BOOKS.

MR. LLEWELYN DAVIES'S SERMONS.* Tam volume, both in its substance, prefix, and suffix, represents the noblest type of theology now preached in the English Church. Its characteristics are faith, freedom, and fearlessness. It has too much faith, not too little, to ignore the difficulties which honest intellects feel in groping amongst the foundations of faith. Instead of sidling away from a difficulty like the English Archbishops in their recent pastoral letters,—letters which we do not hesitate to say prove that they are either quite unequal to guide the studies of their clergy, or, if equal, quite nnwilling to do it in a manly spirit,--11r. Davies teaches his people and his readers to look every difficulty full in the face, to ignore no light of criticism, to claim no undue authority for the literary form of prophecy, gospel, or epistle, to reject no honest testimony of the Spirit of God speaking in the heart of man ; and he not only teaches us this in the letter, but when he comes to the practical occasion for an illustration of his

own teaching he does not take, like the Archbishops, to the sidling manoeuvre ; he acts up to his teaching ; he looks at the

Gospel and its records as a sincere layman who is " committed " to nothing, but on whom the influence of Christ's Gospel has taken a powerful and involuntary hold, would look at them,— recognizing inconsistencies in the accounts, stumbling some- times over the substance even of our Lord's words, but yet re- joicing to find in the great fact of the Incarnation the key to the otherwise insoluble riddle of human life and divine government.

The Archbishop of York, in the pastoral just issued, avows,— shall we say as his personal belief, or rather as a position that the situation of the English Church requires him to maintain ?—that the doctrine that the Bible is "coextensive with the Word of God" is the guarantee and root of the whole Christian faith. "It is almost superfluous to observe," he says, "that this is no question of terms, but of doctrine, and that it is not a question of one doctrine, but of the doctrine on which all the other doctrines of the Church of England rest If the Bible is not the Word of God, but contains the Word of God, as the greater contains the less, every one of these predicates falls to the ground. There is no touch- stone which shall test for us whether a, given passage is part of the Word of God or of the word of man therewith entangled,"— except we venture humbly to suggest, the living Spirit of God. Deadlier doctrine it is impossible for a ruler in the Church to teach. The Archbishop will really, then, stake the Incarnation itself op the success of the conjuring critics who profess to reconcile all the statements of Kings and Chronicles, the date of the Last Supper given in the fourth Gospel with the date given in the Synoptics, and other such historical inconsistencies. Very different is the spirit of Mr. Llewelyn Davies :—

"It is a great advantage to present clearly to our minds the circum- stances of the Church in the first century, when there was no New Testament, in the canonical shape, existing. The Church was founded and guided for many years by oral testimony, and with the help of records and letters upon which no stamp of sacredness had yet been put. The Gospels and Epistles come to us as representatives of that Apostolic teaching, by the living energy of which the Church of Christ was founded. It is not by any means a necessary or even a reasonable pre- sumption with regard to them, that they should be preternaturally exempt from error. If you consider them independently of such a pre- sumption1 their intrinsic perfection is likely tomake the profounder im- pression. . . .. .. . . . . . . . . . . . .... When we endeavour to describe the real, and not the logical, evidencp on which we believe in Christ, we find it exceedingly difficult to be either strictly definiic or exhaustive. Early instruction, the example of the good and wise, the authority of the sacred books, the heavenly glory of the person of %list, the influence of voices seeming to be from * Sermons on the Manifestation of the Son of God. With a preface addressed to laymen on the present posiLion of the Clergy of the Church of England, and an ap- pendix on the testimony of Scripture and the Church as to the possibility of pardon in the Suture State. By Rev. J. Llewelyn Bayles, Rector of Chrhit Church, Mitry- lebone. London : Macmillan. above, the conscious cravings of our own souls, the wants of the world, the spiritual vitality of belief, the results of unbelief, the character of allternative speculation—these and many other reasons blend with one another to create a strong but not always definable pressure upon our minds, and to make us cry out, 'Lord, I believe ; help Thou my un- belief. This recourse to what is called cumulative evidence, accom- panied by a refusal to construct a logical scheme with defined logical supports, is baffling to an opponent, and may look like biding oneself from attack in an atmospheric cloud. But in confessing the power of such influences we are only following the reality of things, instead of bending reality to the exigencies of argument."

Such is the language of a man who looks at the matter candidly with his own intellect. Who would wish to preserve the Church of England if her life and influence are to be staked—not on a hazard even—but on a proposition as certainly known to be false by all genuine critics, by all who consult the Bible, not with a predetermined purpose to extinguish inconsistencies, but in the sincere wish to see things as they are, as it is known to be false that St. Peter and St. Paul always agreed ?

Luckily, for the poor laity we find teachers in such men as Mr.

Llewelyn Davies, who do not force us into unbelief by using the highest hopes of our spiritual nature to force upon us what every calm intellect knows to be simple falsehood. Mr. Davies says most truly that the danger of the day is not genuine doubt, but half- hearted belief and unbelief. "The constant endeavour of half- hearted believers and half-hearted unbelievers has been to persuade themselves that neither one thing nor the other is true, that they may be more liberal than those who actually believe in Christ, more reverent and Christian than those who deny Him. Who can say how many of the educated laity are at present aiming at such a position ?" It is to this position that Mr.

