Maecenas, or the lusisti satis, edisti satis atque bibisti: tempus abire tibi est, are quite in Crabbe's vein. He would have written admirable epigrams, if he could have endured the pains and time spent on filing and polishing. His best things are said without effort, and exactly fit the case; so completely that we sometimes wonder how he came by them and was able y mettre tant d'esprit. Crabbe's knowledge of human nature was entirely derived from observation. A platitude-for how else? What is meant is that he had little creative power-that is to say, power to individualise observation by investing it with a vivid personal shape. Creative power of this kind does not necessarily imply high genius. It is common enough among the novelists of to-day, but some of the greatest writers have not had it. Crabbe, as he tells us himself, drew direct from the life; constructing his stories, we may believe, but not creating the actors. His figures are not dramatic, and often so little effective that we are wearied by his careful portraiture of persons not worth portraying. He commands our belief, because he saw and could represent what he saw; but his touches, though always true and often profound, sometimes want vigour, and the interest, which is never absent, is due to circumstance rather than character. He looked upon human life as imprisoned in circumstance, which is one aspect of the human comedy or tragedy; he had not the courage, or the versatility, to imagine the other aspect, and describe characters wrestling with their surroundings and winning the battle. True enough, life is for the most part a poor compromise with environment; but not always; life supplies, and the masters of fiction and poetry portray, individual figures-heroic, pathetic, tragic, or comic; figures which stimulate our imagination and enlarge our conception of humanity. There is little of this in Crabbe. His actors are impotent pieces of the game,' who derive more interest from the game than from themselves; and they do not stamp themselves on our memory as the creations of Scott or Dickens, writers who may not have reflected so deeply or analysed so finely as Crabbe, but who saw their characters clearly, and had the dramatic touch which is essential to action, even in narrative; for narrative and drama are closely allied. To sum up. Crabbe's position as a poet is secure, because his poetry is sincere and spontaneous and full of unexpected beauties. In writing verse in preference to prose he expressed his true natural capacity. His descriptions of external things are of the first order, and they are never mere descriptions, but strike a key of sentiment with unerring tact. His knowledge of the poor human heart and his pity for its fate is the distinguishing note of his genius. His observation is his own, his reflexions are his own; there is nothing second-hand in him, except the Johnsonian robe which he trails in awkward contrast to his occasionally plebeian diction and his slovenly grammar and versification; and the more we read him the more we value the sincerity and soundness of his judgement, and discover fresh beauties of poetical thought under the homely garb in which it suited him to disguise his genius. Von PAUL ART. III.-1. Die Anfänge unserer Religion. 2. Das Wesen des Christentums. Von ADOLF HARNACK. Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1900. [English translation, 'What is Christianity?' London: Williams & Norgate, 1901.] 3. L'Évangile et l'Église. [Épuisé.] Par ALFRED LOISY. Paris: A. Picard, 1902. 4. Dogma, Gerarchia, e Culto nella chiesa primitiva. Da G. SEMERIA. Roma: F. Pustet, 1901. 5. Liberal Judaism. By CLAUDE G. MONTEFIORE. London: Macmillan & Co., Limited, 1903. THAT HAT the theory of evolution should have been received with hostility, and should still be regarded with suspicion, by theologians is a striking instance of the extent to which judgement may be obscured by prejudice. For it is only by a liberal use of this theory that the beliefs and institutions of the Churches of to-day can be defended: the primary admission incumbent on the historian faced by the problem of the relation of later Christianity to that of the first ages is, that in the beginning it was not 'so.' The first name that will occur to English readers in this connection is that of John Henry Newman. In his Essay on the Developement of Christian Doctrine' this eminent divine found himself under the necessity of dealing with this delicate and at the time (1845) novel position. The book was epoch-making: it was the bridge between Tractarianism and Rome. It helps us to understand the epidemic of atavism which in the middle of the last century led so many Englishmen to revert from the somewhat jejune Protestantism of the period to the fuller beliefs and more picturesque observances of medieval religion. The author was gravitating surely, and no longer slowly, Romeward he was bound, he felt, to justify his action to himself and to others; he was a considerable patristic scholar, and he was one of the most consummate advocates who ever lived. He was aware that there were certain specifically Roman doctrines and practices which it was difficult to bring under the famous