The Heavenly Father. Lectures on Modern Atheism. By Ernest Neville.
Translated from the French by H. Downton, M.A., English Chaplain at Geneva.-31. Neale is a master of declamation and sar- casm, and we are not surprised to hear that his eloquence attracted large crowds at Geneva during the delivery of the lectures which con- stitute the volume before us. Atheism, or what comes to the same thing as far as the relations between God and man are concerned, the deism that holds that God has made the world but withdrawn from the active superintendence of it, and the pantheism that identifies him with nature, may have obtained such a hold on Continental thought as to require the vigorous treatment that it receives in this volume ; but we do not think that this is the case in England. Most of our heretics would welcome the idea that M. Neville opposes to the error of his contemporaries—"Faith in God as it has been given to the world by the Gospel, faith in the Heavenly Father." No doubt it is a groat treat to hear M. Narille, but the 'eloquence that delights the ear does not always produce the same effect when presented to the eye in the form of printed matter. Still, there may be some even in this country on whom the discovery of law in the universe has the paradoxical effect of disproving a law-
giver, and to them we may recommend the volume, creditably trans- lated as it is by the English Chaplain at Geneva. They need not be discouraged by the hint that the latter drops that his author in another volume proclaims the doctrines of the fall, the propitiatory sacrifice, and the eternal punishment of the wicked with a fulness altogether satisfactory to his, the chaplain's, feelings. There is no re- ference to these topics in the book before us, which is confined to the consideration of the subject of life with and without the Heavenly Father.
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