Prayer," had much conduced to this. "No part of my prayers are so deeply serious as that for the conversion of the infidel and ungodly world, that God's name may be sanctified, and His kingdom come, and His will be done on earth as it is in heaven." It is justly told, as one of Baxter's great claims on the gratitude of posterity, that he was chiefly influential in obtaining the charter of our oldest, though not wisest, missionary organisation-"The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel."

We do not represent Baxter as a consummate ecclesiastical statesman, though he had largeness of view, courage, readiness, and a definite reasonable policy. He had difficult materials to work upon. He grew up among a clergy whose ecclesiastical convictions were wonderfully vague and undetermined; and when his own views took shape, he was balked in the days of the Commonwealth by Cromwell's dislike to Presbytery, and after the Restoration by the severity of the Government against all who demurred to the Prelatic régime. And then he was hampered, as we have said, by his acceptance of that which Scottish Presbyterians always refused, the Royal Supremacy over ecclesiastical affairs. We do not affirm that he was always an easy man to work with. In the pages of his own Reliquiæ, we can see that he could be rather tart with even the great Dr. John Owen, and that he often differed from his own friends. But when we think of his constant vexations and pains, and of the calumnies with which he was assailed, we really wonder that he retained so much kindness as he did. He grew in patience and sweetness in his later years; and he has left on record a beautiful expression of regret for any words in his controversial writings "which are too keen and apt to provoke." "I wish all over-sharp passages were expunged from my writings, and desire forgiveness of God and man." Baxter might have been pragmatical and contentious. It was the constant devoutness of his spirit which saved him from this, and cast a sacred fragrance over all his words and works. One who knew him well has said-"When he spoke of weighty soul concerns, you might find his very spirit drenched therein." Success is a sharp test of a man's spirit: and when our worthy was at the height of his public influence, we find him never boasting of his party, but always pressing

His devoutness of spirit.

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on men of every degree the necessity of a spiritual life. In grand old Westminster Abbey, thus he preached to the House of Commons-" Men that differ about bishops, ceremonies, and forms of prayer, may be all true Christians, and dear to one another and to Christ, if they be practically agreed in the life of godliness, and join in a holy heavenly conversation. But if you agree in all your opinions and formalities, and yet were never sanctified through the truth, you do but agree to delude your own souls, and none of you will be saved for all your agreement."

Well and truly said, O rare old Baxter!

D. FRASER.

ART. II.-Evolution in Religion.

The Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India. By F. MAX MÜLLER.

IN this work, which we propose to review, we have the first

fruits of the Hibbert Lecture. The seven lectures of which it consists were delivered by their distinguished author in Westminster Abbey in the year 1878. They awakened so deep and general an interest, that, to satisfy public curiosity, each lecture had to be repeated to a different audience in the same place. A book so heralded has doubtless had a wide circulation, and the views expounded in it will be regarded by many as the best results of the latest investigations of the important subject which it discusses. The author does not undertake to present a synoptical view of the development of religion among the various nations of the earth. He confines his attention to a field with which no living scholar could be presumed to be more familiar than the editor of the Rig-Veda and the historian of Sanskrit literature, namely, the ancient religion of the Hindu Aryans. But an accurate exposition of the development of religious thought in that influential branch of the Indo-Germanic family must prove a weighty contribution to the general philosophy of religion; and they who agree with the lecturer in his main conclusions will not be in doubt as to

what they should think regarding the existence of a divine supernatural revelation, or as to the highest form of religion which man can attain by the exercise of his reasoning powers. At the close of his last lecture he gives expression to a hope that a time will come when the deepest foundations of all the religions of the world will be laid free and restored; and then Christianity will not be considered to be the one absolute universal religion; but the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Mohammedan, the Jew, and the Christian will form one Church, by each retaining of their respective systems some great principle, their pearl of great price, after "they have learnt to put away childish things, call them genealogies, legends, miracles, or oracles." This is the avowal of a view of religion so comprehensive and unexclusive that even a man of the wide sympathies of the present Dean of Westminster might well shrink from homologating it.

