BOOKS.

PROFESSOR PLUMPTRE ON THE MOVEMENTS IN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT.* THESE are thoughtful lectures, conceived in a very large spirit, and set off by that sort of scholarship which adds so much of

literary effect and vividness to the discussions of the religious thinker. The most interesting, and also the ablest of the three lectures, is the last, on Agnosticism. Dr•. Plumptre's sermons on Romanism and Protestantism are indeed, though keen, a little thin. They rather hover round the borders of these subjects,. making acute remarks on the mischievous deficiencies of the two schools of belief, than touch the central life of either. Ac-

cording to our own view of the matter at least, the Roman Church, though she has been guilty of greater acts of violence, both to the intellect and the conscience of man, than any other of the great Christian communities, has yet managed to vindi- cate for her members a larger and richer life of devotion, a truer- humility and insight in relation to supernatural gifts, and a far

higher standard of spiritual self-forgetfulness, than any of her younger and freer rivals. Her great deformities have been due- to ambitious, worldly, and selfish administration, and to that relative indifference to truth which is apt to develope itself amongst the rulers of any very potent organisation which has a stronger aptitude for government than for self-criticism. Protestantism, on the other hand, which sprang mainly out of a revolt against the moral obliquities of the Church of Rome,.

and in great measure, too, out of the critical spirit which was born of the revival of learning, has always suffered to some extent from the accidents of its birth, has always been apt to be too critical, as well in morality as in

intellectual matters, and has lost in great part the powerful' religious initiative of Rome while teaching men to re-

sent the unscrupulousness of her strong esprit de corps, both in matters of conduct and in matters of belief. If Catholicism would have admitted purification,—both moral and intellectual, —a higher form of Christianity might have resulted from that purification than from any of the creeds which sprang out of her refusal to admit it. But it is one of the essential evils of the strong spirit of authority identified with such a Church as that of Rome, that it is almost the law of its being to resent anything that savours of mutiny, even though the origin of that mutiny be the conscience of man.

On the other hand, in dealing with Agnosticism, no one can say that Professor Plumptre keeps on the edge of the subject,. rather than penetrates to its centre. Though he is, of course, profoundly opposed to its main doctrine, the unknowable- ness of the Divine Being, he has studied carefully every tendency which makes for that doctrine. He feel's keenly the paradoxes of the world. He feels nothing more keenly than the paradoxes which the existence of the Christian Church has added to the paradoxes of the world, though he believes, of course, that it has removed many more than it has created. He enters frankly into those lines of scientific thought which are sup- posed to show that thought may be a very late and tardy pro- duct of the evolution of natural law. He is alive to the points of view common even to minds as utterly opposed to each other in general drift as those of the poet Lucretius and St. Paul. Taken altogether, the lecture on Agnosticism is one fuller of insight into the sources and roots of Agnosticism, than any we have read for many years from a clergyman of our national Church, and if it is less forcible in its critical suggestions on the weakness of Agnosticism than it is in its study of that form of opinion itself,—yet we cannot look for completeness of all kinds in a lecture of only fifty short pages, and are dis- posed to be very grateful for what we have. What strikes us first in the lecture is the remark that St. Paul sympathised deeply with that feeling which Lucretius, as the representative of anti-anthropomorphic religion, expresses, namely, that the Gods are raised far too much above man to need his sacrifices or his praises. Speaking of St. Paul's address to the Athenians about the altar raised " to the Unknown God," Dr. Plumptre says :—

"It will be enough to note that he sees in the inscription a token of that awe of the unseen and unknown forces that lie round us, which is at once the germ of all true religion and the source of the basest supeistitions ; that in contrast with the false idea of God, of which • Morements in Religious Thought. I. Romanism. II. Protestantism. III. Ag- nosticism. Three Sermon; Preached before the University of Cambridge in the Lent Term of 1879, by E. II. Plumptre, D.D., Professor in King's College, Loudon Prebendary of St. Paul's. London: Macmillan and Co.

the latter were developments, he proclaims the true philosophy of worship, almost, as far as its negative aspect is concerned, in the very words of Lucretius*, as resting on the thought that God seeds nothing at our hands, but gives all things."

That shows us, as Dr. Plumptre says, that the religions spirit of Christianity has some sympathy with the dread of anthropo- morphic superstitions which the scientific spirit feels. Only it is a dread founded not on distrusting all that we cannot verify for ourselves, but on the immeasurable trust which is reposed in God. But the most striking point in Dr. Plumptre's lecture is the passage in which he describes how the idea of St. Paul's address at Athens was carried on into his Epistle to the Romans, and formed the main ground of the reasoning of that epistle :-

