CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Life and Writings of St. Peter. By the Author of "Essays on
reader's attention. Its main feature is, as may be supposed, the con- troversial argument, as it is pressed against the pretensions of Rome. In this there is only one weak part, and that is the treatment of the subject of patristic opinion. This is a subject, indeed, of which an adequate-treatment is excluded by the very limits of a work of this kind. As -it is, half-a-dozen or a dozen quotations from as many writers of -the first five centuries are absolutely useless. The passages themselves, quote them as exactly .11.8 you will, cannot be properly weighed without a full understanding of the circumstances of each case. Why, it would take, a volume . certainly not smaller than this properly to discuss the question of the relations between Cyprian and Cornelius. On the other hand, a remarkably well argued, and to our minds conclusive, chapter is that which deals with the locality of St. Peter's labonrs. If this was, -as there is surely very. good reason for thinking, the dispersed Jewish communities of Asia Minor, the core- mutrities which he addressee in his epistle, and addresses, too, as is here well observed, in the order which would suggest itself to one writing not from the Westsbut from the East, "to the elect stra.ngersof the Disper- sion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia," what becomes of the twenty-five years' episcopate at Rome? The Babylon of the epistle was, it would seem, the real Babylon, which, so far. frona being a desolate ruin, as it is now, was actually the seat of one-of the largest Jewish communities, and was-weld fitted to be the abode of the Apostle. The author thinks that.Sts Peter did suffer martyrdom at Rome, and ingeniously suggests that Nero selected as examples the most con- spicuous among the Christians of the West and of the East, in St. Paul and St. Peter. This-is certainly an able-and interesting book.
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