BOOKS.

THE THEOLOGY OF THE LATE DR. MACLEOD CAMPBELL.* THIS volume will be opened by many with interest, and by a few with emotion. There are some here, and more in Scotland, to whom it will recall one of the most saintly personalities (using that epithet in its distinctive sense to express a certain type of goodness associated with a traditional ideal) with-which they have evercome in contact. And beyond this circle there are others who will fully realise that one is gone who leaves no successor. The key-note of his life is to be found in some words which form a por- tion of the Catechism learnt by Scotch children, and which are -often quoted in these pages, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy .Him for ever." When on his death-bed, we are told (p. 46), he said, after repeating those words, "I never saw so much meaning in them before." Some among us could still use those words, and find a meaning in them that deepened with the widening experience of life, but we cannot believe that they will form the natural expression for more than a very few minds which -are likely to exert any great influence over the present time. Putting aside the many to whom questions as to the ends of man appear altogether unanswerable by man, or who would find the expression " enjoying " and " glorifying " God alike meaningless, the most earnest of our religious thinkers, we believe, would shrink from a definition of the aim of human existence condemning to absolute failure those who, as far as the present day is concerned, have done most to enrich human existence. And though they might allow that there was a sense in which the words were true of a Mill, a Camte, a Darwin, still they would consider that the words which were true only in the sense that men- who during their sojourn in this world ignored or denied God might glorify and enjoy Him for ever, were too much allied to paradox to be the desirable vehicle of a truth which might be quite simply conveyed in other words. Man's relation to God, they would concede on the one side and urge on the other, is the root of his whole being, 'but by that very fact it is a hidden reality, while his relation to his fellow-man is obvious and tangible, and that on which specula- tion is more usefully exercised. To Dr. Campbell the facts of life took a different aspect. All that is positive in what we call toleration was his in no ordinary degree, but it did not lead to the conclusion which most of our contemporaries draw from it, that a subject on which individual convictions greatly differ is -one-on-which no decision is possible. "Man's relation to God" he says (p. 170), "was seen by me as almost the whole of man." Those - words apply to the early days of his ministry, but they eould never have ceased to be true of him, and the whole world of interest which the thinker of our day discovers outside man's relation to God measures the interval between such as him and those who come nearest him now. We do not bring out this antithesis as a compliment to either side. We believe that trust in God implies loyalty to the historical .development of thought which He has appointed, and hold with St. Anselm when he vindicated the claim to martyrdom of one who had died in defence of his brethren, that the truest service of God is the service of man. There is a time to look at the stars above us, and there is a time to till the fields beneath our feet, and the spiritual universe may have its day and night, as well as

Reminiecences and Reflections referring to his Early Ministry in the Parish of Row. By the late John McLeod Campbell, D.D. London: Macmillan.

the physical. Still when the last of those pass away from us who spent on the invisible world the thought, the industry, the patience, the trust, which has brought forward such wonderful results when applied by our generation to the visible, we feel some- thing more than would be awakened by a gap among those who bequeath to their spiritual children their task and their wealth alike, and we turn to any memorials which may depict them to us with an interest possibly beyond that which their individual importance would justify.

The volume which has occasioned these considerations is more unlike an autobiography than we had expected a volume of reminiscences to be. It consists of fragmentary thoughts, referring to the early years of -Dr. Campbell's life, when he was a minister in the Scotch parish of Row, a ministry from which he was removed, in 1831, for teaching the heretical doctrine of universal atonement and pardon through the death of Christ. "The Row Controversy" excited much interest at the time, but for the English reader, at all events, the chief fact to be remembered about it now is the remarkable one that a controversy, resulting

in a sentence of heresy, should leave him who had been affected by it so free from sore feeling and from the ambition of martyr- dom as the writer of these Reflections. He considered the narra- tive of these events correctly given, we are told, in the memoir of a friend and brother-clergyman, Ur. Story, of Rosneath, a volume worth the attention of any reader who cares to follow out an interesting phase of Church history, and one which gives and receives interest to and from the subject of this notice.

