BOOKS.

MR. ROW ON CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES.* As we did not notice this v'ery able book on its first appearance, we are glad to seize the occasion of its reaching a second edition to give our readers some account or its line of argument, and some impression of the force with which it deals with the greatest question that can present itself to the mind of man. Mr. Row is persuaded that it is a great mistake, in an age widely separated from that of the first proclamation of Christianity, to base the claim of Christian teaching to a supernatural origin, in the first instance, on the phy- sical miracles with which its early history is so closely associated. He points out with great force that whatever the evidential force of miracles might have been to those who beheld them,—and even with those first disciples, we know that the signs and wonders of the Christian teachers wore not the most potent among the causes of faith,—the evidence of those must necessarily be weaker for men who live in an age remote from their occurrence, and requires to be supported and confirmed by other and more spiritual not of superhuman origin, instead

* Christian Evidences Viewed in Eeiniion to modern Thourtht. Being the 13staptoR Leotures for 1877. By the Bev. 0. A. Row, M.A., Prebendary of St. Paul's Cathedra. Second Edition. London: Frederick Norgate. of justifying us . in resting , on them the whole weight of our conviction. Accordingly he opens his book with a very able demonstration that we have, sooner or later, the same means of judging what is clearly beyond the conditions of purely human causation, in relation to moral origination, that we have in relation to physical origination; and he points out that while in relation to isolated events removed from us by many centuries, the evidence of superhuman origin must necessarily diminish with the lapse of time, our means of judging what is and what is not within the natural reach of man's moral force, in relation to a permanent moral influence, often increase rapidly with the accumulating records of history, and will give us, for instance, a much better means of judging whether such a spiritual force as that exerted by the life of Christ is, or is not, within the range of the highest moral powers of Himple humanity, than the first disciples of Christ had at their disposal. The relative power of Christianity as a moral phenomenon, in comparison with other moral phenomena of a like kind, was almost entirely beyond the appreciation of the first ages. They were too near it,—were, in fact, a part of it,—and had nothing similar with which to compare it We have had eighteen centuries of its history by which to measure its vitality, and we have before Its, in the histories of the great rival religious foundations, other compar- able phenomena which, if not similar, are different only be- cause they contain so much less that subdues human nature, and so much more that illustrates its inherent faults and weakness. Mr. Row, perhaps, hardly concentrates sufficiently this part of his argument. He points out the unique characteristics of Christi- anity, but in it form somewhat too discursive and scattered for the most effective delineation. But the chief points are these : —What is superhuman will show itself by achieving a victory over the most constraining of the conditions of race, time, and place, while utilising to the full all that serves the highest pur- poses to 'which those conditions can be Made subservient. Christ, as Mr. Row shows, did this after a manner otherwise utterly inconceivable by man. He took the Jewish idea of a Messiah, and more than fulfilled it, while moulding it to a wholly new and, unexpected form. He accepted the idea of an eternal Kingdom, but totally transformed it, so that it was com- patible with submission to the better laws of human kingdoms. He accepted the prophetic picture of a suffering and atoning Israel, of a lamb slain for the sins of others, and yet combined it perfectly with the grandeur of a spiritual and invisible throne. He gave to the Jewish anticipations of a coming prophet greater than Moses, a perfectly original turn, when he made himself the living centre'of the new revelation, when he exchanged the prophetic formula, "Thus saith the Lord," for the "I say unto you" of the New Testament, and made love to himself and life in himself the very heart of the new faith. No other religious teaching has ever done this, or even conceived the possibility of doing it Buddha and Mahommed made their teaching the essence of their work. Christ made his own life the essence of his teaching.. And yet he dwelt on the shortness of that life, on the shameful death that was to end it, and on the invisible presence by which alone in the future, after a brief interval of renewed intercourse with a few, the inspirations of that life were to be enforced. As Mr. Row points out, no con- ception,—if it had been 11=am—could have been wilder than this of founding an everlasting spiritual kingdom on the basis of two or three years' life amongst a few ignorant disciples in an obscure corner of the world, accompanied with a number of promises (of which a mere man had no more means of procuring the performance than he had of ruling the courses of the stars), that the meaning and power of this life should be brought home, by the aid of superhuman gifts, to all future genera- tions willing to listen to the missionaries of its story. Yet we have evidence far beyond that accessible to the early ages of Christianity that these utterly wild, if merely human, guesses at the secrets of time were to a marvellous extent fulfilled, in other words evidence that' the moral power revealed in Christ was, in the fullest sense, superhuman, such, that is, as no other being in the history of the world has ever either exerted, or even seemed in any degree likely to exert. We cannot speak too highly of the second Supplement to the fourth lecture„ that in which Mr. Row discusses the Messianic elements of the Old Testament, and shows them to be inadequate as a model to ideologists for the delineation of the Christ of the New Testament. For our own parts, the proof of that particular. thesis is not exactly the use to which we should have applied the reasoning of this supple- ment. The notion of the delineation of Christ lathe Gospels being a merely ideal literary composition at all, seems to us so purely absurd, that we do not believe it has ever really influen ced a single, sound judgment. But for the purpose of showing that Jesus of Nazareth, if a more man of spiritual genius, without superhuman powers, could not have gathered from those Messianic ele- ments of the Old Testament the necessary hints for the origination of his own career, the supplement is invaluable. We heartily agree with Mr. Row that no one who does not first feel profoundly the wonder and awe which our Lord's spiritual career is calculated to inspire in any sound mind, will ever be disposed to weigh carefully the evidence for the physically supernatural els- ments of that career. You must feel the awe which the miracle of his life inspires, before you can see the appropriate- ness of the framework of miracle in which that life is set. And this is the great merit of Mr. Row's work, that it puts this spiritual and moral wonder in the foreground of the picture,. and then weighs calmly the claims of the physically super- human, in its harmony with, and subordination to, the great wonder of the superhuman moral achievement which the writer has depicted. Thus, and thus only, can Christianity be set forth in its true claim to the belief of the present age.

