Connexion at large; and would not suffer them to be disgraced, even if, to prevent it, some thousands of pounds were required.' (Minutes, vol. ii., pp. 38, 39.)

Again in 1801:

'After all our collections have been disposed of, we are in debt above two thousand pounds, notwithstanding above two hundred pounds have been subscribed by the Travelling Preachers towards defraying the debt...Preachers, some of whom, last year, literally wanted bread... And, what is still more afflicting, we have been obliged

to refuse an increase of Preachers to many Circuits which have petitioned in that behalf....

'We have employed many days in considering the ways and means to extricate the Connexion out of its present difficulties -we say, the Connexion; for the cause is common both to Preachers and people...... We believe that you only need to have some practicable plan proposed to you for the payment of the public debt, and you will voluntarily and cheerfully comply with it for the glory of God, so far as is consistent with Christian prudence.'

Within three years of the first appeal the public debt' had disappeared.

The campaign of 1878-9 was opened most befittingly at City Road Chapel, under the most gracious auspices. Four things especially in that memorable meeting gave the happiest foretokens of success: the spirit of prayer, the joy of fellowship, deep humility and liberality liberally devised.

When God's people begin a great undertaking in the true spirit of prayer, their projects become prophecies: for then the Head of the Church comes forth as Jehovah 'that performeth the counsel of His messengers; . ...that saith to the deep, Be dry.' (Isaiah xliv. 26, 27.) The joy of fellowship, too, is a sure presage of good speed. The

Love-feast spirit was the real leverage that raised the enormous Centenary Fund. It would be a most blessed result of this movement if the taste for mutual edification by the intercommunication of religious experience were quickened and developed; so that nothing but a little more spontaneity and a little less routine should be needed to make the Class-meeting a throughout and after the enterprise, delight. Genuine humility, before, is absolutely essential. There must be, at every meeting, as at the first, no glorying in men, or in Methodism as a system; as if it were possible, by the most perfect Church machinery, to organize religious prosperity, as Carnot was said to organize victory.' But since nothing noble can be achieved without elevation of spirit, and a kind of military élan; he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord.' The Centenary movement was not only an era in the annals of Methodism, but also in the development of the science of Giving. It was a perceptible upheaval in the general level of liberality in British Christianity, being emulated, first by the Free Church of Scotland, and since that, more or less, by almost all denominations.

May God prosper this strenuous effort of His people for the relief and advancement of His own Work! On mountains where there has been such plenteous dew of grace there should also be fields of offering.' At the Centenary movement, 'the religious and devotional improvement of the Centenary' was made by the Committee of arrangement, the first and foremost object; and thus it must be with the present enterprise.

THERE comes a wail on every gale

To Judah from the North,

For Egypt's might to mortal fight
Hath poured in fury forth.

The young, the fair, the bold, the strong,
Lie lifeless on the plain;

And good Josiah swells the throng,
By Pharaoh's archers slain.

She mourns his fate-the wise, the great,
Her bravest and her best;
By men forlorn from Kishon borne,
Among her kings to rest.

Her singing women leave their mirth,
With all her singing men,

To weep for him whose like on earth
They may not see again.

O, well thy woe may overflow!
Nor can thy anguish tell

His worth to thee-how brave was he
Who at Megiddo fell :

Yet, Judah, weep not for the dead,
Nor vainly him bemoan:

Worse ills than gathered round his head
Are gathering round thy own.

The die is cast, the word is past,

Gone by the hour of grace;
Thy joy and hope, thy pride and prop,
Must quit his native place.
His house, forsaken of its God,
Shall to perdition fall;
For, see, the fateful ICHABOD
Is written on the wall,

To Egypt borne with shouts of scorn-
To infamy and chains,

He goes, no more to hail thy shore,

Or see thy fruitful plains:

In Pharaoh's dungeons doomed to weep,
To pine away, and die;

For where his great forefathers sleep
His bones shall never lie.

For him, unblest, no Sabbath-rest,
No Holy-Day shall be;

Thy cities fair, thy House of Prayer,
He never more may see:
No wife, no mother shall attend
To cheer his dying hour;

No Prophet o'er his couch shall bend,
With words of healing power.

Each passing gale his dirge shall wail;
Each flying cloud shall shed
A pitying tear upon the bier
Of thy unhonoured dead.