The interest of the book, we have intimated, is rather different from what the title-page leads the reader to expect. One other negative criticism has to be made before passing on to the work of an interpreter, and the following quotation forms its text :—

"I know that time is accepted by many as, I may say, man's eternity ; that man's relation to man is accepted by many as his one living social relation, to be occupied in the light of man's own thinking concerning it, with no recognition of light from God, clothed with His authority Yet it is also to be said of this time, and indeed of this very day, as com- pared with that past which I am now recalling, that occupation of mind with. Religion is more widely spread ; though much of it is, so to speak, an adverse interest, though the question 'How am Ito be at peace with God ? ' is in so many minds become the question, 'Is there a God whose peace I ought to seek ? ' Even men speaking such things may be helped to an answer of their question, by any true words concerning the God that is, and the secret of peace with Him ; and as such I trust to com- mend what I now recall to every reader's conscience in the sight of God. This hope is not forbidden me as to those extreme cases." (pp. 172-173.)

While we think that something in this passage, and in many such through the volume, would deeply impress those whom theydescribe, we cannot say that the hope with which the extract concludes is to us a very real one. Everyone who still values the name of Christianity, as describing something real, organic, and precious, will find here an influence that quickens and elevates the whole being, even while they will also meet with much that may appear to them obsolete and technical ; but those who, to take another of his singularly just descriptions, care more for " any ray of light shed on what is due from man to man than any measure of light shed on man's relation to God" (p. 169), will care for this book, and for all the writer's books, chiefly from that artistic or historical point of view in which all has interest for us that illustrates the vivid convictions of the past, and this kind of interest, perhaps, could be better gratified elsewhere.

The true interest of these pages is the manifestation in them of that conviction to which Christianity owes all its power, without the narrowed sympathy which has almost always been associated with it since first it was uttered by St. Paul,—the conviction, we mean, that the death of Christ was an event affecting organically the lives of mankind, putting them in a new spiritual attitude, and making them members of a new race. Whatever men under- stand by Redemption, in that lies the lever of Christianity. Substitute for it moral perfection as the result of patient effort, and the contemplation of an unselfish life lived in this world nearly two thousand years ago, and whatever else you gain, you lose the force that moves the ignorant, the wretched, and the vicious. We are not inquiring whether this kind of effect is the test of truth ; we are simply endeavouring to grasp that aspect of Christianity under which it has been effective, in producing such

results as in the physical world would be accepted as testa of a real agency. But we have to note a fact concerning it that is strange, though not inexplicable. "God bath concluded them all under unbelief," says St. Paul, "that he might have mercy on all."

An unbiassed modern reader, coming upon the words for the first time, would seethat the correlation of these two clauses was a great deal clearer than the meaning of either. Whatever concluding a set of persons under unbelief may mean, and whatever having mercy mercy on all whom He delivers from their unbelief, says another, which meets us in every page of the Bible must be softened down but both parties alike granted that this purpose of God with regard into precepts for self-improvement, the denunciations against sin to man was fulfilled as to a mere fraction of the race He had created. into warnings against folly and imprudence, the promises of eternal One party asserted that he only intended it to apply to a mere life into a super-mundane sanction given to the proverb that honesty fraction, another that He was baffled with regard to the residuum, is the best poliey. Those who rejected the dogma that God called the but the proportion of the lost to the saved, and the fate of the majority of us into existence for an eternity of torment felt sure that lost—eternal and unendurable torture—was the same with both. this was false, whatever else was true. Their opponents (speaking How comes it that so hideous a representation of the Ruler of logically rather than historically, for we cannot, perhaps, say it of our lives, and our probable fate, was accepted by the religious contemporaries) held as firmly the belief that the benefits procured world as "the good news of Christ "? Its hideousness was not by the death of Christ must be of transcendent value. Now what hidden from the minds which adopted it most consistently. arrays these two convictions as implacable foes ? The firmest Luther, who set it forth in all its naked repulsiveness (in a work belief that the Ruler of our lives can have no favourites does not which we suspect from one passage Dr. Campbell never read), put any difficulty in the way of believing that He may have con- allowed that none of its opponents had recoiled from it with a ferred transcendent benefits on mankind in a particular transac- greater horror than he. Yet against this horrible doctrine stood tion. The most absolute confidence in the excellence of the not only the protest of reason and nature, but the words of Paul. blessings thus conveyed does not oppose itself to the supposition Of course, said Whitefield, when pressed as to election, it is not that they may be universal. These convictions appear as mutu- to be exactly found in the Bible, but "if you take the Bible liter- ally exclusive, then, and then only, when the limitations of earth.