Our author begins by determining what we are to understand by religion; for if we put too much into our conception of the term we shall unduly restrict its application. There are people in our day who make it an easy matter to claim to have a religion. We are becoming accustomed to the idea of an "untheological religion." It is not necessary to believe in a personal God in order to be religious. Our author will make Dr. D. F. Strauss a religious man in spite of himself. For did he not believe in order and law, reason and goodness, a Cosmos full of life and reason? He is therefore reproached for not decidedly claiming to have a religion. He committed a great blunder in thinking that true religion must "manifest itself in prayer," whereas religion can be either with or without worship. The indications are that a profession of religion is about to become quite fashionable among a class of thinkers who would formerly have thought it a reproach to have religion imputed to them. Now they have a weakness for the designation. There is nothing new under the sun. Human nature is continually repeating its old ways with variations. The Buddhists reasoned themselves out of a belief in a Creator and a Providence. But they had still a craving for an object of worship, and so, contrary to their own principles, they made a god out of the founder of their system. And John Stuart Mill could not bring himself to believe in theism. But after his wife's death

What are we to understand by Religion?

23

he was not in doubt like Strauss as to whether he had a religion. For he could say of his deceased wife: "Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life." It is to Mill that our author alludes when he says: "Nor should we hesitate to recognise the last glimmerings of religion when we see a recent philosopher, after declaring both God and gods obsolete, falling down before a beloved memory, and dedicating all his powers to the service of humanity." So a definition of religion must be found wide enough to embrace all these phases of thought, for "all this is religion." We might go even further than our author, and include Ludwig Feuerbach among the men of religion; for he had a religion, the mystery of which he thus expounds at the close of his work Das Wesen des Christenthums: "Life is God; the enjoyment of life is the enjoyment of God; the true pleasure of life is true religion."

Professor Tiele,' in writing the history of religion, thought that he might define religion to be "the relation between man and the superhuman powers." But there are obvious objections to this definition, as he himself allows; and Max Müller is forced to deplore that "there seem to be almost as many definitions of religion as there are religions in the world, and there is almost the same hostility between those who maintain these different definitions of religion as there is between believers in different religions." We will refrain, therefore, from attempting a new definition of what has been found by those who have tried it so hard to define to the satisfaction of all. But in regard to the derivation of the term we think that religio is best connected with religare, and not with relegere, as is done by our author after Cicero. The idea of binding, fastening, restraining is more germane to the meaning attached by the Romans to the term religio than the idea of considering, pondering. We could suppose the Greeks to attach to religion the primary notion of reflection, but we should rather expect to find in the term in the view of the Romans the original conception of obligation. It is to no purpose to say that we should have from the verb religare the normal form religatio, and not religio. For have we not optio

1 Outlines, p. 2.

related to optare, rebellio to bellare, opinio to opinari? In ascribing to religio the radical notion of binding, we have the support of such names as Servius, Lactantius, and Augustine. It is admitted that "the sense of duty in ancient times had always a religious character"-(Müller, p. 47.) And why should not the same connection between religion and duty be still recognised? We hold Kant to express a fundamental truth when he states in his Metaphysik der Tugendlehre that we cannot represent to ourselves that obligation which is involved in the feeling of duty without connecting with it the idea of another, namely, God, and of his will.

Nothing said by our author is more fitted to arrest attention than the manner in which he deals with the objection of the positive philosophy that men cannot apprehend the infinite, and that, therefore, religion is impossible, inasmuch as the objects of every religion transcend the apprehensive and comprehensive powers of our senses and reason. By infinite he understands what might be expressed by the terms “indefinite, invisible, supersensuous, supernatural, absolute, or divine." It is, in short, "the characteristic qualification of the objects of that class of knowledge which constitutes what we call religion" (p. 26). He formally joins issue with the positivist on this point, and maintains that the concept of the infinite as he has defined it is supplied by the senses. In what way? we inquire. He thus explains: A man sees, he sees to a certain point, and then his eyesight breaks down. But exactly where his sight breaks down, there presses upon him the perception of the unlimited or the infinite. get our concept of the infinitely great. "There never is, or can be, to our senses, a horizon, unless as standing between the visible and finite on one side, and the invisible and infinite on the other. The infinite, therefore, instead of being merely a late abstraction, is really implied in the earliest manifestations of our sensuous knowledge" (p. 36). From the very first act of touch we are brought in contact not only with a visible but also at the same time with an invisible universe. This is very true and simple, and will be allowed on all hands. Does this, however, make religion, so far from being impossible, inevitable, as he contends? (p. 30.) Is the idea of the infinite thus obtained sufficient to form the foundation of all religion? Is

Thus we