that this long-time preacher of Positivism feels at the age of seventyfive that Comte's Religion of Humanity is not worth talking about any The subject seems to have gone by. Requiescat in pace!

more.

Father Taylor. By ROBERT COLLYER. 12mo, pp. 58. Boston: American Unitarian Association. Price, cloth, 80 cents, net.

Robert Collyer always refers to Methodism as "my mother church." Once on a Methodist platform he gave this homely account of how he got away from his good mother church: "I made faces at her, and she boxed my ears." He held her license to preach; he began to deny some of her fundamental doctrines; she told him to recant or get out and go where he belonged. He went to the Unitarians. But his speech sometimes betrays a sense of the hallowed glory of the creed he once held, and even his "liberal" ministry owes something sweet and warm and winsome to his early Methodism-a debt greater than he can ever pay or even estimate. In this thin, brief book he tells with hearty sympathy the fascinating story of that scintillating child of genius, known as Father Taylor, who bewitched more, and more widely various men and women than did any other man in New England in his day. Not long after Robert Collyer left Methodism he attended a morning prayer meeting in Dr. Bartol's church in Boston. Father Taylor was there, and spoke, casting over young Collyer the magical enchantment of pure genius. Being introduced to the Sailor's Preacher at the close of the meeting, the young man held out his hand rather shyly; but Father Taylor, instead of taking it, opened his arms wide and gave Collyer a great brotherly hug, and kissed him on the cheek; giving him a new sensation, for he had never been kissed by a man before. Collyer describes Father Taylor as he appeared that morning: "A broad, thick-set man, a man whom, in his prime, you would have traced back to the lion if you were taken by the humor of seeing him through Darwin's glasses; with a great mane and gray eyes, with a gleam of red fire in them when his blood boiled as it was apt to do, but always for good reason: a brow wide and ample, that knotted rather than knitted under intense thought or overmastering emotion: a grand jaw, well set and well corded, and a mouth large and limber, equal to every demand of utterance." Edward Thompson Taylor was born forlornly in Richmond, Virginia, of a father and mother whom he could scarcely remember at all, tossed on the world as a poor little waif, cared for by some kind-hearted woman whose

man

very name is unknown. At eight years of age a friendless cabin-boy, tossing to and fro on the wide ocean for ten years. One tradition of his childhood is that he held a funeral service over a chicken he had killed with a stone. A lot of little Negro children, whom he pressed into service to act as mourners, failed to behave as befitted the occasion; so he trounced them till they cried, thus solemnizing their frivolous little minds and insuring enough genuine tears to make a proper funeral. Coming ashore in the port of Boston, the sailor lad, eighteen years old, floated into a church and heard Elijah Hedding preach. One of the brethren had sense enough and heart enough to shake hands with the

rough, bronzed-faced boy, and ask him to come again; in which decent little act he did more for Methodism and for the neglected men of the sea and for the world than if he had that morning gathered in a dozen gray-headed millionaires. For the sailor-boy came again, and "was converted," Robert Collyer says, "in the good old Methodist way of knowing you are converted." Unitarian ministers like Bartol, and laymen like Amos Binney and Governor Andrew, helped Father Taylor much in financial support of the Seamen's Bethel; but when a Unitarian preacher said something sour about Methodist ministers, Father Taylor rose on him in majestic wrath and defied the Unitarians to match them in power with God and with men, when set with the Bible in their hands and before them a wilderness of human souls to save. More than once he told the Unitarians, so Collyer says, that they might as well try to heat a furnace One with snowballs as to save souls in the way they went about it. morning Jenny Lind went to hear Father Taylor. The Bethel was crowded up to the pulpit floor. He paid a tribute to the gentle and devout Swedish woman whom he called "the sweetest singer that ever alighted on our shores," and commended her modesty and charity. When he finished his spontaneous and honest little eulogy, a tall, grim-looking stranger sitting on the pulpit steps arose and asked the preacher whether a person who died at one of Jenny Lind's concerts would go to heaven. Father Taylor glared at him and replied: "A good man will go to heaven, sir, die where he may; and a fool will be a fool, though he sits on my pulpit stairs." Once after listening to a stern, gloomy sermon he said: "That man preaches as if he had killed somebody." A rough sailor once said to Father Taylor: "You seems to be a good old chap as knows what's what; and I'll tell you what I likes in your preachin'. When a man is a preachin' at me, I wants him to take sommat hot out o' his heart and shove it into mine. That's what I calls preachin'." One Sunday when a broadcloth gentleman appeared at one of the Bethel meetings, and with an air of condescension told Father Taylor's sailor boys how grateful they ought to be to the Boston merchants who built and sustained the Bethel for them, the old sailor-preacher said: "Now if there's another old sinner from up town who wants to talk, this is the chance before we go on with the meeting." He permitted nobody to patronize his "boys." When one of the sailors got up, and told of his good opinion of himself before conversion, saying, "The devil told me I was good enough, but I heaved him overboard stock and fluke," he was delighted with the figure of speech, and cried: "Well done, Jack; that's salvation set to music." When another said, "Faith is sunthin like tinder; shut it up and it will go out, but give it vent and it will burn," Father Taylor responded, "Well done, Peter; the bishop of England couldn't have said it better." When a Portuguese sailor rose in a fervent meeting and shouted with much feeling, "If a man tell me I don't love my Jesus, I hit dat man 'tween da eyes," Father Taylor did not rebuke him, but sat shaking with silent laughter. When he heard a minister teaching that the non-elect cannot be saved, no matter what they do, he said: "If that be true, then inviting men to repent is like inviting a lot of gravestones home to dinner."

John Calvin the Organizer of Reformed Protestantism, 1509-1564. By WILLISTON WALKER, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Yale University. Pp. vviii, 456, New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Son's, 1906. Price, $1.35, net. [Heroes of the Reformation.]