ally, then nobody will be damned." Is it not a strange problem are transferred to heaven, when we take our type of God's deal- in the history of religious life that a doctrine has been read into ings with us not from that natural world where all things most the Bible of which Luther said that in contemplating it in all its I precious are most common, or from the world of human relation,.

horror it had made him ready to choose death rather than life, where the most inexhaustible love is that which has least in it and White held confessed that the plain words of the Bible were that depends on the individual, but from the world of what we against it? So strange it seems to us, that is impossible in noticing may call artificial relation,—the law courts, the exchange, and the last words of one who held the positive belief with which it the mart.

has been associated, without ever apparently even contemplating It is through this medium that Christianity has almost always this hateful corollary, to refrain from a few words of suggestion as been contemplated, wherever it has been contemplated as a sys- to its source. tem, whether the interest roused by it has been sympathetic or The world in which Paul preached his good news of Christ pre- hostile. As a faith truer to the teaching of St. Paul we commend, sented an illustration of the moral condition brought about by this little book to those who desire to know what is most slavery such as can hardly recur in the history of our race, and characteristic in Christianity. In one sense, it belongs to the one which does not exactly confirm popular notions on the ten- past ; the predominating ideas, if they are to influence the future,. dencies of slavery. Pity, it appears from this chapter of human must take a somewhat different shape. But the characteristic experience, is not necessarily blunted by the habit of irresponsible excellence of the present is here in no common measure. The control, but this habit unfit a men not only to practise, but even to worship of humanity which appears in our day in so many dif- understand what is meant by justice. When, therefore, a race in ferent forms, and the protests elicited by that worship (one lately

which right was known only as the endowment of a privileged few made by a vigorous writer will be fresh in the mind of all our

heard of a transaction conferring enormous benefits upon men, readers) alike bear witness to the presence among us far beyond. the inevitable inference was that these men must be a privileged the Christian world of an ideal of the highest love as all- few. Experience furnished no mould which could shape the ideal embracing. In this book this ideal is presented in harmony of a spiritual kingdom otherwise than exclusive • that some should with that which it is supposed to exclude. That a bond need be lost, was part of the conception that any should be saved. And , not be exclusive when it consists in a common centre, and not.

there were reasons, at the time when Paul preached to the Gentiles, in any pressure from without, is made clear in these last words,, why this sentiment of exclusiveness should affect their attention from one who was shut out from his pulpit forty years ago to his message with peculiar power. It was just being driven out for teaching that redemption was the inheritance of humanity;.

of its last stronghold, and looking for refuge elsewhere. Receding and the opposite truth, that the common centre need not be from outpost to citadel, as the patrician ceased to look down on weakened in order to get rid of exclusiveness, is shown here also.. the plebeian, the citizen on the peregrinus, now that even the The conclusion of the many who would accept Lord Palmerston's servile world was no longer to remain in what appeared the right- proposed designation of " General Christians " is that the.

ful state of subjection for slaves, this spirit of exclusiveness had to orthodox view of redemption exaggerates the evil of sin and seek a new home. As an oligarchic caste, Rome had subdued and needlessly expands the demand for holiness, and most people sup- elevated the world, as a mob of emancipated slaves it was a centre pose that the choice is between their view and that of an endless of corruption and death. Think how these facts, wrought into hell. We wish that those who imagine this antithesis could have the the whole character of that generation through the accumulating patience to study this volume, that putting aside for the moment all.

and transforming influences of inheritance, through the long question as to the truth of what the writer believed, they could. traditional association of a noble national life with narrow exclu- bring themselves to hear patiently what that belief was. It needs. siveness, through the sudden revelation of the degrading in- somepatience to read what Dr. Campbell writes, for the style is fluences that were joined with inclusiveness,—think how they involved, and needs the same kind of attention as a foreign lan- must have affected the conception of a Kingdom of Heaven. In guage; but this patience would be rewarded by the discovery that Christ was no longer Greek or Barbarian, bond or free,—in Christ, it is possible to bring into religion the ideal of justice inspired by: then, was the elect and the reprobate. The spiritual kingdom modern democracy, without losing the ideal of holiness now classed. ignored all the distinctions of the earthly, but it was only to with that obsolete conception of the moral universe finding its.

