BOOKS.

LUX MITNDI.*

[FIRST NOTICE.]

This is a very difficult book to estimate, partly on account of its complex character and considerable range, partly on account of its purpose, which is explicitly defined to be to so open up Church principles as to connect them with the newer science —the science of evolution,—and the newer criticism—the criticism that springs from the careful use of the comparative method in literature,—and to disconnect them with that sense of the word " development " in which Dr. Newman chiefly understood it in his celebrated plea for the developments which had characterised the Roman Church. Mr. Gore, who has contributed the essay on "Inspiration," on which the criti- cism directed against this volume has chiefly turned, has said in his interesting preface, that the book has been written by men who had long worked together at Oxford, under the conviction that "the epoch in which we live is one of profound transforma- tion, intellectual and social, abounding in new needs, new points of view, new questions, and certain therefore to involve great changes in the outlying departments of theology, where it is linked on to other sciences, and to necessitate some general restatement of its claim and meaning. This is to say that theology must take a new development. We grudge the name development on the one hand to anything which fails to pre- serve the type of the Christian creed and the Christian Church ; for development is not innovation, it is not heresy ; on the other hand, we cannot recognise as the true develop- ment of Christian doctrine,' a movement which means merely an intensification of a current tendency from within, a nar- rowing and hardening of theology by simply giving it greater definiteness or multiplying its dogmas. The real develop- ment of theology is rather the process in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual movements of each age ; and because the truth makes her free.' is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself into the sanctification of each new social order, bringing forth out of her treasures things new and old, and showing again and again her power of wit- nessing under changed conditions to the Catholic capacity of her faith and life." That summarises clearly enough the general drift of these essays, which is to give new associations to the word " development " in its theological relations, associations which shall greatly enlarge the sphere of the Church, and draw closer her ties with the best secular life of society, instead of crystallising theological doctrine as it was crystallised in the various " developments " of the Roman communion, in a form, namely, which almost excluded every kind of life other than what was either rooted in dogmatic principle or directed to the moulding of popular worship.

Of course the main difficulty of an attempt of this kind is its tendency to fritter itself away in vague and indeterminate sentiment. And with much that is powerful and vivid, and that rests on a solid foundation in this volume, we find a good deal that merely puts out feelers in different directions, with- out making it clear what is the exact drift of the scientific, or critical, or social, or political doctrine which the new Church- men propose to assimilate. Moreover, they often fail to make it clear how far this enlarging process may go, and where it

Luz Nandi : a Series of Studiee in the Religion of the incarnation. Edited by Charles Gore, M.A., Principal of Pnsey House, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. London: John Murray.

ought to end. There is no definition of the principle of Church authority, nothing to tell us what Church principles would peremptorily exclude from that enlarging and comprehensive grasp which the essayists are endeavouring to fasten on the living world outside the Church. The late Mr. Aubrey Moore, for instance, whose death since this volume appeared, has been a serious loss to the Church of England, quotes with approval Lacordaire's rather windy apophthegm : "God is the proper name of truth, as truth is the abstract name of God." That is the sort of vague generalisation which seems to us much more attractive to persons in search of com- prehensive phraseology than to those in search of compre- hensive principles, and not one that helps much in the effort to show what it is in the new science and the new philosophy which the Church should assimilate, instead of jealously excluding. The defect of this volume is, we think, its rather indefinite expansiveness towards modern science and thought, more especially its omission to lay down any clear conception of Church authority which might guide Anglicans in keeping clear of heterodoxy on the one side, and, on the other side, of those dogmatic Roman Catholic decrees whose hard-and-fast theological definitions and exclusiveness Mr. Gore deprecates in relation to the "development of doctrine" of which Dr. Newman made himself the exponent.

It may be true, we believe it is true, that Dr. Newman's account of theological development is open to the criticism which Mr.

Gore implies rather than expresses, that it both limited itself too exclusively to the region of dogmatic theology, and also, even within that region, crystallised everything it found suit- able to the purposes of subjective devotion, without considering how it might act in narrowing the course of thought in the Church, and in opening a wide chasm between the regions of theological and of secular science. But in a volume of essays intended to deal with this question, and to lay down larger principles of development, there should at least have been some definite attempt to deal with the principle of dogmatic authority in general, and to connect the present with the past in relation to that principle. Now, this is just what these essays seem to us to neglect. The writers are, for the most part, very skilful and very eloquent in selecting and describing elements of modern thought which are in harmony with the theology of the Church of the first five or six centuries ; but they seem to aim at convincing the world that theological orthodoxy, at least after the time of the Apostles, was almost a mere matter of pious intuition. The late Frederick Denison Maurice has been accused of thinking that the Thirty-nine Articles of

the Church of England were a priori forms of thought for which it was not necessary to produce anything like argumenta- tive evidence. Of course that was gross exaggeration ; indeed, a mere travesty of what he did really at one part of his life

contend for. But we do think that there is a tendency in this volume to represent the early dogmatic definitions of the Church concerning the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Incarna- tion and the divine and human natures of our Lord, as merely inevitable forms of pious reflection, which could not have varied, either one way or the other, without ignoring the essential atti- tude of discipleship. The essay on "The Christian Doctrine of God" seems to us to assume this general line of thought.

