BOOKS.

PRINCIPAL TULLOCH'S LIFE.* Mas. OLIPHANT has given us a very interesting book, though we wish that she had given us one half the size. For Prin- cipal Tulloch's intimate friends and contemporaries, no doubt, it is not at all too long; but for those many persons who read it as the next generation will read it, a good deal might have been well spared. Perhaps, if human life and energy were equal to such a task, all biographies should be written in duplicate,— one for those who have known the man, and wish to be reminded of all they remember; one for those who have not known him, but who wish to make acquaintance with a new figure, and to connect the inward life of the man with his external sphere of action. Mrs. Oliphant has given us the former rather than the latter, but she has given us the latter too, only embedded in much detail which rather detracts from, than adds to, the effect of her study of Principal Tulloch's character and personality, for those who have no individual memories to revivify.

Principal Tulloch had something stately and distinguished about him, which no doubt set off effectively the part he played in Scotland as the great friend of a temperate and rational, perhaps, indeed, one ought to say consciously lati- tudinarian theology. A theology of that kind is not likely to

• A Memoir of the Life of John Tulloch, D.D., LL.D , Principal and Priniariva Professor of St Mary's College, St. Andrews. By Mrs. Oliphant. With a Portrait. Edinburgh and London : waft= Blackwood and Sons.

command any very rapt attention unless it be set off by con- siderable gifts both of manner and temperament. In Principal Tulloch's case, it was set off by such gifts. Mrs. Oliphant thus describes the effect produced on Feliciello, the Capri guide of their party, when Principal Tulloch first appeared amongst them :-

" Our favourite guide was a very handsome fellow called Feliciello, whose appearance every day with his train of subdued and saddened ponies, trained to climb the stony stairs which do service for roads in Capri, was always pleasant to the youthful members of the party. His swarthy, handsome face, Greek in feature, which is the Capriote's boast, burnt brown by fiercest suns ; his curly black locks, curling under the red Phrygian cap, which was his daily wear, his lithe and active person, made as picturesque a picture as possible at the head of the little troop. When the Principal first appeared among the party of ladies and children already familiar to him, Peliciello could not conceal his admiration of such a splendid specimen of humanity, and one so different from his own. The great height and stately bearing,. the barbs-rossa and fair Saxon colour which always impress a swarthy race, the easy largeness and magnificence of the man, took all speech from the admiring and surprised guide. After walking round him with murmurs of ecstasy, Feliciello, at last inr despair of being able otherwise to give expression to his feelings, came forward in a sort of rapture and patted the Principal energetically on the shoulder, in sheer applause and delight.'

But the mere physical presence of the Principal was but the

least of his gifts. The large, pleading eyes on which Mrs. Oliphant so often dwells; the depth and warmth of his religious feelings; the charity which went so much deeper than his•

love of what is rational, and was in great measure, indeed the spring of that love of what is rational ; the tendency of his deepest convictions to overflow, even in the course of a lecture, so that he was compelled to ignore what he had written, and to launch into extempore illastrations of his

leading idea,—all combined to give to his benignant and never dry rationality a glow and significance which im- mensely added to its popular effect. Moreover, with all his restlessness and ambition,—and no doubt Principal Tulloch was, as he frequently declared to himself, both a restless and

an ambitions man,—there was a deep humility in ftim made men pardon or altogether overlook his not unfrequent impatience and irritability. In one of the phases of that melancholy which repeatedly attacked him, he accuses himself' of the besetting sins of "pride and sensitive indulgence," and further, of "inordinate love of distinction without the patience• and thoroughness of work upon which intellectual distinction can alone be rightly based, and a certain passionate restlessness:

of temperament which has often carried me away, and made me yield to what I afterwards regretted." There is a good deal of clear self-criticism in that passage, though it was con- ceived in a strain of excessive self-depreciation ; but there is also in it the full evidence of that humility, that utter dis- satisfaction with self, which went far towards turning pride- and sensitiveness and restlessness into powers for good rather than occasions of offence.

Principal Tulloch's chief theological function in life, namely,.

to convince Scotland that all creeds must be studied in relation to the history out of which they sprang, was, at any rate, most needful for Scotland, and for the special Church in which he was one of the leading teachers. He pressed this home with the greatest benefit on those who were bound to accept some of the creeds first produced at the Reformation,—the Westminster Confession, for instance,—but he often seemed to deduce from- it consequences which make it difficult to understand what the distinction in his own mind was between the creed implied in all Revelation, and the creeds which represent but a temporary aspect of mediaeval or modern thought. For - example, he says in his journal, in 1864 :—

" My work is plain enough, if God spares me, and I shall try and note it before closing this journal. It is not controversy; and' from any revival of dogmatic controversy nothing but harm can come to the theological mind of Scotland, always on dogmatic. edge at any rate. Criticism and teaching are what are needed— historical criticism of the great formative theological epochs especially, that the clergy, if possible, may learn how tentative, how temporary are all theological products, the result of the• spiritual forces moving in their time, neither more nor less,. coloured by the opinions and prejudices and half-thoughts of their time. Till this is understood—and it is not understood either in England or Scotland—there is no use in talking of further expansions or developments of theology. The clear under- standing of the nature of theology will supersede dogmatic system_ —as authoritative—altogether,. and leave the Church, if the Church can ever come to such an understanding, content with Scripture—with the Gospels, Epistles, Psalms, and to some extent the prophecies."