establish its own for ever and ever. shadow in "the hell that priests and beldames feign."

when Theology absorbed eager interest and arduous thought, and would appeal to the negative mind of our day. Dr. Campbell.

thus was perpetuated a medium through which the teaching of an had that conviction of the self-evidencing nature of light, in the earlier age has almost always been contemplated. But we do not spiritual world, which, with regard to the material world, is mean that the impulse to measure any good in an inverse proportion universal, though elsewhere it is represented as making belief ita upon them may mean, he would say, one thing is clear, that to its diffusion is the special characteristic of any time or any race. the same set of persons are spoken of in the first phrase and It is the temptation of humanity. It is an intellectual quite as much- in the second. The strange fact is, that in the development of as a moral temptation. We see, as a matter of fact, that there is a.

Christianity this order of certainty has been exactly inverted. certain definite amount of most of the good things of this world, Men have taken for granted that the " all " who are concluded and the choice is between some having much and many having ex- under unbelief has a different meaning from the " all " on whom ceedingly little. Men have carried on this reasoning unconsciously He will have mercy. The first word is taken absolutely, the last into the world of the unseen, and have argued that Redemption, to has a varying scale of limitation introduced with it. The particular be valuable, must, like all visible objects of value, be limited. And kind of limitation has been the badge of the great partiesof Christen- so the all-pervading influence of Modern Democracy had filtered, dom since the Reformation, but some kind of limitation has been its way into Religion, and men saw that what would be hideous accepted by all who have preached Christianity with any real tyranny in the human ruler could not be fathomless love in the power, any sense that they had a message to mankind. God will have Divine ; still this antithesis influenced them unconsciously,—much mercy on all those who quit their unbelief, says one. He will have for the few, or little for the many. The demand for holiness- mercy on all whom He delivers from their unbelief, says another, which meets us in every page of the Bible must be softened down but both parties alike granted that this purpose of God with regard into precepts for self-improvement, the denunciations against sin to man was fulfilled as to a mere fraction of the race He had created. into warnings against folly and imprudence, the promises of eternal One party asserted that he only intended it to apply to a mere life into a super-mundane sanction given to the proverb that honesty fraction, another that He was baffled with regard to the residuum, is the best poliey. Those who rejected the dogma that God called the but the proportion of the lost to the saved, and the fate of the majority of us into existence for an eternity of torment felt sure that lost—eternal and unendurable torture—was the same with both. this was false, whatever else was true. Their opponents (speaking How comes it that so hideous a representation of the Ruler of logically rather than historically, for we cannot, perhaps, say it of our lives, and our probable fate, was accepted by the religious contemporaries) held as firmly the belief that the benefits procured world as "the good news of Christ "? Its hideousness was not by the death of Christ must be of transcendent value. Now what hidden from the minds which adopted it most consistently. arrays these two convictions as implacable foes ? The firmest Luther, who set it forth in all its naked repulsiveness (in a work belief that the Ruler of our lives can have no favourites does not which we suspect from one passage Dr. Campbell never read), put any difficulty in the way of believing that He may have con- allowed that none of its opponents had recoiled from it with a ferred transcendent benefits on mankind in a particular transac- greater horror than he. Yet against this horrible doctrine stood tion. The most absolute confidence in the excellence of the not only the protest of reason and nature, but the words of Paul. blessings thus conveyed does not oppose itself to the supposition Of course, said Whitefield, when pressed as to election, it is not that they may be universal. These convictions appear as mutu- to be exactly found in the Bible, but "if you take the Bible liter- ally exclusive, then, and then only, when the limitations of earth.

ally, then nobody will be damned." Is it not a strange problem are transferred to heaven, when we take our type of God's deal- in the history of religious life that a doctrine has been read into ings with us not from that natural world where all things most the Bible of which Luther said that in contemplating it in all its I precious are most common, or from the world of human relation,.

horror it had made him ready to choose death rather than life, where the most inexhaustible love is that which has least in it and White held confessed that the plain words of the Bible were that depends on the individual, but from the world of what we against it? So strange it seems to us, that is impossible in noticing may call artificial relation,—the law courts, the exchange, and the last words of one who held the positive belief with which it the mart.

