discussion, is to reign supreme, though its main concern will be with the immediate interests of the day. On the influence of sculpture and painting upon character Mr. Pearson is silent. Nor does he say much either on the drama, apart from its literary aspect, or on music (with the exception of an allusion to the music-hall) as a source of elevation and consolation for the inevitable loss of brightness which he fears will overshadow the life of our descendants. This last omission is somewhat singular when we remember how marked a feature of the age has been the development of a taste for music during the last thirty years, a hopeful sign that there may be in store for the cultivation of this art at least still greater triumphs in the future. Although our author can often be sufficiently epigrammatic, of humour there is little or none either in him or in the society that he forecasts. The times, we presume, will be too serious and sombre to admit of it. The spectacle of the stationary condition to which the world is moving is too profoundly hopeless and cheerless for anything of the kind. Some lively remarks of M. Scherer may here be not out of place, in considering the absence of this quality both in our author and in his subject. The humourist,' he says, 'has neither the fault of the pessimist, who refers everything to a purely personal conception, and is angry with reality for not being such as he conceives it; nor that of the optimist, who shuts his eyes to everything missing in the real world, that he may comply with the demands of his heart and his reason. The humourist feels the imperfections of reality, and resigns himself to them with the good humour which knows that our own satisfaction is not the rule of things; that the formula of the universe is necessarily larger than the preferences of a single one of the accidental beings of whom the universe is composed. The humourist is beyond all doubt the true philosopher-always providing that he is a philosopher.'1 In a state of society where so much that formerly gave a zest to existence is to be taken away, with waning genius, with less enterprise, less ambition, less energy, we naturally ask what are the compensations. Equable political order, greater efficiency of exact thought, material comfort, adequate wages, a far higher average of healthiness, longevity, and its result, greater self-confidence, is the answer. All these, it is urged, may affect character for the better. But surely some of these, as indeed is admitted, would be dubious Essays on English Literature. Translated by George Saintsbury. London, 1891, p. 148. advantages. Imagine a society where nonagenarians would be as common as those who have reached their threescore years and ten are now, but where the innocent prattle of children was comparatively seldom heard, for the size of the family would be checked by prudential motives. What would be their talk? To what would they look forward for themselves or their posterity? What would be their resources and amusements? Trivial results, ephemeral discussions, 'the apprehension of art dwarfed to taking comfort in bric-a-brac, the year-book, the review, the French novel' (p. 338); for this last, it seems, whatever else is to perish, is destined to survive. It is in truth a depressing outlook-this ' age of reason or of a sublimated humanity,' that we are told we are approaching. We are not permitted to rest upon the consolation of believing that as the world has lived through evil times before so it may be in the future, and that advance is certain in the end, though it may be slow. These are dreams from which a sober survey of history must disenchant us, and they derive no warrant from the analogies of the national world. 'On the whole neither our despondency nor our cheerful expectation can be assumed to correspond with any real forecast of the future. For a man to argue that he will recover from senile decay because he has outlived fever and a fall from his horse would clearly be irrational' (p. 340). Still the question is whether there must be the counterpart to this senile decay in the body politic, and whether the symptoms of its approach are so manifest as is here implied. The retrospect of the past has proved a source of consolation to minds of a robust nature. One who was, as Mr. Pearson was, a Fellow of Oriel, the late Dean Church, spoke thus in contemplating the advancing tide of what seems adverse to Christianity in modern civilization: 'There are reasons for looking forward to the future with solemn awe. But awe is neither despair nor fear; and Christians have had bad days before. Passi graviora. A faith which has come out alive from the darkness of the tenth century, the immeasurable corruption of the fifteenth, the religious policy of the sixteenth, and the philosophy, commenting on the morals, of the eighteenth, may face without shrinking even the subtler perils of our own.'1 How cheering and stimulating is such language as this! When we come to Mr. Pearson's really terrible summary, and 1 Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford. London, 1868. Sermon IV., 'Civilisation and Religion,' p. 136. think of the monotonous existence, the paralysis of energy that, according to his view, awaits the generation of weak men who are devoid of the saving hope that Medea had,1 that there remained to her at least herself, we are tempted to exclaim, 'Oh! Mr. Pearson, whither are you leading poor humanity? What is to be left to her? "Thy head is clear, thy heart is chill, As we close the volume, which we do with a sense of relief that such a dreary state of things as it predicts cannot well be realized in our own time, we must admit that it is a profoundly impressive and masterly one. There is no bias, no passion, no wish to exaggerate, nothing cynical or sickly in the writer, if we except a few passages already alluded to on the Church, indicative of asperity and undue warmth. His 'open eyes,' like those of Freedom, 'desire the truth,' and nothing but the truth. We may, however, be permitted to doubt whether some regenerating influences, and some factors moral and physical, too