man. He does not like bare deserts and vacant rooms and bristling negatives. He will not answer an invitation that calls to prison and to chains. God always seeks to put the good, rich and full in the place of the evil. You should not say more to the young man about what he must 'give up' than you say about the blessed and noble things he will take on. The emptiness made in his life by the prohibitions of religion should be filled at once by its positive inspirations and duties. So, my friend, do not make the young man feel that our blessed faith is a vast 'No,' when it is truly an eternal 'Yes' for the best that is in him. Directly the young man comes to feel that life is large-very large. We have much to say about the confidence of youth and the lexicon that does not contain the word 'fail.' But I wonder if the people who talk thus really know the dictionary of the young man. He does fear failure. Whether he teaches his first school, attends his first patient, addresses his first jury, or deals with his first customer, his outer boldness hides an inner tremor. The largeness of life oppresses him. It is just here that the Christian evangelist has his opportunity. Personally, I have found young men peculiarly susceptible when they stand before life's opening work. They well know that the strength and wisdom of the great God are alone adequate for their help. My friend, watch for this peculiar mood in the life of the average young man and meet it with the offer of Christ's unfailing aid. I think, too, that the young man has the sense of life's conflict and that our appeal must be to his heroic quality. Truly he is not looking for softness. He prefers football above croquet. In deeper things his heroism comes out. Our armies were largely made up of young men who became the central heroes in the tragedy of the last century. Our faith will reach the young man more surely if it sounds an heroic note. We often say that life is a battle; yet I feel that we do not make real enough the spiritual conflict. An eminent teacher said recently that we need now 'a moral equivalent for war.' Our Lord offers just this; offers it so actually that his greatest follower called himself a 'soldier of Jesus Christ.' My friend, put this militant spirit into evangelistic appeal until many a young man shall feel that the failure to enlist under the banner of the cross is the very shame of cowardice." Speaking of the need of more aggressive methods in church work, and of going out among men to get their attention on behalf of religion, Dr. Hughes truly says that no other business on earth could survive if it depended so largely as the church does on voluntary public gatherings. Once Dr. Hughes said to a wholesale merchant: "Suppose that your salesmen were sent into our various towns and cities to sell your goods; that they advertised in the papers in each place that at 10:30 A. M., on a certain day (one special day out of the seven being chosen) the goods of the firm would be presented and described by an expert; that all people interested would be 'heartily welcomed'; and that, if the feeling of those present seemed to warrant it, the goods would be offered for sale! How long would your firm last?" The merchant's immediate answer was: "We would go into bankruptcy next year." Dr. Hughes insists that this illustration points a terrific moral for church work. For two centuries we have been following the course described above, depending largely on the public and general presentation of our gospel wares and too often wholly omitting that "face to face" urging which is the very life of most business houses. It is little short of a miracle that our church is alive at all! The literature which furnishes instruction, suggestion and inspiration for practical evangelism is now voluminous and varied. No pastor can plead lack of guidance as an excuse for inaction and a passive ministry. The intensifying urgency of the times in which we live serves notice on the young minister of today that if he wishes to win success for his Master and for himself in this intense age, his ministry must be of the stirring, active, outreaching, ingathering type. Dr. Hughes's Letters on Evangelism, Dr. W. F. Sheridan's The Sunday Night Service, Dr. C. F. Reisner's Workable Plans for Wide-Awake Churches are, each in its own way, helpfully suggestive. From them each minister can select such suggestions as he can best use. Atonement in Literature and Life. By CHARLES ALLEN DINSMORE. Crown 8vo, pp. 251. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Cloth, $1.50. The successor of Dr. Joseph Anderson in the pastorate of the First Congregational Church in Waterbury, Conn., is already known to our readers by his two books on the study and the teachings of Dante. In this volume Dr. Dinsmore takes the gospel of reconciliation out of the stiff forms of theology and finds its essential truths as they appear in life as the best minds have seen it. Inasmuch as Atonement is as prominent a theme in literature as in religion, this book makes a study of the theme in the pages of the great seers who have been recognized by the generations as portraying most truthfully the guilt, the woe, the peace of the heart. Approaching one of Christianity's supreme verities by this unfrequented path, he brings to view two aspects of Reconciliation which are clearly revealed in literature, but which have either been neglected by theology or been left out of our systems of religious thought. Walking with such master-minds as Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Hawthorne, Tennyson, and Whittier, who saw life steadily and saw it whole, one becomes convinced that the legend of Lethe with its magical waters has a deep spiritual value, and that a trust in "some soul of goodness in things evil" exercises a most important part in reconciliation. It is the unfolding of these two truths that gives distinction to Dr. Dinsmore's study of "Atonement in Literature and Life," a study which makes strongly and in a fresh way for faith in the reality of the eternal atonement wrought by the Son of God. His book will help to bring on the day, which he with confidence expects, "when the Church that has lingered weeping at the Cross will catch a glimpse of a splendor which will dim the shadow, and with exultant joy will preach the glad tidings that the blood of Christ, offered through the eternal Spirit, is efficacious through all the ages, changing the wrath of man to praise, restraining the residue of evil, and achieving for God and man the great Reconciliation." The first chapter shows that sin, retribution, and reconciliation are the controlling ideas of both literature and religion; the second defines recon ciliation and atonement, and the relation of the incarnation to the atonement; the third studies sin, retribution, and reconciliation as set forth in Homer's Iliad; the fourth examines this theme as treated in the pages of Eschylus; the fifth in Sophocles; the sixth in Dante; the seventh in Shakespeare; other chapters study the great all-pervading theme in Milton, Hawthorne, George Eliot, Tennyson, Hosea, Job, Symonds, and Whittier. In Part Second, the first chapter deals with Sin, its defilement, devastation, moral blindness, and lawlessness; the certainty of retribution: also with Reconciliation, its conditions-repentance, confession, satisfaction: and the necessity that the sanctity of moral obligation shall suffer no diminution in forgiveness. It is shown that reconciliation is a larger problem than forgiveness, and that memory needs a Lethe, and that the triumph of goodness, either realized or believed in, is the ground of reconciliation. The next chapter shows that over against every great clerical expounder of the Atonement there is a great poet or novelist who caught the same vision and proclaimed the same essential truth. By way of illustration, our author sets Eschylus over against Anselm, Dante over against Aquinas, Sophocles over against Duns Scotus, Hawthorne over against McLeod Campbell, Hugo over against Bushnell. The next chapter answers the question, "What Did Jesus of Nazareth Do for the Forgiveness of Our Sins?"; and the closing chapter aims to set forth what the Eternal Christ does for our reconciliation. It is explained that the Eternal Christ is Christianity's solution of cosmic evil; that while the chief note of every great theory of the Atonement is that God must be satisfied, it is also true that sin will be so dealt with that every living creature, every moral being, will be satisfied; that Christ's victory is a Lethe for the memory; that the indwelling Christ literally takes our sins upon himself; and that his triumph is as essential a part of the Atonement as are his sufferings. Such is the outline of the volume's argument, which is presented as a new path to Calvary and to that Cross which is the focus of all the truths and forces disclosed in the life and words of Jesus. The soundness and virility of Dr. Dinsmore's doctrine is indicated in a sample passage like the following: "The moralinfluence theory of the Atonement is greatly in vogue to-day. As often expounded, it amounts to little more than this: God, in the life and sufferings and death of Jesus Christ, so revealed his fatherly love and pity that men are persuaded to repentance and won to a life of rectitude and filial obedience. This makes Christ an actor and Calvary a spectacular performance. The voices both of literature and of experience are strongly against any such trifling and artificial conception of Redemption. In all the authors studied in this book, the sinner has been aroused by a knowledge of the dire consequences of his sin, and not by any vision of the glories of righteousness. The penalties of sin check the footsteps of the one going in the wrong way; the solicitations of love are effective after the sin has become abhorrent." As to Horace Bushnell, a powerful exponent of the so-called "moral-influence theory," this book says that he sought to avoid any such dilutions of his doctrine as have become current; he taught that Christ does more than reveal God's fatherly com passion, that He is "the moral power of God upon us," and that "He executes the remission by taking away the sin and dispensing the justification of life." In all literature, whenever the problem of sin, pardon, reconciliation, has been presented or pondered, one point of universal agreement is found; the invariable conclusion is that forgiveness must be strictly in accord with fundamental righteousness; in its very going forth it must reveal the blackness and baseness of sin, and unveil the august and spotless majesty of holiness. As Dr. Dinsmore presents to us the teachings of author after author related to his theme, we perceive anew how full of ethical feeling and force all really great literature is. Even very ancient writers furnish us with language for describing and denouncing the sins of to-day. Eschylus might be characterizing the criminal rich of our own time when he speaks of "the gorgeous glare of gold, obtained