BOOKS.

JO WE TT'S SERMONS.*

Wno does not recall the miserable explosion of sectarian enmity of which the late Master of Banjo' was the object not so many years ago ? He was treated as a kind of neo- pagan, as a sceptic, as a writer who was engaged in under- mining the faith of Oxford and in transforming the Church of England. We have no doubt that those who thus assailed him were themselves sincere and excellent, but they did not know what it was they were talking about. For while it may be admitted that Jowett was fundamentally a man of letters and a thinker rather than a reformer and a religious teacher, this volume of sermons proves conclusively that he was also a devout Christian believer, holding the central creed of Christianity, but well aware that that creed needs ever new interpretation, and that there has been in the Church much non-essential matter which is not to be thrust on inquiring minds as fundamental and inspired. There are sermons in this volume, such as those on Richard Baxter, John Wesley, and Hugh Pearson, which might have been preached by the simplest exponent of unquestioned orthodoxy to the simplest congregation of ordinary men and women. Indeed, the last-named, dealing with the memory of a good man and the hope of immortal life, is just such a sermon, actually preached to the simple folk of a country village. Because a scholar is versed in German criticism and familiar with Plato, is there any reason why he should be ignorant of the oracles of God ? If so, we must beware of some of the greatest of the Church fathers, such as Augustine, Clement, and Origen. We have said that Jowett was a thinker. He was not, however, a great thinker. It was his metier, rather, to act as a medium between great minds and the cultivated public of England. That is what one feels when reading this volume, as it was what one felt in reading his comments on the dialogues of Plato. He had more than a touch of the English common-sense which fears to soar to any lofty height in speculation, as a reference to the sermon on T. H. Green shows, wherein Jowett deprecates the rather severe philosophic criticism which Green passed on Locke. On the other hand, Jowett's mind was somewhat Greek in its spirit. He disliked extremes, he believed in the poise of the mind which was essentially Greek. One element of his nature, which may come as a welcome surprise to those who think of him as somewhat of a cynic and as purely academic in his aims and sympathies, is his intense humanity. He is always thinking of the poor and the suffering, and he rightly condemns the Christianity which spends its energies on comparative trifles about robes and gestures, the Christianity which is of Paul or of Apollos or of Cephas, and which neglects the task of binding up the wounds of the social body. and of ministering • Sermons, Biographical and Miscellaneous By the late Benjamin Jowett M.A. Edited by the Very Rao. the Hon. W. H, Fremantle, M.A., Dean of Ripon. London: John Murray. [75. 6c1.] to the needs of the victims of sin and sorrow. He is ever reverting to that side of the Christian faith.

We think that the kind of subjects taken by Jowett for his sermons might more frequently be taken by preachers. The life of a great or noteworthy man is surely a more useful theme than three or foar words from some text in the Old Testament which we have often heard tortured into some- thing which the original writer would scarcely have recognised It must be admitted that Jowett sometimes placed his bio- graphical characters in strange juxtaposition. One sermon, for instance, deals with " Bunyan and Spinoza," and another with " Gambetta and Archbishop Tait," and we can hardly conceive personalities having less in common. The union of Bunyan and Spinoza is justified on the ground that they were contemporaries. The wonderful dreamer in Bedford prison would, as Jowett says, have regarded the equally wonderful man who ground glasses at Amsterdam for a living and whose thoughts wandered through eternity, as outside the pale of salvation ; and the philosopher would have looked on