But this, though the. central, is very far indeed from the only merit of Mr. Row's book. For he shows throughout, the same sense of the true proportions between the different parts of his case,—knows what to lay stress on, what not to lay atress ; what is of the first importance, what of secondary importance and what of no importance at all. Thus, in dealing with the physically superhuman in Christ's life, he properly takes the resurrection as the main point of his case, shows how impossible. it was that Christianity could have had the career it had, if this resurrection had not been profoundly believed by the whole Christian Church, from within two or three days of the Cruci- fixion ; and not only the resurrection, but the fact that new instructions were delivered by the mien Christ after his resurrection, whereby the whole life of the Apostles was moulded afresh to new conditions, and the form of the energy of the Church was recast. Mr. Row justly insists on the point that a mere appearance of the risen Christ is not all that is im- plied in the Epistles of St. Paul, any more than it is all that is stated in the Acts of the Apostles. As the Acts of the Apostles state that Christ, before he was taken up, gave " command- ments to the Apostles whom he had chosen, to whom also he showed himself after his passion by many infallible proofs, being seen of them forty days, and speaking of the things per- taining to the kingdom of God," and that he told them ex- pressly at the same time, in answer to their questioning " whether he would at this time restore the kingdom to Israel,'" that it was not for them to know the times or the seasons, which the Father had kept in his own power,—so the Epistles of St. Paul prove that St. Paul, after special communication on the subject with St. Peter and the other Apostles at Jerusalem,, had ascertained that, in the belief of the primitive Church,.

Christ, after his resurrection, had had two interviews with the whole Apostolic body, as well as separate interviews with Peter and James, and one at least with a large body of five hundred.

brethren, most of whom were living at the time he wrote, and that the whole preaching of the Church was based on the testi- mony it could thus give to Christ's resurrection. As Mr. Row in- sists, this shows that to the early Church the resurrection was not believed as men believe in fugitive and mysterious visions, but was believed with the full energy and conviction implied in the account in the Acts, of repeated and, so to say, business-like iuterviews and questionings taking place between Christ and his disciples, both collectively and individually, about which it was, to their minds at least, simply impossible to have a doubt. That, it is clear, was the couviction which St. Paul had derived directly from the Apostles, no less than the conviction which the author of "The Acts of the Apostles" had derived from his own sources of information, Now, of course, this conviction might have been mistaken ; but it is one thing to account for the growth of such a conviction as this, and quite another thing to account for the growth of a mere impres- sion that Christ had been seen alive after his crucifixion.