His place in darkness none shall know-
Acquaintance, guide or friend;
No children to his grave shall go,

To mourn his timeless end.

Bewail not thou the mighty, now
With spirits pure at rest:
By valiant deed from evil freed,
The buried are the blest.
To those no lamentation give
Who have in glory bled:
Weep for the weary hearts that live,
Not for the peaceful dead.

O! hadst thou pressed with dauntless breast
Along the ancient ways,

For Israel's sake would God awake,
As in the olden days.

But now the lingering judgment breaks,
His fury forth is gone,

His fruitful Gilead He forsakes,

His stately Lebanon.

Thy sons He gave, the wise, the brave-
Thy glory and thy joy;

And He creates thy darker fates-
The spoiler to destroy :

The want, the woe, the cruel hate,
Which threaten great and small;
Till they who wondered at thy state,
Shall wonder at thy fall.

Their feeble prey to tear and slay,
To thee the eagles fly;

And to the feast one from the East
Comes on with fearful cry.
And all that hear it bate their breath
That such a thing should be:
Fiercer than Pharaoh, and than Death
More terrible is he.

For him that goes away, whose woes
The grave alone may end,
Let all the tones that Misery owns
In frantic chorus blend.
Weep for the evil days which come
Like mail-clad men to thee;
For as thy Prince's hopeless doom,
So shall thy children's be.

He to the West, they to the East
Repair, till death to dwell;
By Nilus gray he fades
away,
And they by Hiddekel.
Their singing women silent stand,
With all their singing men ;
For hope and home and fatherland
They may not see again.

In valleys dank, by Gihon's bank,
They hang their harps on high,
Their woes to tell as tempests swell,
Or vernal winds go by;
Till the relenting Tyrant's ears
Are wearied with their wail,
And Babel's daughters stand in tears
While listening to their tale.

History of the Reformation in Germany and Switzerland, Chiefly. By Dr. K. R. Hagenbach, late Professor of Theology at Basel. Translated from the Fourth Revised Edition of the German, by Ecelina Moore. Vol. I. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. 1878. This is the third volume of Hagenbach's History of the Church; and numerous as are the histories of the Reformation, it is far from being superfluous. It has the charm and value of a popular narrative written by a deep thinker, an accomplished scholar and a distinguished theologian. The book, though the work of a very learned man, 'is not intended for learned men,' and is not a 'compend of Church History.' It is thoroughly interesting to the general reader. Not so picturesque and dramatic as D'Aubigné, it evinces higher culture and wider, calmer thought. Amongst the best parts of the volume are the accounts of Luther's Bible, the comparison and contrast of Luther and Zwingle, the delightful description of the home life of the great Reformers, the exposition of Melancthon's doctrinal system, the rich quotations from Luther and the apology for Luther's familiarity in prayer. But Hagenbach is too lenient altogether with Luther's shallow, self-confident, headstrong rejection of the Apocalypse and the Epistle of James, and his wish to put Melancthon's chief works into the Canon. Hagenbach applies the word 'liberal' to this arbitrary, egotistic, overbearing eclecticism of the great Reformer. This is to make liberal another word for wayward and self-willed. The work, however, is of real value and deep interest.

Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to

the Romans. By Friedrich Adolphe Philippi, Professor of Theology at Ros-tock. Translated from the Third Improved and Enlarged Edition, by the Rev. J. S. Banks. In Two Volumes. Vol. I. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. 1878.-Dr. Philippi is a theologian as well as an expositor: he has a keen and delicate tact of exposition, which is carefully, patiently and scientifically applied; he is also an acute grammatical interpreter, exploding a false rendering by showing. how the Greek must have read if the hypothesized sense had been the real one. His theology is often very judicious: cautious, well-considered and well-stated. He feels the absolute dependence of theology on exegesis and spares no pains to get at the true syntactical meaning of the successive sentences. He sometimes, though rarely, explains what does not need explaining; and, like many of his predecessors,' mistakes expansion for exposition." The worst of it is, however, that he is often least satisfactory on the most difficult passages. He moves like a halting giant on a hobbled war-steed. Thus he fails, as a theologian, in the solid, mutual adjustment of antithetical passages. He greatly underrates the action of the Spirit on the unconverted and the heathen. His interpretation of shall also perish without law' is altogether too bald and curt, too rough and ready, for such an exegete on such a text. In this way he misses some precious rays of revealed truth. weakens his, for the most part, powerful exposition of Romans v. 12, etc., by such an arbitrary and inconsistent limitationor such an unskilful putting-as the following comment on, the free gift came upon all men, etc.' Still there follows

He

here, as matter of course, the qualification that by all men are only meant all that believe.'

