In Famine Land. By Rev. J. E. Scott, Ph.D., S.T.D. Crown 8vo, pp. 206. New York: Harper & Brothers. Price, cloth, $2.50.

This is a painfully realistic description of the terrible famine in India caused by the great drought of 1899-1900. The awful story is told by Dr. Scott, one of our own missionaries, who was chairman of our Mission Relief Committee at Rajputana. Having spent most of his life in India and having been a strenuous and sacrificing toiler in the effort to save starving multitudes from death, he is competent to give a vivid and exact account of India's latest famine and of the causes of and remedies for famines in general. He dedicates his book to "Lord Curzon, Viceroy and Governor-general of India, under whose energetic and benevolent administration the horrors of the great famine were mitigated and relieved." Fairness requires us to admit that wherever England sets up her government her administration is “energetic and benevolent." In the Indian famine the British government and Christian missionaries were the agencies and forces of relief. This fact works mightily to subdue all India to England's beneficent rule, and to win the land to Christianity. India, unhelped by her idols, comes out of the famine saying, "The God that answereth by corn-ships and bread, let him be God!" She covers with kisses of love the Christian hands that fed her starving millions. Lord Curzon's government expended fifty millions of dollars for the relief of the famine sufferers; and from many lands money and supplies were sent by Christian charity, notably from our own country, which sent one installment of six hundred and fifty thousand dollars by Mr. Louis Klopsch, part of it in a cargo of grain on the corn-ship Quito, which sailed from Brooklyn to Bombay, chartered for the purpose by the United States government. Dr. Scott tells the pathetic story of heathen suffering and Christian compassion in a plain, straightforward, matter-offact way; but no words can equal the numerous photographs in this book which show the actual scenes of the famine, in making us realize the ghastly realities of distress and death. These pictures would melt a heart of stone to pity. Dr. Scott truly says that Doré's illustrations of Dante's Inferno are not more frightful than the actual scenes in India during the famine. As usual, the devotion and heroic self-sacrifice of Christian missionaries, toiling and dying for the wretched, show them to be of the blood-royal of humankind, the superb aristocracy of lofty character. Of many of them it is written, "They saved others; themselves they did not save."

MISCELLANEOUS.

Is the Lord Among Us? By D. W. C. HUNTINGTON, D.D., LL.D., Chancellor of Nebraska Wesleyan University. 16mo, pp. 163. Cincinnati: Jennings & Graham. New York: Eaton & Mains. Price, cloth, 50 cents.

In this volume of "The Methodist Pulpit" are nine sermons by Dr. Huntington on topics evidently suggested by everyday intercourse with many sorts and conditions of men and women and a realizing sense of their frequent misconceptions of what to him is very plain-that the requirements of the Christian life are easily met by the sincere. He feels

that God is present in all this world's affairs and gets along with as few miracles as he can. To ignore God, to doubt his presence, is the greatest blunder which can be made in individual life. "He knows that consecration is our own voluntary act and state. . . . We consecrate ourselves, if we are ever consecrated; . . . it is dwelling with God and living for man.” "He is a Christian who lives unto the Lord; chooses what the Lord chooses, 'for no man liveth to himself.' The fact is, living to self and refusing to live unto the Lord is the one all-comprehensive sin." Temptations to fretfulness he discovers and discusses, giving breezy and vigorous advice to those who would overcome such. "Our Bible," its history and effects, furnishes a most instructive chapter, followed by "Are We All Going to Heaven?" We can all be in heaven, we are all needed and wanted there, but "the law of adaptation is likely to obtain throughout the spiritual worlds. If heaven is not 'the survival of the fittest' it is the arrival of the fitted." Hence Jesus said, "Strive to enter in." Heaven is, "first of all, a spiritual state." God's estimate of man is shown by the fact "that it was fitting for God to sacrifice all that he sacrificed, and that Christ should suffer all that he suffered, in order to save man," and "the divine declarations concerning him work toward his elevation and salvation. They lift him up into the thoughts of God." "Christ is still in the world, worshiped by many, but by some doubted. . . . There is in some a pride in doubting. . . . The one final cure of your doubting is to know God. You may become as conscious of him as you are of yourself." Unbelief-the practical unbelief of Christians themselves-is the theme of the final discourse. It is difficult to refrain from further quotation, but enough has been cited to recall Dr. Huntington's terse and clear methods to those who are familiar with them and to recommend the book to others. In these days of machines and unions perhaps it is not good form to allude to typographical errors, but there is large scope for improvement in a future edition of this little volume.

...

The Wisdom of James the Just. By the Right Rev. W. BOYD CARPENTER, D.D., Hon. D.C.L. Oxon., Lord Bishop of Ripon. 8vo, pp. xix, 253. New York: Thomas Whittaker. Price, cloth, $1.20.

No book of the New Testament is better suited to our time than the Epistle of James. It has a broad, deep, clear, ethical message which cannot be misunderstood and which has only to be effectively preached to startle the attention and command the assent of honest minds. The brother of our Lord, though stoutly resisting his claims to Messiahship until after the memorable post-resurrection interview mentioned by Paul, seems to have been so akin to him in character and mental make-up that he soon took his place in human leadership and became the first and best interpreter of the inner mind of the Master. Bishop Carpenter first studies the letter as a self-revelation of the writer. James, though reticent about himself, distinctly reveals a religious temperament of the most winning and lovable kind, while his philosophy of life and thoughts about God are lofty and wholesome and sound. In Part II the letter itself is discussed in twelve chapters of considerable compass and beauty.