Davies most strenuously opposes not merely his own faith but that of our Church. Whatever, he says, the Privy Council have decided,—and he rejoices that they have decided to leave the clergy unfettered on tho subordinate questions of revelation,— they have not emancipated and cannot emancipate the clergy from.assuming, for the foundation of their belief, the incarnation of God in Christ, for that is the foundation and centre of the Gospel which the Church makes it her work to preach. With this faith,—at once historical and spiritual,—limited by conditions of time and place in order to set the spirit of man free from the unspiritual bonds which time and place by conditions of time and place in order to set the spirit of man free from the unspiritual bonds which time and place

so often impose—the clergy of our Church have deliberately burdened themselves; and if Christ "had no title to be the Lord of the spirits of men, if He was not really the Son of God taking our flesh upon Him, the Church of England proclaims a delu- sion: when the people of England are satisfied that there has been no manifestation of the Son of God, they ought to sweep away the Church with indignation and shame." Mr. bevies ac-

cordingly attempts in this volume to remove the ground of dis- cussion altogether fro lp the secondary questions of the inspira- tion of the Scriptures, to the primary question which is the final cause of much of the vehemence with which these are discussed, —the manifestation of the Son of God.

igr. Davies's object is throughout to teach that Revelation does not profess to enchant by its touch every human instrument it uses so as to make it free from imperfections,—nay, that the resulting effects of revelation, even on human nature in its deepest sense, are not a proper part of the revelation,—which, strictly speaking, is limited to the unveiling of the nature of God,

and of the spiritual relation He bears to man. What God is, what the Son of God is, what He became for the sake of man,

and what He intends man to become for His sake,—that is the theme of revelation. The metaphysical side of Christian piety which lays down the modus operandi of salvation Hr. Davies does not, we infer, regard as any real part of the Gospel. The Gospel, he insists, consists in the light thrown upon the Eternal life by the actual entrance of that Eternal life into every incident of the lot of man. This light may, nay must, teach us much about ourselves, throw forwards much light into the future, throw backwards much light into the past,—but the new distinctions we draw about ourselves, the new experiences we have under this stimulating and inspiring influence, though they may give rise to a religious literature, are not in reality a part of the Gospel,— indeed they will almost necessarily be different according to the mind on which the light falls, and we have no right to

confound convictions formed about ourselves under the influence of divine light with the theology which God has given us con- cerning Himself. It is a common thing to hear it said that theology is mere matter for the intellect, and therefore uncertain ; religion, matter for the heart, and full of certainty. Mr. Dav:s,eas,

teaches almost an opposite truth, that theology—what God told us of Himself—is the true sunlight for mind, heart, and spirit;

religion, the reflex action of our own minds in responding to this message, is full of groping opinions, onesided experience, and dogma setting itself up as truth. "Verbal inspiration of the Scriptures," "doctrine of everlasting punishments," "salvation by creed," are all religious opinions, and all full of doubtful human generalizations. The eternal life of the Father, His eternal love for the Son, the spiritual dependence of the Son on the Father, and His spiritual union with the life of men, these are the burden of the Divine Gospel which it was life to man to hear, and which, even if they seemed to some too good to believe, are not liable to the uncertainties arising from the many differences of human character and experience.

Mr. Davies shows, too, in his masterly appendix on the Future State, that though these divine truths of course bring out in their strongest colours both the evil and the good in human character, deepening the shadows, brightening the lights, and generally widening the chasm between evil and good,—yet they are not adapted nor meant to help us to estimate human character in its individual aspects at all ; their object is to reveal God to man, not to reveal man to God, and hence the uncertainty and appar- ently wavering character of the different passages about man's future destiny which are introduced, not to satisfy our desire to anticipate the secrets of future ages, but to present to us the immutable purity and justice of the Divine Judge. If we will wrest that which is told us to reveal the righteousness of God, into an augury of our own destiny, we may naturally

despair. That Christ divides strictly the evil from the good,—the goats from the sheep,—is a great truth revealing His nature, and told us for that purpose ; but when we infer from it what it was never meant to teach,—that every individual man is to be sorted into one of two classes only, either the saved or the lost, there to remain for ever, we translate a light into a shadow,—a certainty about Christ, into a surmise about the future misery of individuals.

It would be impossible of course to give any fair account of the contents of this manly and impressive volume in any newspaper article. But the sermons are all lucid, all in the highest tone, and some of them—that, for example, on "The Shadow of the Passion on the Life of Jesus," and many others,—of great ability. Few men have entered more deeply into the teaching of St. John, and no man has reconciled that teaching more honestly with the light of the present century. Mr. Davies does not believe in the spirit "that is the result of civilization," but he does believe most deeply in the Spirit who is the cause of civilization ; and while he teaches us therefore the word of God as infinitely higher and deeper than civilization, he never asks us to put back the centuries, or to try to believe what true science has taught us to reject.