were 'scarce looked upon as Academical studies, but rather Mechanical." But in a few years Isaac Newton was born, and was the worshipped hero of Cambridge for a long period. In 1710 the "Principia" was in such request that copies originally published at ten shillings were considered cheap at two guineas. The enterprise of printers would scarcely allow such an honour to be enjoyed by a college text-book for any long period to-day. The particulars Mr. Wordsworth gives us in his excellent arrangement are most varied, interesting, and instructive. Among the matters touched upon are Libraries, Lectures, the Tripos, the Trivium, the Senate House, the Schools, text-books, subjects of study, foreign opinions, interior life. We learn even of the various University periodicals that have had their day. And last, but not least, we are given in an appendix a highly interesting series of private letters from a Cambridge student to John Strype, giving a vivid idea of life as an undergraduate and afterwards, as the writer became a graduate and a fellow. This series, combined with the many vivid details of Mr. Wordsworth's work, leads us to suggest what a fair subject for any writer with a taste for fiction would be found in a sound romance which should draw its local colour from a picture of university life in a century just not too far removed to be appreciable in the present. Pyramid Facts and Fancies. By James Bonwick, F.R.G.S. London: C. Kegan Paul and Co. 1877. Mr. Bonwick's book affords a striking instance of the omnivorous character of the modern mind. Here are certain relics of the past, architectural contemporaries, we might almost say, of the megalosaurus, so dim is their age; they have been regarded with a careless eye for centuries upon centuries; but now in the day of inquietude of intellect these dumb stony things are pressed to speak. The galvanism of busy brains is directed upon them, and they respond with a hundred voices. The actual present result is somewhat confusing, but nine-tenths of the theories will in time kill one another, and their death allow the truth to be seen. When we quote the following numerous facts and fancies for which Pyramid students are responsible, it will be seen at once that the Pyramid Builders could not have entertained so many motives at once. ; The Pyramid was built as a barrier against desert sands; as Satan's seat; in imitation of Noah's ark; to cover filtering reservoirs; to please the fair sex of dusky Egypt; to hold the generoustreasures of the Queen of Sheba as Joseph's granaries; as a display of royal despotism, or to give em-ployment to labour for which no use could be found; for the preservation of treasures of learning from deluge; for the tomb of the king; to contain standards of weights and measures. We take breath and proceed :-For an astronomical observatory; to tell its own latitude; to wish happy returns of its own birthday; to reveal the circumference of the earth, the true shape of the earth, the density of the earth, the distance of the sun; to give the calendar of the year, the law of gravitation, the measure of descent to the sun and moon in steps of their semi-dia-meters; to record the planetary distances, the rise of a polar star, the Equinoxes, the precession of the Equinoxes; the revolutions of Sothis the dog-star of the dead. Again we take breath :-To pro claim the unity of God, the divine origination of measure; to afford an inspired communication of dogmas; a memorial of the Deluge; a reminder of a primeval institution of the Sabbath; a model for Mosaic institutions; a Messianic monument; a type of Christ and his Church; the altar of the Millennium. Once more we pause, for there are more theories yet:-That the object of the Pyramid was to mark the rise and fall of land in Egypt; to illustrate geometric truth; to convey the proportion between a circle's diameter and circumference; to masonify the quadrature of the circle; to form part of a gigantic geometrical plan in conjunction with all other pyramids; to typify the generative principle; as an emblem of sun and fire; to celebrate mystical baptismal ceremonies; to be symbol of the temple of the Phremason, the great architect of the human body; to afford special and continued revelations to mystics. a Many of these presumptive attributes of the Pyramids are manifestly merely subjective, or born. of the inclinations of investigators who have greedily jumped at the smallest atom of apparent support to their notions. In Mr. Bonwick's book are collected in a very painstaking manner, brief accounts of all these theories. His own he does not give; but we find the following observations in the closing pages of the book : "But there is another class, more truly mystic than any we have mentioned, whose notions, if revealed privately to the expounders of millennial markings in the pyramid, would extort derision and contumely, but who are nevertheless worthy of a word in a book on the Why?' of the pyramid. Still, as these mystics write not for the public, have no mission to fulfil for the public, and care not one straw for the public, it seems hardly worth while to say anything about them to the public. It has been the writer's good fortune to come across the path of one or two such persons. Perhaps other men, in a pilgrimage of sixty years, who have good faith in their fellowcreatures' intelligence, and sympathy with honest, earnest aspirations, encounter some who seem but to live on the confines of this everyday world of The dreamers are seen to have some method in their supposed madness, and some reason in their wild imaginings. In these cases, an incoherent speech testifies to the dread of ridicule, the consciousness of being misunderstood, or the conviction that ours. the truth is too sacred for utterance. M. Caviglia, born in Malta, dying in Paris at the age of seventy-four, in 1845, buried with his Bible beside him, was one of these mystics, and so passionately devoted to pyramid study that for some time he lived in an