Page:The Dial vol. 15 (July 1 - December 16, 1893).djvu/48

 36  him. Through education—the education that trains the hand as well as the head, that gives stability to character—his real emancipation must come.

It only remains to thank the author and publisher for this valuable contribution to American political history. 



Obviously, the late learned Professor of Church History in the University of Kiel used, as the basis of his work now appearing for the benefit of English readers in an octavo volume entitled "History of the Christian Church, 1-600," the notes for his accustomed lectures. The original skeleton with which his lectures began can be readily differentiated from notes added from year to year as the same lectures have been delivered to successive classes of students at Kiel. How thorough and how entertaining the lectures must have been, the book shows. One can imagine how each of the parenthetical references, interspersed in great profusion throughout the volumes, has been made to remind the lecturer of an illustrative incident that has lost none of its effectiveness in the telling. Lecture notes, however, require much emendation and rearrangement as well as expansion to render them readable in a printed volume, and to give English readers the benefit of his profound knowledge, the learned author of Kiel needed, quite as much as a translator, a careful editor, who could separate from the text the explanatory parentheses and citations of authorities and relegate them to their proper place as footnotes or appendices. As it is, we have upon each page a confused mass of text, explanatory notes, and references to authorities, interspersed with parentheses in some cases of such length as to cause the reader to lose the thread of the narrative,—the whole making the reading exceedingly laborious. The variety of types used in printing the book,—Roman capitals and lower case, italics, and full-faced letters,—tends to still greater confusion. It is evident that the full-faced letters are resorted to for emphasis. The reason for setting up the text in small pica with paragraphs here and there in bourgeois is not so evident. The book does not justify its appearance at this time either by adding newly discovered facts in history to those known to students in theology, or by presenting the old matter in any new light. The author's deductions are those likely to be most acceptable to ultra-Protestant Germany. As a text-book, the work will probably be useful, its chief value consisting in its exhaustive bibliography. Certainly its style is not calculated to popularize the study of Church History, or (to borrow a phrase from the author's preface) "to animate delight in that study." The present volume was intended to be the first of three to take up that number of great epochs of Church History. Whether or not the author's death (since Easter, 1891, the date of his preface) has interrupted the preparation of the subsequent volumes does not appear.

A book-buyer might be led by the title of Professor Ramsay's recent book—"The Church in the Roman Empire before 170"—and by its general appearance (it is an octavo of 480 pages with an index) to expect a narrative history of a certain phase of the early church promising much of deep interest in its development. Such a one would probably be surprised, without being disappointed, upon finding in the volume an exemplification of "the method of applying archæological, topographical, and numismatic evidence to the investigation of early Christian History." The volume bears as a somewhat misleading sub-title, "Mansfield College Lectures." The six lectures delivered at Mansfield College, Oxford, in 1892, form, indeed, the basis of the book, but these lectures (themselves almost entirely re-written) include a chapter expanded from a lecture delivered at Cambridge in 1889, and are preceded by a long excursus (divided into eight chapters) upon "St. Paul in Asia Minor." Therein the author supplements and corrects Conybeare and Howson and Dean Farrar in their biographies of St. Paul, from a topographical study of Asia Minor, and he even corrects his own previously published "Historical