poor. But all these are small matters. The important thing is the message, which no man can give to another, but which God alone can give: "Unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." There terror before God must cease; peace comes into the heart, and great joy for all people begins. And this message is accompanied by a blessed assurance, for this Gospel has for us to-day better and clearer tokens than the manger and swaddling clothes. And with the birth of Christ begins at last a new world, into which we are invited to enter and in which we find forgiveness, life, and salvation. A few words with reference to the sermonic use of miracles may be valuable. The critic, as a rule, no longer denies, but asserts, the reality of the miracles of Jesus. But he holds that these miracles are recorded to show not only the power of our Lord and the condition of the souls of those upon whom he wrought his miracles, but rather to portray Christ before human eyes that men may be drawn to him. Looked at from this standpoint, the individual miracle stories may, or may not, be strictly correct historically. Whether they are so or not, the preacher's business is to recommend Christ to human hearts and human needs; and in this task the miracles give him extremely important aid. The resurrection and ascension of Jesus are not to be demonstrated by the literal utterance of the gospels, but by the experience of those who commune with him. Thus, alongside of the fact of science that soul and body die together is placed the fact that the soul and body of Jesus live together. He who came from heaven must of necessity return to heaven. He who brought the kingdom of God belongs at the right hand of God. It will be seen that, though there is little emphasis upon external phases of the record, the kernel is maintained. Whether the method appeals to our readers is not with us the question. Our business is to record the facts.

The Christian Socialist Party of Germany. The Christian socialists of Germany recently met at Frankfurt-am-Main, being represented by about two hundred delegates from all parts of the Fatherland, under the presi dency of Dr. Stöcker. The following declaration of principles was adopted: "We justify the separation of Dr. Stöcker from the conservative party, which under the circumstances was unavoidable. By ourselves we form a party of Christian socialists. We shall continue to oppose every conservative tendency which makes concessions to the policy of the middle party or represents purely material interests. We desire to secure a greater equality between rich and poor for the future, and legal assistance to the efforts of the weak to obtain a livelihood; but we repudiate all radical doctrines which teach the unconditional equality of all. In the same manner we are opposed to growth of power on the part of the extremely wealthy, so far as this endangers the freedom of the State or the welfare of the people. We regard the combatants under the banner of true, living Christianity as those alone who can gain the victory over the powers of destruction, against which we shall wage a warfare with all our powers."

SUMMARY OF THE REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES.

"THE Early Ages of the Human Race" is the opening article in the London Quarterly Review for July. It gives a summary of our present knowledge of prehistoric man. Speaking of a clay image found in a gravel bed of the pliocene or pleistocene age in Idaho, and which "shows the high intellectual character of primitive man," it says: "Like the Calaveras skull, it throws a heavy weight into the scale against the idea that the earliest members of the human race were sunk in the lowest depths of mental and moral degradation." In reference to a quotation from Mr. John Fiske's Man's Destiny it makes this comment: "This is pure romance. In man's earliest days there was no need whatever for this endless fighting, simply because the causes for hostility did not exist. Food was everywhere abundant. Game of all kinds existed in such vast numbers as to be easily captured, and all the rivers swarmed with fish. Men were few, and immense uninhabited tracts separated the earliest human wanderers. If collisions did occur-which must have been rare-the beaten party simply moved off to distant regions where man had not yet penetrated and where their safety was complete. Instead of the earliest ages of man's existence being days of incessant warfare, they must have been times of profound peace." The second article, "Profit Sharing and Gain Sharing," contrasts these methods of solving the labor problem with those advocated by the trades unions. In the third article, "Clive and Hastings," occurs this sentence, which is one of many indications that in these days there is none so poor as to do Macaulay reverence: "Macaulay's portraits of Clive and Warren Hastings, and, in association with the latter, of the much-aspersed Sir Elijah Impey, are caricatures indeed; but the glowing color and the magical chiaroscuro of the great word-painter so disguise the wild incorrectness of his drawing that the magnificent caricatures have been accepted as living, faithful resemblances; and two heroes of English history have been wronged of the fair renown to which lives of unswerving, patriot devotion had justly entitled them." The fourth article is "Ritschl's Theology;" the fifth, "Keats's Letters;" the sixth, "The Bible as Literature;" the seventh and eighth, "Recent Researches among the Annelids" and "A Naturalist in Mid-Africa."

