The Inductive Method of Christian Inquiry. By Percy Stratt. (Dodder
and Stoughton.)—.We do not find it easy to say what is the precise drift of this volume, or for what sort of readers it is specially intended. The title does not scorn to na quite appropriate. We thought that the application of the inductive method to this subject would lead us to some tolerably definite result, or point the way to some ono phase of Christian theology rather than to another. But as far as we can 800, we arrive at no result of the kind. After a good deal of beating about the bush, and repeating what has been said over and over again about induction, we are brought to a general conclusion that, in the opinion of Mr. Strutt, while dogmas must still be maintained, there must yet be growth, progress, and inquiry. We understand hint to mean that the facts recorded in the Gospels must be accepted in their usual meaning, that Christ must be regarded as the perfect revelation of God, but that at the Mine th110, "amid the repose of faith, mental processes may go forward which shall result in the modification of opinions once held, the abandonment of convictions once cherished, and the reception of truths altogether new to the mind." Faith, in fact, ashe says, produces a readiness" to forgot the things which are behind, and to reach forward to those which are before." There must therefore be what ho calls a spirit of intellectual sacrifice, and this is 1100088Mily opposed to anything like dogmatic infallibility. Theolo- gians have been too apt to confound fidelity to conscience with fidelity to truth, and so conscience has boon wrongly erected into an Infallible standard of orthodoxy. Authority has been claimed by good men for human dogmas, as if they were the eternal truths of God, but the Christian facts are more Catholic than the Creeds of the Church, and there is more Christianity in Christ than has yet passed into the scien- tific definition of theology. The author seems desirous of showing that unlimited inquiry and new lights are perfectly consistent with a thorough belief in Christ as the divine pattern of humanity. But although we can for the most part follow his meaning without difficulty, we cannot quite put together the different portions of his book, and say exactly what it is which he specially wishes to impress on us. If it is some now truth, we fear that we have missed it.
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