Instead of "the eternal silence of the infinite spaces, where the intolerable vastness bows him down and the awful homeless spaces scare his soul;" instead of "the cold, pitiless, passionless eyes, cold fires, yet with power to burn and brand His nothingness into man;" instead of "a ghostly eyesocket that stares at us where an eye should have been," the seer detects the living God-God, moving, acting, progressing!

God is also progressing in his Truth. The Bible is a progressive revelation. Troubled by the discovery in the Bible of outworn standards and lower levels-scientific, literary, historical I have in this definition, all stumblingblocks removed, an increasedly enlivened Bible, and the recovery for myself and others of the experience that the blessed "secret of Christian rejuvenation is a bath in the original sources."

The revelation of God has always been commensurate with the capacity of man to receive it. God is the Father of Lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning." The variable quantity has not been God, but man. Man, being the medium of that revelation, and man's mind having varied, the received revelation has varied. Light has always been the same. The changeable factor has been the medium.

It is like physical light and the eye. Science knows that once the light shone and that there was no organism of the eye to receive it. But light beating on the rind of the creature's skin finally developed a crude organ. Then, still shining, more and more it refined, developed, and enlarged the organ, till its retina caught more and more of the light ray. The sunlight was the same but the medium differed. The light came to the creature gradually through the gradually developed eye. The Creator made the eye as well as the light, and therefore determined the gradual and progressive reception of the light. Just so, it is not to disclaim God and to say that only man made the Bible when we call it a progressive revelation, with truths, standards, and levels at first imperfect and lower, then advancing commensurately

It is like the evolution of the windowpane. The sunlight has always been the same. But once the window-pane was of oiled skin, and the light that shone through into human dwellings vague and darkling. Then the window-pane was of oiled paper, and the light that fell through was brighter but still vague. Then the window-pane was of crude, rough, coarse glass, and the light that fell through was brighter, yet still discolored. Finally the window-pane was of melted white sand, pure as crystal, and the light that illuminated the dwelling was absolutely clear and brilliant.

In

So with the Bible-the light of God is eternally the same. In Genesis, as through oilskin, it fell through the childmind of primitive man, and the resultant light recorded was real but vague. the Kings it permeated the oiled paper, as it were, of the minds of that day, and the reflection was brighter but still vague. In the Prophets it passed through the raw, crude glass of the prophets' mind, and the light that shone through was radiant and roseate, realer than ever before, but not yet clear. Finally, in the mind of Christ came the crystal-pure medium, and we see in it" as in a glassthe glory of the Lord."

To detect God thus in his truth, moving, progressing, through man to man, medium to medium, age to age, is to see in the old dead Bible the Living God. Instead of making us throw the Bible away at the discovery of lower levels, it will make us cry, "Surely the Lord is in this place; and I knew it not."

God progresses not only in his worlds and in his truth, but in his love!

The love of God reached its high tide in Christ on Calvary. There was its extension into time and space. Christ on Calvary was the fountain head on earth of the underground stream of the atoning love of God. There was the nativity, not of the Christ-babe, but of Love, full-born, not of Mary at the incarnation, but out of the travail of God's heart when Christ cried, "It is finished." There, at Calvary, the love of God first

reached high tide Yet it did not end there. In height Love's high tide was reached. In breadth it was not.

Is it high tide when out in mid-ocean the water rises to full sea? No; it is not high tide till it sweeps over the surface of the intervening seas, uplifting their level to its level, surging earthwards till it fills every empty channel and lifts every listed ship. Not till then is the tide high and the sea full. So the love of God that reached its blessed

height in Christ on Calvary did not end there. It is still progressing. We are in a stage of that progress now. Starting from that point in the mid-ocean of time, at the crucifixion, it still goes sweeping over the intervening seas of humanity, lifting their levels to its level, surging earthwards, till it fill every empty channel and lift every listed ship. Yes, God's love is still progressing! There's no question about that. The only question is, Are we progressing with it?

T

HE Macmillan Company have just issued Georg Brandes's "Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature " in a new illustrated edition. This monumental work is now completely accessible in English. The six volumes bear the following titles: I. The Emigrant Literature; II. The Romantic School in Germany; III. The Reaction in France; IV. Naturalism in England; V. The Romantic School in France; VI. Young Germany. It is only fair to say parenthetically that the arduous task of translating Brandes's pure, flexible Danish into our language has been admirably done.