Again, he expresses the same deep conviction, with still more power and explicitness, in his study of the Confession of Faith in 1865, where he expressly associates all the earliest creeds of the Church with the more artificial creeds of the sixteenth century, and treats them all as standing equally on a totally different basis from " the statements of Scripture :"-

"The Westminster Confessions of Faith and relative documents —that is to say, the Larger and Shorter Catechisms and the Directory for Public Worship—are the expression of these pecu- liarities,—so much so, that a historical student who might by some accident never have seen these documents, but who had yet studied the course of Puritanism in its dogmatic and ecclesiastical phases, would have no difficulty in at once telling what they were, and probably, even in fixing without hesitation the decade in the seven- teenth century in which they were produced, the men who were chiefly concerned in producing them, and the mode in which they went to work in doing so. More or less, indeed, the same thing could be said of every Protestant Confession of Faith, and even of the briefer symbols of the earlier Catholic Church which has been incorporated into her Creed by the Church of England. They are one and all historical monuments, marking the tide of religious thought as they have swelled with greater fullness in the course of the Christian centuries ; and none of this can be understood might simply by themselves, or as isolated dogmatic utterances, but only in connection with their time and the genius of the men who framed them. The popular ecclesiastical notion of creeds and con- fessions, as in some sort absolute expressions of Christian truth, credenda, to be accepted very much as we accept the statements of Scripture itself, is a notion in the face of all theological science which every theological student deserving the name has long since abandoned. Those creeds and confessions are neither more nor less than the intellectual ideas of great and good men, assembled, for the most part, in synods and councils, all of which, as our Confession itself declares, may err, and may have erred.' They are stamped with the infirmities no less than with the nobleness of the men who made them. They are their best thoughts about Christian truth, as they saw it in their time : intrinsically they are nothing more : and any claim of infallibility for them is the worst of all kinds of Popery, that Popery which degrades the Christian reason, while it fails to nourish the Christian imagina- tion. And so it is that the student of the history of doctrine who has entered into the meaning of the successive developments of the Church's thought and life, can locate, as it were, these various creeds ; through them can ;ead the theological spirit of the age to which they belong, and again understand them through the study of the men and the times which originated them, and whose controversies and modes of thought made them what they are."

That is very ably and powerfully said ; but are not many of " the statements of Scripture " just as much imperfect in- tellectual reflections of the infinite mind revealing itself through prophets and apostles, as the earliest creeds of the Church ? What is St. Peter's Confession except the effort of St. Peter to explain the impression made on his mind and heart by his Master? And if we are to treat all such Confessions as entirely external to the essence of revela- tion, what is there in revelation itself which we can take hold of as absolutely true ? Scripture is nothing but the record of the impressions made upon a certain number of finite minds by the spirit and the discipline of God. And the question seems to us to be, not whether a creed portrays the mind of the Church, or the mind of a special Scripture writer, but, whichever of the two it may be, whether it is the simplest and truest epitome of the facts in which the whole teaching of the Divine Spirit is embodied. Of course, the mind of the Church is fallible; but so was the mind of an Apostle. There is no reason why the mind of the Church should not be at least as trustworthy a witness of what was implied in the events of which the Church was a witness, as the mind of an Apostle.

Not the least interesting, in• some respects perhaps the most interesting, part of Mrs. Oliphant's very interesting book, is the account of Principal Tulloch's reiterated illnesses, and of the dejection of mind which was almost the only uniform symptom of those illnesses, though in the last two attacks a rapid loss of flesh was added to the dejection. The curious feature about the earliest attack, at all events, was the tendency of his mind to fix on some very slight and trivial error or failure, and to brood over that without being able in any degree to fix his attention on more urgent and more interesting matters. And as regards every attack, the most painful part of it seemed to be the morbid self-consciousness to which it reduced an otherwise very healthy, active-minded, and not at all brooding nature. In the first illness, it was some blunder in quota- tion, some false quantity, with which he had been twitted, which appeared to him to dilate into an intolerable burden under which he found himself sinking ; in the subsequent attacks, it was rathei a mere " blackness of darkness."

swallowing up his own inner life, and yet leaving him almost abnormally quick at discerning the deficiencies of others, so that what rendered him helpless for work, rather sharpened his insight into the weaknesses around him. This cloud returned upon him three or four times in a life of otherwise unusual prosperity and calm, and embittered something like three or four years out of the sixty-two to which his career extended. He seems to have studied the character of the attacks with singular detachment of mind, almost as if he were looking at the malady of another rather than his own,—as if he had incurred his own pity as the one bystander who alone under- stood his own sufferings. Here is his own account of his malady :—

" The misery of the state is not easy to describe—although, always on recovery from it one of my main wishes has been to- write about it, and if possible analyse its strange fluctuations, the ups and downs, and the only remedies from which I have got any good. According to the doctors, it is all the result of over- work acting on a sensitive temperament. This is partly the cause, no doubt ; but there is also some purely physical element or tendency of constitution in it, like a species of blood-poisoning.. My last attacks especially have been so sudden. From being apparently in good health and working order, I became in a day- or two hamited with a constant self-consciousness, seizing upon some fraction of wrong in my life, or more frequently still, mis- take in my work, and gradually deepening till at times it becomes so intolerable as to make me weep like a child. Altogether, I seem to myself to sink into a state of darkness and imbecility in which there is no light and no strength. My self-depreciation becomes intense, my cynicism at other times concentrated and painful, not without dashes of bitter humorousness."

This misery, recurring as it does, adds the element of tragedy to an otherwise even and distinguished career, and endears the Principal to the readers of this book, by the mingled simplicity and humility with which he records and endures. his evidently keen sufferings.