fore us has been compiled. This volume comprises twelve chapters. The eleven first contain a sketch of ancient Egyptian history, the two last of which are devoted to the Pharaoh of the oppression, and the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The twelfth is a paper read by Dr. Brugsch before the International Congress of Orientalists in London, in 1874, on the route of Israel in the Exodus. Dr. B. claims that he has proved, by comparing the Scripture account with inscriptions on the papyri and monuments, that the route was northerly, by the great military road along the shore of the Mediterranean and the Sirbonis Gulf, ("Serbonian Bog," as Milton calls it), among the quicksands of which Pharaoh and his army perished. Diodorus relates that Artaxerxes Ochus, king of Persia, lost part of his army there, swallowed up in the same way, in B. C. 350. The author presents a strong argument,

but his conclusions have been controverted. The volume is accompanied with a map of ancient Egypt reproduced from the original.in Egypt under the Pharaohs.

DR. TAYLOR'S LECTURES ON MIRACLES.*—This volume contains a course of seven lectures on Miracles, delivered before the Princeton Theological School. The subjects discussed are the Nature and Possibility of Miracles; the Supernatural in Christ; the Credibility of Miracles; Testimony in behalf of them; the Mythical theory; the Evidential value of Miracles; and their spiritual significance. The lectures are marked by the author's habitual freshness and vigor of thought, and clearness and force of style.

ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF THE PSALMS.t-The two first lectures in this volume discuss the origin and history of the Shemitic peoples, and the history of the Hebrew language and early literature. The remaining lectures discuss the Psalms, but only with reference to their literature and history. The author reaches the conclusion that the book of Psalms, as we now have it, consists of five books collected and edited for the worship of the second temple between 537 and 337 B. C. The first book (Psalms 2—41)

*The Gospel Miracles in their relation to Christ and Christianity. By WM. M. TAYLOR, D.D., Pastor of the Broadway Tabernacle Church, N. Y. New York: Anson D. F. Randolph & Co., 900 Broadway. pp. 249.

+ Lectures on the Origin and Growth of the Psalms. By THOMAS CHALMESS MURRAY, Associate Professor of the Shemitic Languages at the Johns Hopkins University. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 743 and 745 Broadway. 1880. xiii. and 319 pp.

was compiled at the re-building of the temple, and its material is drawn entirely from the service-book of the first temple, "The Sacred Songs of David." The second Book (42-72) and the third (73-89) were compiled by Nehemiah, nearly a century later. It comprises psalms used in the first temple and others fitted for sacred song, drawing from all existing sources as a compiler of a modern hymn-book would do. The fourth (90-106) was compiled about fifty years later to meet a want for liturgic chorals which none of the other books supplied. About 350 B. C. the fifth book (107-149) was added by those who regulated the temple service, and the five books were brought into one, Psalm 1 being prefixed as introductory and Psalm 150 added as a closing doxology. The author discusses the five books successively, with literary and critical notices of a large number of the Psalms. He also considers incidentally Lyric, Epic, and Dramatic poetry among the Shemitic peoples; also the book of Job and Solomon's Song; also the return from exile, and the Maccabean period. The author dwells on his theme with an enthusiastic interest which the reader cannot well avoid catching. He regards as the most beautiful Psalms those which, in their titles, are accredited to a collection by the Sons of Korah, (42-48, and 84, 85, 87.) He says of them, "They exhibit a daintiness of workmanship and delicate sensibility of the niceties of metre which place them side by side with the lyrics of Pindar or Horace. . Were there a score of poems like Psalm 42" (of which 43 is a part) . . . . "the student of style would have to learn of the Hebrew rather than the Hellen." "Poetry of such dainty form and brilliant color is to be found no where else in Hebrew literature, and rarely, if at all, in any other." The Psalms as a whole he characterizes as "the world's deepest, tenderest, and most artistic poetry." The author is devout and reverent in spirit; the work evinces extensive learning; the subject is treated in the free and scientific spirit of critical history. He corrects Dr. Draper's representation of Arabic science in the Middle ages; he says, "Renan in his history is graceful as fiction and scarce more trustworthy." His conclusion in respect to the Old Testament generally, is that "we have the old Hebrew literature with unchanged credibility and historical value; what it has lost is its original literary form."

The author had not revised the lectures for publication; consequently there are occasional instances of negligence in the use of language which the editor might properly have corrected. This

scholarly and instructive volume enables us to imagine what contributions to the knowledge of the Shemitic peoples Prof. Murray might have made had he lived to continue his studies and to give the results of them to the public.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION; by Dr. CAIRD.* The substance of this volume was delivered in Edinburgh as the " Croall Lecture," in 1878-1879. It has been re-cast, and no longer retains the form of lectures. Its object is to demonstrate the competency of the human mind for a scientific treatment of religion. In the outset the author answers three objections; from the alleged relativity of human knowledge; from the alleged fact that religious belief depends on a faith faculty (which he calls intuition) and not on reason; and from the authoritative character of religious knowledge as communicated by revelation. He then discusses the necessity of religion; first, negatively, the inadequacy of materialistic theories, and then, positively, the necessity of rising to the point of view of religion. The next subject is an examination of the proofs of the divine existence, which he reduces to three: the Cosmological, the Teleological, and the Ontological. He puts the principal reliance on the last, as demanded by the first and second. He explains it to mean "that as spiritual beings our whole conscious life is based on a universal self-consciousness, an Absolute Spiritual Life, which is not a mere subjective notion or conception, but which carries with it the proof of its necessary existence or reality." He next discusses the Religious Consciousness, showing that it contains not feeling only, but also religious knowledge. The inadequacy of this unscientific knowledge is then pointed out and the method of transition to a speculative or scientific knowledge analyzed. The ninth chapter treats of the religious life and the relation of religion to morality. The last chapter is on the relation of the philosophy of religion to its history.