apartment-Mr. Piazzi Smyth's symbol of of heaven-over the King's Chamber. Lord Lindsay met him at Gizeh, admired and honoured him. He was, as he himself expressed it, tout à fait pyramidale.' His lordship wrote, We are told that in Ceylon there are insects that take the shape and colour of the branch or leaf they feed upon; Caviglia seems to partake of their nature, he is really assimilating to a pyramid.' This was not said in ridicule. He described him as 'happy with his pyramid, his mysticism, and his Bible.' Even then, at sixty-six years of age, he had, we are told, 'reared a pyramid of the most extraordinary mysticism-astrology, magnetism, magic (his favourite studies), its corner-stones: while on each face of the airy vision he sees inscribed, in letters of light, invisible to all but himself, elucidatory texts of Scripture.' Mr. Ramsay has this account :'He has strange, unearthly ideas, which seem to open up to you, as he says them, whole vistas of unheard-of ground, which close up again as suddenly, so that one can hardly know what his theories are. We hope that Mr. Bonwick's forthcoming work, "The Religion and Learning of the Ancient Egyptians," will give us, between the lines, something a little more definite regarding these mystic lights. a very well known anomaly in the Church of England. The gifts of men are various among the clergy; one can console the afflicted, another can mould institutions and build churches, a third can think and preach. But as the law and custom are (and Church authorities are ever unalert towards improvements), every man, be he inexperienced curate of unformed mind, or practical rector of busy parochial life, is presumed to have from his ordination a constant flow of spiritual thought, and to be ready to embody it in the form of a lengthy discourse at a rate extending to that of two or three sermons a week. The possibility is an ecclesiastical fiction. gra The Fight of Faith. Sermons Preached on Various Occasions. By the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, M.A., Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen. London: C. Kegan Paul and Co. 1877. Some of the highest thoughts that are affecting our time and dually transforming our theology, may be found in these sermons, brought home to the religious mind of moderate culture, not by attenuation of their matter, but by their transformation in the affectionate warmth of the preacher's nature. These sermons are essentially undogmatic, and yet there is no lack of order perceptible in them, no failure of closeness to the central fact of law. When the Church renews her lost nationality by taking apostolic life and purpose as her basis, rather than doctrinal traditions, which by their inherent or developed contradictions challenge rational men to impugn their authority, the sermons of Mr. Stopford Brooke may still be preached. And this is his great praise; he is helping to shew the way back through the accretions of disputatious ages to the early Christian faith. He is a worthy successor to Maurice and Robertson, while the growth of knowledge and the development of ideas have enabled him to be wiser in many respects than were his forerunners. The a fact is that the vendors of cheap and musty theology do a large trade, and the preacher who is without the literary gift grinds out what should be living food from mixture of these dead old bones. Or he buys manuscript sermons written by nameless persons whose style is so colourless as not to endanger the preacher of suspicion of being a borrower. If a bishop would set the right fashion-since the Church goes by fashions as well as by truthsit would be easy to find followers. A hard-working clergyman might arise in his pulpit and say, I have been reading a sermon of Stanley's or of Fraser's, of Robertson's or of Brooke's, of Temple's, Vaughan's, or Farrar's; and I feel its truth and warmth so much that I can preach it. It says what I would say, better than I could have said it, even if parochial business had allowed me the time to put my thoughts into form. If any of you have read it, you will like it none the less, for I mean not to read it to you, but to preach it. The Divine laws do not disdain The consideration of sermons economy; why should it be deleads us to advert to what must be spised in prejudices ecclesiastical, "They loved theories, not acts; fancies of feeling, not true feeling; but to do good things, to practise the life of goodness, to sacrifice a tithe of their pleasures or their wealth, to give up a single delightful immoralitythey were not ready to do these things. They wanted a religion they could put on when it suited their pleasures and their worldly repute and wealth, and put off when it interfered with them, and the moment they found that neither the religion of John nor that of Christ were flexible to wants of this kind, they threw them both overboard. At first they tried the Baptist, but they soon had enough of that resolute teaching. It dared to meddle with the exactions of the publican, the violence of the soldier, the pleasure of the Pharisee; it called on them not only to repent-that were easy, but to do works meet for repentance that was too hard. And when they found that he insisted on a change of life which would damage their gains and their pleasures, and that, without such a change, John denounced their religious feelings as worthless and guilty, they turned away with indignation, and said, 'he hath a devil.' They were mourned unto and they had not lamented. But, all the same, they could not get rid of the religious impulse in their heart. The leaven of the time still worked, and when they got back to their homes in Jerusalem they were charmed to hear of a more liberal teacher than John. It seemed that Christ required no ascetic life, that He did not wish them to separate themselves from the world, that instead of the rude, homespun, hardhitting teaching of the prophet of the wilderness, they might now listen to refined and gentle words, to gracious stories, to symbolic suggestions of a high life from the lips of one who moved among villages and cities, who lived with all in the freest manner, who ate and drank and shared in the joys of men. This is the teacher for us,' they said, and they sought Him out and followed Him. We will dance to His piping,' was their thought, and possess a religion.' But the result was a still more complete failure. The religion of the Baptist had been too hard for them because of its stern morality. It demanded outward purity-domestic, social, political, and mercantile purity. 