How lamentably does wedded life suffer from lack of conscience. The marriage vow of fidelity for better or for worse too often becomes a veritable figment. Notwithstanding the solemn pledges, how numerously the newly-wedded begin to speculate as to incompatibilities. Divorce follows divorce.

There is forsooth an open question as to incompatibility. Is such speculation compatible with the most sacred vows to love, honor, and cherish? The untruthfulness of matrimonial compacts is the bane, a most alarming menace of our wouldbe Christian civilization.

Still, it is added, we are justified in false assurances to the sick. Nay, nay. There are truths that are healing. Can we prescribe? Or are we mere imbeciles? And shall we add mendacity to our imbecility? Shall our sick friend be tempest-tossed as to what to believe? Or perfectly trustful and confident? Shall our friend be prepared for the real, for the worst, or cajoled by specious fictions to the gates of the unseen? There is an increasing demand that physicians, so far as they speak, speak veraciously. Recently an able practitioner lost his field because his patients lost their faith.

Finally comes the test case. May we lie to save a life? In any event the evidence would, at the best, be merely probable-not to say doubtful,-that truth would be fatal. Shall we presumptuously falsify? Moreover, whatever impairs health endangers life. Shall we discount truth accordingly? But, what risk? Any risk? To me, to you, to some one? Is it not every time more or less an open question? And we become a prey under a theory of discount. Eternal quandary -unlimited travesty-confusion worse confounded. The rule is unworkable.

Doubtless veracity calls for brain power and courage. Man is rational because and before he is moral. The spherical cerebrum that enables complete inhibition is the equipment of his freedom. "God cannot lie." He knows. Intelligence cannot lie. A writer in the first century said, "They that be drunken are drunken in the night." May we not write in the twentieth century, They that make lies make lies in the night?

All deception reacts, impairs the vision. The vision impaired, the choice enslaves. The deceiver is deceived. There can be complete vision, full freedom, only in a perfect moral system. Trendelenburg declares, "It is conscience that preserves the might of the will."

Man's refuge indeed is in an ideal world. The True is in perfect affiliation with the Beautiful, the Right, and the Good. With all its shams the age is inheriting and developing the truth,-Truth in its all-pervading, all-commanding reality. Our country is safe when the soldier is ready to offer his life in its defense. Can Ethics stand with a lesser loyalty? The civil law conserves society saying "Nothing but the truth." Can religion accept a lower standard? Already the genuine expositor is heralded as a high critic, not because of his scholarship expressly, but of his sincerity. Let other critics, loving truth equally, with higher vision and broader scholarship, follow him, and he descends to the common level.

Our business life must develop in terms of the real, the genuine, the true. The goods that hold the market are to be equal to the sample. Wundt says we have reached one stage of progress toward Kant's prediction of a perfect kingdom. When the yea of a promise becomes valid, as binding as an adjuration; when our religious faith in God becomes as well, faith social, political, faith in man, we shall have reached another stage of development. It was the Nazarene who said 'The Truth shall make you free."

ARTICLE X.

NOTES ON BRITISH THEOLOGY AND PHI

LOSOPHY.

ONE of the most interesting of recent works in theology is an "Introduction to the Early History of Christian Doctrine" by J. F. Bethune-Baker, B.D., Fellow and Dean of Pembroke College, Cambridge. The book is one of a series of Handbooks on Theology, edited by Principal A. Robertson, D.D., London, and is carried up "to the time of the Council of Chalcedon." Mr. Bethune-Baker has kept the text-book purpose steadily before him, giving a continuous narrative in free and untechnical fashion, with footnotes for authorities and details. His design is to show theology in the making, and this he succeeds in doing most admirably, for the student's purpose. The work is performed, not only with wide and painstaking scholarship, but also with discrimination and independence, its prevailing orthodoxy notwithstanding. It would, of course, not be fair to judge particular parts or aspects of a student's handbook from the standpoints. of experts, for it could not but be wanting from such viewpoints. Remembering, however, the purpose of the book, Mr. Bethune-Baker's work is altogether admirable, and deserves to be very extensively used, for teaching purposes, on both sides of the Atlantic. The author in his modest preface says, "I believe that this point of view, from which Christian doctrines are seen as human attempts to interpret human experiences the unique personality of Jesus of Nazareth supreme among those human experiences, is a more satisfying one than some standpoints from which the origin of Christian doctrines may appear to be invested with more commanding power of appeal." It cannot be expected that

