IV.

However poetical this idea may seem, there is no doubt about the prosaic reality of the good services acknowledged in the concluding paragraph of the address. It is well known that the Bodleian has become one of the richest storehouses of MSS., particularly of rare and valuable Oriental codices, in the world, with which but three or four of the greatest libraries in Europe can vie. Hence it is that scholars come from all parts to examine, collate, or copy these, manuscript treasures. It is true that the Bodleian, by one of the fundamental articles of its constitution, can never lend a single volume of any kind outside of its own walls; and history records the two interesting occasions when, first of all King Charles I., and some years later the mighty Protector, Oliver Cromwell, on applying for the loan of a volume, were each in turn stoutly refused, on the strength of this regulation, by the unflinching librarians of their day; and though neither Charles nor Oliver were men to brook lightly a contradiction of their wills, it is to the credit of both that they each gracefully acquiesced and respected the founder's law. On the other hand, scholars, whether English or foreign, wishing to work in the library, are ever received with all kindness and courtesy. Members of the Louvain University, among others, have in our own times, as indicated in the address, availed themselves of this privilege. One or two instances are referred to by name. The distinguished Professor of Holy Scripture and the Semitic Languages, Mgr. T. J. Lamy, during the past few years, has been engaged in publishing the hitherto inedited hymns and sermons of the greatest of the Syrian Doctors of the Church, St. Ephrem of Edessa. This fine edition, containing the original Syriac texts, with Latin translation, notes and commentaries, is based upon a number of codices in various European libraries, and among them the Bodleian.* Mgr. A. Hebbelynck, who, as the present

Sancti Ephraem Syri Hymni et Sermones, quos e codicibus Londiniensibus, Parisiensibus et Oxoniensibus descriptis edidit Thomas Josephus Lamy, Mechliniæ, Dessain, 4 vols., 1882-1902. There is an inaccuracy in

Rector Magnificus, signs the address quoted above, has also been indebted to the courtesy of the authorities of Bodley's Library, whilst copying or collating some of its Coptic MSS., one of which, an exceedingly curious, quasignostic treatise on the "Mysteries of the Greek Alphabet," he published in text and translation only last year.†

It was as a fitting and graceful acknowledgment of these and other services that the University of Louvain entrusted its delegate, in addition to the Latin address, with a selection of some dozen bound volumes of publications of members of its staff, for presentation to the Bodleian Library among them being, naturally, the works just described.

What I have written above will, I think, suffice to show the continuous traditions of friendly intercourse and reciprocal services which, for nearly four and a half centuries, have existed between the ancient University of Oxford and her younger, though venerable, sister University of Louvain; and it is possible, perhaps, to trace a long-linked chain of intellectual and moral cause and effect between the going of Robert Lincoln, the Oxford bachelor, to Louvain in 1472, and the sending by Louvain of her delegate to share in the joys of the Oxford celebration of 1902, after an interval of precisely 430 years.

L. C. CASARTELLI.

the Louvain address in quoting Mgr. Abbeloos as a collaborator in this important work. It was in the similar edition of the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of Bar-Hebræus, or Abu'l-Faraj, the greatest of the Syrian historians, that Abbeloos, Lamy's most distinguished pupil, co-operated with the latter thirty years ago (Gregorii Barhebræi Chronicon Ecclesiasticum conjuncta opera ediderunt Abbeloos et Lamy, Lovanii, Peeters, 3 vols., 1872-77), but the text published was that of a British Museum codex, not of the Bodleian.

+ Les Mystères des Lettres Grecques d'après un Manuscrit Copte-Arabe de la Bibliothèque Bodléienne d'Oxford. Louvain: Istas. 1902.

ART. V.-RELIGION AS A CREDIBLE

MR:

DOCTRINE.*

R. MALLOCK may often fail to convince us, and may sometimes fail to instruct us, but he seldom fails to interest us. In his latest work, however, his thoughts. and style have run away with him so completely that though we have always ranged ourselves with his admirers, we own to having read the last chapter of his book with a subconscious yet very effective sense of approaching relief. None of our present philosophical writers has hitherto imposed himself with more imperativeness as a model of clear, emphatic and persuasive writing than Mr. Mallock. But we confess that our hero-worship has suffered a severe shock from the extravagances, and we must say the absurdities, of Mr. Mallock's latest work.

