THE THINKER.

THE SURVEY OF THOUGHT.

AURICULAR CONFESSION AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.-In a very able and interesting article in the Nineteenth Century, Canon Carter defends the rite of auricular confession as practised by many in the Church of England. He maintains that it was not confession itself, but its necessity, that was the main matter of dispute between the Roman Church and our Reformers. "Rome had ruled that a priest's absolution, following on private confession, was a necessary condition of membership, and this for every one alike, under all circumstances. What had in earlier days been dependent on special circumstances, became, according to Roman use, universally obligatory. And it was against this enforcement of authority over the spiritual life of souls and their individual responsibilities to God that our Reformers contended, as a matter of vital moment. They did not question the benefit or the need of confession, as a voluntary act or as a sacramental ordinance. They struck against the iron rule. They contended for personal freedom, and this not merely as a rightful Christian claim, but as securing for such an act, what alone can give it value, the free-will of a responsible agent." He makes it quite clear that the leading English divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries approved of confession as a salutary practice, while at the same time they shrank from prescribing it as obligatory upon all. This being so, it appears somewhat strange that many should regard auricular confession in the Church of England as an invention of the Oxford Movement. Canon Carter's explanation of this impression is as follows: "I cannot myself," he says, "doubt as to the cause. There supervened upon the Revolution the secession of the Non-jurors, and this comprehended no less than four hundred priests and eight bishops, including the primate. The men who clung to the belief of the Divine right of kings, and to whom their oath to the exiled family was a part of their religion, were also the upholders of the higher view of the Church's system. They were succeeded by men of a different stamp, and with these came in a lower view of the Church's life. There is no mistaking the difference between those who seceded in consequence of their reverence for their oath, and those who were able to accommodate themselves to the new order of things and the new principles of government. The consequences of such a change extended

throughout the Church as well as throughout the State. There were families that retained the old usages. There were individual witnesses to the forgotten truths among the clergy, but they were comparatively few and far between, as voces clamantium in deserto. The Oxford Movement was, as it were, the rising up again to the surface, for the first time after more than a century, of the stream which had so long been hidden underground, bringing with it the treasures of Catholic truth held in abeyance during the interval. The Oxford Movement is as the rising to the surface of the teaching and uses of the days of Andrewes, and Jeremy Taylor, and George Herbert, and Cosin, and Ken. The strength of those who held firm, and still taught, and have prevailed, arose from their clearly seeing that the Tractarian theology was nothing new in the Church of England, was simply a recovery, through faithful witnesses, of the good old system for which a long line of our forefathers prayed and suffered, before the Revolution in Church and State led to the decline and torpor of the last century. This is the true explanation of the contrast between the last century and the present, which so many view with surprise and suspicion. The Evangelical Movement led the way out of the Slough of Despond;' the Oxford Movement completed the recovery.”

THE DIVINE SACRIFICE. In a series of articles by Emma M. Caillard, that have appeared in the Contemporary Review, an attempt has been made to state in present-day terms, and to regard in the light of present-day knowledge, some of the great mysteries of life. The last of these articles is entitled, "The Divine Sacrifice," and in it the writer states her conviction that the solution of the problem of the existence of evil, as of other great problems, is to be found in the character of the Supreme Being—in the Divine nature itself. She argues that it is possible for man to realize the character of God, and thus departs at once, and in the most sharply defined manner, from the conclusions of agnosticism. We know each other-we can therefore know God, both kinds of knowledge being limited. Such knowledge implies reciprocal action, and in accordance with this, God has made Himself known to us in Jesus Christ. "In Christ we see God putting Himself in the place of His creatures, entering into the conditions which so perplex them, submitting to the limitations that so harass them, and this in order that He may explain Himself to them by meeting them on their own ground, and speaking to them in the only language they can understand. We call this the sacrifice of Christ, and in it we have the clue to all that we can know of the character of God, and therefore of the constitution of the universe and the destiny of man. If God is the key to His creation, then without God it will be for ever an insoluble problem; with Him an open book, in which there may indeed be written things hard to understand, but which little by little we shall learn to decipher and to master." This sacrifice, made clearly known to us in the life of Christ, began with