The author's mind is imbued with the ideas in Hegel's Philosophy of Religion. He seems also to accept the theory of Evolution. The work is an earnest effort to ascertain the position and grounds of theological knowledge in harmony with these views. It is one of the works indicating the movement of religious thinkers to broaden and deepen theological thought and the grounds of *An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. By JOHN CAIRD, D.D., Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Glasgow, and one of her Majesty's chaplains for Scotland. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1880. 8vo., pp. xi. and 358.

theological belief in the light of modern philosophical and scientific investigation. In this endeavor Dr. Caird lays stress on three positions--(1) The idea of God is a necessity of human thought. We believe in God because, in so doing, we follow the path which thought takes in its own necessary movement. This is apparently the doctrine expressed by Julius Müller in saying that God is in the background of all human consciousness. (2) The idea of the solidarity of the rational system. There is no reality except a thinkable, intelligible reality, "a reality which has its inseparable correlative in an intelligence that thinks it." The infinite contains the idea of the finite and the finite has no existence separate from the infinite. "It is only in communion with the Absolute Spirit that the finite spirit can realize itself." The universe is an organism; the universal is first, the individual is the manifestation or specification of the universal. (3) The idea of the immanence of God in nature. In contradistinction from the error that a Science of Religion may be constructed by retaining in the definition of religion the elements common to all religions, which would reduce it to the lowest Fetichism, Dr. Caird conceives of religion as the striving of the finite towards the infinite,--the same impulse of the soul revealing itself in all religions, with increasing clearness as religious culture advances.

The volume is the work of a vigorous thinker. It powerfully impresses the reader, as he goes on, with the reality, immediacy, and intimacy of his relations with God. But the discussion lacks clearness and consistency and the subject evidently has not been completely thought through. Though the author of it rejects Hamilton's philosophy of the conditioned, and the agnosticism to which it leads, the shadow of it seems still to lie on his path. In treating the objection from the antinomies of reason, he seems to concede the whole ground to the objector. He seems to teach that the logical law of contradiction is not valid to the higher spiritual intelligence. He seems to represent reason as antithetic both to faith and intuition. He says that a spirit alone apart from other spirits is inconceivable. He seems to carry his unity of the rational system into a unity of organization, and to assume the essential principles of Pantheism. He says that "a free finite intelligence and will, conditioned by an infinite or absolute thought and will, is a contradictory notion." He clearly shows, in the general drift of his thought, that he holds none of the agnostic or pantheistic errors which at times his sentences,

taken in their immediate connection, imply. He is a strenuous defender of Christian theism. The seemingly erroneous statements are inconsistent with his main doctrine, and not necessary to the specific arguments in which they appear. These inconsistencies in a work of so much philosophical power are greatly to be regretted, the more so as they obscure his thought, weaken his argument, and put weapons into the hands of the adversaries of the doctrine which he defends.

THE TRUE GENESIS OF LIFE.*—The design of this work is to establish the doctrine that the primordial germs (meaning germinal principles of life) of all living things, man alone excepted, are in themselves upon the earth, and that they severally make their appearance, each after its kind, whenever and wherever the necessary environing conditions exist." The author claims that this is the teaching of Genesis i. 11, which he translates: "Whose germinal principle of life, each in itself after its kind, is upon the earth;" also that the account of creation in Genesis i. discriminates between vegetable and brute life which is originated from the earth and the waters, and man, whom God made after his own image and himself breathed into him the breath of life. The volume consists mainly of the statement of facts pertaining mostly to vegetable life, urged as proving that any specific kind of living organism is produced from the earth itself (Gen. i. 11, 12, 20, 24) when the appropriate telluric and climatic conditions exist. The most important of these is the fact that when forests are cut or burned off, trees of a different species succeed. President Dwight, in his "Travels," mentions a piece of land in Vermont which had been cultivated and afterwards left to lie waste, and on which there sprung up a thick and vigorous growth of hickory, "where there was not a single hickory tree in any original forest within fifty miles of the place." He also refers to the springing up of new herbaceous plants; the author himself, in digging a well in Wisconsin struck soil thirty-five feet below the surface, which was evidently ante-glacial, and which, when brought to the surface," produced several small plants wholly unlike the prevailing local flora." The well-known facts of this kind seem, many of them, to be quite inexplicable by the common theory of pre-existing seeds. The author also argues from facts pertaining to the distribution and vitality of seeds, plant migration, and

*Life: Its True Genesis. By R. W. WRIGHT. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 1880. pp. 298.