Vincentian Canon: and he met the difficulty, first, by an effective tu quoque, What ever be historical Christianity, it is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this'; and, secondly, by pointing out that the canon, taken literally, was fatal to the dogmatic position-which he and his opponents alike took for granted as such; since it was notorious that fundamental beliefs common to England and Rome had been ignored, ambiguously expressed, and even, in terms at least, denied by early writers. This, indeed, was no new position; it had been triumphantly upheld in the seventeenth century by the Jesuit Petavius against Bull and Bossuet. Tertullian's Fuit tempus cum Filius non fuit' was Arianism pure and simple; the teaching of St. Basil and the Gregories on original sin was scarcely to be distinguished from that of Pelagius; Hooker's apology for them amounts to no more than a plea in mitigation of judgement: Shall we give sentence of death inevitable against all those Fathers in the Greek Church which, 'being mispersuaded, died in the error of free will?' But the controversy, famous in its day, had, after the manner of controversies, been forgotten; Newman's book burst like a bombshell on the religious world. On the one hand it cut away the 'Perpétuité de la Foi'-the keystone, it was believed, of orthodoxy; on the other it opened the door to uncertainty and error of every description; if it justified the Athanasian theology, it justified also the creed of Pius IV. He proposed to account for the facts by a theory which he called that of 'Developements '-viz. :— 'that the increase and expansion of the Christian creed and ritual, and the variations which have attended the process in the case of individual writers and Churches, are the necessary attendants on any philosophy or polity which takes possession of the intellect and heart and has any wide or extended dominion; that, from the nature of the human mind, time is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas; and that the highest and most wonderful truths, though communicated to the world once for all by inspired teachers, could not be comprehended all at once by the recipients, but, as received and transmitted by minds not inspired and through media which were human, have required only the longer time and deeper thought for their full elucidation.' (Developement, p. 27.) But the theory was too subtle to command general acceptance. First, it was a hypothesis to account for a difficulty,' and orthodoxy does not readily recognise difficulties; secondly, such catchwords as 'Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omni * Developement, p. 5. 'bus,' or the 'unanimus consensus patrum,' empty as they were of any real content, were more effective, because more easily understood. Protestants distrusted it because it was devised in the interests of Catholicism; Catholics, because it represented Catholicism as another Gospel,' an aftergrowth contained only implicitly in the Gospel of Christ. It is impossible to suppose that so acute a mind as Newman's was blind to the applications of which his theory was capable, or to the results to which, when thus applied, it led. But it was no business of his to indicate them; he used it for a particular purpose, and no further. His conception of it, indeed, oscillates between that of an evolution properly so called-which, valid as it is, is foreign to the antiquity on which he relied and which he desired to re-establishand that of a mere explication, 'a developement of distinct'ness of analysis.' And, under the guidance of the idea which inspired the book throughout, he lays down certain skilfully chosen tests of a true developement '-preservation of type, continuity of principles, power of assimilation, early anticipation, logical sequence, preservative additions, chronic continuance of which it is not too much to say that it is impossible to conceive a corruption of the Gospel which could not be brought under one or other of them. Brilliant as the argument is, it is advocacy, not science. Catholicism is on trial, and we are listening to counsel for the defence. 6 Since then much water has flowed under the bridges. During the last half-century the historical sense has developed to such an extent as to transform our outlook over the past. Before, taking names for things, we construed it in the terms of the present, attributing to men of remote ages the conceptions, the standpoints, the institutions of to-day. The Church' of which we read in the New Testament suggested an organised society like the Church of Rome or the Church of England; a deacon,' a newly ordained curate fresh from Oxford; a 'bishop,' a dignitary living in a palace and wearing lawn sleeves. Human nature, it is true, is much the same at all times; its elemental needs, instincts, and passions sway, as they have swayed and will always sway, men. But this identity is fundamental, and subsists under an almost infinite diversity of setting and detail. Hence, over and above a knowledge of the facts and the power of weighing evidence, the faculty of historical imagination is part of the equipment of the student. This faculty is characteristic of the writer of |