archal narratives" and regarded these features as justifying the opinion "that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob [and Joseph] are historical persons, and that the accounts which we have of them are in outline historically true" (Hastings' Dictionary of the Bible, articles Jacob and Joseph). Notwithstanding the goading of Professor Cheyne that he date the Book of Ruth after the beginning of the exile, he declared that "it seemed" to him "that the general beauty and purity of the style of Ruth point more decidedly to the pre-exilic period than do the isolated expressions quoted to the period after the exile."

Characteristically, then, Dr. Driver was not an innovator, but a judge (Peake, Expositor, 1914, p. 397), calm, cautious, careful. Possibly the chief limitations to the finality of his judgments are the narrowness of his gaze, which was fixed too exclusively on the literature of the Old Testament and in its historical range did not extend sufficiently beyond the confines of ancient Israel; and coupled with this, strange though it may seem in view of the long lists of words which formed the basis for many of his arguments, an occasional incomplete induction of facts.

Dr. Driver "came to the New [Testament] as a disciple and a believer" (J. Hope Moulton, London Quarterly Review, 1914, p. 310). His own confession of faith regarding the New Testament is found in the preface to his Introduction, in each edition from the first to the last. "While in the Old Testament," to quote his words, "there are instances in which we can have no assurance that an event was recorded until many centuries after its occurrence, in the New Testament the interval at most is not more than 30-50 years. Viewed in the light of the unique personality of Christ, as depicted both in the common tradition embodied in the Synoptic Gospels and in the personal reminiscences underlying the fourth Gospel, and also as presupposed by the united testimony of the Apostolic writers belonging almost to the same generation, the circumstances are such as to forbid the supposition that the facts of our Lord's life on which the fundamental truths of Christianity depend can have been the growth of mere tradition, or are anything else than strictly historical." (For references to "the God-man" and to "the central truths of Christianity," see

Sermons, pp. 186, 199, and Christianity and Other Religions, pp. 40, 44.) And among Dr. Driver's favorite hymns were "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" and "Just as I am, without one plea, But that Thy blood was shed for me".

Dr. Driver married in middle life, in 1891. Four children, two sons and two daughters, blessed the union. Dr. Sanday, his colleague and intimate friend, gives a beautiful picture of his home life. "Absolutely simple, absolutely sincere, absolutely without guile, single-minded and at the same time humble-minded, the Bible and the Home were the two centres of his being, and in both he had the fullest satisfaction. A happier or more united home could not easily be. Beyond the little vicissitudes of everyday life, undisturbed by external events, not wholly without and yet with less rather than more of the common lot of sorrow and trouble,

'Along the cool sequester'd vale of life

He kept the noiseless tenour of his way.'

It was such a career as a scholar would wish for himself, such a career as those who loved him may rejoice to look back upon, now crowned and made perfect in death" (p. 5).

Princeton, N. J.

JOHN D. DAVIS.

REVIEWS OF

RECENT LITERATURE

PHILOSOPHICAL LITERATURE

The Problem of Christianity. Lectures Delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston, and at Manchester College, Oxford. By JOSIAH ROYCE, D.Sc. (University of Oxford), Professor of the History of Philosophy in Harvard University. New York: The Macmillan Company. 1913. Vol. I, pp. xlvi, 425; Vol. II, pp. vi, 442.

The philosophy of Professor Royce has always had a religious side, in fact has been to a large extent a philosophy of religion. One of his earliest works was The Religious Aspect of Philosophy; another, The Conception of God,-a symposium in which Royce took the principal part. His well-known Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, deal largely with religious problems. In the volumes before us, however, our author treats for the first time in extended form the Christian religion distinctively, though he had previously published. some articles on the subject in periodicals.*

It may be said at the outset that it would probably be difficult for any one to realize the full import of these lectures who did not know something of Professor Royce's previous works and in general of his philosophy. Some of the books which he has published in the last few years may be regarded as forming a transition from the more purely philosophical works to the present one. We refer to The Philosophy of Loyalty, William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life, and his Bross Lectures on The Sources of Religious Insight. Professor Royce in the preface to the present work refers to the second-mentioned volume as containing the assertion, "that the spirit of loyalty is able to supply us not only with a philosophy of life, but with a religion which is free from superstition, and which is in harmony with a genuinely rational view of the world." (I, vii.) And in the Bross Lectures, one of which was on The Religion of Loyalty, the promise was made that in a future discussion he would, if possible, "attempt to apply the principles there laid down to the special case of Christianity". "The present work redeems that promise according to the best of my ability" (I, viii). The work before us, therefore, is not one that is independent of Royce's general

* An article of his on the Incarnation and the Atonement in the Harvard Theological Review, Oct. 1909, was adequately considered in this REVIEW, July, 1911, by Prof. Willis J. Beecher. Articles in the Atlantic Monthly, February and March, 1913, are substantially chapters in the work before us.

system, but rather the culmination of it in the interpretation put upon what is declared to be the highest religion known, Christianity. We shall not be surprised, therefore, to find that Professor Royce calls his views as to the nature of the Christian religion "novel views", inasmuch as he has not derived them from an impartial, objective study of historic Christianity, but has confessedly applied to this Christianity a ready-made framework viz., The Philosophy of Loyalty. We may remark, however, that the views of the Harvard professor are in reality not as novel as he seems to think.