In his introduction to the second volume of the series the Danish critic makes these statements: "I shall endeavor . . . to treat the history of literature as humanly as possible, to go as deep down as I can, to seize upon the remotest, innermost movements which prepared for and produced the various literary phenomena. . . . By preference, I shall always. when possible, embody the personal in the abstract. . . . Drawing-room history of literature, like drawing-room poetry, sees in human life a drawingroom, a decorated ball-room-the furniture and people alike polished, the brilliant illumination excluding a!! possibility of dark corners. Let those who choose to do so look at things thus. It is not my point of view."

From the attitude these lines denote (they were written over thirty years ago) Brandes has never departed. In a certain sense and to a certain extent his development has taken place along a straight course. To the best of my knowledge, his life has been shaken by no such phenomenon as a spiritual reaction. The difference between Brandes at thirty and the same man at sixty-four is mainly one of stature. The years have left his early convictions, beliefs, principles, practically unchanged. He knew and accepted himself, stood erect and strong in the light of his assurance, at an age when most men are still groping in the dark of moral trepidation, surrounded with phantoms of multiform questions, riddles, enigmas. Once having recognized his own particular genius in that of the man who taught him the very rudiments of modern criticismHyppolyte Taine-the pupil was never to renounce his first and chief master. What wonder, then, that here and there throughout Brandes's many books we should hear, as it were, the echo of the great Frenchman's voice?

A journey with the subject of this little sketch is not so much a journey among books as an intercourse, a companionship, with men. His interest in what certain writers have said is, indeed, sometimes even subordinate to his curiosity as to what they have done or how

they have lived. It seems trivial (for the obviousness of the thing) to observe that there is nothing of the traditional Easy Chair atmosphere in his writings, nothing suggestive of the familiar-talksin-a-library style of literature. As discursive as any contemporary, he yet never chats with you good-humoredly, reminiscently, about this or that situation, character, or subject. It is apparent that the Gentle Reader type is not, with him, a favorite presence.

The revolutionary spirit has always exercised a strange charm upon Brandes. Hence the men in whose company he himself appears most impressive are Shelley, Byron, Börne, Hugo, Heine, Ibsen, etc.-men at war with conventional society, all forms of authority dramatic figures, iconoclasts. With those writers who seem screened behind their writings or who stand obscure, remote, timid, in the background of their stage he has scant patience. Beauty to Brandes is in a large sense inseparable from strength, strength equally so from passion, and passion from the fighting spirit, the latter quality being essentially indicative of personality. We have had too many harmless, soft-speaking, polite poets, he seems to contend. The sea of literature is altogether too calm and the crafts that sail it too gorgeous, too fashionable-looking. Let us have more open boats with fearless, viking-like commanders at the helm. The pen, like the sword, is a weapon to fight with, not a mere brush to splash colors. Be rebellious, Brandes further seems to exhort the young writer-audacious, fiery, determined, fiery, determined, human or dæmoniac, but, above all, be fearless. Let your books be strong with the strength of your struggles, let them have the taste of the battles you wonor lost. Learn the lesson of the great individual, the great personality, whether intellectual aristocrat or spiritual democrat, and in his deeds you shall discover the secret of all human glory.

If there be any living critic greater than Georg Brandes, there certainly is none like him; none, that is, comparable to him for power of persuasiveness, eloquence, and stimulation. For one who has had occasion to acquaint himself with the story of his remarkable career

it is impossible to read Brandes without feeling that he appeals most forcibly to youth, or, more properly, to the spirit of youth, which he has ever championed, and whose fire has never ceased to burn within his own bosom. Youth, and all that that grand word implies, represents to him the superb fundamental pregnant influence in human life. Without its devoted admiration, its passionate enthusiasm, what shall a man's endeavor avail? But if he can animate, arouse it, focus and harness its immeasurable resources of will and courage, he shall conquer empires.

In cultivating his critical faculty and storing his mind with myriad knowledge, Brandes has yet effectually guarded himself against the deadly affliction of staleness--to speak with the athletes. He has read tons of books and spent thousands of hours in libraries; but of equal significance is the fact that he has known thousands of men and women, and lived the life of a man of the world, constantly in touch with his environment, with the various manifest movements of his time, and forever "on the lookout" for the appearance of some new formidable gladiator in the arena of civilization, It was Brandes, we may recall, who first interpreted to Scandinavians the message of such men as John Stuart Mill, Henrik Ibsen, and Friedrich Nietzsche. And how he welcomed, how he celebrated, how he rejoiced in their achievement!