" The speech came to an end, but not so the train of thought of which it was, as it were, the first-fruits. The Apostle's mind worked on in that groove, and sought to solve the problems which had thus presented themselves. How was it that, though God had not left Himself without witness, giving showers from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling men's hearts with food and gladness, men either showed by their worship, as in the popular ritual, that they knew Him not, even by the hearing of the ear, or as in the altar to the Unknown God, confessed their ignorance ? What adequate explana- tion could be given of those times of ignorance during which God had overlooked, and as it were, connived at the world's evils, tolerating the sins of men, while as yet there were no signs of the repentance which is the one condition of forgiveness ? If the history of the world was the education of mankind, what was the goal to which that edu- cation was directed ? The whole argument of the Epistle to the Romans is the outcome of the thoughts which were working in St. Paul's mind in that speech at Athens. It is not reading too much between the lines to find in the very words which open the argument an echo of the inscription which had been the origin of those thoughts. The despairing confession of the altar to the Unknown and Unknow- able God is met by the assertion that' That which may be known, the knowable, of God is manifest in them,' that the ignorance into which men have fallen is the result wrought out by their unwillingness to face the thought of God,—that this led, in its turn, to a baser view of their own nature and of the end of life. As in the entail of curses on which the Greek poets loved to dwell, one sin became the parent of another, which was at once its natural consequence and its divinely ordained penalty. With nnshrinking hand he tears aside the veil of a flimsy optimism which boasted of the triumphs of wisdom and art and culture, and in words that make us shudder lays bare the putrid and leprous cancers that were eating into the life of the Greek and Boman world, and plunging it into a fathomless corruption. That dark ■ nd terrible picture might well have crashed out all hope. No older Manieluean, no modern Pessimist, could have constructed, it might have seemed, a stronger indictment against the divine attributes of -wisdom, and love, and power. Did not the history of the world seem A colossal failure, the education of mankind one that ended in ever- deepening ignorance and guilt St. Paul could not rest in that thought, Any more than he could satisfy his questioning intellect, with the phrases of a Stoic apathy or Epicurean tranquillity. He found what helped to sustain him and give him guidance in the record of another failure, that more nearly concerned himself and the race of which he was a member. Israel had not been left to the twofold witness of .creation and of conscience, but had been chosen for a higher know- ledge and a special revelation. Law and Psalm and Ritual and Pro- phecy had preserved them from the darkness that had brooded over the heathen. Were they, after all, better than the heathen ? Had they been truer to the Law written on the Tables of Stone than the Gentiles had been to the law written in their hearts ? The answer to those questions was a sad, stern negative. Both Jew and Gentile had alike come short of the glory of God—were alike guilty before Him— shut up under sin and condemnation. Each had had sufficient know- ledge to be `without excuse ;' neither had so used his knowledge as to attain to holiness and peace. The darkness on this view might have seemed blacker and more abysmal than before. If Israel was rejected, with all its special prerogatives as a chosen and peculiar people, what hope was there for the Gentile world ? It was given to St. Paul to see the gleams of a divine light breaking through the -darkness. We cannot say that he solves the whole problem, and re- moves all difficulties. The varying interpretations that have been put upon his words hinder us from saying that his Theodicy, his vindication of the ways of God, is speculatively complete. He him- self is the first to confess that those ways are ' past finding out But he has seen, at least, what we may call the drift of things,—the pur- pose which is working out a result for good, and not for evil. Men had been led—and were being led—Jew and Gentile alike, by a ter- rible experience to feel their impotence apart from God, to welcome the revelation of God in Christ by which they have access to the Father. The mercies of God were manifested even in the sentence of condemnation. He had concluded all in unbelief, that He might have pity upon all."

That strikes us as a very fine criticism on the general bearing of St. Paul's thought on a subject which has the closest possible relation to modern Agnosticism. And it is true enough to say that St. Paul found relief from the apparent failure of divine

* Lucretius, De Natant Rerun; II., 645480 :—

" Omuta enim per se divom nature necesse est Immortal' aevo summa cum pace fraatur, Semota ab nostris rebus sejunctaque longe; Nam private dolore omni, private. periclis, Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri.

Nee bene promeritis capita, neque tangitur ira." Acta xvil , 25, *Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though He needed

anything."

purpose,—if failure it were,—in the heathen world, by dwelling on the similar and equal failure in the world of the chosen people. This reminds one of Bishop Butler's answer to the difficulties of Revelation,—that one might fairly expect some of the difficulties which we find in the constitution of Nature to be repeated in the system of Revelation,—only that St. Paul was really assuming that as God's own Revelation could not fail, the very appearance that it had failed pointed to the fact that its true drift had never yet been properly understood, and that it would be found something much larger than it had been supposed to be, something large enough to redeem the whole world, whether Gentile or Jewish, from the imputation of failure, as well as to prove that the chosen people had not been in any true sense the objects of divine favouritism, in re- lation to what had seemed the exclusive privileges which they enjoyed,—privileges which had turned out to be as full of peculiar trial and temptation as of peculiar blessing.

The great merit of this lecture of Professor Plumptre's ap- pears to us to be this vivid picture it gives us of the struggle of a sort of Agnosticism with the hearts and spirits of those who, St. Paul being the chief, have struck the deadliest blows against Agnosticism. It is not those who have thought least sadly of the terrible darkness threatening man's soul, who have done most to remove it. The great men of all ages who have most aided the work of Revelation have been apt to begin by tracing anew the enormous obstacles to that work, —and for a very good reason. Those who felt the travail of Creation most, felt most the overshadowing of that power which was bringing that travail to the birth. Only to those who could feel the one, has it been given to feel in its full power the other. The really great side of Butler's Analogy is not the logical attempt to establish the presumption that the difficulties of Nature would be repeated in Revelation, but the profound sense that the manifold obstacles—whatever they were —which presented themselves to the successful outcome of Religion in the " constitution and course of Nature," would reappear in some form or other, although with greater aids to victory over them, in the constitution and course of Revelation. In feeling this as he did, Bishop Butler, as we wish Professor Plumptre had noted, really returned in his own way to the course of • St. Paul's great argument. And it is only by those who do return to it, with St. Paul's profound conviction of the overwhelming power of the divine purpose which is always at hand to encounter the terrible resistance of the human will, who can bring light upon " the times of our ignorance," and by revealing the perpetual straggle with Agnosticism in all our hearts, help us to conquer the dogmatic Agnosticism of so much wide-spread Sciolism, and of a little true Science.