The reader may ask what our author means exactly by the title of his book, The Problem of Christianity? Simply that he regards the Christian religion as a problem to be studied in order to discover its essence, to ascertain what truth there is in it (if any truth), and in what form (if in any form) Christianity is to win the world. For many reasons religion is a most important study, and Christianity is the most effective expression so far in history of the religious longing. We ought therefore to understand it. And when we have discovered what the essential features of Christianity are, the problem arises, Can such a creed be accepted by the "Modern Man"?

Confronting, therefore, the question, What is the creed of Christianity? Professor Royce asks whether we shall find the essence of the Christian religion simply in following the teaching, the personal example, and the spirit of the Master? If so, the problem for the modern man as to adherence to this is quite simple. But our author declares that this view as to the essential nature of the Christian religion cannot be held. He says: "Historically speaking, Christianity has never appeared simply as the religion taught by the Master. It has always been an interpretation of the Master and of his religion in the light of some doctrine concerning his mission, and also concerning God, man, and man's salvation,-a doctrine which even in its simplest expressions, has always gone beyond what the Master himself is traditionally reported to have taught while he lived" (p. 25). He goes on to say there can be no doubt that the Master uttered words that could not be fully understood until interpreted in the light of subsequent events, and such interpretations deepened and enriched his sayings, such doctrines supplemented and fulfilled the view of life and salvation set forth by the Master. Yet he declares that after all we know little or nothing regarding the person of Christ. "Legends, doubtful historical hypotheses and dogmas leave us in this field in well known and to my mind simply hopeless perplexities. Hence this book has no positive thesis to maintain regarding the person of the Founder of Christianity. I am not competent to settle any of the numerous historical doubts as to the Founder's person and as to the details of His life" (p. xxvi). How, then, did the distinctive conceptions of Christianity originate? Professor Royce answers: "Historically speaking, the Christian Church first discovered the Christian ideas. The Founder of Christianity, so far as we know what his teachings were, seems not to have defined them adequately. They first came to a relatively full

statement through the religious life of the Pauline churches; and the Pauline Epistles contain their first, although still not quite complete, formulation. Paul himself was certainly not the founder of Christianity. But the Pauline communities first were conscious of the essence of Christianity. . . . Those I say are right who have held that the Church rather than the person of the Founder ought to be viewed as the central idea of Christianity (pp. xx, xxi). Professor Royce is very sure that the modern man, to be just to his own historical sense and to the genuine history of Christianity, cannot take any other view than this. The modern man must, therefore, decide whether in view of this interpretation of the essence of Christianity, he can be a Christian. The author states his fundamental position with great distinctness as follows: "The thesis of this book is that the essence of Christianity, as the Apostle Paul stated that essence, depends upon regarding the being which the early Christian Church believed itself to represent, and the being which I call in this book the Beloved Community, as the true source, through loyalty, of the salvation of man" (xxvi). How then we may ask did the Christian community originate? What was its ultimate source? Was it not Jesus Christ? Professor Royce declares that this work "has no hypothesis whatever as to how the Christian community originated. . The historical evidence at hand is insufficient to tell us how the Church originated. The legends do not solve the problem" (xxviii). But no historical student, we may remark, can pluck the Church out of mid-air in this way, and the author is compelled later to recede to a certain extent from this position.

The method pursued by Professor Royce in treating his subject in this work is as follows: First, to discover what are the essential features of Christianity; secondly, to discuss their meaning and the real truth at the bottom of their symbolic expression; thirdly, to ground this esoteric truth of Christianity in metaphysical reality by a philosophical investigation. The first two heads are treated together in the first volume entitled, The Christian Doctrine of Life; the third head is treated in the second volume, The Real World and the Christian Ideas.

I. What now in Professor Royce's judgment may be regarded as the essential features of Christianity? "They are all of them ideas that came to the mind of the Christian world in the course of later efforts to explain the true meaning of the original teaching regarding the Kingdom of Heaven" (I, p. 35). These Christian ideas are as follows: 1. "The salvation of individual man is determined by some sort of membership in a certain spiritual community,-a religious community, and in its inmost nature a divine community, in whose life the Christian virtues are to reach their highest expression, and the spirit of the Master is to obtain its earthly fulfillment. In other words: There is a certain universal and divine spiritual community. Membership in that community is necessary to the salvation of man" (p. 39). 2. "The individual human being is by nature subject to some overwhelm