volume to the views that are held as to the composite structure of chaps. xl.1xvi., especially as this is a subject which is receiving a good deal of attention just now. Ewald, Prof. Cheyne, and Mr. G. A. Smith support their views with arguments of great force; certainly chaps. lviii. 3-10, lix. 1-15, lxv. and lxvi. require a good deal of " adjustment" and explanation before they can be attributed to the author of xl.-lii. 11.

After a useful discussion of the nature and form of Hebrew Poetry, Dr. Driver takes us through the Psalter along a path which we cannot help feeling is somewhat hard and mechanically clipped. Nowhere is his habitual caution more unflinchingly maintained. He alludes to Professor Cheyne's Bampton Lectures with something like ominous reserve. If only they had come out six months earlier we should have enjoyed the satisfaction of a more definite judgment on some points where Dr. Driver's opinion would be specially valuable. We may, perhaps, conclude that he is not disposed to place the Psalter as a whole in the time of the Exile and after; he would probably ascribe a good many Psalms to the age of the later prophets.

The treatment of the book of Job will prove most helpful. The argument, often so difficult to follow, is traced with great clearness and sympathy. The purpose of the book, controversial, ethical, practical, is carefully summarized. Job is taken to be "a type of the suffering godly Israelite," in an age of advanced civilization, observant reflection, literary culture, with a gloomy background of disorder and misery. These and other conditions point to the Babylonian Exile as the birth-time of this dramatic poem.

A brighter and more obvious drama is revealed in Dr. Driver's delightful treatment of the Song of Songs. He follows Ewald's scheme of the poem; and his interpretation carries conviction with it. The essential feature of this exposition is that the fair Shulamite has two lovers, her absent shepherd, and the persistent Solomon, whose addresses she consistently rejects. This exquisite little drama is, in fact, a poem of the triumph of true love. One of the keys to its right understanding is Dr. Driver's interpretation of the recurring verse, "I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem (i.e., the ladies of the court), that ye stir not up, nor awaken love, until it please "do not, that is, excite it artificially in Solomon's favour.

We cannot do more than allude to the admirable way in which the enigmas of Daniel are made to tell their secret, which after all turns out to be an intelligible and attractive prophecy. Perhaps this is one of the most admirable portions of the whole work. At any rate, Dr. Driver's criticism is quite irresistible.

It is time to draw to a conclusion. Enough has been said to show the high importance and permanent value of this first English Introduction to the Old Testament, based on the best critical methods of the day. It is a sign of the vitality and vigour of the Church that she can thus meet the requirements of the age, and joyfully appropriate the careful results of reverent criticism. Nothing remains but to study, with zeal and patience, what has been so richly given to us. This is, indeed, an obligation which we dare not escape, as we would love and reverence God's revelation.

CHRISTIANITY AND GREEK PHILOSOPHY:

THEIR MUTUAL RELATIONS AS CONCEIVED BY DR. HATCH.

BY REV. T. B. KILPATRICK, B.D.

THE central position of Dr. Hatch's Hibbert Lecture is that, under the influence of Greek ideas, Christianity has been falsely intellectualized. doctrine of the Person of Christ, and of the Trinity, are no part of primitive Christianity. Conceptions which we have held to be essential to Christian faith are importations from an alien world. Christianity will not regain its power till these ideas are relegated to the sphere of mere speculation, and men are recalled from them to the consideration of conduct and character, which alone are essential to the maintenance of Christian life. Such a thorough emptying out of the ancient creeds of the Church has a bewildering and paralysing effect on the mind. We have gone on the supposition that these doctrines were essential to Christianity. We have been prepared to discuss them, but in doing so we have been convinced that we were discussing Christianity itself. To be told that is not the case, that we have been fighting for a dream, and that Christianity as an historical fact lies wholly apart from such ideas, is sufficiently startling. The whole fabric of theology, the whole organization of the Church, and the whole circle of ordinary Christian thought and experience, are shown to hang in the air, with no basis in fact, if the historical work of the school to which Hatch belongs is held to be sound and its conclusions valid. Apologetic may well pause in its business of refuting materialism, pantheism, deism, and other imagined foes, to deal with the questions raised by this school of critics, lest it find itself without a position to defend, and its occupation consequently gone. To deal thoroughly with such a book as this would require learning, which I do not possess; and all that I can attempt is at most a very general estimate.

