Raw Enrrions.-Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography. By Sir James Stephen. 2
vols. (Longmans and Co. 3s. 65. per vol.)- The book was published in 1849 and reprinted in the following year, and again in 1853. In 1860 an edition to which Sir James Fitzjames Stephen added a biographical notice of the author appeared. It was five times reprinted between this date and 1891. It now appears in the "Silver Library." Vol. I. contains Hildebrand, St. Francis of Assisi, the Founders of Jesuitism, Martin Luther, the French Benedictines, and the Port-Royalists ; Vol. TI., Richard Baxter, the Evangelical Succession, William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, the Historians of Enthusiasm, with an epilogue, added to the essays, which had originally appeared in the Edinburgh Review. From this last we may quote a passage which is certainly not less apposite to-day than it was fifty-eight years ago :— "There is a Catholic Belief and a Catholic Morality broad and comprehensive enough to form the eternal basis of a Catholic Church and a true Christian Unity. That Belief is that • God is light,' and that 'God is love.' That Morality is that we love Him supremely and each other as ourselves. That Church is composed of all, who in the strength of this belief are habitually striving to practise this morality. That Unity is effected, not by any external conformities, but by the same interior spirit and bidden life manifesting itself in the members of all Christian communities, by acts of devotion, of humility: of self-sacrifice, of temperance, of malice, of truth and of peace.'
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