Lights and Shadows of Church Life. By John Stoughton, D.D.
(Hodder and Stoughton.)—We may be permitted to congratulate Dr. Stoughton on the intellectual vigour which enables him at an age so advanced—" eighty-seven," he tells us in his preface—to bring out this interesting volume. It is founded, we under- stand, on some essays "on the Lights and Shadows of Primitive Christendom," which were privately printed some time ago. Encouraged by their favourable reception, this veteran author has extended the limit of his subject from the " primitive " period to the first six centuries of Church history. The early literature of Christendom, the development of its ecclesiastical institutions, the great personalities which were in it, whether men of thought or men of action, the persecutions endured by the Church, the division which divergencies of thought or feeling produced in it, these and other kindred matters are treated in a series of vigorous sketches. The writer's view of his subject is not always that which we should have taken, but he is always anxious to be just and, we may say, sympathetic.
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