His exposition of Romans vi., vii., viii. 1,2-as the work of so accomplished an interpreter-is admonitorily inconsistent and confused. In his exposition of the sixth chapter he is misled by a theory of baptismal quasi-regeneration. He affirms that those to whom St. Paul wrote died to sin in baptism.' But he omits to explain how, in that case, the Apostle came to write buried with Him in baptism'; and not crucified with Him in baptism.' He makes baptism to be the sacrament of initiation into communion with Christ,...of incorporation into Christ.' And immediately after says, 'This holds true especially of infant baptism, preceding the ministry of the Word.' He adds, 'As, in baptism, the general act of salvation has been accomplished in me directly by God, my faith as to its assurance of salvation rests upon my baptism.' (P. 292.) And yet, on the words 'were baptized into His death,' he maintains, The Apostle describes a psychological event, mysterious indeed, but real and certain, although conceivable only by experience of the new birth effected through justification.' It seems then that, after all, the new birth is effected through justification,' and we are 'justified by faith'; so faith, not baptism, is the instrumental cause, as well as the condition, of the new birth.' What, then, is it which faith accomplishes, as distinct from that which baptism effects? We have Dr. Philippi's answer in the following terms: The fellowship with Christ in which baptism places us objectively, and faith subjectively.' It appears from this that, according to Philippi, the 'communion with Christ,' 'incorporation with Christ,' etc., which baptism, apart from faith produces, is merely outward, not inward; not a matter of experience whatever outward communion with, or outward incorporation into Christ, may be supposed to mean.

Dr. Philippi's exposition of Romans vii. is bewildered by a hopelessly unmanageable hypothesis, which even his skill can in no wise reconcile, by process of scientific exegesis, with the inspired phraseology, and as little with the facts of healthy Christian experience. He regards the seventh and -eighth of Romans as, not descriptive of two states or stages of development in the Christian life, but as concurrent phases of that life. But in order to give plausibility to his conception, and to work it into accord with the consciousness of earnest believers, he is driven to give an unwarrantably enfeebled sense to some of the

key-verses and critical expressions of the Apostle, such as 'sold under sin,' and captivity to the law of sin and death.' He repudiates the word 'normal,' as applied to the condition of a believer; būt he adopts the word 'ideal,' in such a way as to imply that the ideal of a Christian can never be realized, was never meant to be realized in this life. He is also entangled in the meshes of the old Scotch theology, which places regeneration, as an experienced fact, before repentance; thus leaving no intermediate, transitional or embryonic state between that of the unregenerate and the regenerate; here, again, ignoring the powerful action of the convincing Spirit on the as yet unregenerate.

These serious deductions notwithstanding, the close, grammatical student of the New Testament will find this a work of great helpfulness, by reason of the fine critical qualities of the author above indicated.

Mr. Banks has done his work admirably.

The History of the Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century, called Methodism. By Abel Stevens, LL.D. Vol. III. From Death of Wesley to Centenary of Methodism. New Edition, reprinted from the American Edition. London: Wesleyan Conference Office. 1878.The concluding volume of Dr. Stevens' great work betrays no flagging in the interest of the narrative or slackening of the energy with which the author began his task. In fact, the last volume is, in some respects, the most valuable of all, inasmuch as it traverses less beaten ground. The second chapter, on Conferences and Controversies from the Death of Wesley to the Settlement of the Wesleyan Polity, is one of the most important in the whole work. The author has taken a wise course in making great part of the volume a succession of historical portraits of representative men and women of various classes. The engravings enrich this volume greatly; not only as works of art, but as highly characteristic presentations of remarkable personages, especially those of Watson, Dawson, Bunting, Newton, Entwisle and Lessey. The two concluding paragraphs are very vigorous and perfectly just. A few unimportant topographical mistakes and one or two not unimportant omissions and obselete statements, result from the fact that this is a 'reprint' from the last American edition. A conspicuous omission is that of the name of Mary Barritt (Mrs. Taft) from the rol of Methodist female preachers in the present century. She was the ablest, most active and most successful of them all: the

instrument in the conversion of hundreds, amongst whom was the late venerable Thomas Jackson. This reminds us of a like omission in the first volume: that of Prior from a brilliant catalogue' of literary names, in which Rowe is included!

