THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT.* Tins book, which, though the

author only is responsible for its conclusion.% has been critically revised by Professor C. F. Burney

and Mr. C. G. Montefiore, is one of exceptional distinction. It is " intended for educated laymen, students, and ordination candidates." NO other Englishbook covers the ground so fully, or approaches the texts in a spirit at once so scientific, so literary, and so religious. No student of the Old Testament can overlook it ; and there are probably few Bishops on whose list of books recommended to candidates for orders it will not appear. Such a work may be taken as a sign of the increasing reaction against the provincialism which is the besetting sin of English, and in particular of Anglican, theology. Dormiunt multi ; even now it is too much to expect that a book of this fine quality should be published by the Society of St. Peter and St. Paul, Pub-

lishers to the Church of England, or by a distinctively " Church " firm, such as the But the name of the actual publisher is a guarantee of its character and tendencies.

" My standpoint is not radical, neither is it likely to be called conservative ; but a writer is bound to speak up to the level of his convictions. My one humble, earnest, reverent desire has been to promote, so far as in me lies, the interests of true religion."

The first quality required in the theologian is veracity. " Doth God need your lie ? " And the secularist objections to what is, unfortunately, still the general teaching of the school and the pulpit are, with few exceptions, as valid as the conclusions

drawn from them are the reverse. Deplorable and disastrous are not too strong epithets for this teaching : what a living writer

calls is scandals des intelligences is the besetting sin of the Churches. The last half-century has brought about a revo-

lution in our ideas which affects our whole outlook over the Bible.

" Evolution has given us a new knowledge of Nature which makes even the man in the street look askance at the Genesis Creation-Story. Science, with its Reign of Law, has taught man to pull a wry face at the word ' miracle.' Modern scholar. ship compels even the most orthodox to question some of the Bible's historical facts, and to challenge the ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses or the Psalms to David. The study of other creeds and their sacred books has opened out the long vistas of Comparative Religion, and proved that all religions, the wide world over, have the same roots, a strong family likeness, and all claim a divine origin. Chief stumbling-block of all, the morality of the Bible is at times imperfect. These moral and intellectual difficulties trouble, and should trouble, men to-day."

They can be solved, and more easily than we suppose. But they cannot be solved without learning and thinking ; and the average man is unwilling either to learn or to think. Unless this unwillingness can be overcome, there is no hope for him. And heterodoxy is often as unintelligent as orthodoxy. The difference between a criticism and a cavil is that the critic does, and the caviller does not, think out his objections, and follow where the thought leads.

The first six chapters, among which those on " Early Man and his Creed " and on Babylonian influence in Hebrew religion call for special notice, are of the nature of Prolegomena. With Moses and the Judges the transition is made from the prehistoric period to the dawn of Israel ; finally, the section devoted to Historical Israel takes us from Saul to the close of the Canon

with the apocalyptic book of Daniel, 168-165 B.C. The great feature of the last stage of this process is the development of the conception of individual immortality, for the late appear- ance of which, the difficulty with which the notion of the individual emerged from that of the group accounts. "Natur- ally, if a man has no distinct individuality on earth, he expects

none in the world beyond the grave " ; and the Old Testament estimate of the value of life here and now as compared with that of its shadowy prolongation in the underworld does not greatly differ from that of Homer—" I would rather be a serf on the land of a poor portionless man than rule over all the dead who have come to naught " (Od. : xi., 489). It is not that the later belief was denied, but that it was absent and lay

• The Bible and Modern Thought. By Rev. J. R. Cohn, M.A.. Rector of Aston Clinton. sometime Fellow of Jesus College. Oxford. London : John Murray. 110e. net.]

as yet below the human horizon. And its historical origin is rather speculative than religious ; it is the supreme achievement of the moral sense of man. The parallelism between the Priestly Code and mediaeval Catholicism is striking. This Code

" views everything from the priest's standpoint. The high priest is God's one vicegerent on earth. Temple, altar, priests, ritual overshadow all else by divine decree. Not for man to question the reasonableness, the why or wherefore, of ritual, fasts, and feasts, New Moons, Sabbaths, foods allowed or forbidden, scales or kinds of offerings, ceremonial purifica- tions and so on—one and all they are decreed by God Himself as His will and law ; and any, the slightest, deviation from them is fraught with dire consequences."

The fall from the level of Isaiah and Micah is -great. Yet,

" all said and done, religion is largely a matter of temperament ; men are born High, Low, or Broad." The mischief begins when these matters of temperament are allowed to pass over into dogmas, and are mistranslated into intellectual terms. For, as Philip Henry reminds us, it is not the actual differences among Christians that break up the body of Christ, but the mismanage- ment of these differences. In themselves the three elenients of religion, the institutional, the mystical, and the scientific, are complementary : an experience which excludes, or overlooks, any one of them is one-sided, and fails to present God in any recognizable shape to men. Well for us that men are better than their systems and wiser than their creeds. The Mediaeval Church gave us the Imitation of Christ and the Catholic Saints.

And " before we condemn Judaism wholesale, as we are so apt to do, let us study the Psalter, Job and Deutero-Isaiah ; and then ask with Christ, ' Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles ? ' "