CURRENT LITERATURE.
Expository Essays and Discourses. By Ssmuel Cox. (Hodder• end Stoughton.)—This volume is full "earned and ingenious comment on various difficult theological subjects and obscure passages in the Scrip- ture. Much of it has appeared before, but all well deserves to be thus collected and preserved. The discourses may be divided into two classes,—those that deal with subjects of wide extent, and those that are occupied with particular texts. Of the former, the four discourses on "Prayer" may be taken as typical ; the latter is exemplified in a sermon on "St. Paul's Cloak, Books, and Parchments." Mr. Cos's views on " prayer " seem to us to be very sound and admirably ex- pressed. "From the whole Biblical teaching on prayer," he writes, in the discourse that is headed " The Reasonableness of Prayer," " we may infer that, so far from being an endeavour• to change the Divine Will, and adjust it to our personal and varying desires, it is rather a sincere and strenuous endeavour to adopt that will, and to bring our actions, aims, desires, into a free and happy accord with its volitions." He does not, however, seek to evade the fact that we do actually ask for various things in prayer, and he points out the ways in which such requests may be answered, by God's working on our own wills, and by His working on the wills of our neigh- bours, and how, " Even in the province of physical sequences, there may be answers to prayer which yet are not miraculous." He grapples boldly with the chief difficulty of the subject in the next discourse, " The Reign of Law an Incentive to Prayer," and does so, we think, with very considerable success. As an admirable exposition of a difficult passage, we would mention that entitled " The Hundredfold," a comment on our Lord's words (Matt. six., 29) :—" Every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life."
Previous page
