Philosophy and Development of Religion. By Otto Pfleiderer, D.D. 2
vols. (Blackwood and Sons.) —We cannot pretend to give more than a very brief account of these volumes. They contain the Gifford Lectures delivered at Edinburgh in the year 1894. The first volume is devoted to the subject of natural religion, the second to the development of Christianity. It is with the first rather than with the second that we find our- selves in agreement. Surely it is something like an extrava- gance when we find Professor Pfleiderer setting forth as a hypothesis which has "much probability" that the appearance of the Risen Christ to "more than five hundred brethren at once" is "the same event which lies at the basis of the narrative in the Acts of the Apostles of the effusion of the Spirit in the first Pentecost." We cannot see a single feature of resemblance. Every circumstance of place and person was different. In the first volume we may specially point out the fifth lecture, "Revelation of God in the Natural Order of the World," in which the analogical argument from human personality to the divine is drawn out in a way not unlike to Mr. Illingworth's reasoning in the last Bampton Lectures. The final lecture on "Optimism and Pessimism," is also particularly well worth consideration. "To him who estimates life generally from the highest conception in human point of view of the divine purpose," all the experiences of life obtain the significance of a "God-ordered means of educa- tion and Salvation." This seems to contain the root of the matter, though we may demur to the contemptuous dismissal of the idea that there can be any "interferences of an abstract Supernatural Omnipotence with the ordered course of nature." Dr. Pfleiderer is not alone in reading into the word " law " more than its real significance, an observed uniformity in the operations of nature.
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