GLIMPSES OF REVIEWS AND MAGAZINES.

THE letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton are continued in the Atlantic Monthly (Boston) for August, revealing the peculiarities of a pure but crochety and sometimes perverse genius. A severe critic he was of himself as well as of others. In one letter he wrote: "I have often thought of setting down some notes of my life, but I know not how. I should have to accuse my own folly bitterly-but not less the folly of the fondest, faithfullest, most devoted, most mistaken parents that ever child was blest with, or ruined by. For myself, I could speak of my follies and sins-I could not speak of my good. Many of my own struggles for better things I have forgotten. I cannot judge myself— I can only despise and pity. In my good nature I have no merit—but much weakness and folly. In my genius I am curiously imperfect and broken. The greatest part of my life has been a series of delights which are gone forever, and of griefs which remain forever; and my one necessity is to turn away my thoughts from what they refuse to forget. Some day I will set down a few things; but the more you understand me the less you will care for me. I am dishonest enough to want you to take me for what I am to you-not for what I am in the hollowness of me." From Verona he wrote with irony: "This Italy is such a lovely place to study liberty in! There are the vilest wretches of ape-faced children riding on my griffins all day long, or throwing stones at the rarest carvings, that ever were left to find the broad way to Hades without so much as a blinker, let alone a bridle." Between Verona and Venice he traveled, in the same compartment, it would seem, with "an American family" who disgusted him completely, "Father and mother and two girls-presumably rich—girls fifteen and eighteen. I never before conceived the misery of wretches who had spent all their lives in trying to gratify themselves. It was a little warm— warmer than was entirely luxurious-but nothing in the least harmful. They moaned and fidgeted and frowned and puffed and stretched and fanned, and ate lemons, and smelt bottles, and covered their faces, and tore off the covering again, and had no one thought or feeling during five hours of traveling in the most noble part of all the world except what four poor beasts would have had in their den in a menagerie, being dragged about on a hot day. Add to this misery every form of vulgarity in methods of doing and saying the common things they did and said. I never yet saw humanity so degraded (allowing for external circumstances of every possible advantage). Given wealth, attainable education, and the inheritance of eighteen centuries of Christianity, and ten of noble paganism: and this is your result-by means of Liberty!" Not much of an enthusiast for liberty was John Ruskin, it would seem. Writing of an old family servant, his father's nurse and his, also, he says: "From her girlhood to her old age the entire ability of her life was given to serving us. She had a natural gift and specialty for doing for others the things which they found it disagreeable to do for themselves. She was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills instead of her own, and seeking other people's good instead of her own." Who was it

who said, "He that will be greatest among you, let him be your servant"? Did not this woman, and such as she, fulfill His command better than lords and masters do? Must it not be that she, and such as she, are nearer and dearer to "the Son of Man" who "came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," than are the privileged and the pampered? It may be that "below stairs" there are special opportunities for brothership and intimacy with Him who "made himself of no reputation and took upon him the form of a servant❞—whom to know intimately is life eternal. In 1871 Ruskin bought at Coniston "five acres of rock and moor, a streamlet, the finest view in Cumberland or Lancashire, and on it a small, old, damp, and smoky-chimneyed house." Of it he wrote in September: "I shall in all probability be settled in the house in November, for one of the reasons for my getting into it is that I may fully command the winter sunsets, in clear sky-instead of losing the dead of day in the three o'clock fog of London. Meantime I am very thankful for that sense of rest which you also feel; but it is greatly troubled and darkened and lowered by the horrible arrangement of there being women in the world as well as mountains and stars and lambs, and what else one might be at peace with-but for those other creatures." We wonder what woman had been irritating him? A similar perverse exaggeration of language is in his exclamation about the painter Tintoret: "What a gigantic, healthy Sea-Heaven of a life he had, compared to this sickly, muddy, half-poisoned wine which is my River of Life!" To the students of St. Andrews, the oldest university of Scotland, of which he was once Lord Rector, he gave as subject for prize essays: "The definition of Heroism, and its function in Scotland at this day"-not a bad subject for a sermon. When Norton ascribed the fall of Siena to "the failure of religious faith," Ruskin moved to amend by substituting, "the failure of the qualities which render religious faith possible."