'London: Methuen & Co. Pp. xxii, 436. 108. 6d.

different readers will account all parts of such a work equally well done, even for students' use. Occasionally, one feels tempted to wish the author had practised a less "strict economy" in works referred to, and at stray points one judges philosophical matters readily susceptible of stronger treatment. But, withal, so great learning and labor have been expended on the work that one cares not to indulge in ungracious reflections. To many of us, indeed, such teaching would, in student days, have been a veritable godsend, and they are to be heartily congratulated into whose hands Mr. Bethune-Baker's extremely able and serviceable book may be placed, for instruction in things theological. It need hardly be said that the publishers have done their part, in all respects, with their usual excellence.

Another work of much theological interest is "Studies in Theology" by J. Estlin Carpenter and P. H. Wicksteed.1 These studies are thirteen in number, and of varying merit. Two of them-Mr. Wicksteed's "Religion of Time and the Religion of Eternity," and Mr. Carpenter's "Place of Immortality in Religious Belief "-are alone worth the price of the book. Not for a long time have we read a more timely and able pronouncement than this paper by Mr. Wicksteed, enhanced by some scholarly notes as an appendix. It deserves the warmest praise, as a valuable corrective to some current tendencies of thought. We are entirely at one with the writer's insistence-for it has been our own—that progress is related to end or goal, and that the true life of the soul is a progress in-and not merely to-the life that is in God. Mr. Carpenter's paper on Immortality is also excellent, and puts the case in varied, temperate, yet telling fashion. The writers seem to be at their best in these two pieces, and the themes were worthy of it. All the other papers may be read with pleasure (which does not mean always agreement) and profit, such subjects ranking amongst them as "The Education of the Religious Imagination," "The Place of the History of Religion in Theological Study," "Sociology London: J. M. Dent and Co. Pp. 543. 5S., net.

and Theology," and "Religion and Society." The chapter on “Unitarianism as a Theology" is of too sectarian a character to be of general interest, and indeed one almost regrets its acompanying themes of much larger and more inspiring interest. Our occasional vigorous and emphatic dissent from a phrase or a position does not in the least interfere with our most grateful welcome of these theological studies, which may be most heartily recommended to all robust-minded persons interested in problems of modern theology.

A noteworthy work in philosophy is the newly-issued volune, "Principia Ethica," by George Edward Moore, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. In his preface Mr. Moore says, "I have endeavored to write 'Prolegomena to any future ethics that can possibly pretend to be scientific" If there is boldness in Mr. Moore's aim, we do not on that account object to it, in days when so many works are sent forth without any sufficiently definite or justifying aim. Mr. Moore is already known to philosophical readers as an acute thinker, with masterly powers of analysis and dialectical fence. His treatment will certainly provoke criticism and dissent, possibly even antagonism, but it is to be welcomed all the same, and he deserves all credit for his intellectual courage, candor, and independence.

After a chapter on "The Subject-matter of Ethics" comes one on "Naturalistic Ethics," which deals with the question of "good in itself," and examines Spencer's positions in particular. Mr. Moore's criticism is clear, excellent, and timely. An interesting and able refutation of Hedonism follows in the next chapter, which contains a criticism on Utilitarianism that is deserving of attention. One cannot help being surprised that ethicists are so slow to perceive what we account the vicious-or say, fallacious only-identification of ethical character with mere constitutional motive or natural impulse, in theories of Hedonism. Also, that they so often fall short of realizing what a resolution of ethical right into 1 Cambridge: At the University Press. Pp. xxvii, 232. 78. 6d., net.