creation. The sonship of the creature was the end and aim of the Creator; the son must grow into his Father's likeness, and to become holy must have knowledge of good and evil. "To an all-holy Being the rendering possible the existence of evil is the sacrifice-how great, how awful, it is not for the mind of man to fathom; but the realization of the fact that this is indeed what the sacrifice consists in opens before us a depth of meaning in the revelation of God through Christ which otherwise is hidden from us; for here to a small extent-so far as our human powers of understanding go-we look into the tremendous mystery of what evil is to God. . . . If Christ suffered through evil, that is because and only because God suffers through evil also. I and My Father are one.'" If you ask-Why did God not prevent the necessity of this suffering? the answer is-Because sonship would be impossible without it. "And because of the pre-eminence of the Fatherhood in God, because He would have a universe of sons, not a universe of automata, He circumscribed His own action, and rendered possible the existence of evil by communicating to His creation His own self-determining life, to which, nevertheless, this evil, this darkness of separation and disunion, is absolutely and eternally opposed." Thus to the reason as well as to the heart the Fatherhood of God is the one sufficient answer in all perplexities.

ANCESTOR-WORSHIP IN CHINA.-A strong plea is presented by Mr. R. S. Gundry, in the Fortnightly Review, for some compromise being made by the Christian Churches in China with what is commonly known as ancestor-worship. He quotes the opinion of a distinguished missionary, Dr. Martin, of Peking, that "as long as missionaries manifest a determination to pluck this keystone out of China's social fabric, so long will the innumerable clans that form the nation, rallying round the altars of their forefathers, form an impenetrable phalanx, barring at every point the ingress of a disintegrating doctrine." There can be no doubt that ancestor-worship is the expression of a beautiful and touching sentiment, and was originally merely a reverential and affectionate rite in memory of the departed; but it is equally certain that in it, as now celebrated, adoration is offered to the spirits of the dead, and that they are invoked to bless and help their living descendants. It is difficult to see that any good end would be secured by a compromise between Christianity and such superstitious and idolatrous customs. If it would, on the one hand, materially aid the success of Christian missions in that country, it could scarcely fail, on the other, to lower the character of Christian teaching and worship. Mr. Gundry indulges in some special pleading on behalf of the compromise he desires to see effected, but his arguments are very ineffective. He points out that the Roman Catholic Church, in allowing prayers for the dead, and in adopting heathen festivals while giving them a Christian character, is untrue to its own traditions in setting its face. against ancestor-worship. We may leave Roman Catholics to try to

account for this inconsistency. But when he goes on to say that monuments in Protestant churches, and galleries of ancestral portraits, and decorating graves with flowers, prove that we are addicted to that which, in the case of the Chinese, we call superstition and idolatry, his whole plea begins to assume a ridiculous aspect. The opinion of the majority of those who are engaged in missionary work in China is that ancestorworship is inconsistent with Christianity, and this opinion cannot be lightly set aside. At the same time, it is quite evident that those who are called upon to deal practically with the question have need to exercise special tenderness and care, so as to avoid doing violence to the sentiment of filial piety from which the practice sprang.