PROFESSOR MOSES COIT TYLER, the author of those two exasperating volumes of a History of American Literature-exasperating because, published eighteen years ago and dealing only with early colonial literature, they have not since been followed by other volumes treating of our later and really important literary development-contributes "The Declaration of Independence in the Light of Modern Criticism" to the July number of the North American Review, Russia, that overgrown and naughty child

of modern Europe which will come to manhood by and by and exert a potent influence upon human history, is, of course, the subject of Karl Blind's "After the Coronation at Moscow." The prospect grows "less and less hopeful," he says, "as to the new ruler having any really liberal measures in view." "Father" Clark, of the Christian Endeavor movement, writes pleasantly on "Some International Delusions." "The chief source of these delusions," he says, "is the daily newspaper on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. . . . Even the most respectable papers seem to find room in their foreign columns chiefly for startling crimes or awful accidents. . . . Many an English and Australian friend has said to me: 'I should think you would be afraid to travel in America; you always seem to be having such dreadful railway accidents.' . . . When I informed him that I had traveled many tens of thousands of miles without meeting a serious mishap or ever being held up by highwaymen it almost passed his comprehension, and he made up his mind that either the papers which he habitually read or myself had been drawing a long bow." "But, again, it must be confessed that these popular delusions are due quite as much to our own exceedingly sensational newspapers as to anything that is printed in the lands across the seas." John Gilmer Speed discusses "The Right of Privacy" from a legal standpoint. The late General Gibbon, of the United States Army, concludes his argument, "Why Women Should Have the Ballot," with these words: "That the day for the enfranchisement of women in this country is coming cannot be doubted by anyone capable of reading the very apparent signs which have been shown for some years past; " but the only sign specified is "the desperate struggle those opposed to woman suffrage are making to prevent its accomplishment." Incidentally, we believe that women should have the ballot. Max O'Rell's tirade on "Petticoat Government " in the United States is admirably answered by Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford and Mrs. Margaret Bottome. Other articles are: "The Stepchild of the Republic," a paper on "the seventeen splendid States and Territories" of our "arid" West, by W. E. Smythe; "A Common Coinage for All Nations," by the Hon. C. W. Stone; "The Teacher's Duty to the Pupil," by Cardinal Gibbons; Criminal Jurisprudence, Roman and Anglo-Saxon," by M. Romero, Mexican minister to the United States; and "Sound Money the Safeguard of Labor," by the Hon. R. B. Mahany.

5. "

THE Edinburgh Review for July might easily monopolize the five short pages allotted to this summary. To prove this we need only submit a table of its contents: 1. "Manning and the Catholic Reaction of our Times;" 2. "The New Scottish Novelists; "3. "Sheridan ;" 4. "The Universities of the Middle Ages; The Countess Krasinska's Diary;" 6. "The Paget Papers ; "7. "Gardens and Garden Craft;" 8. "The Government of France since 1870;" 9. "History and the National Portrait Gallery;" 10. "Egypt." The first of these is inspired by the recent publication of Purcell's Life of Manning—a book that has

aroused profound interest and no end of controversy, and is characterized by the Catholic World as "the recent sad spectacle of a clumsy, narrowvisioned biographer's attempt to belittle the fame of the great CardinalArchbishop of Westminster by means of his private correspondence, a performance which Cardinal Vaughan has branded in a recent magazine as 'almost a crime.'" The book certainly makes some interesting revelations ex cathedra; and we hardly wonder at the ire of our Catholic contemporary. The second article will appeal to all lovers of the new Scotch school of fiction. Says this Scotch review, voicing the acclaim of multitudes of non-Scotch readers, "We hail the revival of the rural Scottish novel as a welcome sign of healthy reaction." Of Barrie's Window in Thrums the reviewer says: "There is the Shakespearean subtlety of humor, which, as it seeks its subjects in eternal types of humanity, is bound to survive. The Scotch is perhaps unnecessarily broad; possibly there is too much of it for purposes of effective art, although the extraordinary popularity of the book in the South appears to dispose of that criticism as captious. All the greater is the tribute to the analytical genius which has triumphed over obstacles of its own creation. . . . It is a story we should be sorry to read, were we inclined to homesickness, on the sun-baked plains of Australia or the waterless Karoo of South Africa. We should yearn to exchange the cloudless skies for the dripping heavens and driving mists of Glen Quharity." And further: "An exquisite tenderness of sympathy underlies the book, so that it is difficult to distinguish the pathos from the drollery "-a saying which applies. equally well to the writings of "Ian Maclaren." This of Mr. Crockett:

Comparing him with himself, the Stickit Minister and the Raiders, in their respective manners, stand far above his other productions." The notice of the Bonnie Brier Bush is nothing if not appreciative. It is "a sparkling book; " "there is no cleverer chapter than that on 'The Cunning Speech of Drumtochty ; "Ian Maclaren' probes the infinite depths. of pathos in those simple, sequestered lives;" no sympathy can induce the "rough, almost brutal" Dr. Maclure "to palliate the truth," yet "no fashionable physician from Harley Street or Saville Row can surpass him in natural delicacy; "The Transformation of Lachlan Campbell " is "the most touching of the tales."

WE cannot even mention all of the fifteen articles that fill the pages of The Nineteenth Century for July. The first article, "Russia, Persia, and England," is by Sir Lepel Griffin. George W. E. Russell discusses the question of Church unity under the title "Reformation and Reunion," and concludes, "After all, we must remember that the Master promised, not one fold, but one flock and one Shepherd, even himself." The Bab and Babism," by J. D. Rees, describes a religious sect of Persia, an offshoot from Mohammedanism, which arose about the middle of the present century. The Bab "represented himself as an emanation from the Divinity itself, and then assumed the title of 'highness,' by which also

Jesus, the Son of Mary, or Miriam, is habitually known amongst Muhammadans." The adherents of the sect abound, "and chiefly among the richer and more educated classes." Walter Alison Phillips writes of Walter von der Vogelweide, "the greatest of the Minnesingers," whose name has been made familiar to us by Longfellow. Edward B. Tylor has an article on "The Matriarchal Family System," a system which has prevailed among our American Indian tribes and among some Oriental peoples, and by which inheritance descends, not through the male side of the family, but through the female. "The Woman Movement in Germany' ·" is sketched by Alys Russell. Alvar Nuñez, better known to us as Cabeça de Vaca, the companion of Narvaez and the discoverer of those famous cities of Cibola which have so unaccountably eluded all further discovery, a man whose remarkable story contains so much of the romantic and the impossible, is the subject of a paper by R. B. Cunninghame Graham dealing chiefly with his adventures on the La Plata in South America. "The Story of the Manitoba Schools Question," by T. C. Down, is a study of an important factor in the Canadian problem. "New Letters of Edward Gibbon," by Rowland E. Prothero, and "The Federation Movement in Australasia," by Sir Edward Braddon, premier of Tasmania, are interesting papers and conclude an interesting number.

THE following is the list of contents of the Methodist Review of the Church, South, for July-August: 1. "The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge," by Professor Henry C. Sheldon, of the chair of systematic theology at Boston University; 2. "John Boanerges," by Rev. G. B. Winton, M.A.; 3. "Oxford High Anglicanism," by Rev. W. Harrison; 4. "A Literary Knapsack," by Maurice Thompson; 5. "The Culture Problem in Southern Towns," by Professor J. S. Bassett, of Trinity College; 6. "The Position of the Church in France," by Professor J. F. Crowell, of Columbia College; 7. "Vergil's Preeminence among the Christian Fathers and in the Medieval Church," by Professor E. W. Bowen, of Randolph-Macon College; 8. "Macbeth and Hamlet," by Rev. J. W. Hill; 9. "Good Roads," by Professor H. H. Stone, of Emory College; 10. "The Making of Methodism" (seventh paper), by the editor, Dr. Tigert. The first objection raised by Dr. Sheldon to the doctrine of divine nescience is "that it postulates a limitation upon God that intrinsically is not agreeable to the thought of his infinite perfection." The "most formidable obstacle," however, "is the veto which it encounters from the side of revelation." In addition to "the testimony of a prophetical consciousness, whose central representative was no less than the Son of God,” we have "specific predictions on matters bound up with the free agency of men," which have been not only "confidently uttered," but "fulfilled in a way which argues the legitimacy of the prophetical faith in divine foreknowledge." The seventh article will interest readers of Dante as well as of Vergil. From indications in the fourth eclogue and the sixth book of the Eneid " Professor Bowen concludes that "there is clearly