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The Review of Reviews. 



HIBBERT JOURNAL: DECENNIAL NUMBER. 



CoN-GRATULATioxs 10 the Editor of the Hibbert 

 [oiirnal on issuing his decennial number this October 

 are superfluous. The array of writers contributing 

 to this one number is more than any felicitation. 

 Mr. Balfour, M.Bergson, M.Loisy, Professor Harnack, 

 are of themselves sufficient proof of the eminent 

 standing which the Hibbert has secured, as well as of 

 its catholicity of scope. Several of the principal 

 articles demand separate notice. 



M. Loisy's paper on " The Christian Mystery " is 

 disappointing, except for its audacity. He says the 

 (r.ospel of Jesus was not a religion ; but less than 

 thirty years after His death, a religion had issued from 

 the Gospel. It was a mystery on the lines of those 

 associated with the cults of Demeter, Osiris and 

 Milhra. The Christian mystery borrowed much from 

 jiagan mysteries and supplanted them, because it had 

 a firmer doctrine of God and of immortality, and of 

 a Divine Saviour. 



Dr. Harnack compares Greek and Christian piety 

 at the end of the third century by giving copious 

 excerpts from the letter of Porphyry to his wife 

 . Marcella. Porphyry was the great foe of Christianity, 

 yet his piety accords with that of the Christians of his 

 day, just in its deepest elements. The two opponents, 

 (ireck and Christian philosophy, approach each other 

 not only in the sphere of doctrine and organised 

 wor>hip and of discipline, but in the innermost life, 

 the domain of piety. What still parted them was 

 "the myth'' alone. But it was a Hellenic philo- 

 sophical Christianity ihat conquered heathendom. 

 The Christian piety of the times was apparently too 

 Hellenic. 



Professor Sanday discusses the apocalyptic element 

 in the Gospels as one main starting-point for the 

 teaching of our Lord and for His own conception of 

 His mission. Yet the writer emjjhasises no less the 

 new turn and new significance that He gave to it. 

 The idea of the apocalyptic kingdom was subsumed 

 under the larger idea — of a kingdom already in 

 process of realisation. 



Professor Arthur Thomson shows that from the 

 biological point of view he does not believe that there 

 is one science of Nature. The physico-chemical 

 descriptions of vital processes are insufficient to 

 explain either the everyday functions within the 

 organism, or the still more difficult and complicated 

 animal behaviour. He cites the case of the eels 

 which are born on the edge of the great .\tlantic 

 abyss off the west coast of Ireland, and after spend- 

 ing some time there make their way to the east of the 

 Baltic, pass up the rivers, feed, and then return to 

 iheir native submarine cliff to propagate their species 

 and die. 



Professor Henry Jones inveighs against the Labour 

 Party for corrupting the citizenship of the working 



man by allowing the pre-suppositions of commercial- 

 ism and industrialism to determine their attitude 

 towards the State. The Labour Party, he says, is the 

 victim of the pre-suppositions of Trade Unionism and 

 is " corrupt in its very conception." With a strange 

 ignorance of the facts, the Professor declares that 

 " the Labour Party has everything at its back except 

 the power of a generous idealism." He prophecies 

 that when the true leader of the working man 

 appears, he will come armed with a nobler ideal for 

 the State. 



Dr. P. T. Forsyth, writing on Revelation and the 

 Bible, declares that Christian revelation is really , 

 redemption, that it is the Gospel in the Bible. The 

 Bible is one monument of the two-fold revelation, 

 God's pure fact in act in Christ crucified, and His 

 true, but not pure, word of revelation in the Apostle-. 



Dr. Estlin Carpenter describes the Sikh religion. 



The feature of social service is introduced by an 

 appeal to English gentlemen by the Bishop of London, 

 who thinks that we shall come to universal military 

 service, but urges meanwhile that the voluntary 

 Territorial Army should be made an unqualified 

 success. He urges English gentlemen to train the 

 boys, in Boy Scouts and Boys' Brigades, and to bear 

 witness against the point on which the public opinion 

 of English gentlemen is still in the most rotten con- 

 dition- namely, on the moral question, and declare 

 that vice is destructive. Let English gentlemen work 

 clubs and act as treasurers for religious institutions. 



OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE REVIEW. 



The October number shows that not merely has 

 this review become a partisan organ of the Unionists, 

 but that it is also an organ of the Roman Catholic 

 Unionists. Mr. F. E. Smith's di.scussion of Unionist 

 prospects has been separately noticed, as also has 

 Mr. Burgoyne's jubilant account of our supremacy in 

 Dreadnoughts. But the Roman Catholic interest 

 appears in a paper by A. Delle Rive on "The Two 

 Romcs of To-day,'' in which the claims of the Pope 

 are set forth, and the hope expressed that some 

 reconciliation will be accomplished through an inter- 

 national law which will guarantee the freedom and 

 spiritual independence of the head of Catholicism. 

 Similarly in the article, which is noticed elsewhere, 

 by Georges Goyau. Sir Clement Kinloch Cooke, 

 M.P., advances his scheme for joint action between 

 the Home and Dominion Governments in promoting 

 emigration from the Home Country. Mr. Arthur 

 Ransome defines poetry as a combination of kinetic 

 with potential speech. Purely kinetic speech is 

 prose, purely potential speech is music ; poetry com- 

 bines the two, its kinetic quality preserving it from 

 nonsense, its potential quality separating it from bad 

 prose. An anonymous writer laments " the virtual 

 disappearance from the effective English life of 

 anything that can properly be called a scholarly 

 class." It pleads for the education of study. 



