individual conscience than the Pope himself does, and that they were so infatuated as to believe their Church to be the only true one." "In Wesley's day many of the common people were uncivilized. The inhabitants of Faversham, he says, were in 1738 "more savage in their behavior than the wildest Indians." The whole conversation of the women, boys, and girls employed in the factories at Epworth was profane and loose to the last degree; the people of Kingswood were "so ignorant of the things of God that they seemed but one remove from the beasts which perish." In the upper classes the condition was even worse. Wesley wrote, "It is now the custom in high society to give obscene healths, even though clergymen be present; one of whom, lately refusing to drink such a health, was put out of the room; and one of the forwardest in this shameless company was a bishop's steward." Preaching in Salop in 1790, he was much ashamed of his audience, and wrote, "The moment I ceased speaking I suppose fifty of them were all talking at once; they had neither sense nor manners; and no wonder, for they were all gentle folks." Whenever these "genteel people" behaved as well as peasants he was pleasantly surprised. At Bath in 1789 he wrote: "Here we have the rich and honorable in abundance; and yet many of them came to preaching even in a stormy night and were as attentive as colliers!" The reforming and civilizing influences of Methodism reached the scum on the top of society as well as the dregs at the bottom. A Roman Catholic in Ireland refused to join one of Mr. Wesley's societies, "because," he said, "I now have all my sins forgiven for four shillings a year; and this could not be in your Church." A Grand Jury in Cork in their official presentment characterized Charles Wesley and other preachers as persons of ill fame and common vagabonds. Attached to the Foundery in London was a poorhouse which at one time sheltered nine widows, a blind woman, and two children. Speaking of this almshouse and its inmates, Wesley wrote, "I myself and the other preachers who are in town diet with the poor, at the same table and on the same food; and we rejoice herein as a comfortable earnest of our eating bread together in our Father's kingdom." An attractive young widow named Grace Murray nursed Mr. Wesley during an illness. On recovery he asked her to become his wife and she consented. Afterward, however, she changed her mind and married another man, upon which Wesley expressed his disappointment in these verses: I saw her run with winged speed, In works of faith and laboring love; And showers of blessings from above Companions now in weal and woe No power on earth could us divide; Oft-though as yet the nuptial tie Was not-clasping her hand in mine, Such was the friend than life more dear, The tempter's unresisted power Tore from my inward bleeding heart! The Philippines and the Far East. By HOMER C. STUNTZ. Crown 12mo, pp. 514. Cincinnati: Jennings & Pye. New York: Eaton & Mains. Price, $1.75 net. The perusal of this book confirms us in the opinion that if a special task is to be performed the busiest man to be found is the man to perform it. The man who has plenty of time is not to be relied on. St. Paul's motto, "This one thing I do," is all right in its application to the achievement of life's supreme object, but there are other things to be done betimes. It is safe to assume that when the author declares, "It has been laid upon me to write this book," and that "it came to me as a duty to set down in order the things which American voters and American Christians eught to know for their guidance in helping to shape the policies of our nation, and furnishing the support for our Missionary Societies in the work God has appointed each to do" among the people of the Philippine Archipelago, he has a message to which attention should be given, especially since he was burdened during the preparation of the book with "very heavy duties as pastor and presiding elder." Between the man who must and the man who may write a book there is a vast difference. The first two chapters contain an outline of the geography of the archipelago, and an answer to the question, "Who are the Filipinos?" The author states that "there are seven main racial and linguistic subdivisions of the typical Filipinos," together with "many lesser divisions." After enumerating these subdivisions, namely, Visayans, Bicols, Tagalogs, Pampangans, Ilocanos, Pangasinans, and Cagayanos, and giving the census of each, the author states that "the languages of these seven races all spring from the original Malay, each has its own grammar and vocabulary, and none of the races named can understand each other." The social order and general characteristics of the people are elaborately described and the statement is made that "the result of three years' work in the newly established American schools demonstrates the capacity of the Filipino mind for receiving culture." An interesting historical summary from the discovery of the islands by Magellan in 1521 until the sinking of the Spanish fleet by Admiral Dewey in 1898 occupies nearly twenty pages of the volume. The arraignment of the Spanish government through nearly four centuries of oppression such as only that nation is capable of inflicting is severe and relentless. Since the friars were the instruments charged with the execution of the atrocities ordained by that government, much space is devoted to them and to the cruel practices that secured for them the undying hatred of the populace. The avarice, licentiousness, debauchery, and general immorality of these servants of the Church would seem too astounding for belief only that the testimony of unimpeachable witnesses affirms the absolute integrity of the record. That insurrections against Spanish rule were frequent, despite the moral certainty that those who engaged in them would suffer torture, imprisonment, banishment, and death, is not surprising, nor is it to be wondered at that the friendly advances of our government were regarded with suspicion by the natives in view of the treachery and insincerity of their former rulers. The story of the destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay by Admiral Dewey and the assumption of control of the Philippines by our government is graphically told, and no room is left for doubt as to the author's profound sympathy with the McKinley policy concerning the government of the archipelago. The resources of the islands, the friar lands, Philippine finances, the religious situation, the opening of the territory to missionary undertakings, together with some of the difficulties to be surmounted, are fully discussed. The volume contains a map of the Philippine Islands, a diagram of the city of Manila, and nearly one hundred fine illustrations. Rousseau and Naturalism in Life and Thought. By WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON. 12mo, pp. 260. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Price, cloth, $1.25. This is one of the volumes in the series on "The World's Epoch-makers," edited by Oliphant Smeaton. Included in the series are sixteen others, such as Buddha, Plato, Euclid, Savonarola, Anselm, Cranmer, Francis and Dominic, Origen, Pascal, Luther, Wesley, Hegel, Hume, and Herschel. An unsavory and malodorous memory is Rousseau. His autobiography is full of things which can only be referred to with an apology, if at all. Mr. Hudson, in the volume before us, has done his work capably, 'but he admits the truth of Grant Allen's remark that Rousseau is too indecent a subject to be fully treated in any book written for general perusal. Gray, of the "Elegy," once wrote to Walpole: "Rousseau's Letters I am reading heavily, heavily! He convinces me that he deserved to be burned, or at least that his book did." Another calls him "a sentimental scribbler, always redolent of the gutter," and says truly that the famous Confessions, by which Rousseau is now chiefly known, are both dirty and dull. Not many men have said worse things or had worse things said of them. Madame d'Épinay called him "a moral dwarf mounted on stilts." Diderot, after an interview with Rousseau, wrote: "May I never see that man again; he makes me believe in devils and hell." Johnson called him "a rascal," and "a very bad man." The author explains some of his wickedness as insanity, and says: "To me Rousseau, as a man, is a degenerate, who does not even possess the personal fascination which sometimes goes along with degeneracy." And yet this man is here classed among the world's epoch-makers, and no little importance is attached to his religious writings! We are told that he was a man of profoundly religious nature, who, amid the widespread persiflage and cynicism of his time, passionately upheld the everlasting reality of spiritual things. Mrs. Marian Evans Cross said: "The genius of Rousseau sent an electric thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which awakened me to new perceptions;" and this he did, she says, not by teaching any new belief, but simply because "the mighty rushing wind of his inspiration has so quickened my faculties that I have been able to shape more definitely for myself ideas which had previously dwelt as dim ahnungen in my soul." We did not know that Rousseau was so much of an evangelist; he seems to have started a revival in Mrs. Cross's soul. He confessed his own moral weakness in these words: "To act from duty in opposition to inclination I found impossible." The ideas of Rousseau helped to bring on and largely inspired the French Revolution. His doctrines were made the corner stone on which the leaders attempted to build. In 1788 Marat read and expounded publicly Rousseau's Contrat Social, and Mallét du Pan found it difficult to name a single revolutionist who was not transported by Rousseau's anarchistic theories and who did not burn with desire to realize them. In agreement with this is the emphatic testimony of Edmund Burke, who said: "Everybody knows that there is a great dispute amongst the revolutionary leaders, which of them is the best resemblance to Rousseau. In truth, they all resemble him. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day or the debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; he is their standard figure of perfection. For statues to him the foundries of Paris are now running with the molten kettles of their poor and bells of their churches." Admitting that Rousseau was a man of genius, this biographer says of him, as somebody said of Victor Hugo, "If he had genius, that was all he had." He was not a systematic thinker; his treatment of life was narrow and one-sided; his philosophy was full of paradoxes and inconsistencies; his teachings seem a strange compound of the commonplace and the fantastic, the obvious and the impossible; and in the whole of his voluminous works there is nothing that can for a moment be ranked among the abiding things of literature. One true sentence from Rousseau we catch sight of as we close Professor Hudson's well-written book: "Public safety is nothing if all the individuals are not safe." This is akin to the truth that the only way to uplift and save a community is to save and uplift its individuals. METHODIST REVIEW. SEPTEMBER, 1904. ART. I.-THE RESURRECTION THE CROWNING FACT OF CHRISTIANITY. I. It will be recalled that Harnack began his celebrated lectures on the nature of Christianity by telling his students how important it was "to remind mankind again and again that a man of the name of Jesus Christ once stood in their midst." May.not we add that it is likewise immensely important to remind mankind again and again that one named Jesus Christ once died and rose again from the dead? For Strauss was not far wrong in thinking that the doctrine of the resurrection was "the center of the center, the real heart of Christianity"—at least this is true if the first Christians understood at all adequately the religion which they were set to preach. The two main topics of the apostolic teaching were the death and the resurrection of Jesus. “We preach Christ crucified," was the declaration of Paul,' but side by side with "the preaching of the cross" was the preaching of the empty tomb. In the synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia, in that at Thessalonica, before the philosophers of Athens,' and before Festus and Agrippa at Cæsarea"-to Jew and to Gentile, learned and ignorant, high and low-Paul made known his faith in the resurrection of Jesus, and he put that fact in the foreground of his preaching. In doing this he was making no new Gospel. "I delivered unto you," he writes to the Corinthians," "that which also I received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; and that he was buried; and that he hath been raised 6 What Is Christianity Eng. trans., p. 1. 2 Quoted by Mair, Studies in the Christian Evidences, p. 232. 5 3 1 Cor. 1, 23. 4 1 Cor. 1, 18. 5 Acts xill, 30-34. 6 Acts xvii, 3. 7 Acts xvil, 18, 31. 8 Acts xxvi, 23. 91 Cor. xv. 3, 4. |