Brandes has been reproached in certain quarters on the score of his field of endeavor being cosmopolitan. It is true, of course, that his chief works treat foreign subjects. He has written a large volume dealing with the city of Berlin, biographies of Lassalle, of Disraeli, numerous studies in the French, German, and English literature, books on Russia and Poland, etc. However, it seems to me unjust to accuse the author of "William Shakespeare" of having neglected home product. For many years he acted as touchstone to countless young writers, encouraged and guided them, read their manuscripts, pleaded their case with those whom it concerned. He did all this at a great sacrifice of energy and time, and to a certain extent

vidual, and characteristic, as well may be when we realize that we have to do with a hoary civilization which drew its inspiration from Solomon, and for very many centuries has been cut off from the outside world; indeed, in its essential aspects, Abyssinian civilization to-day is the same as that which prevailed in Palestine two millenniums ago. (Abyssinia of To-Day. By Robert P. Skinner. Longmans, Green & Co., New York. $3.) This posthumously pubCap'n Chadwick lished book furnishes a vivid picture not only of its subject, Captain Chadwick, Marblehead skipper, shoemaker, and storekeeper, but incidentally of the antecedents and early environment of his son, John White Chadwick, who became one of the foremost of American Unitarian preachers and writers. Captain Chadwick was a man of heroic mold; this simple story of his life is good to read in pessimistic hours when the lament comes to mind that "wealth accumulates and men decay." At the tender age of seven he began his toilful industrial career; he early took to the sea, was for many years captain of a Marblehead schooner, and one of his proudest achievements was the bringing of his vessel and crew safely out of the Great September Gale of 1846; he was a man of marvelous memory, of remarkable physical power, and of sterling personal qualities. As a portrait of the rugged yet tender, courageous and faithful New Englander of the older days, who filled his humble station with a fine ethical ideal and with real greatness of soul, this little biography will be treasured not alone by those who revere its author's memory, but by the wider public who will find in it a sympathetic yet discriminating characterization of a life well worth telling about, but of a kind not often described outside of fiction. (Cap'n Chadwick. By John White Chadwick. True American Types Series. American Unitarian Association, Boston. 60c., net.)

The Decade Before the War

Few volumes in the "American Nation" serial history of the United States have proved so thoroughly satisfactory to us as has Professor Theodore Clarke Smith's study of the exceedingly difficult decade preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. It was a decade in which, as the historian must always recognize, the supreme fact was the final breakdown of the effort to solve the slavery problem by compromise. But this was by no means the only fact of the decade. Side by side with the developments in the struggle over slavery ran other currents-social, economic, and intellectualthat left an enduring impress on the life of

the United States. Most historians have taken these currents intc account, but usually, it must be said, they have laid such emphasis on the sectional controversy that their readers have failed to grasp firmly the real significance of the non-political movements and occurrences of the decade. Into this error Professor Smith does not fall. He pays due regard to the slavery issue, tracing its ramifications in the North, in the South, in Kansas, and at Washington, and unfolding the sequence of stirring events in a most lucid way. But he is equally careful to instruct the reader in those other important facts of the period-the industrial and commercial expansion due to the railway “mania ;” the disastrous after effects of that same mania; the contrasting social and economic conditions in the North and South; the complications in the foreign relations of the United States; the wonderful literary activity of the decade, and the unrest that found vent in the spread of "isms," from spiritualism to the crusade for "woman's rights." All this stands clearly revealed, and in proper perspective, in his pages, the tone of which, moreover, is eminently praiseworthy. So that, although Professor Smith seems to have delved into original sources with less assiduity than some of his colaborers, the conscientious student cannot fail to derive from him assistance to the better understanding of conditions as they existed throughout the Union in the years just preceding the great war. (The American Nation. Vol. XVIII. Parties and Slavery. By Theodore Clarke Smith, Ph.D. New York. $2, net.)

An Early American Document

Harper & Brothers,

With the publication of the "Court Book of the Virginia Company" "the National Government places within the reach of every student of American history what has long been regarded as one of the most precious manuscript treasures in the United States. As is well known, it was the Virginia Company that planted the first successful English colony in America, and— what is not so well known-it was by this same Company that the seeds of self-government were first sown here. When in the passage of time King James the First determined to revoke the Company's charters and resume the government of Virginia for himself, the secretary of the Company, fearing the destruction of the official records, caused a transcript of them to be made. His fears were justified to the extent that the original documents have long ago disappeared; but his transcript, as fate would have it, was preserved to become the property of the United States. And this it is that has now