CURRENT LITERATURE.
Columbia College in the City of New York :—" Progress in Knowledge through Love : " a baccalaureate Sermon, June 11th, 1893, by Alfred Barry, D.D., D.C.L., Canon of Windsor, late Primate of Aus- tralia and Tasmania.—This is a very thoughtful sermon, preached before the Columbia College in New York, by Bishop Barry, on the occasion apparently of the grant of the bachelors' degree to the students who had just completed their College course. Its text is St. Paul's saying (Ephesians iii., 18-19) concerning that "rooting and grounding in love," which gives the strength to appre- hend " what is the length and breadth and depth and height" of the love of Christ "which passeth knowledge." It is not difficult to see how this passage lends itself to a sermon on " Progress in knowledge through love ; " but while it is perfectly true to say that for human beings love must be the impelling motive to the gradual apprehension of all the deeper kind of knowledge, we do not understand Bishop Barry to assert that in Him to whom progress in either knowledge or love is impossible, love is any more the root of knowledge, than knowledge is the root of love. In an infinite and perfect being, all the attributes must express the very essence, and all must be so inseparable that it would bo an impossible ambition for us to attempt to see which is the groundwork and which the superstructure. All we can say is that, in Christ's human nature at least, the love and the condescension and the self-forgetfulness strike us as more marvellous even than the knowledge, and that when wo compare ourselves with him, we are even more struck by our infinite deficiency in love, than we are by our infinite deficiency in knowledge. That being so, we need not wonder that St. Paul insists much more on the need of love to qualify knowledge, than he doei on the need of knowledge to qualify love, though both. are needful, and both in- deed essential, to any true progress. Bishop Barry urges the same lesson with great power, and we may well hope that this admirable sermon may be republished by some English publisher, for the benefit of English students.
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