JAMES J. WALSH, M.D., Ph.D., has been showing in the Catholic World (New York) that electrical science owes its origin and progress chiefly to great scientists who were also simple, faithful believers in Christianity. He takes the men whose names were chosen to be used as terms for the units of electrical science, being selected by the Commission of the International Congress of Electricians; these are the names of Volta, Faraday, Ampère, Ohm, and Coulomb; in addition to these he mentions the distinguished English physicists Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin. Ampère was acknowledged to be one of the greatest scientists of his day. After a period of infidelity caused by the spirit of the French Revolution he became a sincere and devout Christian. Religion guided the labors of his life and illumined his contemplations. By its standards he judged all things, even science itself. He prayed at the same altars where Descartes and Pascal had knelt, and beside the poor widow and the little child with a faith as simple as theirs. One who lived with him says that his conversations always led up to God. Frederick Ozanam tells us how Ampère used to say, holding his broad forehead with his hands, "How great is God, Ozanam! How great is God, and how little is our knowledge!" Sainte-Beuve expressed admiration and wonder at the way in which Ampère "united religion and science, confidence in the intellectual possibilities of man with adoring submission to

the revealed will of God." Ampère collected in a book the historical evidences of the divinity of Christianity, and devoted much time to bringing the great truths of Christianity prominently before the men of his generation. He sympathized deeply with the struggles of the South American peoples to establish free and independent republican governments. He was interested in everything that promised to make life more livable for his fellow-men. He laid down principles for what he called a science of public felicity, in which he emphasized not the rights of men, but their duties toward one another. The Archbishop of Lyons said truly, "Ampère was at once a great scientist and a great Christian.” He cheered himself, when dying, by repeating passages from the Imitation of Christ which he knew by heart. Coulomb, an eminent French investigator, a military engineer, the most distinguished authority of his time in hydraulics, a discoverer in electricity and in other departments of physics, notably in regard to heat and the circulation of sap in trees, resisted the demoralizing influence of the French Revolution and the storms of rationalism that swept over France, retaining his faith in God and belief in divine Providence. Of him Biot wrote: "Coulomb lived patiently among the men of his time, only withdrawing himself from their passions and their errors, maintaining always his justice, calmness, firmness, and dignity." Ohm was a German, son of a locksmith, largely selfmade, who became Professor of Physics in the University of Munich. He worked out mathematically from practical experiments the amount of resistance encountered by electric currents, and formulated the law, for the benefit of electrical science. He also worked out and established the law of acoustics which is known under his name, and which, as later demonstrated by Helmholtz, revolutionized acoustics and the theory of music. This eminent scientific discoverer was a man of reverent mind, deeply religious, with a simple, earnest faith in God, his dependence on whom he constantly acknowledged, and to whose will and providence he humbly bowed. Professor Clerk Maxwell "held for more than half of his brief life of forty-eight years a prominent position in the very foremost rank of natural philosophers." Scientists declare his great treatise on Electricity and Magnetism one of the most splendid monuments ever raised by the genius of a single individual. "There seems no doubt that Maxwell took the first grand step toward the discovery of the true nature of electrical phenomena. As professor of experimental physics in the University of Cambridge, occupied constantly with the highest problems of mathematics and of electrical theory, he went home every evening to lead his household at family prayers. The simple and beautiful religiousness which marked his life appeared even more clearly in his last illness. His biographers say: "He was a regular and constant attendant at church, and seldom, if ever, failed to join in the monthly celebration of the Holy Communion, and he was a generous contributor to religious and charitable causes. But his illness drew out the whole heart and soul and spirit of the man; his firm and undoubting faith in the Incarnation and all its results-in the full sufficiency of the Atonement-and in the work of the Holy Spirit. He had gauged and fathomed all the schemes and systems of philosophy, and had found them utterly empty and unsatisfying—' unworkable' was his own word about them-and from them all he turned with simple faith to the Gospel of the Saviour." Clerk Maxwell, one of the greatest leaders of scientific thought in his day, closed one of his last lectures with an expression

