from Him. Assuredly the author views the church as what she is and always has been, an external institute, with her essential doctrines and ministries of worship. But he is unfalteringly loyal to the truth that all these things are of worth or cogency only as they are rooted in the Incarnate Life. They are to him, as they are in themselves, instrumental, not primary, the means of conveying that Life into the inmost principles of every soul, and of thus sacramentalizing all the preexisting relations of men. Indeed, this is the meaning of the whole book, and to everything ending in ecclesiasticism as such the author stands serenely neutral. Neither those who believe that the church will ultimately melt into the Christian state nor those who believe that the two will grow evermore distinct and therein evermore harmonious would, as we judge, find anything here to contradict them, though probably the latter is the author's view.

Those worthy men who are so greatly distressed because this or that longprevailing theory or system or ministry or succession does not receive all the attention they think it deserves, or is perhaps even contradicted in the church, would find their courage refreshed by reading these Lectures and taking the full impression of them. The author evidently believes that the Sun of Righteousness may be trusted to shine on, and by his immediate light to cause things to be seen as they are and by his immediate heat to keep in life the genial forms of spiritual existence, even though the pillars should collapse which have been piously built up to keep him from falling out of the sky. But from beginning to end he treats Christianity as historical, and as rooted in the New Testament. He believes that the historical is the ideal, and that the ideal is the historical Christ, and by this very simple yet fundamental faith, which happens to be the gospel itself, he reconciles the divergence of which we so often hear between the two. The book shows no sympathy with the hazy disposition to call everything Christian which may commend itself to this man or that as good without any thought of subordination to the objective norm. The waters which he sees going forth to renew the face of the earth proceed for him, as for the prophet, from under the threshold of the temple of Zion. He sees the central and perfect light and life of God breaking through the clouds at a definite point on the historical horizon, and gradually enlightening the whole circuit of heaven because unwastingly replenished from the same self-manifesting record. He thus gives to the Scriptures their highest possible authority, by seeking in them not merely the means of establishing sound propositions, but the substantial, ever fresh, self-communication of the Incarnate God himself. And though, with an equally fine literary and spiritual instinct, he keeps himself clear of all entanglement in technical terms or schemes, he so treats Christian history as something far greater than mere church history, that in his presentation it impresses itself upon us as, so to speak, the second great sacrament after the greatest sacrament of the evangelical and apostolic testimony, the enlarging, though yet most imperfect prevalency of the all-subduing Word.

Dr. Storrs vindicates the Western hierarchy from the charge of having been mainly developed under the love of dominion, deeply as this alloy may have mingled with it. And he justly attributes its still present prevalency to this crass but sincere desire to furnish Christ a home worthy of Him in the world. That in this system the evil element is in danger of strangling the good it does not concern him to remark, as he

has too deep a faith in the perennial energies of the church of God, ever renewed from her Head, to imagine that she needs to house in the most magnificent shell of the past.

Perhaps Dr. Storrs, in his style and in his view of things, is a little too much inclined to Queen Elizabeth's fault of wishing that there should be no shadows in the portrait. It is true he has shown most convincingly how no skill of heaven can keep the perfect good from turning, here and there, under human wickedness, to perfect evil, on God's patient way to the consummate realization. But he might have shown more at large how not until the consummate realization does any generation fail to lose much of Christ, as well as to gain much of Him, and sometimes, like our own, to be in ghastly danger of a great revolt against the gospel in the very clearness with which its all mastering aim is coming into view. But he says nothing at variance with this, and what he does say shows the thrice-worthy result of an ever-deepening and enlarging harmoniousness of Christian life and thought as it draws near the time

"When to its Autumn brought, Life's golden fruit is shed."

Charles C. Starbuck.

EXTEMPORE PREACHING. BY WILDER SMITH. Hartford: Brown & Gross.

1884.

If the author had entitled his book "Preaching without Manuscript," or had made it a treatise upon the unwritten sermon, his discussion would have been more pertinent to his theme. In the course of the discussion (page 29) he himself is inclined to admit as much. "It may be reasonably objected that any of the modes of preparation hitherto described, ranging as they do all the way from a completed manuscript to a discourse fully elaborated in the mind, have very little that is of an extemporaneous nature in the sermon as finally spoken. The objection is well taken. It is for this reason that the writer prefers to call them · unwritten' rather than extempore sermons. But it seemed best to retain the title under which they are popularly mentioned." After this admission it may seem ungracious to criticise farther at this point, but the fact that the difference between the extempore and the unwritten sermon is yielded up so easily makes it necessary to insist upon the distinction which is here surrendered. This is our author's definition of the extemporaneous sermon: "An extemporaneous sermon, then, is one on which all possible labor may have been previously expended, but which relies upon the occasion for the language in which it is expressed. It may even happen that it shall have been completely written out, once and again, for there are extempore preachers who spare no pains; but the manuscript is left at home, and its words are allowed to drop from the memory (page 17). Certainly this is not a definition of extempore preaching. It misses the one necessary idea; it leaves out the vital spark. Extempore preaching means more than reliance upon the occasion for the language in which the thought is to be expressed. It means that the mind of the preacher is in creative mood in the very act of preaching. The process of extempore preaching is more than a rhetorical process. The extempore sermon must be preached, not upon insufficient preparation, but before the fires have gone out. The extempore preacher must guard

