recognising essential similarities under superficial difference of external expression, and of tracing the growth of changes under apparent immobility of external form. Naturally then the historian of the Church will not be an untried man; and it is in fact as the coping-stone of an edifice slowly built up during the course of many years that we have to regard each of the three books with which we are here specially concerned.

Dr Bigg took his degree in 1862, Prof. Gwatkin in 1867; Mgr Duchesne was born in 1843. Each of the three writers was therefore over sixty before he published the work under review. Each of the three too had won his spurs by earlier work of more detail. No recent English books in our subject have had or have deserved a greater reputation than Gwatkin's 'Studies of Arianism' and Bigg's Christian Platonists of Alexandria '; the fame of Duchesne's 'Le Liber Pontificalis' and 'Les origines du culte chrétien' is in all the Churches.

Dr Charles Bigg was a man of real distinction on more than one side. A Christian scholar of fine literary instincts, he was moreover a theologian whose writings on mysticism and on the school of Alexandria have a permanent value, and an exegete whose work was always fresh, arresting, and original. Sometimes indeed he seemed to sacrifice other qualities to originality, as when he translated the apostle's salutation from the fellowelect lady in Babylon' into a message of 'kind regards from my wife.' He was in many ways the ideal man for a University Professor, and more than one of the Divinity chairs would have suited him. But he was not primarily or predominantly a historian, and his best work stood in comparatively little direct relation to history. When indeed he allowed himself, during the tenure of his chair, to be side-tracked on to some subject of his personal choice, as when he gave some isolated lectures on the poets and littérateurs of the Christian Empire, Paulinus of Nola, Prudentius, and Sidonius Apollinaris, he was quite admirable. Or whenever his way led him to speak of the Alexandrine Clement or Origen or Augustine, what he said came from the heart of the subject and was instinct with life. But apart

from these three Fathers on the one side-it is a large qualification, to be sure-and apart on the other side from such Christian writers as happened to stand in the more direct line of the classical tradition, the fountain of his sympathy, and perhaps to some extent of his knowledge, tended to run dry. He did not care to follow other currents of the life of the early Church, and so far he was handicapped as its historian. Where he did excel, in the task of portraying the growth of Christianity, was in his knowledge of the background. The classical writers had remained his companions even longer than is usual with the classically trained theologians and patristic scholars of England; and fortunately the limits which a perverse tradition has been accustomed to set to theclassics' had no existence to Dr Bigg's broader outlook. Thus he had gained a familiarity with the Pagan world round about the Church of the second and third centuries which makes this side of his historical writing immensely valuable. Chapter xix, on Heathen notices of Christianity in the second century,' is an instance of this. Perhaps it is a less desirable result of classical prepossessions if the arrangement of a history of the primitive Church is made to follow the reigns of the emperors; the names of Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Commodus appear as chapter headings in both Bigg and Gwatkin. No doubt chronological divisions are thus more easily inculcated, and so early an example as Eusebius may be pleaded in excuse. But there is some danger lest the reader receive a misleading impression of the influence exerted by the State upon the interior life and development of the Christian Society during its primitive generations; and Duchesne, in the titles of whose chapters no one of the five emperors we have cited finds a place, may be thought to show here the truer instinct of the historian of the Church.

Criticism of Dr Bigg's book in detail must be tempered by the recollection that his sudden death, two days after he had sent the MS. to the press, deprived it of those finishing touches which every author likes to give, and which most of us find so much easier on the printed than on the written text. The Dean of Christ Church, as head of Bigg's College and a Delegate of the University Press,

undertook the task of editor, and with laudable selfrestraint confined his work to the references. It may be permitted to believe that the author would not have allowed the same note, interesting though it be, to appear twice, pp. 296 and 326; it may be hoped that he would have made p. 131, n. 2, more intelligible. Of misprints we have noted only two, p. 301, 1. 5, 'the preference of interment by cremation,' and p. 417, 'such names [as "child of Hor "] were not commonly borne by Christians,' where, as the appended note shows clearly enough, Dr Bigg wrote or meant to write 'not uncommonly.' The index is hardly full enough to be of much real value. Dr Bigg's work is a solid and weighty contribution to Church History; perhaps it is the closer printing and crowded appearance of the page, when compared with the volumes of Gwatkin and Duchesne, which gives it the impression of being not only weighty but ponderous --and ponderous, in the subjects that suited him, Dr Bigg certainly was not.