Mr. Mallock was well-minded, and we should have said a year ago well-equipped, for the work of giving some rational account of the reasonableness of faith. But with his finished work before us we can only contrast the reasonableness of his intentions and the sufficiency of his powers with the inefficiency of the completed task. No doubt the author was well advised to write this book; but even his best friends cannot call him well advised in writing it as he has written it. The truth is that Mr. Mallock is a logician rather than a philosopher. His mind more readily deals with words than with thoughts. He is often admirable and sometimes pitiless in picking up the scent of a sophism and running the offender to earth. His own description of himself may well be regarded as a vera effigies. He looks upon himself, and we may take him at his own valuation, as an "intellectual accountant," whose

"primary business is not to say things for either side, but to examine and tabulate what either side has to say, to reduce the arguments of each to their clearest and simplest terms; to note and strike out such as are inconsistent with the others; and so to exhibit the entire affairs of both that the reader may see how on each side the account really stands."* But whilst Mr. Mallock claims the title he is in no anxiety to acknowledge the limitations of his financial counterpart. Called in to go over the books, he allows himself to be drawn into foolish opinions about the business prospects of the company, and in his abstract knowledge of figures he presumes to judge about such concrete things as the prospects of a good harvest or a heavy output. It is needless to say that whilst his accounting is of the best, his speculations are almost of the worst.

To some of his readers, and especially to some of his friends, this change of craft is inexplicable in one who seemed in word and style such a master craftsman. But Mr. Mallock's gift has been his ruin; his power has been his weakness. No one could deny him a consummate Gallican power of getting to the heart of a subject and laying it bare by a few quick strokes of his ready pen. He has long dazzled by his brilliancy, until he has succeeded in dazing those who look to him for clearness. His gift of reducing "arguments to their clearest and simplest form" has at length led him to attenuate them to mere formularies. He has broken down Christianity to a creed and sublimated science to a theory. He has given us the theological formula for faith as'a man may give the chemical formula for air, and because he finds that nitrogen and oxygen are fatal to life he forgets that a man's life is absolutely dependent on the quality of both. He has every mood and figure of argument at his pen point. But he forgets that there is more in reality, and above all in supernatural reality, than can be compressed into syllogistic forms. Reality is fuller than any thought and deeper than any form of thinking. Mr. Mallock forgets or overlooks this; he is in a hurry to reduce "arguments to their simplest form," and like an

* P. 6.

unskilled practitioner, he doses us with logic when we are pining for philosophy.

But though Mr. Mallock's logic is his best gift and worst fault, it is not his only fault. He has committed grievous sins of rhetoric glaring enough to make the groundlings cheer and the wise fume. His keen sense of humour gives his ready pen the power of fascination. But there is a limit to jest, even though Mr. Mallock does not see the limit. Good-humour ill-timed is ill-humour. Assuredly no man may hope to be a philosopher who lacks the sense of the absurd. The beginning of wisdom is to detect folly. Yet a philosopher or even a logician like Mr. Mallock is nearly at his worst when trying to raise a laugh. He touches his worst when the laugh is raised by the indelicate treatment of what is nearest his (or at least his readers') affections or most distasteful to his (or his readers') feelings. Mr. Mallock has sometimes been carried to this folly by the urgency of his humour. He may be grieved to know that only the foolish laugh; whilst those whom Mr. Mallock would most care to interest or persuade, merely grieve to see the jester's smile widen into an unmeaning and repulsive grimace. Whether through fulness of rhetoric or lack of good taste, there are passages in Mr. Mallock's book garnished with rhetorical flowers redolent of the apologetics of the tap-room. It is a sad falling-off from the writer we have admired of old, who knew how to confine his irre pressible frivolities to his works of fiction. If this latter time overflow of levity-we had almost said indelicacyinto his philosophical works, is a distressing messenger of approaching senile helplessness, men will more readily recall Mr. Mallock's earlier, better work, and forgive the evening of his life by reason of the morning.

Yet even in his decay Mr. Mallock cannot fail to blossom out into that which reminds us of his old vigorous and picturesque style. His examples, sometimes brutal, are always telling: "Philosophy, in fact, is like a coat which we are able to button across our stomach only by leaving a broken seam at our back" (p. 287); or again, "The totality of things in general, and of each thing in particular, is a tree of such enormous girth that our arms are too short to clasp