A.-STATEMENT.

It is needless to attempt any reproduction here of the immense material that the learned author has collected in these lectures. It is enough to say that he shows himself at home in the Greek world, to which he attributes so mighty an influence. His information is copious, and readers less learned than the author must be content to accept it as accurate. Without anticipating criticism, it may be said that the faults of the book will be found not so much in what it contains as in what it omits to state, either ignoring it or silently presupposing it. Of the undoubted earnestness of the author, of the subdued and restrained, yet most moving, eloquence of the book, of the practical religious purpose which dominates the whole endeavour, it is not necessary to speak. Probably no theologian of modern times has so fascinated his readers, and grappled them to himself with feelings of such strong respect. In giving a summary of the book, let us notice: 1. The author's statement of his problem. 2. The method which he pursues. 3. The results which he reaches.

I. THE PROBLEM. This is crisply stated in the writer's opening sentences. "It is impossible for any one, whether he be a student of history or no, to fail to notice a difference of both form and content between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed. The Sermon on the Mount is the promulgation of a new law of conduct; it assumes beliefs rather than formulates them; the theological conceptions which underlie it belong to the ethical rather than the speculative side of theology; metaphysics are wholly absent. The Nicene Creed is a statement partly of historical facts and partly of dogmatic inferences; the metaphysical terms which it contains would probably have been unintelligible to the first disciples; ethics have no place in it. The one belongs to a world of Syrian peasants, the other to a world of Greek philosophers.'

The problem at once arises "why an ethical sermon stood in the forefront of the teaching of Jesus Christ, and a metaphysical creed in the forefront of the Christianity of the fourth century." And this outward and visible change is the expression of another more inward and spiritual, “the change in the centre of gravity from conduct to belief." The author points out that this change "is coincident with the transference of Christianity from a Semitic to a Greek soil." He adds, anticipating the conclusion of his work, "that the presumption is that it was the result of Greek influence."

Picturesquely and vivedly, therefore, the author places the Sermon on the Mount by the side of the Nicene Creed, and asks how the transition was made. His answer, briefly put, is that it was made under the influence of Greek philosophy operating upon the elements presented to it by primitive Christian teaching.

II. METHOD. Seeking, therefore, to discover "the influence of Greece upon Christianity," a simple method naturally suggests itself. It is to proceed from antecedents to consequents. The author takes the leading elements in the Greek world of the first three centuries, during which Christianity was growing to its maturity, and endeavours to show how, by their operation, the simple ideas of primitive Christianity became elaborated and transformed into the metaphysical dogmas of Nicene and post-Nicene orthodoxy, the issue of the process being that profound and far-reaching change in the attitude of the Church toward formulated ideas, and in the theory of the Church as to the bond of union among Christians. The aspects of Greek thought and life dealt with are Education, Exegesis, Rhetoric, Philosophy, Ethics, Theology, Worship. Each of these as it came into contact with Christianity changed it, in the author's view, for the worse.

1. Education crushed "uncultivated earnestness," laid "more stress on the expression of ideas than upon ideas themselves," and so stemmed "the very forces which had given Christianity its place," and changed "the rushing torrent of the river of God into a broad but feeble stream" (p. 49).

2. Greek Exegesis consisted in allegorizing and spiritualizing the literature of the past, so that Homer, for instance, was made the vehicle of theories of man and the universe, sufficiently remote from the heroic

narrative, which is all that an ordinary reader would discern in his poems. This style of interpretation, spite of some protests and reactions, passed over entire into Christianity, and was employed upon the sacred books. At first innocent and beautiful, it was soon employed as an instrument in effecting the great and destructive change which was leading Christianity from life to dogma, and ultimately became "the slave of dogmatism, and the tyrant of souls" (p. 83).

3. Greek Rhetoric had a most damaging effect, in replacing the simple earnest prophets of the first years of Christianity's conquest by a "race of eloquent talkers." Our author believes that "the hope of Christianity is that the class which was artificially created may ultimately disappear, and that the sophistical element in Christian preaching will melt, as a transient mist, before the preaching of the prophets of the ages to come, who, like the prophets of the ages that are long gone by, will speak only as the Spirit gives then utterance'" (p. 114).