against the loss of heat, of spiritual passion, quite as much as against shrinkage in thought. Hence the difficulty of repeating extempore sermons. The difficulty is not in recalling the thought; it is in rekindling the fires. The best extempore preaching is always brought out under the pressure of the regular pastorate, when the mind is at work upon fresh themes and under fresh inspirations. Preaching under such conditions compares favorably with extempore speaking in debate or at the bar. Otherwise it is in danger of going over into the memoriter habit. Probably the great fault of most extempore preachers lies in underestimating the difficulty of the art. Too little attention is given to general preparation, to the accumulation of resources, to the art of construction, to the mastery of speech, to the study of men. Mr. Gladstone, for example, or Mr. Spurgeon, are not beyond special preparation, they are not merely impromptu speakers, but their superlative power in speech lies in the steady, persistent training of themselves in the ready handling of great and urgent subjects.

But enough of criticism about titles and definitions. The book is characterized throughout by good sense, fairness of statement, and by perfect plainness and simplicity of style. In this last respect the author may almost appropriate to himself the closing sentences of the book: "His sentences will take an almost proverbial form from much attrition. His style will become pellucid as a mountain brook, through which his ideas show like rounded pebbles on the bottom." What he says in behalf of the unwritten sermon is worthy of attention, and nearly all of his suggestions apply equally to the extemporaneous sermon. Our author has evidently written out of his own experience. The book is full of hints which could have come only from one who had found out for himself the advantages and the difficulties of preaching without manuscript.

Wm. J. Tucker.

THE ANCIENT EMPIRES OF THE EAST. 301.

By A. H. SAYCE. 12mo, pp. xxiv., New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1884.

The accomplished author of this book has two special claims to the confidence of his readers. He is a traveler who has visited the lands he describes. He is also a scholar who has a first-hand instead of a secondhand acquaintance with most of the topics he has treated. Information was wanted up to date on Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, Lydia, and Persia. Professor Sayce has furnished it. In clearness, conciseness, and compre

hensiveness his sketch leaves little to be desired.

We learn from the Preface that the volume was originally written to accompany the author's edition of the first three books of Herodotos. This accounts for the prominence of his polemic against the Father of History. Partisans of the lively Greek will wince, perhaps, at the way in which their favorite is pilloried. That Herodotos was not merely ignorant and credulous, but dishonest and unveracious, they hardly care to admit. All must be interested in facts grouped so piquantly round the man of Halicarnassus. It seems Thukydidês tacitly accused him of errors at home, and Ktêsias abroad categorically declared his history of the East to be false, while Jôsêphos added, with the frankness of a modern journalist, that all Greek authors acknowledged him "to have lied in most of his assertions." Too many of these verdicts the monuments confirm. VOL. III.NO. 14. 13

That the Egyptians drank only out of bronze cups and did not eat wheaten bread could not have been written by a tourist with introductions to cultivated natives.

His story of Kambysês' madness and his wounding of the bull Apis was a mere fable of his guides, disproved by the speaking stones. According to his own testimony Hêrodotos is a wonderful linguist, able to talk freely with the dwellers on the Nile and Euphrates. According to his explanations of any word in these or intermediate tongues he is densely ignorant of all of them. Osiris' name, which was in the mouth of every native, he does not know, but pretends to suppress from religious motives. He wished to be thought to have gone as far up the Nile as Hekatæos and so blunders into calling Elephantinê a city instead of an island. Really he was never in Babylon. In his book he describes Babylon, even the temple of Bel, as if an eye witness, although that temple had been destroyed by Xerxes at the very date when the statue was removed, which, for that reason, he owns he did not see. Hêrodotos is to be admired for his charm of style and folk-lore rather than treated as an independent authority for Oriental history.

