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Courts, than to be listening to lectures on the Roman Civil Law and other recondite subjects. Under a system common to both branches of the profession, the system of teaching will be pushed rather too high for the articled clerks and rather too low for the Inns of Court students; both must, therefore, suffer in the result. Again, the larger the number of students in any particular class, the less will become the value of the teaching to those who attend it. The Judges fully understood this when, by their order dated in 1627, they directed that not more than ten students should attend the class of each Reader. The Benchers of the Inner Temple are so impressed with the same view, that although their annual contribution to the funds of the Council of Legal Education exceeds that of any other Inn, by reason of their having the largest number of students, they have devoted an additional 2000l. a year to give special instruction, in private classes, to the students of their own Society, and have established six tutorships for that purpose and placed their supplemental system under the directions of a Committee of the Bench. It is clear that if all the students of all the Inns of Court and all the articled clerks of all the solicitors are mixed together in one mass, the classes into which they would have to be grouped would become too numerous and unwieldy to be of much good to anyone. Should an attempt be made to avoid this evil by increasing the number of tutors and classes, then the students will have to be grouped with reference to their previous attainments, and the articled clerks will be drafted into one class, and the students from the Universities, who are going to the Bar, will be drafted into others, and for all practical purposes the 'broken down barrier' will be built up again. All learners may begin in the same building, but they will not and cannot learn together. Again, students for the Bar who are to be trained to understand and argue difficult cases of municipal and international law, require a higher system of education than is needful or useful for men whose duties must be principally of an administrative character. Common sense tells us that it would be better for articled clerks to be instructed in mercantile bookkeeping and in those special branches of knowledge which a land-agent should understand, than to be taught to explain such niceties as the differences between Depositum, Pignus, and Hypotheca. If the solicitors, who have suffered their own Inns of Chancery to slip through their fingers, had been more alive to their own true interests, they would never have allowed the body of men, called 'accountants,' to have sprung up, as they have done during the last few years, to absorb a lucrative portion of legal business which the solicitors ought to have kept for themselves, and they would also,

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trade in advocacy, let them remember that there is the new class of accountants and debt collectors,' who are striving to obtain free trade in the instituting and conduct of causes, and to infringe on the exclusive privileges of the solicitors. The existing system of a separation of the work of the barrister from the work of the solicitor is, we are satisfied, the best; it grew up with the growth of the nation itself, and is established by usage, which would long since have been abrogated had it not been beneficial. To use the language of one who was, in years gone by, a distinguished Bencher of Gray's Inn, What is settled by custom, though it be not good, yet at least it is fit, and those things which have long gone together are, as it were, confederate among themselves; whereas new things piece not so well.'

The notion that Lord Selborne and Lord Hatherley are, with a certain amount of countenance from the Lord Chancellor, banded together to obliterate the Bar as a great and separate profession, appears to us to be simply preposterous. There is no sufficient ground for supposing that any one of them entertains a wish of the kind. But some have given encouragement to the projects of a few solicitors whose designs go beyond their own, and they have omitted to explain with sufficient distinctness to what extent they disagree with such projects and are prepared to oppose them. Even if the notion had a basis as real as we believe it to be imaginary, there would be no just cause for apprehension; for the English Bar is too powerful to be destroyed with facility. One fact we consider certain the Government over which Mr. Disraeli presides will never give its support to Lord Selborne's Bill for the Incorporation of the Inns of Court or for the appropriation of their property, in the face of the unanimous disapproval which that measure has received from the governing bodies of those learned and ancient Societies. Why, indeed, should the Conservative Government act so unwisely as to provoke the hostility of a Bar more redoubtable than that of the publicans? They would be covered with derision were they to embark on a course of 'plundering and blundering,' or to sanction any of those innovating schemes by which every class and profession, every institution and establishment in the country, has during a series of years been more or less vexed by Liberal Administrations. Lord Selborne's Bills will be brought before Parliament during the next Session, and our Conservative Government will be obliged to decide whether the new movement now in progress shall receive its support or its opposition. It is for many reasons most important that the Cabinet should come to a resolution on the subject as soon as possible, and let the result be known.

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ART. V.-The Life of Christ. By Frederic W. Farrar, D.D., F.R.S.; late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge; Master of Marlborough College, and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. Tenth Edition. London, 1874. 2 Vols. 8vo.

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WHATEVER opinion be entertained as to the purpose of these brilliant volumes, there can be no doubt that the publishers, with whom the idea originated of placing in the hands of English readers' such a sketch of the life of Christ on earth as should enable them to realise it more clearly, and to enter more fully into the details and sequence of the Gospel narratives,' acted with wise forecast in committing the furtherance of their design to the present Master of Marlborough College. Dr. Farrar was no novice in literature. His published studies in the Science of Language had not merely distinguished him as a writer of independent thought and untiring research, but had shown him to possess gifts of exposition and illustration, such as are to be found only in born teachers. Hardly less important as a qualification for the task imposed upon him was his well-known eloquence as a preacher. And though the aim of the promoters was 'to spread the blessings of knowledge' rather than to strengthen the foundations of faith, the marked ability of his Hulsean Lectures on 'The Witness of History to Christ,' delivered before the University of Cambridge, in 1870, might not unreasonably have been accepted as a substantial augury of his success. To these tokens of aptitude for the work may be added another, the importance of which must have been obvious to his publishers. Dr. Farrar, though known to be staunchly attached to the faith of the Church of England, had publicly expressed himself, on more than one occasion, with characteristic fearlessness, in favour of a clergyman's right to follow his conscience at all hazards in pursuit of truth; and hence his name was sure to carry with it a guarantee, not merely that the faith of tradition would not be trifled with, but that the many deep and intricate problems connected with his subject would be resolutely encountered to the best of his knowledge and ability. The result of his labours is now before us; and, considering that we are reviewing the tenth edition of his somewhat costly volumes within nine months of their publication, he may certainly be congratulated upon a literary success to which the annals of English theology present no parallel. Some portion of this success, it may not perhaps be fanciful to attribute to a reactionary mood in matters of faith, analogous to that which has recently influenced the popular current of political Vol. 138.-No. 275.