4. Greek Philosophy is the strongest and most important of the elements of Greek influence in Christianity. Dr. Hatch sums up its influence in a threefold tendency: (1) The tendency to analyse and define what had been held simply and without reflection. (2) The tendency to create speculative systems whose test is logical consistency and completeness; whereas the primitive Christians had been supremely indifferent to logic, and had held contradictory notions without any uneasiness. (3) The tendency to attach importance to the systems thus created; whereas the primitive Christians had cared nothing at all for opinions of any kind. Dr. Hatch is never more serious than when denouncing the philosophy-begotten theology, which now passes for orthodoxy. It is "built upon a quicksand. There is no more reason to suppose that God has revealed metaphysics than that He has revealed chemistry. The belief that metaphysical theology is more than this"-i.e., personal convictions, dogmas in the original sense of the word" is the chief bequest of Greece to religious thought; and it has been a damnosa hereditas. It has given to later Christianity that part of it which is doomed to perish, and which yet, while it lives, holds the key of the prison-house of many souls."

5. Greek Ethics, in like manner, have had practical effects of the most disastrous kind. The primitive Christian society was a strictly puritan. community, whose members held their place in it on condition of personal holiness. The later and the modern Church is a corpus permixtum, where morality is held to be of subordinate importance compared with belief. This has produced, on the one hand, an extreme puritan reaction, devoted to an ascetic mode of life; and, on the other, a general deterioration "in the average moral conceptions of the Christian Churches" (p. 168). The Sermon on the Mount is no longer the vade mecum of the Christian; and any attempt to reproduce it in common practice would "meet with no less. opposition within than without the Christian societies " (p. 170).

6. Greek Theology, and its share in creating Christian theology, are dealt

with in three most important chapters, which it is impossible to sketch in any detail. The mind of the Greek educated world had been tending toward the conception of the unity of God. In endeavouring to make clear this idea, various difficulties at once emerged, viz., the relation of a spiritual being to extended matter; the relation of a being, at once almighty and good, to and good, to moral evil; the relation of the infinite and absolute to the finite and limited. Christianity entered the Greek world with no theory about God, but with a simple faith, learned from Jesus, in His Fatherhood. Christianity, however, had no sooner been accepted by Greek thought, than it was forced to face these speculative questions, and, as it had in itself no metaphysical apparatus, it was compelled to employ that presented to it by Greek philosophy. It entered, accordingly, upon centuries of wearisome speculations, and most embittered controversies, till, in the end, the opinions of the majority were stiffened into a system of dogma, and imposed on the Catholic Church. Then, indeed, speculation was forbidden, and philosophy, which had created theology, was frowned down as its rival. Dr. Hatch is indifferent whether men speculate or no; but he insists on its being recognized that all speculation proceeds on assumptions that are no part of Christianity. Hitherto, theology has been resting on the assumptions of Greek thought; but he suggests that "the time may have come when-in face of the large knowledge of His ways which has come to us through both thought and research -we may be destined to transcend the assumptions of Greek speculations by new assumptions, which will lead us at once to a diviner knowledge and the sense of a diviner life" (p. 282).

7. We need not stay to consider the influence of the Greek mysteries upon Church usages, or follow our author as he derives the solemn pageants of the Roman and Greek Churches from the dramatic representations of heathen worship.

III. RESULTS. Dr. Hatch has not lived to follow out the conclusions to which this method of study would lead. But the following paragraph embodies what seems to me the necessary issue of Dr. Hatch's argument. Christianity was, to begin with, very simple and almost structureless. Jesus Christ taught both religion and morality. His religion had but one article of belief, viz., the Fatherhood of God, and this He taught not as a philosophy, but as the impulse of a life of daily trust. His morality was of a very lofty and lovely type, and was intended to be the creator and upholder of human society. The primitive Christians started with this religion and this morality. They knew the facts of their Founder's life, but they had no theory of His person. His life was their standard, His memory their inspiration. Thus equipped, they began their mission in the world. They won their way solely by their pure and beautiful lives, and by their gospel of the love of God. They had no system to propagate, no organization to maintain. There was nothing in their society but the simple spontaneity of love and faith. Soon however, and by slow degrees, whose advance it is impossible to trace in detail, a

NO. IV.-VOL. I.-THE THINKER.

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