'We shall be better off with Christ,' they thought; He will not be so hard on us. Alas! they found themselves worse off than before. It was bad enough to hear that the whole of the outward life had to be reformed; it was ten times worse to hear that the inward life had to be reformed. The publican was not only not to cheat, but not to wish to cheat; the soldier -not only not to do violence, but to love his enemy; the impure-not only not to do wrong to a woman, but not to think it in his heart. The whole sphere of morality was thus indefinitely expanded. When it came to this that he who hateth his brother is as much a murderer as he who stabbeth him to the heart, that he who was false to his oath in his heart or wished to be false to it, was in God's eyes perjured; that a life lived morally for a wrong motive was not moral, but immoral-it was too much; the burdens of righteousness were doubled; there were a thousand more sins in the world than they had thought; religion was incredibly hard, and morality impossible, if this was morality." How wide a sphere of life Mr. Brooke's faith includes may be judged from the following: "I make no distinction between the methods and principles of the spiritual and secular worlds. There is one mind at the root of both, and in both the mere intellect is worthless till truth is seen. In both all truth comes to us by Revelation; and when Reve lation has given it, then it is reasoned on for confirmation and application. Those whom we call men of genius in knowledge and art, we call prophets in the spiritual world. They are seers who see directly the truths of God's relation to man, and of man's to God. They declare these truths, they do not attempt to prove them; they let them prove themselves. Some receive them at once, others say they must prove them by reasoning, but they can only be seen, not proved. They can never be reasoned upon with any practical use till the reasoner has felt the life and seen the beauty in them." The subject of worldliness is one that preachers harp on. And strange indeed it is that so little effect is produced. Mr. Brooke's words which we quote, are said in church and on Sundays to people in a Sunday mood; would anyone dare to repeat them in Parliament to people in a week-day mood? What is national worldliness? "It is when there are but very few ideas in a nation, and when these few do not rule it; when its action, thoughts, and feelings are governed by what is present or visible or transitory. It is when the men in it worship, as the first thing, personal getting-on; when wealth is first and any means are good that attain it; when those who have it or rank or position, are bowed down to without consideration of character; when there is but one inspiration, that of competition ; when the natural beauty of the country is recklessly sacrificed for the sake of money; when the natural desire to take care of the lives of others is thought little of and sacrificed to the desire of making money; when pleasure is taken without thought and pursued for its own sake alone; when art is even stained and men work at it not for love of its own reward but to sell it dearly; when politics are governed solely by desire for the material prosperity of the country; when the commerce of a nation is to be kept at all hazards, even the hazard of disgrace; when the Government, following the cry of the people, will spend millions on works that give employment to manufacturers, but will not give a few thousands to things which have no actual returns, like science, or art, or discovery; when the only way to get a thing through Parliament is to shew that it will put cash in the purse of the nation; when (to pass over much more) the visible results of a method of education, or those of a work, or an expedition, are counted the only tests of its excellence; and the present results of measures are wholly dwelt on to the shutting out of any thought of the future; when it is not a spirit which is sent thrilling through the hearts of the people by its rulers, but a dead statement of every man for himself, and then the nation will get on.' This is national worldliness; and if England had reached that point, she would have been plunged, however wealthy, in the foulest mud of degradation. To be like that would be national ruin, though she were rolling in wealth." Here is the same thought turned upon the individual :— "You may purchase the love you long for if you will give way on this one point of truth, if you will gloss over your objection to a wrong mode of action. You may purchase promotion if you will keep what you say within the bounds which social opinion prescribes to the safe man, and yield to those who tell you, in their flattering way, that plain speaking will spoil your influence, for no doubt it was said to John that to offend the king would destroy the good he was doing in Judea. You may purchase wealth if you will condone your partner's or your principal's dishonesty, or even shut your eyes to a little commercial grazing of the edge of it. You may get into a higher range of society if you will flatter the follies, or smile on the vices, or enslave yourself to the caprices of some of those above you in rank. You may find the path of life velvet to your tread if you will modify your convictions on political and social topics, if you will keep what is called a wise silence, if you will avoid giving advice, and find your way round thorny |