And Canon Scott Holland's essay on " Faith " takes it up also.

We miss any explanation of what Church authority properly meant and means, and any clue by which we are to find out a substitute for it in days when men of the school which this volume represents are not in the least disposed either to defer to such Councils of the Church as have actually been con- vened, for several centuries back, or to indicate any dogmatic authority which can take their place. Instead of doing so, the writers, though they give us a vast deal of original criticism which is full of truth and spiritual feeling, seem disposed to ignore the difficulty, or to soften it down by re- presenting the actual and very elaborate Church decisions which inaugurated Catholic theology, as all but inevitable consequences of the feeling of true Christian disciples.

For example, the very eloquent,—at times too eloquent,—

essay which opens the volume, by Canon Scott Holland, on "Faith," deals in this very unsatisfactory manner, as it seems.

to us, with the Creeds :—

" The dogmatic definitions of Christian theology can never be divorced from their contact in the personality of Christ. They are statements concerning a living character. As such, and only as such, do they come within the lines of faith. We do not, in the strict sense, believe in them : for belief is never a purely intel- lectual act; it is a movement of the living man drawn towards a living person. Belief can only be in Jesus Christ. To Him alone do we ever commit ourselves, surrender ourselves, for ever and aye. But a personality, though its roots lie deeper than reason, yet includes reason within its compass : a personality cannot but be rational, though it be more than merely rational ; it has in it a rational ground, a rational construction ; it could not be what it is without being of such and such a fixed and organic character. And a personality, therefore, is intelligible ; it lays itself open to rational treatment ; its characteristics can be stated in terms of thought. The Will of God is the Word of God ; the Life is also the Light. That which is loved can be apprehended ; that which is felt can be named. So the Personality of the Word admits of being rationally expressed in the sense that reason can name and distinguish thoso elements in it, which constitute its enduring and essential conditions. The dogmas, now in question, are simply careful rehearsals of those inherent necessities which, inevitably, are involved in the rational construction of Christ's living character. They are statements of what He must be, if He is what our hearts assure us ; if He can do that for which our wills tender Him their life-long self-surrender. 'Unless these rational conditions stand, then, no act of faith is justifiable ; unless His personality correspond to these assertions, we can never be authorised in worshipping Him. But, if so, then we can commit ourselves to these dogmas in the same way, and degree, as we commit ourselves to Him. We can do so, in the absolute assurance that He cannot but abide for ever, that which we know Him to be to-day. We know Him indeed, but in part : ' but it is part of a fixed and integral character, which is whole in every part; and can never falsify, in the future, the revelation which it has already made of itself."

That is very much like saying that the fine and often

subtle definitions of the earlier Councils, which dealt with the divine personality, and both the divine and the human nature of our Lord, were mere inevitable results of loyal personal feeling, in which the intellect of the Church could not, without moral degeneracy, have missed its way. Canon Scott Holland does not say so in so many words. But that is certainly what we gather both from his essay and from the

one which follows it. And it seems to us manifestly untrue. While we are ready to acknowledge gladly the large a priori elements in religious thought which serve to support and

verify the decisions of the Church on the nature of God, and the divine and human nature and the divine person of our Lord, it seems almost absurd to say that the theology of the Arian and Nestorian and Monophysite

controversies could by any possibility have been safely piloted through those stormy conflicts by the light of such a priori considerations alone. Either the early Church

had some intellectual authority to guide its discrimina- tions which modern Christianity has lost, or if we have that authority still, we ought to be told where it is and in what it consists. We speak of this as the cardinal defect of the book, for in reading it and admiring it, as we constantly flo, and hope to show that we do, we are always conscious that the writers appear to ignore this great hiatus in their theology, and sometimes even seem to be drawing our attention away from it, being uncomfortably half-conscious that there is such a gap in their principles which they are not very willing to acknowledge. We should be very sorry indeed not

to recognise the rich veins of true thought in Luz Mundi. To many of its essays we hope to express our hearty

'obligation. But this seems to us its defect as the ex- pression of a school of thought,—that it tries to get rid of the principle of dogmatic authority by side-winds, by indicating all sorts of spiritual aids to belief which, taken alone, could never have resulted in the Church's Creeds, though no doubt they render submission to those Creeds, when authoritatively promulgated, much easier. These essayists never say straight out, what we suppose most of them to -think, that the Church's Creeds are founded upon authority, and upon an authority which is now not living but dead, or at all events in a cataleptic condition.