Theories which might account for the latter, would not account for the firm and widely diffused assurance that the interviews between the risen Christ and his Apostles had been frequent,, various in their conditions, and. full of important consequences to the reorganisation of the Church. And to ono who admits the existence of the amorally superhuman in Christ's life, this new element of the physically superhuman is not a fresh difficulty, but the diminution of whatever difficulty there was

before. Mr. Row, therefore, shows that the belief in the truth of the resurrection remains, to one who perceives the moral miracle of Christ's life, the most reasonable interpretation of that miracle, and with the acceptance of the physical miracle of the resurrection, all a priori improbability of other physical miracles, of course, utterly disappears. Mr. Row's discussion of the visionary explanation of the resurrection is able, though not the ablest part of the book ; while his discussion of the view that Christ's crucifixion did not really end in death, but only in a swoon, and that it was a Christ who had never died, not one who had risen from the dead, who inspired his disciples' belief in the resurrection, is to our minds simply final. We may add that a very masterly lecture on Inspiration, with the principles of which we heartily agree, concludes this remarkable book.

The argument which the book contains is too much of a continu- ous whole to make isolated extracts any fitir representation of it ; but we will give two passages by way of illustration, not because they embody a new observation, but because they put very vigorously an observation which is of the utmost importance, and one which has been much lost sight of in the criticism of the last few years :—

"Another fact, apparent on the surface of the Gospels, has a

most important bearing on this question. Of this great char- acter [Christ's] they present us with no formal delineation. Nothing is more common than for ordinary historians to furnish us with formal portraitures of the characters of the persons whose actions they narrate, and to render them the meed of praise or blame. All this is totally wanting in the pages of the Evangelists. Not one of them has attempted to depict the character of his Master. Yet so conspicuously does it stand forth in them that it is obvious to every reader, and produces a more distinct impression f i

than the most elaborate delineation. O vhat, then, does it consist P To this question there can be only one smswer, it is the result of the sum-total of the narratives and discourses which compose our Gospels. These, by being simply placed in juxtaposition, by their combined effect, form the portraiture of the divine Christ. I say that

the simple juxta-position of the this result has been produced by

materials, because the most cursory perusal of the Gospels must con- vince every reader that nothing was farther from the intention of. their anthers than to delineate a character by an artificial arrange- ment of its parts. Their obvious aim and Purpose was to furnish such a selection of the actions and teaching of Jesus Christ as would be adequate to teach the great principles of Christianity The almost entire absence of praise or blame assigned to the different agents in the scenes ,which they depict is a most striking

Th feature in the Evangelists. e absence of the expression of any

personal feeling on the part of the writers seems almost like cold- ness. They have not one word in commendation of the absolute self-sacrifice manifested in their Master's life; nor of his unwearied labours in doing good ; nor of his benevolence , his holiness, or his humility; or any one of the striking traits of his character, They must hare viewed his death as the most atrocious of murders ; yet not one word have they uttered for the purpose of heightening the effect of his cruel sufferings, or even of drawing our attention to his patient endurance. The whole account of the Crucifixion is a re- markably matter-of-fact one, in some respects it is even meagre ; and not one word is added for the purpose of giving pathos to the scene. Equally remarkable is their entire absence of any expression of sur- prise or admiration at any miracle which Our Lord performed, mid the want of dramatic colouring in their relation of them. The authors of the Gospels are exclusively occupied with the facts which they narrate; and trusted to them alone to produce the effect which they desired, In QUO word, all four Evangelists write like men who are utterly unconscious that they are delineating the greatest char- acter in history. It is very remarkable that even with respect to the immediate agents in Our Lord's death there is an absence of de- nunciation, the hardest term which they employ being that by which they designate Judas as the Traitor, softened in three out of the four into the expression, 'he who delivered him UP' (6 rapaBiaouf, instead of 6 frpolitSrws). This absence of remark is not a peculiarity of any one of the Evangelists, but alike distinguishes the four. When we consider that their attachment to their Master was profound, it constitutes a most surprising trait, and is utterly inconsistent with the idea that any portion of the delineation has been worked up for the purpose of producing effect. let it has produced one which has utterly distanced the mightiest creations of genies."

This complete unconsciousness in the Evangelists of the effect of what they were doing, and this striking reserve in their treatment of facts which must have thrilled their hearts to their deepest depths—(it has often been remarked, for in- stance, that the martyrdom of the apostle James by Herod is told more in the manner in which an Annuat Register might record it, than in the manner in which a religious com- munity commemorates the death of one of its chief leaders) --are utterly inconsistent, either with that excitable enthu- siasm which is essential to the theory of a purely visionary resurrection, or with that tone of controversial comment which later traditional retrospects almost necessarily assume, and which is, for instance, to some extent visible in the tone of the Apocalypse.

This is by far the most weighty volume on the Christian Evidences which we have read for some years.