civilisation. Most people know the typical Pompeian house' which is figured in so many schoolbooks and has vexed so many school-children. This is not, as its frequent appearance in manifold editions might suggest, the only type of house occupied by the ordinary citizen of the Roman Empire. Up and down Italy, and still more in the provinces, other styles of dwelling-house meet us; and they may aid the historian of the Roman world. In our own country, the Roman province of Britain, perhaps the most common house is one which in ground-plan very much recalls a certain kind of cricket pavilion with a verandah in the centre of its front. That is not a building in which one can trace out atrium and triclinium and sudatorium and the rest of it, though it is easy to distinguish apartments for bathing and for ordinary use. It seems to be a native house, fitted up in Roman fashion, but laid out on a non-Roman plan. It becomes important to the historian when it is found to occur not only in our island but across the Channel, in northern France and the Low Countries and the west of Germany. As the enquirer goes further east and south, it vanishes. It is a mark of a large 'culture area,' to use an ugly but lucid modern phrase, which stretched from the Severn to the Rhine and the Vosges in Roman times. It is a proof that then-as indeed in many medieval days-the narrow seas of the Channel were seas that united. Then the now distinct areas of southern England and northern France and north-western Germany were peopled by men of the same Celtic race, living under the same variety of Roman provincial civilisation. We said of Signor Ferrero's narrative that it seemed exciting but not true. It may be retorted on us that this unwritten evidence, these sermons in stones and crockery, are very valuable, but at the same time very dull; they contain no heroic characters or dramatic scenes, stir no blood, kindle no love or hatred. That is not altogether regrettable. The place of heroes in a history is not quite that which they rightly occupy in a novel or a poem. In the actual world genius seems to occur more often in small States-an Athens or a Florence-than in Empires; and, when it occurs, it is not seldom a disturbing influence. A recent German writer on the Roman Republic, Dr Kromayer, selects, as the most surprising feature in the growth of that state, its total want of really great men. That want really made the growth easier. The Roman Republic, or rather the Roman Senate in its best days, embodied the triumph of character, not of genius. Had the members of its oligarchy been divided by marked differences in intellect, they would never have united to wear down Hannibal and to conquer the Mediterranean. When great men began to appear, Gracchus and Sulla and Caesar and the rest, the Roman oligarchy was falling to pieces. So too in the Roman Empire. The history of that long period seems at first sight to be a mere record of the lives, the characters and the crimes of the successive rulers. That certainly is the idea which anyone would take away from a perusal of Suetonius and the so-called 'Historia Augusta,' and even from a good deal of Tacitus; and there has been a movement among recent writers, visible even in Prof. von Domaszewski's singularly learned volumes, to emphasise the personal element in the narrative. This is not wholly wrong. The military genius of a Trajan, the restless curiosity of the traveller Hadrian, the vices of a Nero or an Elagabalus, the virtues of a Pius or a Marcus Aurelius, must always stand out conspicuous. But, as we look closer, the significance of these things dwindles. The Emperors no longer appear to be the Empire. Instead, there comes into view a background of numerous officials and administrators, dull, second-rate, even stupid, but capable and competent for their work. These are the men who carry out the routine of the government, who conduct campaigns and rule the provinces. They remind us of the English statesmen who, after the death of the younger Pitt, fought out the last years of war against Napoleon, among whom-as Vandal says 'pas un ministre d'un renom, d'un passé glorieux, d'une intelligence supérieure.' But they kept the Roman Empire upright for two hundred and fifty years, through worse and longer assaults of more innumerable enemies than any other Empire has yet faced. If stupid character, if simple organisation and science and system, have their romancelike Kipling's '9.15'-beside genius and dramatic heroism, this Roman history is all the better for not having so many heroes. F. HAVERFIELD. Art. 3. THE ISOLATION OF THEOLOGY. 1. The Communion of the Christian with God. By W. Herrmann. 2nd English Edition. London: Williams and Norgate, 1906. 2. The Philosophy of Religion. By H. Höffding. London: Macmillan, 1906. 3. Identité et Réalité. By E. Meyerson. Paris: Alcan, 1908. 4. La Valeur de la Science. By H. Poincaré. Paris: Flammarion, 1909. 