The appearance of this volume just now is very opportune. We can scarcely think of anything more likely to stir up an enthusiastic zeal for the relief and extension of Methodism than the perusal of this book.

Notes on the Rev. G. W. Olver's Fernley Lecture, 1878. By J. L. Posnett. London: Elliot Stock.-A severe examination of Mr. Olver's novel and startling views.' Mr. Posnett adduces superabundant evidence, by quotation from a great number of expositors and theologians of various denominations and schools of thought, that the views in question are 'novel'; but this the Lecturer himself does not deny. Mr. Posnett also shows that the Lecturer's definition of bodily death is as foreign to Greek or Latin and to ordinary' usage as to the Scriptures and divinity. He calls attention to inconsistencies of statement. He then points out the newness and irreconcilableness with Scripture of the representation given in the Lecture of the death of Christ. In like manner, the hypothesis of the solitude of the lost soul and the reduction to nothing or to ashes of the raised bodies of the unsaved, is shown to be destitute of Scriptural support. Several pages are occupied with the citation of authorities as to our Lord's preaching to the spirits in prison. Mr. Posnett's conclusion' is: The aim of the author appears to be that of treating philosophically the awful subject of sin and its consequences. In so doing, we think that he has deviated from the true lines of Biblical interpretation.' The pamphlet is quite as much a manifesto and a protest as an investigation and an argument. It evidences familiarity with the grand old divines. Mr. Posnett wisely recommends to us all, 'less of speculation, more of childlike trust and patience.'

The Englishman's Greek New Testament: giving the Greek Text of Stephens, 1550; with the Various Readings of the Editions of Elzevir, 1624; Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Alford and Wordsworth. Together with an Interlinear Literal Translation, and the Authorized Version of 1611. London: 8. Bagster and Sons. The object of this work is thus stated in the very modest, sensible and devout Introduction: To

help the devout English reader of the New Testament, who may, with a little know.. ledge of Greek, desire to refer to the actual words used by the Spirit of God.' It is, like the Englishman's Greek Concordance, especially adapted for the help of those seeking to learn from the Word itself rather than from the Commentaries." It is also an endeavour' to furnish the English student with all that he may require both as to the text of the New Testament, and possibly all that he requires for its word for word translation.' Just deference ispaid to the spiritual insight of the reader," and reverence to the grace and help of God.' This benevolent and well-conceived object has been accomplished with notable efficiency, by dint of careful and competent scholarship. The rendering is resolutely simple, and on that account all the more helpful; whilst the preservation of Greek modes of expression casts a kind of slanting light on the sense of Scripture. This work will be found very useful to a large number of searchers of the Scripture, who without such help might be discouraged. No pains have been spared to make that help effectual. The volume, being inexpensively got up,' is all the more accessible. The Greek type is easily legible, and pleasant to the eye.

Plain Proofs of the Great Facts of Christianity, for the Help of Minds perplexed with Difficulties. By F. E. White, M.A., Author of The World Unseen.' London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1878.-A very timely, well-conceived and well-executed little work. In his exemplarily modest Preface the author much underrates the merit of his production. True, it is mainly a compendiouspresentation of the arguments of Prebendary Row, Professors Westcott and Wace and Rev. W. Sanday; but the writer's own vigorous and remarkably well-balanced mind has been brought to bear on those arguments in a most happily effective way. His great subjects are treated in a manly, independent and really original manner, and with admirable clearness, precision and moderation of treatment, tone and style. It is a book for minds of some degree of cultivation; and we know of no other so suitable to be placed before such of them as have not the means, leisure or patience for the study of larger works. As a judicial summing up of those arguments, it may be read with great advantage by all.

It is, moreover, free from the grave faults of Prebendary Row's, in the main, very valuable Bampton Lecture. We are convinced, however, that Mr. White undervalues the force of the Presumptive Evi