of his faith in "Him who in the beginning created not only the heaven and the earth, but the materials of which heaven and earth consist." He vehemently uttered his contempt for that pseudo-science which aims to reduce the whole system of the universe to a fortuitous sequence of uncaused events. The greatest living physicist is Lord Kelvin. As a practical scientist he is distinguished for his remarkable services in applied science. The big ships of iron and steel are sailing the seas safely to-day because of what he did for the improvement of the compass. He is also a great theorist, having by his studies thrown more light on many of the baffling problems of physics than any man in our generation. Like his friend Clerk Maxwell, Lord Kelvin is a sincere, unostentatious Christian. Only last year he not only made it clear that he believes in a Divine and Infinite Creator, but he declared that modern science is not atheistic or materialistic in its tendencies, but actually furnishes proof of the existence of a Creator. As he put it: "Science positively affirms creative power. It makes every one feel a miracle in himself. It is not in dead matter that we live and move and have our being, but in the creative and directing Power which science compels us to accept as an article of belief. Modern biologists are once more coming to a firm acceptance of the existence of a vital principle. If they know God only in His works, they are absolutely forced by science to believe with absolute confidence in a directive Power." (Lord Kelvin, walking with Liebig, asked the great chemist whether he thought a roadside flower, which he plucked, could possibly have come into being by chance. Liebig replied, "No more than I could think a book on botany, describing the flower, had come into existence by a chance arrangement of letters and words, pages and chapters, cover, contents, and illustrations.") It is shown that the science which looms largest, and shines brightest, and promises most wonderful things in the world of to-day-the science of electricity-owes its progress chiefly to intellects whose greatness did not interfere with faith in and reverence for the Supreme Mind, which invented the universe and filled it with the forces which the keenest of human intellects delight to study in order to utilize them for human good, while they rejoice, as Kepler did, in thinking God's thoughts after Him. It is most fitting that electricity and the Gospel should go together. The future belongs to them both; their greatest triumphs are yet to come. Each has its mission of illumination, purification, unification, healing, progress, and power. Each is a parable and analogue of the other. Some say electricity is life; millions know the Gospel is life. Each in its own way is to be the Light of the world. To think what these two mighty forces will do, judging by actual indications, makes one long to live through the twentieth century, just to witness the wonder of it all. Will not some poet-preacher, some high man with knowledge, faith, and vision, build us a prophetic parable of Electricity and the Gospel? We think preeminently of two men who ought to do it, and send it to the Methodist Review.

Two strongly conservative and timely protests appear in the Bibliotheca Sacra (Oberlin) for July, one against the excesses of present-day biblical criticism, by Dr. Abraham Kuyper, who is Holland's greatest man as well as ablest and most influential theologian; the other against the excesses of the New Theology, so called, by Philip Hudson Churchman, of Princeton University. Dr. Kuyper

denounces the biblical criticism which tends to destroy the Church of the living God, inasmuch as it revokes her theology, robs her of her Bible, and destroys her liberty in Christ. He contends, and shows, first, that such criticism must end in the destruction of theology, since it tears the parts of theology out of their relation, violates its character, and substitutes for it something which is no theology. The Church needs a theology in order that she may grasp the more hidden sense of God's Word; that she may discover the deflection of this line of error; that she may protect the medical art of the soul from passing into a spiritual quackery; that she may exhibit the reasonableness of her faith, and, as an apologete, may plead for it. Kuyper's most strenuous protest against the destructive criticism is on the ground that it robs us of our Bible. "When," he asks, "do we have a Bible, and when do we not?" and then this great scholar speaks for himself as follows: "Allow me to speak of this holy matter plainly as a day laborer, because the Holy Scripture is a divine jewel common to the day laborer and professor. And then I say it frankly and unhesitatingly— to us Christians of the Reformed faith, the Bible is the Word and the Scripture of our God. When in private or at the family altar I read the Holy Scripture, neither Moses nor John addresses me, but the Lord my God. He it is who then narrates to me the origin of all things and the calamitous fall of man. God tells me with silent majesty how he has appointed salvation to our fallen race. I hear him himself relate the wonders which he wrought for our deliverance and that of the people of his choice, and how, when that people rebelled against him, he afflicted them in his wrath, and when chastened restored them again to his favor, the whilst they sought the day of the coming of the Son of his love. In the midst of that sacred history I hear the Holy Spirit singing to my spiritual ear in the Psalms, which discloses the depths of my own soul; in the prophets I hear him repeat what he whispered in the soul of Israel's seers, and in which my own soul is refreshed by a perspective which is most inspiring and beautiful; till at length, in the pages of the New Testament, God himself brings out to me the Expected One, the Desire of the fathers; shows me the place where the manger stood; points out to me the tracks of his footsteps; and on Golgotha lets me see how the Son of his unique love, for me, poor doomed one, died the death of the cross. And, finally, it is the same God, the Holy Spirit, who, as it were, reads off to me what he caused to be preached by Jesus's disciples concerning the riches of that cross, and closes the record of this drama in the Apocalypse with the enchanting Hosanna from the heaven of heavens. Call this, if you will, an almost childish faith, outgrown by your larger wisdom, but I cannot better it. Such is my Bible to me, and such it was in the bygone ages, and such it is still, the Scripture of the Church of the living God. The human authors must fall away; in the Bible God himself must tell the narrative, sing, prophesy, correct, comfort, and jubilate in the ear of the soul. The majesty of the Lord God is the point in question, and that only. If, then, the Scripture has spoken, all controversy is ended; when it affirms, the latest doubt departs; even the habit of turning to the Scriptures, in times of need or despair, for help and direction from God, seems to me by no means unlawful, but a precious usage. Thus I stand with Augustine, and with Cormie, who entirely along his lines exclaimed: 'When I read the Scripture, I listen to what God speaks to me; and, when I pray, God listens to what I stammer."" Further, Kuyper