complex, perhaps, to be visible until a few more pages in the book of destiny have been turned, have not eluded his scrutiny. In the realm of science alone is it quite so certain that she has done her greatest work, and that there is nothing now left for her but to fill in details? Some of those most competent to speak on this matter hold that great fundamental discoveries are still possible in the future. However, our thanks are due to Mr. Pearson for having produced a most suggestive and valuable work. It is a book every page of which teems with thought, and raises many more questions of vital interest than could be dealt with adequately within these limits. It is a serious attempt to foreshadow some of the next scenes in the world's drama, and to weigh exactly the probable losses of modern life and character against their gains. No one who has the prospects of the human race at heart can afford to disregard the calm and judicial utterances of this forecast, however much he may find himself often dissenting from and regretting some of its melancholy conclusions. 1 Surely Seneca rather than Corneille deserves the credit for originality in this thought. His 'Medea superest' is admirable for its terse ness. ART. V.-ST. PAUL IN ASIA MINOR. The Church and the Roman Empire before A.D. 170. 'Westward the course of empire takes its way,' By and the spiritual empire of the Christian Church has followed the same law of history. Rooted in Judaism, its earliest home was the sacred city of the Jews. At Jerusalem the Apostles awaited the Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit, and, according to the tradition as recorded in the next century by Apollonius and by Clement of Alexandria, twelve years were to pass before the foundations of the first Christian Church were laid deep enough to warrant the Apostles in finally separating to take up their original missionary work. There too, in the person of James, 'the Lord's brother,' the Apostles created the first type of the episcopal organization which was to be the model of the permanent government of the Church, and guaranteed its supremacy in deferring to his right to preside at the Apostolic council which showed Jerusalem to be still the centre of the Church. But the increasing importance of the foreign and especially of the Western Churches, and the increasing rift between the standpoint of the Jewish and of the Gentile Christian, were tending to leave the Church of Jerusalem stranded high and dry away from the main stream of Christian history, even before the great cataclysm of A.D. 70 came in the providential order of events to cut apart sharply and once for all the cord which bound the Catholic Church to its Jewish origin. A generation before some far-sighted spirits who had grasped the true significance of the new dispensation found their way to Antioch, the great capital of Northern Syria, when the liberal tendency of their ideas drove them from the scene of their earlier preaching. At Antioch Saul of Tarsus found a congenial home, and thence he was despatched, after being solemnly set apart for the Apostolic office, on the first of his three missionary journeys; at Antioch, the first centre of Gentile Christianity, the battle of Gentile freedom from the Jewish law was fought and won; and yet Antioch itself was only a temporary halting-place in the Church's western march. St. Paul passes on to Ephesus, to Corinth, and to Rome. St. Peter, if we may accept the Antiochene tradition that he first organized the episcopate of the city, followed in the steps of St. Paul, perhaps to Corinth, certainly to Rome. Ignatius, the last great name of the primitive Church of Antioch, is known to us only through the journey which he too took westward as a prisoner over the same road and to the same goal. That its only other well-known bishop in ante-Nicene times, Paul of Samosata, was deposed for his want of loyalty to the faith, serves well to illustrate how during the second and third centuries the primacy in Christian history passed away as completely from the Church of Antioch as it had done from the Church of Jerusalem. It might have been an open question whether the westward progress of Christianity from its first home should take the route northwards by Syria, or south-westwards through Egypt; and it would be an interesting problem to work out why Alexandria, the second home of Judaism, occupies no place in the development of the Church as depicted for us in the Acts. But when once the direction of Antioch was taken, geographical conditions, political and natural, conditioned closely the future course of affairs. Eastwards lay the Euphrates the 'Great River' of Bible history—and the Roman frontier. North-east lay range beyond range of inhospitable mountains and barren table-land. Civilization beckoned along the one natural road which led north-west and west through the Syrian and Cilician gates up on to the plateau, through Lycaonia and Southern Phrygia, and down again to the great cities of the Ægean coast. Here in Asia Minor was the well-worn battle-ground of East and West. Here horde after horde of Eastern invaders had passed on to the old errand of the subjugation of Europe. Here Greece and Rome had for the time turned the tables in favour of the West, though even so Greek culture and Roman organization had as yet made but a faint impression on the peoples of the interior. If Christianity was to win Greece and Rome she must win her spurs on the ground that brought East and West into contact; and by insight or by instinct the Apostles grasped the need. St. Paul chose Lycaonia for the scene of his first missionary journey, Ephesus for the centre of the longest stay recorded in his later life; and half of his epistles were written to correspondents or to Churches of Asia. St. Peter's epistle is addressed to the 'dispersion' in the four Roman provinces which made up Roman Asia Minor. St. John's Apocalypse is directed to the angels of seven representative Churches of the district of the coast. From the destruction of Jerusalem to the final passing away of the generation of immediate disciples of the Apostles, till the |