Thirty years ago Mr Gwatkin, as he then was, published a contribution to ecclesiastical history of the very first order in his 'Studies of Arianism.' Just as Bigg's 'Christian Platonists of Alexandria,' which we are glad to welcome in a second edition, will probably survive his more directly historical work of which we have been speaking, so Gwatkin's 'Studies of Arianism' set a standard of such high attainment that it is hardly matter of wonder that its author should have produced nothing since which can successfully stand comparison with it. Early Church History,' his present 'œuvre de vulgarisation,' has indubitable merits. It is fresh; it is readable; it has all the attractive note of personal appeal; it is illuminated with plenty of the side-lights that are so helpful a part of the lecturer's equipment. But if it has the merits, it has also the defects of lectures. It seldom goes much below the surface of things; its habitual repetitions may have been an assistance to the hearer, especially if he was a beginner, but they are a hindrance and even a nuisance to the attentive reader. It may be desirable in a lecturer to be as cock-sure as Prof. Gwatkin shows himself in these volumes; there is here no balancing of alternative possibilities; the phraseology of doubt, the 'perhaps' or the

'probably,' is absent from his vocabulary. Much critical work is no doubt disfigured by the opposite reluctance to commit itself to any definite conclusions; yet where the problems are so many and the evidence often so slight and so indirect as in the early stages of the development of the Christian Church, the sober historian should surely express himself from time to time with varying degrees of assurance.

If Prof. Gwatkin does not do this, it is not simply because his book may have grown out of lectures. A more deeply fundamental question as to the right of these volumes to be properly entitled history is involved in the whole dogmatic spirit in which their author conceives of his subject. A Christian historian indeed, whether writing of the days of Athanasius and Basil or of the earlier death-struggle with the Pagan world, cannot be expected to write as though the issue was to him a matter of indifference. But Prof. Gwatkin, here as in other work of his, does much more than this. His devoted loyalty to the Founder of our religion makes it for him a paramount duty to mark each deviation, as he counts it, from the Master's teaching. Theologically it may be an open question whether the Lord ever recognised Matthias in the place of Judas' (i. 65); but it can hardly concern the historian at all. The plain teaching of Scripture' (ii. 276) is a matter in one respect for the theologian, in another for the exegete. How the early Christians interpreted Scripture, and why they interpreted it as they did, are proper subjects for the historian; to go further than this may be justifiable on occasion, but to do so systematically is to write a theological pamphlet in two volumes rather than a history.

It is all the more curious then that a writer who introduces into the history of the second and third Christian centuries so much of his own interpretation of the Christian Scriptures, should neglect their evidence exactly at the point where to the historian it is indispensable. It would be incredible, if it were not true, that neither Prof. Gwatkin nor Dr Bigg has really made any serious attempt to include the history of the Apostolic Age as part of the history of the early Church. Of the two, Dr Bigg is the worse offender, seeing that, apart from four pages on the Foundation of the Roman Church,' the

'Origins of Christianity' commence with the persecution of Nero. But there is not much to choose between them, for, though Prof. Gwatkin has one chapter labelled 'The Apostolic Age,' the whole development of the period between the Crucifixion and the Neronian persecution is, apart from the problem of organisation, confined within ten pages (i. 54-64). Whether the true reason for the curt treatment of these crucial years lies in some unexpressed conviction of a difference in kind between history based on the New Testament writings and history based on other books, or perhaps rather in a tradition of the Theological Faculty allotting the one class of documents to the sphere of Exegesis and the other to the sphere of Church History, the result is in any case deplorable. It is impossible to isolate the apostolic from the sub-apostolic Church, and to understand them apart. There is no break between the one and the other.

We do not know whether a systematic attempt to begin the history from the beginning, and to follow down from its sources in the New Testament writings the current of thought in the early Church upon sacraments and asceticism and allegory, would have modified Prof. Gwatkin's hostile attitude on these matters. That the writer of the Fourth Gospel held sacramental views, and that the writer of the First Epistle to the Corinthians found a place in his ethics for asceticism and in his exegesis for allegory, are surely at least tenable theses. But be the Professor justified in his strictures or no, there is at least a want of proportion in his manner of making them, for he expatiates in these directions so often and so harshly that his sense of the shortcomings of the early Church comes to seem more acute than we suspect is the case.

Nor can Dr Bigg be quite acquitted of an оссаsional tendency to be on the pounce for evidences of nascent sacerdotalism. His account of Origen is, as we should expect, full of value; it is discriminating, sympathetic, illuminating, until the moment comes when his favourite theologian can be pressed into the service of anti-sacerdotal thought. Then we learn of his 'definite antagonism to the growing sacerdotalism of the age'; 'allegorism appears as what we call Protestantism, and