WHAT, WHERE, AND WHEN WAS THE DELUGE?-These questions are answered with considerable freshness in a thick volume entitled, The Deluge and the Emigrations of Peoples, by Franz von Schwarz. This writer, who is familiar with Central Asia through long residence there in the service of the Russian Government, ascribes the Deluge to the discharge, through an opening in the west, of the water of a great inland sea which once covered a wide region in that part of the world. This sea, the existence of which is generally allowed by modern scientists, but is supposed by them to have ceased before historic times, is believed to have contained about as much water as the Mediterranean. It was bounded, in our author's judgment, by the Pamir and Thian Shan Mountains on the west; by the Zungarian Alatau and the Tarbagatai on the north-west; by the Altai, the Tannu-ola, and Yablonoi Mountains on the north; by the Kinghan Mountains on the east; and by the Inshan and Nanshan Mountains, the Altyn-tag, and the western Kuenlun on the south. Its length, in round numbers, amounted to about 2485 miles, and its greatest breadth to about 869 miles. Its level lay about 6000 feet above that of the ocean, and its depth must have amounted to at least 7000 feet. This enormous mass of water is supposed to have been suddenly released by the bursting of its western bank through an earthquake occasioned by an explosion of subterranean steam. Such explosions are known to occur in Turkestan at the present day, and it is thought that on a large scale they are sufficient to account for the opening up of a way for the imprisoned waters to rush forth towards the west. As the ancestors of the various races possessing the most notable Delugestories all dwelt about this sea, the wide diffusion of the memory of it can be readily accounted for. A reminiscence of this vanished sea, represented now only by a few lakes, may be preserved in the Chinese names of the Desert of Gobi: Schamo, or "Sea of Sand," and Han-hai, or " Dried-up Sea." The flowing off of the sea is supposed to have been sudden, thus occasioning a tremendous inundation exceeding all the other floods of history, and therefore well meriting the title of the Deluge. It is identified with the awful flood said by the Chinese historians to have

occurred during the reign of the Emperor Yao, and to have caused great loss of life. In that case it occurred in the year B.C. 2297. This date is not very probable, and many of the details of the theory may be doubtful, but its general features are striking, and not in themselves improbable. An inundation, produced by the bursting of a large inland sea, would fit in much better with the language of the Bible about the breaking up of the fountains of the great deep than the mere submergence of the country round the Euphrates and the Tigris by the overflow of those rivers. If the date of the sea in Central Asia can be shown to have fallen in historic times (and our author thinks that his own observations supply some such evidence), the explanation is tempting. The weight of this evidence, however, can be determined only by specialists. The way in which the Bible account of the Deluge is dealt with is extremely unsatisfactory. It is strained to mean what it need not mean; and its marvellous purity, grandeur, and instructiveness are unrecognized.

A SPECIMEN OF CRITICAL ANALYSIS.-The new edition of the Books of Samuel in Hebrew, by Professor Budde of Strasburg, in the series of texts coming out under the editorship of Professor Haupt, reminds the imaginative reader of a patchwork quilt. Not fewer than eight colours are made use of to indicate the sources from which the unknown compiler has drawn his materials. The effect may be pretty to the eye, but it is bewildering to the judgment. A good specimen of the results at which Professor Budde arrives is furnished by the analysis of the chapters which relate David's introduction to Saul, a portion of the book which is well known to present considerable difficulties to the expositor and the historian. The first thirteen verses of ch. xvi. are printed in dark orange, to show that they are taken from a popular expansion of the book made about B.C. 400. This is supposed to be identical with the Midrash, or commentary mentioned in 2 Chron. xxiv. 27. The remainder of the chapter, printed without any additional colouring, belongs to the Judaic document, the main body of which was compiled before B.C. 800, with one small exception. The words at the end of ver. 19, "who was with the sheep," have been inserted from the Midrash referred to above. The first verses of ch. xvii. are printed in dark blue, the colour marking the older strata of a source described as the Ephraimitic document, the bulk of which dates from before B.C. 750. Then, in vers. 12 and 13, we have another bit from the Midrash, printed, of course, in dark orange. The remainder, extending from ch. xvii. 14 to xviii. 4, is referred to the Ephraimitic document, but with one curious exception. The reader is puzzled at the beginning of ver. 15 by a new colour. The words representing, "Now David went to and fro from Saul," are printed in purple. What does this signify? That in these five words we have a redactional addition by the redactor of JE, working about B.C. 650. So in this part of the book, containing only about two chapters, we have four colours-dark