METHODIST REVIEW.

NOVEMBER, 1904.

ART. I.-THE VIRGIN-BIRTH OF OUR LORD.

To those who watch the trend of a certain kind of theological thinking among us it seems probable that the next conflict will center about the virgin-birth of our incarnate Lord. The controversy some ten years since in Germany over the origin of the Apostles' Creed involved the dogma of the miraculous birth, and many works on the subject immediately appeared. The discussion passed over to England and developed there no slight commotion in Church circles, and the indications are that a lowering of the temperature on this side the Atlantic may be expected at any time, if the storm is not already here. On our eastern coast the rationalistic spirit, the baneful influence of Unitarianism, repressing all evangelistic effort, is more marked than in former years, while among other Churches not blighted by the frost of unbelief there is a growing tendency to discuss with evident leaning toward rationalism all questions involving the miraculous or that put upon reason a burden to explain.

It is not at all strange that those who would reduce Christianity to a mere system of ethics by destroying all faith in the essential divinity of its Founder should attempt to weaken confidence in the Gospel record of his miraculous birth. As the Rev. Bishop D. A. Goodsell observes in his remarkable little book, The Things Which Remain, "If one seeks to rid Christianity of the supernatural here is the place to begin." It is not the purpose of this article to treat in any manner the dogmatic aspect of the question, nor to touch upon the scientific questions involved; for even Professor Huxley has admitted that the mysteries of the gospels, including the virgin-birth, are not greater than the mysteries of science;

and in evidence that this marvelous event is not contrary to nature we have the statement of Professor G. J. Romanes, in Darwin and After Darwin, that "even if a virgin has ever conceived and born a son, and even if such a fact in the human species has been unique, it would not betoken any breach of physiological continuity." My design is rather to outline in a general way a few exceptions to the critical and historical objections which have been vigorously urged against the truthfulness of the record in the first chapters of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, and which have been recently put in a new setting by Professor Paul Lobstein, of the University of Strasburg, and other writers on the Continent and in this country. The points of criticism are numerous. The argument from silence is made to do effective work. Of all the documents in the New Testament two only mention the miraculous birth. Hence, "That which is unknown to the teachings of St. Peter and St. Paul, St. John and St. James, and our Lord himself, and is absent from the earliest and latest gospels, cannot be so essential as many people have supposed.'

Now, while on the face of the records it may be admitted that the doctrine of the virgin-birth is not without historical and exegetical difficulties, yet it cannot be admitted that these difficulties, even intensified as they may be by a rationalistic bias, are as insoluble as some critics would have them appear. Assumption is sometimes overdone. To assert, for example, that our Lord knew nothing of his miraculous birth, because he never declared it, is to assume such intimate knowledge of what things Christ did not know that one is inclined to think the chief difficulty with some critics is their omniscience. And with regard to the objection above urged from the silence of the New Testament a more critical investigation of the subject might suggest that this objection really begs the whole question. St. Mark, the writer of the "earliest gospel," is silent on the birth of Jesus, but it should also be stated that he passes over with deliberate silence thirty years of our Lord's life, and therefore his silence on this particular fact cannot be construed as evidence of his ignorance. It is significant, however, that he begins his gospel with the striking statement,

Incarnation of our Lord, p. 217.

"The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." As for St. Paul, we should not expect him to mention the virgin-birth unless the logical implications or relation of the particular thought he is unfolding necessarily led him for illustration or proof to historical details of Christ's early life. But it is clear that the history of our Lord did not fall within the thought circle of Paul's epistles to the Christian communities. His preaching had for its theme the moral or spiritual significance of the Christ, and not the events of his earth-life. It can be shown, I think, from some of Paul's epistles, a needed work which has not yet been done, that the churches to which he wrote did have in their hands Matthew's gospel, and that, therefore, since Paul made use of this gospel he was not unacquainted with its contents, Matthew's narrative of the virgin-birth, and of the belief of the earliest Christians.

The confident affirmation that John, the author of the fourth gospel, knew nothing of the birth story, because he does not expressly refer to it, is also without historical or other evidence to support it. The simple truth is that, like other errors, it carries with it its own refutation, since it necessarily implies that John knew nothing of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, which narrate the incidents of the virgin-birth, while these gospels were well known in Christian communities years before the fourth gospel was written, and while the virgin-birth of Christ had become one. of the great themes of Christian teaching and preaching. Thus Ignatius, while on his way to Rome and martyrdom, A. D. 110, writes to the churches in Asia-Ephesus, Smyrna, et al.-not many years after the probable date of the fourth gospel, that the virginity of Mary was among the three mysteries which were "loudly proclaimed." It is difficult to believe that John, the beloved disciple who took Mary, the holy mother, to his own home after the crucifixion, knew nothing for or against the narrative of the Nativity recorded by Matthew and Luke and which had become the common belief of the Church before he wrote his gospel.

What, then, is the historical value of these two documents which of all the writings in the New Testament do contain the account of this miraculous birth? In order to rule their evidence