Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/395

No. 3.] not logically inevitable conclusions from absolutely certain premises. The author claims to have shown only that the essential features of the Christian conception of God are in no wise discredited by the teachings of modern science. "God is the postulate of a soul that finds the world without God utterly dark and unintelligible" (p. 162). The moderation of the author's claims, his fairness toward all opponents, and his ready acknowledgment of all that is good intellectually, morally, and religiously in other theories cannot fail to win the respect of open-minded readers of all schools of thought.

The remaining two-thirds of the work has no direct bearing on philosophy. Book II, "The Historical Preparation for Christianity," gives an admirable account of Hebrew religion and Old Testament literature as constructed by modern scholarship. Book III, "The Christian Origins," does the same for the teachings of Jesus and the literature of the New Testament. The same readiness which we found in the first book to accept the results of natural science, is manifest in the second and third in accepting the conclusions of scientific criticism. Colleges that give courses in Apologetics or Christian Evidences, and that wish to present the subject in the light of modern thought and from the point of view of liberal orthodoxy, will find this an excellent text-book.

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This work, by the late Father Gratry, is written from the standpoint of Catholic Philosophy. It was crowned by the French Academy, and has passed through many editions in France. "In order to bring the two volumes of the original within the compass of a single larger volume in the translation, the superfluous appendices and some of the foot-notes containing the texts rendered by the author in the body of his work, have been omitted. The prefaces to the first three editions, abounding with personal and local references, as well as a long and polemical Introduction, have likewise been left out." The treatment falls into two parts, the first being a sketch (colored by a good deal of polemical matter) of the chief theodicies offered in the history of human thought, and the second an independent discussion of the whole subject, critical and constructive. It should be noted that 'Theodicy' is used in the widest possible sense so as to describe the entire doctrine of God, and especially the proofs of the divine existence. The authors whose views on these subjects are discussed at length are Plato, Aristotle, Saint Augustine, Saint Anselm, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, Fénelon, Petau and Thomassin, Bossuet, and Leibniz. The main conclusions reached are these: (1) "The demonstration of the existence of God is the supreme achievement of a general process of the reason, of which the infinitesimal methods of geometry are but a special