which, to do it justice, should be pronounced slowly, and with a pause between the words) is very accurately descriptive of the man.

It is all the more so, since, last September, Mr. Brooke publicly renounced the communion of the Church of England. This change of position calls fresh attention to the real attitude of that Church. The two best-known parties in it, High and Low, Mr. Brooke thinks, hold each a distinct and consistent position. The third, known as Broad Church, he had till then adhered to, honestly attempting to insure the largest liberty consistent with the limits of the establishment. He thinks now that compromise has been stretched as far as it will go. The miracles, and in ticular "the miracle of the incarnation," he can no longer accept, and so can no longer honestly remain within those limits. The new position he has taken, with his statement of reasons, will be found in the concluding portion of this volume.

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The logic of Mr. Brooke's argument will be objected to by those who decline to accept his main position as to the actual existence of the invisible world; namely, that it must be accepted, first, by an act of faith, just the same as the existence of the visible world, before the reasons for its existence can be made intelligible. On the plane of the scientific understanding, in which his argument is supposed to move, it is at least as easy to accept miracles as it is to accept personal immortality (for example) by that precious act of faith. Nay, the average English understanding has always assumed, not merely that the two are to be taken together, but that the former should come first, as the easier and more elementary belief. With the logic of the position, however, we have nothing to do here, except to show how the topics stand related in this representative modern religious mind. It is a very significant revolution in English thought, which has so completely within the last generation reversed the position of the

two.

These discourses, then, stand for the very broadest, highest, and most spiritual interpretation to be given to the phrase "natural religion." In their writer's view, moreover, this is not simply "free religion," as we have been accustomed to understand that phrase, but is distinctively, loyally, emphatically Christian. Some of the most striking illustrations in the book are those designed •Faith and Freedom. By Stopford A.,Brooke. Geo. H. Ellis. pp. 342.

to exhibit the thought and teachings of Jesus himself in this light, and to show how it is the genius of Christianity to embrace whatever we can know as the "religion of humanity." I should be glad to copy as examples, if there were room, the paragraphs on pages 102 and 123, the fine illustration of the expansive text, and that from the realisms of Christian art.

There are two qualities in these sermons of which, in particular, I wish to say a word. The first is that they are good sermons to listen to. The style throughout is as simple, direct, and clear as that of conversation.

The other is the high level, intellectually and spiritually, at which the argument is sustained. I mean by this not ability, of which there is no lack, but altitude. It is not often that a volume so clear and easy to read moves in so rare an atmosphere of thought, deals so exclusively with a range of topics and arguments belonging purely to the highest mental life. A curious example of this is the thought, which keeps recurring, that spiritual things have proof of their objective existence, quite as manifest as material things; in short, that it is, after all, about as likely as not that nothing does exist except pure intelligence. This "subjective idealism," Mr. Brooke has too good sense to put dogmatically; but he suggests it, from time to time, as the view he naturally inclines to take, and one which, in his view, takes away all logical objection to the order of spiritual verities he would prove. This seems to imply a certain atmosphere of the closet or of the philosophical lecture-room, which makes him unconscious of the blank nonsense such propositions appear to the carnal mind.

This impression, again, implies not exactly a fault, but at least a lack, of which the reader becomes vaguely conscious in this charming volume. It is, to put it in a word, a lack of robustness. This does not imply any lack of sincerity or breadth or courage. It only means that one misses a certain vigor of grasp, a certain coarseness and rudeness, perhaps, that is got from much handling of the things of this life. It is even a merit, as we may think, that we breathe for a while the atmosphere of a sweeter and better life, just as it is better, now and then, to listen to the harmonies of a symphony than to the noises of the street. The conditions under which we hear that music are such as make us, as far as they go, refined, recluse, fastidious. It would not be

fair to say so much as that of these sermons, which give us now and then vigorous and wholesome words on secular, out-door things. Still, the ethical view is always subordinated. It makes the application, not the body, of the argument. The illustration. I have just used does hint at a certain delicacy and refinement characteristic of the volume and of the class of minds to which it will be most welcome. And it cannot have a better mission anywhere than if it should give something of that spirit to another class of minds equally broad and free, that sin the other way; which yet give to religion, honestly, the best rendering they can; which, in short, are so apt to have a great deal of the "freedom" with very little of the "faith."

J. H. A.

Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here to-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall, the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a challenge, not because they wish to fight, but because they are ashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a teacher can be exposed, the ordeal of teaching other teachers. Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the consolation of remembering Goethe's verses:

"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,

Sicher ist's in allen Fällen."

*This address, delivered at Princeton, Mass., Oct. 4, is, in matter, though not exactly in form, a fragment of a larger essay on the "Sentiment of Rationality," of which a first fragment was published in Mind for July, 1879. Another fragment will, it is hoped, appear some day in the Princeton Review, the corrected proof having been for nearly two years in the possession of that periodical.