Letters to his Son on Religion. By Roundell, First Earl
of Selborne. (Macmillan and Co. 3s. 6d.)—Lord Selborne, it would appear, wrote a small treatise on Christian Apologetics in the shape of letters to his son, when a young man at College, and it is natural and pious in the son to honour his father's memory by preserving them. But we doubt the wisdom of their publica- tion. In law Selborne was an expert, in theology he was but an amateur ; and the mark of amateurishness is everywhere to be discerned in these pages. The philosophy, and the natural science, and the criticism of origins, are all written "like a Lord Chancellor,"—that is to say, with the greatest acumen, but with- out the technical knowledge and the practised habit necessary to make the judgment of more weight than an vbiter dictum. The plan of writing a letter a week has in one case interfered with the consistency of the arguments. In chap. 3 the almighty power of God is identified with the force which pervades all matter, and this is counted as an argument for omnipresence. But in chap. 4, when Pantheism has to be subverted, we are told that omnipotence and omnipresence are ideas "opposed to the conditions of all material substances." It is a little disquieting, too, in a philosophical argument to come (p. 27) upon an appeal to common-sense. Lord Selborne saw nothing in the arguments of anthropologists to lead him to doubt the once universally accepted date of the Creation. He saw nothing in the arguments of the "higher critics" which shook his faith in the once universally accepted date of, say, Deuteronomy. Nor do his contributions to exegesis strike us as worthy of serious attention. We are told (p. 74) that the passage about one jot or tittle" not passing from the law must imply a theory of " literal inspiration," because a jot was a letter ; and we are told (p. 140) that St. Matthew's story of Judas's "casting down the pieces of silver" can be reconciled with the statement in Acts, "This man purchased a field," by taking these words of " involuntary acquisition,"—" this, a place to die in, and to be buried in as a stranger, was all that he got out' of those pieces of silver." We hope the day is past for such subtleties.
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