Bunyan as an ignorant fanatic. And yet each brought an essential element to the perfecting of life. Faith and know- ledge, piety and culture, have too often been separated, but in

the ideal world they are united, and the Church must recog- nise that in the great fabric of regenerated souls, the piety of Bunyan and the profound thought of Spinoza both have a place. The discourse on Wyclif, whom Jowett regards as the greatest man ever connected with Oxford, is an excellent survey of the great reformer's work, governed by the idea, not so much of drawing a moral, as of deriving good from merely looking at a great man. No more excellent dis- course is to be found in the book than that on Loyola, from

which a moral is drawn, and is so well stated that we venture to quote it:— "We may sometimes buy a controversial victory at the expense of truth ; we may stimulate a religious feeling which soon passes away and leaves the soul vacant and dark ; we may gain political power and lose the better empire of the heart ; we may be all things to all men, and arouse mistrust and suspicion in the minds of all ; we may stir up a great religious movement, only to be followed by a still greater reaction. All actions and all qualities, the virtues themselves as we call them, when narrowed and isolated and intensified, carry the seeds of their own destruction in themselves."

The moral thus set forth as to the spiritual failure of the great Jesuit Order is not only profoundly true, but its state- ment well indicates what we have called the Greek temper of Jowett's mind. The same spirit pervades the discourse on the great foe of the Jesuits, Pascal, that marvellous mind.

He says of him that "what Plato did for the Sophists, Pascal did for the Casuists : he made them eternally ridiculous."

This is so true that we may say of the Lettres Provinciales what we can only say of a very few of the world's books, that it did its work so perfectly it could not be done again. Jowett places the Pensees not quite high enough, in our judgment. The mere fragmentary nature of

the work is in its favour, for, as Jowett himself says, Pascal was no system-maker. His claim to immortal renown is that he possessed the moat delicate and penetrating insight that mortal man perhaps ever possessed. Wesley is criticised, but the mere criticism is lost in admiring tribute to one who resolved to " devote all his powers to the good of his fellow- men," the result of whose labours on the English-speaking world cannot be over-estimated. Not the least interesting of these pulpit tributes are those to two men known rather to scholars than to the public at large,—Henry Smith, the mathematician, and T. H. Green, the philosopher, two men who have probably set a deeper mark on modern Oxford than any other of her sons. Henry Stephen Smith had perhaps, along with Cayley of Cambridge, the most wonderful mathe- matical mind of any Englishman since Newton, and yet, says Jowett, "he was ready to lavish all his gifts and powers on the humblest and least promising of his pupils." There are few signs of greater grace than that, when a high intellect aids willingly and affectionately one of a dull and limited nature. Along with all his enormous work in connection with the theory of numbers, which hardly a score of men living can appreciate, Smith had more to do with the manage- ment of the University of Oxford than any one else. He was no dry-as-dust, but was a fine scholar, and a brilliant man. Of T. H. Green, Jowett says that he seemed to live in the unseen world, "that he was a man to whom an inner and future life was a, reality, to whom, in the language of his own philosophy, the absolute good was his good, and truth itself the gate of another world." But, notwithstanding this lofty idealism—perhaps because of it P—Green threw himself with a noble energy into civic life, and for the first time in Oxford history broke down the old barrier between University and town. " He was not the pliable politician who would readily hush up a scandal. For his liberal views, which some may have thought carried to an extreme, rested on moral and philosophical principles."

Green's simplicity of life and total disregard of money are rightly dwelt on by Jowett as of particular importance in inspiring young men at an impressionable age and moulding their future lives.

Of the miscellaneous sermons, those on " Church Parties" and "The Church, Past, Present, and Future," are especially welcome just now when a bitter controversy is raging on Church questions. Extreme partisans will not listen to what Jowett has to say, but those who know that the life moulds

the form will. The idea pervading these two discourses is that all organisations are doomed to perish when they have

served their day, but that the spirit of truth and love is all in all :-

" It is vain to expect that men can be made better, unless we can speak to them heart to heart; giving to them higher concep- tions of God and of the truth, and a deeper sense of their duties to one another. It is vain to suppose that they will listen to a religion of which any part is at variance with their own con- science, or with common-sense, or with the morality of the ago in which they live. They need something higher, holier, better : and this better thing for which they ask is the revelation of a divine perfection in which all the elements of earthly goodness are realised and fulfilled."

We think the central religious idea of Jowett could be scarcely better expressed than in these, his own words.