5. Science et Religion. By Émile Boutroux. Paris: Flammarion, 1908. English Translation, by J. Nield. London: Duckworth, 1909. FOR nearly a century theology has perforce been enlarging her borders. I am about to contend that she now finds insufficiently comprehensive any narrower scope than that which it was her glory to claim in the days of the great Alexandrines, or, again, in the golden period of the Scholastic age. Theology must henceforth be competent to appreciate and to assimilate the knowledge ever being acquired in fields such as science and philosophy; for many questions raised and answered there, as she well knows, have as profound an influence on theological development as the results of critical and historical research. She needs this competency, if she would gain the Greek as well as the barbarian, for missionary activity; especially in England, where, since natural science is taught with deplorable neglect of the elements of logic and philosophy involved in its structure and revealing its limitations, some students thereof are all too easily beguiled into an agnostic or naturalistic attitude. She needs it too for self-interpretation; and must long for the day when psychology and the science of knowledge shall have enabled her to evaluate mystical intuition, or to take a further step in elucidating the hitherto almost impenetrable mystery which gathers round the union of the two natures of our Lord and the conditions of His knowledge as man. She needs it alike, whether she would seek to isolate religious faith from contact with the several spheres of natural knowledge, or whether she would boldly proclaim, while working and waiting for its realisation, the catholic ideal of the unity of all truth. Alike, I say; for those of her own house who have been urging upon theology the careful policy of isolation necessarily defend their position with weapons borrowed from the armoury of philosophy; just as those of us who deem such retrenchment a timid and disastrous mode of succouring faith in distress derive from the same source the more fundamental grounds on which we base our convictions and our larger hope. The tendency to divorce theology from metaphysic, to ground religious belief exclusively upon individual feeling or the judgments of the practical reason, and consequently to dissolve its relations with the historical and natural sciences, save psychology alone, constitutes a prominent movement in recent theological thought. This movement, to which I would now invite attention, undoubtedly arose as a reaction from overweening intellectualism. Moreover it is, in its main features, so closely analagous to a wave of thought which swept theology once before, that in describing its growth I would venture in few words to trace a parallel. If Scholasticism may be said to have begun with Erigena, it entered upon its course of development with a calm confidence in the unity of all truth, the identity of theology and philosophy, of faith and reason. 'True philosophy is true religion,' the first Schoolman maintained, and true religion is true philosophy.' Nearly three centuries later this intellectualism was wholeheartedly embraced by Abelard, who, reversing Erigena's equation, sought to reduce theology to the level of philosophy. But before the rationalistic tendency of Scholasticism had thus reached its height, the identity assumed by Erigena had already appeared less obvious to so typical a Schoolman as St Anselm. St Anselm taught that reason could justify the assertions of Christian faith, and so lead faith on to knowledge; but he recognised that the two are distinct, and that logic is needed to bridge the chasm between their respective spheres. Another century elapses, and the logic which Anselm had thought sufficient is found to be inadequate. It breaks down when called upon to demonstrate the more mysterious doctrines of the Church. In the age of the Vol. 217.-No. 433. 2 B Summists the hope of theoretically proving such dogmas was abandoned. There were truths, Aquinas acknowledged, 'above reason,' though not contrary to reason; and, somewhat in the spirit of Kant, St Thomas sought to make room for these by narrowing the domain of knowledge. He who tries to prove by natural reason the Trinity of Persons and the Incarnation,' he says, 'detracts from the rights of faith.' Henceforward the decline of scholastic intellectualism was rapid. Duns Scotus, who would nowadays be called a voluntarist, maintained the supremacy of will over intellect, upheld the practical nature of religion, and insisted on its independence of reason and philosophy. Soon the rational demonstrability of the Being of God-a tenet held to the last by Aquinas-was surrendered by William of Occam; and he, as the radical empiricist of his day, resigned all knowledge transcending experience to the sphere of faith. Finally, along with other representatives of Scholasticism in its decline, Occam accepted the doctrine, or rather the fiction, of 'the double truth.' Not only were reason and faith, philosophy and theology, utterly distinct; what is false in the one might be true in the other! Such was the conclusion of an age-long movement of thought with regard to its central problem of the rationality of faith. For some twenty generations Scholasticism travailed to bring her answer to the birth; and when almost dying she was delivered of the still-born and monstrous doctrine of 'the double truth.' But from the dawn of Greek philosophy to the last century, belief that the world is speculatively comprehensible by the human intellect has never long been absent from the motives to philosophical endeavour. Reason has shown herself generally unwilling to accept Bacon's eirenicon and to render unto faith the things that are faith's.' She has sometimes treated the facts and doctrines of Christianity as symbol and parable, the real significance of which only appears when she has rationalised them, or assigned them a place in her all-embracing system of theoretic knowledge. She has even retorted against Faith Faith's own authoritative word to her: Whom ye ignorantly worship, Him declare I unto you.' And never has this spirit waxed more bold, never, at least, since the Christian intellectualism of Abelard and Raymond Lull, have the |