C URRENT LITERAT URE.
THE REV. H. C. BEECHING'S INNS OF COURT SERMONS.
Inns of Court Sermons. By the Rev. H. C. Beeching. (Mac- milieu and Co. 4s. 6d.)—These twelve sermons, preached before cultivated audiences (in the University pulpit of Oxford, the Temple Church, and Lincoln's Inn Chapel) are excellent speci- mens of present-day preaching. They deal with the questions social or religious, that are actually occupying men's minds, they are enriched with illustrations, some of which an older genera- tion might have thought too secular for the pulpit. They are not neglectful of dogma, but they are always practical. Now and then the free speech which is one of the most precious privileges of the twentieth-century preacher is used with a little less discretion than one might wish. Tho "paradoxical epi- grams" of Christ, for instance, is a phrase that does not please. " Paradox " may pass ; it is a convenient word ; but "epigram," whether we consider its first or its secondary meaning, is certainly out of place. Sermon II. is an admirable application to the practical questions of life—such as almsgiving—of the text, "All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth." In III. we have the complaint, often made by the preacher, that the Trinity of theology is reduced in actual religious observance to a duality by "practical disbelief in the Holy Spirit." The warning is needed, but the remedy is not easily discovered. In IV., "The Reasonableness of Worship," the preacher devotes his concluding pages to what may be briefly described as a plea for Ritualism, a protest against the attempt to forbid "certain dramatic and symbolic elements." " Symbolic " is a little dubious. Mr. Beeching knows very well that these things are often made to symbolise beliefs which the loyal Anglican cannot accept. Sermon VI.," The Lord of Hosts," with its admirable description of the testimony of Amos, the "herd- man of Tekoa," against the corruptions of Israel, and its very forcible application to the conditions of modern life, is one of the best in the volume. "Retaliation in God and Man" (ur.) deals in an enlightening way with one of the most difficult problems of ethics. "The Rock of Love" is a fresh and instructive reading of a text which has many unlovely associations. "Upon this rock I will build My Church." We may say the same of "The Lesson of the Wilderness," a very good discourse on the in- exhaustible subject of the Temptation. Sermon XII. was preachel on the Sunday following the death of Queen Victoria, and should take a high place in the homiletic literature called forth by that event. The most elaborate discourse in the volume is that on "Justification by Faith." This may be described as an exposition of the doctrine from the myst:cal point of view. Justifying faith is in man, but it is the expression of the Christ spirit in him. So we read : "Our Lord being, as we believe, the Son of Man, the Second Adam, at once type and source of a redeemed humanity, must have exhibited in Himself, in its perfection, the characteristic life of true humanity, which is declared by the Church to be the life of faith." And again : "Christ's life was the perfect life of faith in God," taken along with "What wonder then that faith should save us, when our faith in God is nothing less than the presence in us of the Eternal Son ! " No one would now consider these utterances heterodox ; they were spoken in St. Mary's pulpit without reproach. Yet compare them with what Mr. Heath, Vicar of Brading, was condemned for saying in 1862, and that by the Privy Council, always slow to condemn : "The faith by which man is justified is not his faith in Christ, but the faith of Christ Himself." (We quote from the summary in the " Dic- tionary of National Biography.") In conclusion, we must thank Mr. Beeching for having given us a volume of real worth and distinction. He is a scholar and a man of letters as well as a theologian ; butihe never allows the literary impulse to outpace the spiritual. He remembers so to be a man of letters as not to forget that he is first a minister of God's Word.
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