plating disaster and discipline as a necessity for Jerusalem in the retributive and righteous government of God, out from which must still come blessing to Zion and to men. It would take comment on the whole section in minuteness to bring out the force of the foregoing suggestion. But read chapter liii.—“Who hath believed our report," and chapter lv.-" Ho, every one that thirsteth," and chapter lviii.-"Cry aloud, spare not," and see how malapropos they are to a call to go up to Jerusalem and rebuild its walls. In such state of affairs, even the very first word in the section-"Comfort ye, my people," is a false note. The people with whom Zerubbabel, Ezra, and Nehemiah wrought did not need comfort, they needed a gad. The generations on the stage with them had been born in Babylonia. What was Jerusalem to them or they to Jerusalem? They were adjusted to Babylonia. They had thrived there. The Jew has always been realistic enough to adapt himself to circumstances. To sacrifice himself by going back to Jerusalem must have seemed to him unpractical idealism. It is unthinkable that a great man living in the time of the captivity should not have uttered a call for some specific acts adapted to the return, even that he should not have appealed to specific men to have ideals worthy of their fathers. There is nothing of all this in the Song of the Return. It is as oblivious of particulars respecting the return as it is of those pertaining to the captivity. On the theory of the higher critics the greatest man of the day sails in the air over this crisis and never once touches the earth to adapt himself to it. Credat Judæus Apella! When you come to the matter of the further disintegration of Isaiah so as to make his work a collection from various writers at different times, I can only say that I am not impressed with the soundness of the philosophy or scholarship which attributes the great literary results which mark history to "the fortuitous concourse" of intellects. "Every house is builded by some man." The masterpieces of literature are the outcome of the activity of the world's great minds, not the collected dribbling of an infinity of small ones. The majestic harmony of Isaiah throughout never tumbled together out of a tendency; it was born of the travail of one great soul. Isaiah of Jerusalem could write what passes under his name. There is not only no evidence to show that any one else did write anything attributed to him, but that there was any one in being who could write it. C. CAVERNO. BOULDER, COLO. DRUMMOND'S "ASCENT OF MAN." THIS latest work by Professor Drummond has already passed through several editions, and is being read by thousands of thoughtful youth. Several combined causes account for his phenomenal success. He is bright, spicy, rhetorical, illustrative, clear, and a master in the art of put ting things. The subject-matter treats of the two most vital questions of the age-biological science and religion; not the religion of shibboleths and sibboleths, theories and Hebrew manuscripts, but a vital religion of every-day experience. He stands beside thinking young students who are debating between the two roads, the one leading to materialism, and the other to theistic philosophy. The earnest student fears to trust the mere scientist; he has been warned against the specialist as an unsafe guide, and yet this is a scientific age. He also knows that religion has power and value, and the tearing down of religion means the letting loose of nihilistic and anarchistic forces upon society. In such an hour Professor Drummond stands by the student's side and in words of consummate skill, in phraseology of the latest scientific theories, points him to the "Everlasting Father and the Prince of peace." He assures him that he may run even in the advance ranks of the most progressive scientists, and yet need not join the cohorts of infidels in an anarchistic attack upon revealed religion. This is no small gain. Some one asks, Is Professor Drummond's book a permanent contribu tion to human knowledge? It is too soon to answer, but Christians should hold him in grateful remembrance for his remarkable power in persuading young students to wait awhile ere they throw away personal faith in religion. His example of personal faith at the same time that he is an ardent believer in most advanced evolution theories is of great value in staying the tides. He in his own person is an illustration, that, despite the hue and cry of blatant infidels, the scientific doctrine of evolution does not read God out of his universe, but is a mere modus operandi of his marvellous workmanship. In 1736 the thinking of the world had long been arrogated by infidels to themselves; religious foundations seemed to have sunk beneath authority and logic; intellect looked disdainfully upon piety as weak, ignorant, blind. What chance had a student in the universities of the world in those days? Bishop Butler in the above-mentioned year published a modest little volume which proved an epoch-making book. Men said, and still say, He proved nothing; analogy is no proof. But he turned the tide, and showed students how they could be men of thought and science, and yet earnest believers in God and active followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Drummond's book accomplishes a similar function in our own age. Readers by the thousands, not alone in colleges and universities but in homes, and shops, and factories, are held to faith by works of this class. These find comfort in Drummond's works-and more than comfort; for they turn with greater confidence to their Bible and their churches as fortresses over which the flag of faith is still waving unharmed. They are not driven to choose between their religion and the facts of science-there is no irreconcilable conflict between religion and science! The most satisfactory part of the book is its introduction. He shows how the evolution of man has been studied, 2. 3. As to the mind, by Romanes; As to the animal body, by Darwin, Huxley, Hæckel, and Wallace; 4. As to morals, by Herbert Spencer; 5. As to religion, by Edward Caird; 6. As to sociology, by Benjamin Kidd. ... Professor Drummond seems perfectly in accord with Professor Henry Calderwood, who says: "Evolution supposes organic life; there was a lower form from which a higher had been evolved. . . . In natural history therefore life is taken as existing, a reality already present, given at some earlier stage in the world's history. Evolution cannot be a complete natural history; at most it is a scientific account of later stages in the history of the universe."1 Of the opening chapters of existence, of the first verse in Genesis, evolution ought not and cannot speak. In reading histories we must clearly distinguish between a historian's facts and his interpretations of those facts. Professor Drummond boldly says: "At present there is not a chapter of the record that is wholly finished. The manuscript is already worn with erasures, the writing is often blurred, the very language is uncouth and strange." He quotes Mr. Herbert Spencer's famous and much ridiculed definition of evolution, and says it "throws no light, though