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 Baird : Theodore Beza 551 With so much of clearness and justness in his view of the Reforma- tion, one cannot help feeling a certain regret that the limitations of the series in which his volume appears did not allow Professor ^Valker to em- body his results in a form that would have admitted some more distinctly literary treatment. One feels at every step the formula of a text-book demanding a little something about everything, rather than the spirit of an essay which should interest and hold the attention by its consistent working out of a main theme. The positive qualities of this volume make it rise easily above the general level of the series, but after all it is neither a good text-book nor an interesting book to read. It lacks, almost necessarily, the system of the former and the style appropriate to the latter. Let us wish to Dr. Walker in the inspiration of his new sur- roundings, the leisure to work out, free of all limitations, such an inter- pretation of the Reformation period as the literature of the past score of years makes possible and desirable. Theodore Bcza, the Counsellor of the French Reformation {i^k^- i6oj). By Henry Martyn B.ird, Professor in New York University. [Heroes of the Reformation.] (G. P. Putnam's Sons: New York and London. 1899. Pps. .x.xi, 376.) No one of the volumes of the series which has been planned under the editorship of Professor Jackson, finds so large an empty space wait- ing for it as this. Of the two best-known lives of Beza, the fragment of Baum was written in 1843 ^i^d the complete work of Heppe in 1861. English readers have had no other source of information concerning Beza except such slight sketches of ten or twenty pages as appear in Harbaugh's Fathers of the Reformed Church or Hook's Ecclesiastical Biography. No one could be better qualified by knowledge of contemporary re- lated literature than Professor Baird, to write a sketch of the man who succeeded Calvin as intellectual leader of the French Reformation, and was during the last thirty years of his life one of the most conspicuous ecclesiastical personages in Europe. Professor Baird has been faithful to his own ideal expressed in his recent review of Dr. Lindsay's Martin Luther, and has given us a volume which " intended for general readers, naturally avoids any display of authorities, although it is evidently built upon a firm foundation of solid scholarship hidden from view." The title of this series, " Heroes of the Reformation" (a title which Dr. Enierton humorously represents the ghost of his hero, Erasmus, as refusing with dismay), suggests a somewhat eulogistic method of treat- ment. Dr. Baird, while adopting this tone, is not betrayed into any unconscious suppression or distortion of facts, and he is free by instinct from the partisan special pleading of writers like D'Aubigneand Janssen, which the prospectus of the series promised to avoid. There is a clear cool atmosphere of candor about Chapter IV., ■' Treatise on the Punish- ment of Heretics," very refreshing to those who have been wearied by the