by foul, polluted hands"; and his ancient warning loses no force now when he says that though "ruthless and oppressive power may triumph for its little hour," yet full soon a Power above the hard oppressor's power "shall break his fell force, and whirl him down through life's dark paths, unpitied and unknown." The reader of this admirable book will have only pleasure and profit in its pages. From the choice and apt extracts which preface the chapters we take these: "There is no principle involved in the Atonement that is not included in its essence in the most sacred relations between man and man" (Phillips Brooks). "I am striving to bring the God which is in me into harmony with the God which is in the universe" (Plotinus). Also from James Martineau this following, which leans far toward evangelical orthodoxy; "Were the human Conscience, like human Prudence, the mere product of experience; were it the reflection of the world's opinion; were it given only for our temporal guidance without significance beyond; why should we not get rid of our sins as we do of our mistakes,-commit them and have done with them, and leave no ghost behind? This is actually the approved wisdom of hard and driving men whose ethics are but the instruments of external work. But where there is a deeper insight, where the outer doing is looked upon as the symbol of the inner being, where affection, character, will, have any life and drama of their own, this discharge of old compunctions, this cheerful erasure of bankrupt accounts, is quite impossible. Only when evil is regarded as a transitory mishap, can it be thus forgot: once let the consciousness awake that it is disloyalty to the Spirit of eternal Holiness, and there is in this a conservative power which will forbid its awful shadow to depart. And hence, strange as it may seem, it is not the guilty who know the most of guilt; it is the pure, the lofty, the faithful, that are ever haunted by the sense of sin, and are compelled by it to throw themselves upon a love they never doubt yet cannot claim. . . . Why do you hear from a Fénelon words of humiliation that never escape a Richelieu? why are the prayers of prophets and hymns of saintly souls so pathetic in their penitence, so full of the plaintive music of baffled aspiration, like the cry of some bird with broken wing? It is because to them the truly infinite nature of holiness has revealed itself, and reveals itself the more, the ... higher they rise; because in its secret breathings to their hearts they recognize, not any romance of their own, but the communing Spirit of the Living God. But if this be the meaning of our sense of sin, what hope, you will say, that it can ever leave us? Was it not the work of Christ to give us rest from the strife and sorrows of compunction? Yes: not, however, a rest within ourselves, as if we either ceased from sin or could see it with other or less saddened eyes; but a rest out of ourselves, a pure and perfect trust in Him whose spirit draws us from before and whose pity supports us from behind." The impression made by the personality of the author is one of blended modesty and mastery. Is Religion Undermined? By REV. C. L. DRAWBRIDGE, M.A. Crown 8vo, pp. 238. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Price, cloth, $1.25, net. The author's previous book, Old Beliefs and New Knowledge, sought to prove that there is no necessity for a breach between devotion and intelligence, between intuition and science, between what we believe and what we know. This volume addresses the shallow notion that the foundations of religion have been undermined by modern investigation, and answers by showing that the fundamental faiths and facts which unite believing saints in one vast brotherhood (no matter what their theological systems may be) are still undisturbed. Various unenlightened persons, at sundry times and in divers places, have imagined that religion had been undermined and was toppling to its fall. In the early part of the eighteenth century unbelief had an uproarious revel and laughed religion down the wind. Then came Archbishop Butler in 1736 with his great Analogy, in the preface of which he wrote: "It seems to be taken for granted by many persons that Christianity is at length discovered to be fictitious." After him came the Wesleys with the mighty evangelical revival proving the reality of religion and its power to silence scepticism and sweep wickedness away. And the boastful giant Unbelief, pierced through the brain by Butler and through the heart by Wesley, fell down. The book before us canvasses fundamental questions without obscurity in a clear and sensible way. The author calls it a critical investigation of the bases of religious belief. Its eleven chapters contain outlines for many possible sermons. One of its notable and valuable features is its wealth of pertinent quotations from authoritative sources. In the introduction, the author shows that Faith cannot be destroyed by inquiry, any more than Life can be blotted out by interrogation points. Rather is Bishop Gore's declaration correct, that faith and inquiry “subsist together and force each other." Fearless investigation is an absolute necessity for religion. Faith cannot build its house on anything but truth and reality. To fear lest some undiscovered truth be brought to light is the depth of cowardice and the height of unwisdom. It betrays timidity, doubt, and disloyalty. As Lytton says: "Truth is certain, soon or late, to appear To avoid the meeting. Better when we hear |