it is often supposed to do so, upon ultimate causes." The chief force of Professor Drummond's book is reached in the statement of what he calls “the missing factor in current theories." He lays at Darwin's door the charge of misleading the world in scientific thought by the exclusive use of the principle of "the Struggle for Life." This principle Drummond allows, but says of it: "The Struggle for Life is the 'Villain' of the piece, no more; and, like the 'Villain' in the play, its chief function is to react upon the other players for higher ends" (p. 13). Drummond maintains most earnestly, that along with the principle "the Struggle for Life" must go the second factor, the Struggle for the Life of Others. It is by the neglect of this second factor that interpreters of nature have told a history whose pages are full of woe, have drawn "a picture so dark as to be a challenge to its Maker, an unanswered problem to philosophy, an abiding offence to the moral nature of Man. The world has been held up to us as one great battle-field heaped with the slain, an Inferno of infinite suffering, a slaughter-house resounding with the cries of a ceaseless agony" (p. 19). Drummond maintains that a consideration of the second factor, the struggle for the life of others, relieves the picture of nature, and makes the world not a selfish one of battle, but an altruistic home of love. In ten long and interesting chapters Drummond applies his theories of evolution to the Ascent of Man. In these chapters many will find much that is unsatisfactory and at times even repulsive. The introduction carries conviction, but the main part of the book offends in attempted descriptions of how nature accomplished everything, and thereby the book becomes visionary in the extreme. For example, take the first assertion: "The earliest home of Primitive Man was a cave in the rocks-the simplest and most unevolved form of human habitation. One day, perhaps driven by the want within his hunting-grounds of the natural cave, he made himself a hut—an artificial cave" (p. 59). To call such a statement science is a misnomer: it is only a theory, an imaginary algebraic "r" to test whether or not the equation can be made and solved. He then proceeds to show how the one-roomed cave develops into the modern magnificent palace-the one-celled organism into the highly differentiated many-celled body. His rhetoric gets advantage over scientific facts, for biological "segmentation" must not be compared to the architect's "adding room to room." The process is antithetical to “adding room to room." Segmentation combines increase through division and subdivision and then growth. To call division addition is a strange figure of speech! In his chapter on "The Ascent of the Body," our author vividly portrays from embryology the mysterious facts of man's relationships through the body to the lower creation. This is the most satisfactory of his chapters, and yet he admits: "In no case is the recapitulation of the past complete. Ancestral stages are constantly omitted, others are over-accentuated, condensed, distorted, or confused; while new and undecipherable characters occasionally appear" (p. 73). We might well adopt Goethe's words, as Hæckel has done: "Alle gestalten sind ähnlich doch keine gleichet der andern, "All forms have a resemblance; none is the same as another, In his chapter on "The Scaffolding left in the Body," we meet with many interesting facts, the right interpretation of which is the question under discussion. The facts are unquestioned; the philosophy is quite another matter. Mention was especially made of the "gill-slits" found in the neck of the human embryo, slits which sometimes remain even at birth. Moreover the history of embryos shows that the ear is a development from one of those slits, and cases arise where the other slits develop into abnormal ears down the neck. In all vertebrate animals-man included the most prominent features of the early embryo are the head, and then these gill-slits. In the early stages it is impossible to distinguish between the different embryos. Hæckel has a comparative set of figures showing this fact most convincingly. The fact of this likeness between the embryos must be acknowledged. Does it necessarily follow that these appearances are mere stages of a development, "scaffoldings still remaining," "vestiges of former states"? The evolutionist demands credence in his philosophy of placing facts. He must not be impatient and contemptuous of others who have another philosophy of these same facts, a different grouping of them. The difficulties are most seriously complicated because the champions on each side spend so much time and strength calling one another hard names—“atheist," "materialist," "infidel," "bigot," "religionist." The most serious difficulty arises from the intense determination of so many evolutionists to rid the world of what they call the “teleological " purpose of nature, the doctrine of "final causes." They are determined to rule out of court any and all arguments which imply any supervising intelligence. Such a man as Hæckel disfigures his pages by contemptuous expressions against those who defend theories other than materialistic and mechanical. Such men not only leave God out of the account, but would drive him out of the account. A scientific man's theories are his theories, and have value only in the ratio of truth in them. When he resents any teleological philosophy as unscientific, his assumptions must be repudiated and himself shown to be unscientific, because he refuses to consider all the possible working hypotheses in the case. If a teleological hypothesis can be made to answer the demands of the case, he is not scientific who refuses to accept it: he is ruled by a prejudice; he seeks not truth, but a predetermined theory. Such an evolutionist is not Professor Drummond. He is a firm believer in God who accomplishes his purposes via evolutionary methods. No short review can give one any idea of his masterly presentation of the evolutionist's side of the argument. In Chapter I. he deals with the general evidences of man's ascent of body from the lower forms of life. Chapter II. shows how there still remain in our bodies traces of the forms through which they have been made to pass in previous ages-one of his most interesting and valuable chapters. In Chapter III. he treats of man as the finality, beyond which there can be no more physical development; reason, and not "natural selection," from here on takes the ruling hand. Evolution now changes its course from a physical to a psychical universe. In Chapter IV. he deals with the evolution of mind, and acknowledges it as the great difficulty to be met. He starts with the given quantum of mental "elements," and then finds no further difficulty in developing present conditions. The sources of information are the study of the child mind, brute mind, mind of man in early ages as evidenced in flints, potteries, weapons, etc.; study of savage races, and the study of primitive languages. Some of the positions taken seem a strain upon science. He mentions twenty-three emotions manifested by animals, and asserts the definite |