For about forty years no important life of Calvin has appeared in English. This is hardly creditable to our Presbyterian brethren, who largely derive from him their life and breath. What would be thought of such an ignoring of Wesley by Methodists! And Calvin was a man of world-historical significance if there ever was one. After Luther he achieved the greatest work of any man of the sixteenth century, and that work still stands and will praise him in the gates, we trust, for centuries to come. In the meantime many important lives of Calvin, and dissertations on various aspects of his life and teaching, have appeared in French and German. It is singular that one of the best of these was written by a Roman Catholic layman, a professor of history in the philosophical faculty in Bonn, who, however, was so disgusted with the Vatican Council of 1869-70 that he became an Old Catholic. It is a pity that this by Kampschulte was not the life of Calvin translated for English Catholics instead of the inflammatory and false life of Audin, on which so many English and American Roman Catholics have fed since its translation in 1843. However, we have at length by the successor of Professor Fisher in Yale a Life of Calvin which will remain the standard for English-speaking readers for the next fifty years. It is impartial, well written, and well proportioned, founded on several years' careful study of Calvin's works and of the large French and German literature of the last half century, represents the very latest results, and it can be cordially commended as a thoroughly adequate and competent piece of work. We have read it through from beginning to end with hearty appreciation of the scholarlike diligence with which the author has left no stone unturned in his search for information, and with which he has read opposing opinions in order to reach a just judgment. Professor Walker writes neither as the apologist nor accuser of Calvin, but as a fair, sympathetic, but just student of him and of his time. His bibliographical note (pp. xi-xviii) was not intended to be exhaustive, or he might have mentioned the Bridgeport minister Waterman's Life, with selection of letters, Boston, 1813; the American Edition of Sibson in translation of Beza: Life, Philadelphia, 1836; the brilliant essay by Guizot; the learned fragment by the veteran historian McCrie, The Early Years of John Calvin, 1509-36, edited by Ferguson, Edinburgh, 1880; nor did we notice any regard paid to other Calviniana on our Calvin shelf, namely, Lobstein, Die Ethik Calvins, Strassburg, 1877, and Scheibe, Calvins Prädestenationlehre, Halle, 1897. The notable articles by Professor B. B. Warfield on the history of the Institutes in the Presbyterian and Reformed Review should at least have found mention in a footnote. Professor Samuel Macully Jackson has greatly enriched Christian literature in planning this series of noble biographies. Brethren in the ministry, read the lives of the great Protestant leaders, and preach a series of sermons on what they did and what they stood for!

METHODIST REVIEW

MARCH, 1907

ART. I.-NATURAL VS. SUPERNATURAL

WE all remember days when we walked forth with a light step and a glad heart to commune with nature. The fresh air of the morning fanned our cheeks, the fruitful valley stretched out beyond the range of our vision, the river winding down through field and forest, dispensed blessings on every hand, generous fruits and gorgeous flowers proclaimed the provision made for man, the height of the mountain beckoned to the adventurous foot, the glorious sunshine was like a robe of brightness flung over the fascinating picture, the groves rang with the music of birds and the sweeter music of the voices of children. Even while we looked a light shadow flitted over the fair face of nature. It came and went in a moment. It touched the mountainside, it deepened the green of the foliage and the darkness of the pool in the forest, it tempered the golden sunshine for a moment, and then the same picture in its bright colors lay again before us. But what did the shadow mean? To what did it owe its origin? What was its purpose and mission at this particular moment? Did it whisper one of the secrets of nature? Did it say there can be no shadow without the concurrence of sunshine and cloud? Was the shadow a voice out of the depths of nature to break the monotony and suggest sullenness, and stormy moods, and tempests that come-no one knows from whence, and go-no one knows whither? This little hint that nature supplies is taken up and elaborated in human experience. If you ever engaged in an earnest conversation with your fellow man on any subject involving the deepest

needs and calling forth the most impassioned utterances, why, then you know that as the conversation drifted away from commonplace sayings, and you got farther away from the mysterious shore bordered by what we call actual knowledge and began to speculate about what lies beyond the horizon, the voice of your fellow grew lower and his countenance took on an appearance unearthly, for in that moment he expressed a hope, or a doubt, or a fear, that came from the great deep of his soul, and you felt awed and hushed by the intensity of feeling or the bitterness of the grief. There is a great deal that is on the surface in conversation and in books, but in every character and in every book that would escape the fate of being ephemeral and evanescent there must be some soul utterances. People will find out in spite of you that there is a difference between gewgaws and gold. There is no cry so pathetic as the cry of the soul after God. There is a conception of Deity that is fraught with doubt, anxiety, bewilderment. It says that God is immanent in his world: he is associated with all forms of vegetable and animal life, he is in some mysterious manner identified with all forms of activity and all conditions of repose, he is in the gleam of the lightning, the swing of the storm and the shimmer of the sunshine, in the heat of the summer and the cold of winter; in the healthful breezes of the mountain, the malaria of the jungle and the simoom of the desert; in the firmness of the earth and the troubled surface of the great deep; in the grain of sand and the towering mountain; in the drop of water and the rushing river; in the flower that fades in a day and the tree that took fifteen hundred years to reach maturity; in the tumult of an individual life and the convulsion that rocks a whole nation; in everything, from the most insignificant matter to the profoundest mystery, God is immanent; but, as between matter and mind, you cannot tell where one stops and the other begins. Now, however comforting such a notion may at first seem, it will be found on closer analysis that it is altogether unsatisfactory, for it omits all reference to a personal revelation of God to man. Then there is a conception of Deity which spurns such an interpretation as the foregoing. It arraigns the notion as low and unworthy; it is a caricature of greatness; it is groveling and sensuous; it suggests