Professor Sayce's sprightly criticism of Herodotos is followed by brilliant yet solid chapters of his own. On Lydia, "the link that binds together the geography and history of Asia and Europe," he has a timely paper. Here we see the turned up boots of the mountaineers, and the wealthy marts of trade, the bright mythologies of Gordios and Midas, the many-breasted body of the Goddess-mother adored with cymbal-crash. Phoenicia too opens to us its harbors, into which the tin of Britain, the silver of Spain, the birds of the Canaries, the frankincense of Arabia, the pearls and ivories of India all flowed. The Phoenicians were intermediaries of ancient civilization, They borrowed the rosette and palm-leaf from Babylonia, the sphinx from Egypt, the cherub from Assyria; but gave to each a form and spirit of its own. Solomon's Temple best shows their decorative art. Their creed was not beneficent but baneful, their worship impure and cruel. The chapter on Egypt begins with the statement that what is "historically the eldest of countries is geologically the youngest." Professor Sayce has no doubt that traces of a prehistoric stage have been found. There is no evidence of Egyptian civilization being brought in from abroad, on the contrary everything seems to point to its having been of indigenous growth. So far as our present materials are concerned, the Egyptians were as autochthonous as their civilization. Mariette's statements must be received with caution as to numbers, yet are in the main correct. Provisionally his dates are adopted. Hyksos is the Egyptian hik-shasu, " chief of the Beduins" or "Shepherds." The slab of Sân confirms the period of their rule to have been 511 years. Possibly their leaders were Hittites. Like the Moors in Spain, they never subjugated all Egypt, and were, in manners, art, and religion, subjugated by Egypt. Of the three theories of the Egyptian religion, monotheistic, pantheistic, and henotheistic, Professor Sayce takes neither. "The kernel of the Egyptian state religion was solar." The magical virtue of names, the deepening gloom of the future life in the Middle and New Empires, the apotheoses of kings, the jealousy of strangers, the equality of woman, the gayety of the masses, the vigor of their art, and the justice of their laws, are made to stand out saliently as under their cloudless sky or on their carven rock.

-

The chapter on Babylonia and Assyria is most original and authorita

tive. Nor is it the least attractive. It is an admirable illustration of the author's principle, i. e., native monuments a better source than foreign historians. Of the native texts he well says: "The statements of those that are contemporaneous may be frankly accepted, due allowance being made for Oriental exaggeration and tendency to self-praise. The Assyrian historical documents, however, are singularly free from these faults. They were intended to be read by a large and well-educated public, and the practical character of the Assyrians made them realistic in style. The historical inscriptions are scrupulous in recording the names, and if possible the parentage, of the foreign princes they mention; every small town is carefully noted by name, the numbers, whether of conquered population and spoil or of the Assyrian armies, are seldom round and never excessive. Even the disaster which befell Sennacherib, - the least trustworthy of all the royal authors, in Palestine is not denied or glossed over; it is simply omitted, leaving a break which presupposes it." From such documents Professor Sayce shows us the people painted by themselves. They have a fixed chronology, dating from Eponyms, like the Archons at Athens. This began as early as the fourteenth century B. C. The Semitic conquest was gradual; that by the Cassi or Kossæans the most permanent in its influence. The first Assyrian Empire, in the twelfth century, was military; the second, in the eighth, commercial. Pul and Tiglath Pileser II. are one and the same. The weak, vainglorious, and tyrannical Sennacherib is a contrast to the astute and humane Esarhaddon. Elements of weakness in Babylonia invited the conquest of the politic Cyrus. Shamanism developed into Polytheism, the sun worship superseded the moon worship. The deities of the Accadian and the Semite were fused in lower and higher circles. To the esoteric few the mixture may have led to Monotheism. In art, letters, and science, Assyria was the child of Babylonia. The government was an absolute monarchy. The Tartan or Turtannu was commander-in-chief. Among the state officials were the Rab-Saki (RabShakeh) or vizier, the Rab-Saris or chamberlain, the Music director, and the Astronomer royal.

John Phelps Taylor.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

FROM J. H. CHOATE AND CO., SALEM.

Two Centuries of Church History. Celebration of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Organization of the Congregational Church and Parish in Essex, Mass., August 19--22, 1883. Pages 214.

FROM GINN, HEATH AND CO., BOSTON.

Outlines of Metaphysic. Dictated Portions of the Lectures of Hermann Lotze. Translated and edited by George T. Ladd, Professor of Philosophy in Yale College. Pages xii., 166. 1884. $1.00.

FROM CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, NEW YORK.

Biographical Essays. By F. Max Müller, K. M., Member of the French Institute. Râmmohun Roy, Keshub Chunder Sen, Dayânanda