has been associated, without ever apparently even contemplating It is through this medium that Christianity has almost always this hateful corollary, to refrain from a few words of suggestion as been contemplated, wherever it has been contemplated as a sys- to its source. tem, whether the interest roused by it has been sympathetic or The world in which Paul preached his good news of Christ pre- hostile. As a faith truer to the teaching of St. Paul we commend, sented an illustration of the moral condition brought about by this little book to those who desire to know what is most one which does not exactly confirm popular notions on the ten- past ; the predominating ideas, if they are to influence the future,. dencies of slavery. Pity, it appears from this chapter of human must take a somewhat different shape. But the characteristic heard of a transaction conferring enormous benefits upon men, readers) alike bear witness to the presence among us far beyond. the inevitable inference was that these men must be a privileged the Christian world of an ideal of the highest love as all- there were reasons, at the time when Paul preached to the Gentiles, in any pressure from without, is made clear in these last words,, of corruption and death. Think how these facts, wrought into hell. We wish that those who imagine this antithesis could have the the whole character of that generation through the accumulating patience to study this volume, that putting aside for the moment all.

and transforming influences of inheritance, through the long question as to the truth of what the writer believed, they could. traditional association of a noble national life with narrow exclu- bring themselves to hear patiently what that belief was. It needs. siveness, through the sudden revelation of the degrading in- somepatience to read what Dr. Campbell writes, for the style is fluences that were joined with inclusiveness,—think how they involved, and needs the same kind of attention as a foreign lan- must have affected the conception of a Kingdom of Heaven. In guage; but this patience would be rewarded by the discovery that Christ was no longer Greek or Barbarian, bond or free,—in Christ, it is possible to bring into religion the ideal of justice inspired by: then, was the elect and the reprobate. The spiritual kingdom modern democracy, without losing the ideal of holiness now classed. ignored all the distinctions of the earthly, but it was only to with that obsolete conception of the moral universe finding its.

This was the aspect under which Christianity appeared to the world We have said that there is little or nothing in this volume which, own ground. When science has more entirely disciplined the faculty with which men judge of evidence, they will see that to seek for other evidence of light than vision is not more reasonable in the one domain than the other, and will recognise the truth expressed in a striking passage in this volume (p. 212), that confi- dence in God does not exist if it is not ultimate. Each man must take his start from that which is ultimate to him ; how far we are responsible for that which is ultimate to each one of us is not a question to be entered on here. As a protest, therefore, against a kind of demand which we think bewildering both to the con- science and intellect, we welcome what Dr. Campbell says of "Faith and Doubt." To those who know what doubt is, it will minister vital help, but we believe for our own part no state of mind is so rare. The confusion of a critical or negative attitude with doubt seems to us one of the dangerous mistakes of the present day, and perhaps there may be a little of this confusion in these pages. But though we have allowed that they may not benefit those whom the writer had in his mind, we consider them so pregnant with deep and soul-healing truth that we conclude this notice with some extracts from this part of the book, given with such condensation as seems to us always desirable in extracts from any utterance of continuous thought :—

" Intolerance is not only what can co-exist with secret misgivings, but is often produced by such misgivings, and the eagerness with which men labour to show their opponents to be in the wrong, is a craving for the strengthening of their own position by the reflex effect of succeeding in persuading others. In whatever measure the cer- tainty which belongs to true light is enjoyed, a man is saved from this temptation to seek confirmation of his own conclusions in the assent of others." (p. 200.)

"The true fountain of charity is conscious possession of light, not consciousness of darkness, yet would that the consciousness of darkness yielded all the charity it should." (p. 202.) "The wisdom of love as practical wisdom seems rarer than love itself Many a man errs because lie derives not his practical guidance as well as his motive from Christ." (p. 256.) As we are not to do evil that good may come, so neither are we to be reconciled to evil even by the hope that God will over-rule it for good." (p. 256.) "The more our individual preciousness in the sight of God is appre- hended the more is the mystery deepened of our dependence one on another." (p. 251.) "Even the desire to do no injustice may mislead I believe we are exposed to this temptation, which calls itself charity, through lack of more divine love. For pure love needs no shutting of the eyes on evil to sustain its intensity ; needs, indeed, no assumption of positive good, nothing beyond that possibility of good which made man redeemable." (p. 261.)