Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/507

 1899.] LITEEATUEE. 83

Theology and Philosophy.

As a kind of supplement to the life of Dr. Pusey, there was pub- lished early in the year a collection of the Spiritual Iiettere of Edward Bourerie Posey (Longmans), edited, with an interesting preface, by the Rev. J. O. Johnston and the Rev. W. C. E. Newbolt. The letters reveal the attitude of the writer towards the later developments of the Oxford movement, and his lack of sympathy with the extremists of the ritualistic party, who seemed to him to be departing from the original principles of Tractarianism.

The Gifford Lectures have produced as usual volumes of importance to the progress of religious thought. The Fundamental Ideaa of Christianity (Maclehose) is the title of the lectures delivered by the late Dr. Caird, Principal of the University of Glasgow. Dr. Caird was perhaps greater as a philosopher than as a theologian, but the subject chosen by him for these lectures was well suited to a writer so used to philosophic reasoning and so capable of clothing it in language of dignity and eloquence. Another series of Gifford Lectures, those deliv- ered by Professor A. B. Bruce in 1898, were published under the title of nie Moral Order of the "World in Ancient and Modern Thought (Hodder & Stoughton), and contain an able review of the chief pre- Christian ethical ideals.

A third series of Gifford Lectures calls for mention here, though in this case the subject does not rank under theology proper, but only remotely touches theology through metaphysics. This is Professor James Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism (Black), a rather abstruse discussion of the materialistic theory of the universe, tending to establish the reality of life or mind as something not accounted for by the latest utterances of mechanical naturalism.

An addition to the long list of biographies of St. Paul came from an American theologian, Dr. Lyman Abbott, in The Life and Trotters of Paul the Apostle (J. Clarke). The writer makes it his object to trace the evolution of the apostle's ideas from his sincere hostility to the Christians in his youth to his later " large and spiritual teaching " of the Gospel, transcending the limits which the sects have tried to impose upon it. The book is an excellent popular biography, in which the personality of St. Paul is vividly conceived.

A very noteworthy book, well illustrating the tendencies of modern theological thought, is Dr. Percy Gardner's Bxploratio Kvangelioa (Black). The question which he deals with is that of the adjustment of Christian belief in the face of the difficulties raised by historic criticism. He states with candour and ability the real importance of these difficulties, and for his own part pleads with great eloquence that spiritual experience, not historical evidence, must be the real basis of religious belief.

Mr. Richard Holt Hutton held a place of his own as a religious thinker ; but he was a journalist and not a divine. A volume called Aspects of Religions and Scientific Thought (Macmillan) gathers to- gether some of his journalistic writings, which certainly deserved more than an ephemeral life. The Congregationalist divine, Dr. Fairbairn,

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