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ideas in England. Since the publication of Essays and Reviews,' society, for good or for evil, has extended an ever-increasing tolerance to scepticism, of which the Press has not been slow to take advantage. Opinions which a few years since were confined to learned corners, are broached to-day without reserve in leading journals and popular magazines; and side by side with the last new novel, upon the counters of our circulating libraries, may be found attractive essays, bearing influential names, which make no secret of their author's belief that the creed of our common Christianity is a sham. It would, nevertheless, be a mistake to suppose that the religious mind of England, curious as it is in regard to sceptical ideas, is, at bottom, sceptically inclined; least of all, is it disposed to tolerate anything like ridicule of that which it holds sacred. But criticism has indulged itself of late in a licence of badinage to which we are little accustomed on this side the Channel. We have been told in accents of mock pity that our theology is nothing better than a series of fairy tales, tricked out with delusive metaphysics. The same self-confident authority has assured us that the reign of the Bible miracles is doomed.' And, in order, we suppose, to hasten their extinction, we have been treated quite recently, among other pleasantries, to an exposure of rationalistic interpretation at least suggestive of a parallel between the Miracle of Cana and the story of Cinderella.* Such liberties overreach themselves. There is, probably, no religious conviction which has not been worried, no religious interest which has not been affronted, by the assumptions and familiarities of this kind of writing. Hence, apart from the intrinsic merits of Dr. Farrar's work, we are inclined to think that there was a predisposing cause for the enthusiastic welcome it has met with. And though it might savour of rashness to infer, from the success of a single book, that there is no such disintegration of faith in our midst as that of which we have been lately warned ad nauseam, the fact that a new Life of Christ, avowing itself 'unconditionally the work of a believer,' has achieved a popu larity far exceeding that of nearly, if not quite, the most captivating sceptical work of modern times, may well serve to moderate the over-sanguine expectations of the critic, no less than to calm the undue fears of the orthodox.

Dr. Farrar's standpoint is that of an orthodox theologian, not, however, of the school to which the somewhat unguarded expression we have just quoted might seem to attach him. While

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Objections to Literature and Dogma.' Part. I. Vide Contemporary Review' for October, 1874, p. 816.

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adhering to every fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith,' he holds liberal views in regard to Inspiration which distinguish his position fundamentally from that of the mere harmonist. We quote the following, as a more distinct expression of his opinion upon this subject than we find in these volumes, from a work to which he refers us (vol. ii. p. 182, n):

'We believe with unfeigned heart that Holy Scripture was given by inspiration of God. That in it is contained all that is necessary for salvation. . . . We hold that, while the revelation which it contains was continuous, many parts of that revelation were delivered in a manner relative to the immediate needs of the age in which they were uttered; and as regards the method of its deliverance, we have seen a multitude of facts, both external and internal, which lead us to believe that, except in special clearly defined instances, it was not essentially dissimilar from that by which we arrive at the apprehension of those truths which are vouchsafed to us from other sources, i.e., that it was only supernatural as the deepest facts of our spiritual experience are supernatural; and only miraculous, as any communications must be miraculous whereby the Finite is enabled to comprehend the teaching and will of the Infinite.'

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He acknowledges the existence of formidable difficulties in the Gospel records, and, in many instances, candidly admits the possibility of error. Against any harmony which can be devised, some plausible objection,' he allows, could be urged.' Hence he lays no claim to finality for his own efforts. At the same time he aims at showing by the mere silent course of the narrative itself, that many of the objections' brought against it 'are by no means insuperable, and that many more are unfairly captious, or altogether fantastic.' For a delineation of the Life of Christ, from an orthodox point of view, his work is singularly free from the special pleading which has too often nullified the labours of his predecessors in the same field. It may, no doubt, be charged on this account with inconsistencies and ambiguities which a less candid pen would have avoided. But, whatever may be our differences with Dr. Farrar as to the method he has employed, we are not disposed to quarrel with him for what we regard as its necessary results. We feel at any rate that he has no mental reservations, but that, from first to last, he gives us the honest impressions of a richly-gifted and highly-cultivated mind, fairly representing, both in its certainties and in its uncertainties, the great majority of religious, which are at the same time thinking, minds of the present day.

The volumes are prefaced by a long list of authorities, to whom reference is made in the course of them. The list is by no means complete, nor does it give any idea of the many-sided

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