262 NEW BOOKS. procedure of the Understanding, our author stands for the Concrete Reason, of which the Christian Church is a growing realisation. Perhaps the freshest parts of the book are the two essays in which the writer explains and criticises the views of Sabatier, Harnack and the Bitschlians, and M. Loisy. As the interest here is mainly theological, I confine myself to a few remarks. Dr. Sterrett rightly points out the diffi- culties which beset Eitschlian theologians owing to their refusal to recognise the constitutive function of reason in religion. And he criti- cises the tendency of Harnack and others to treat the dogmatic creeds of the fourth and fifth centuries as false accretions which obscured the essence of Christianity. Naturally he objects to this separation of essence and manifestation. Yet I cannot but feel that Dr. Sterrett, in his polemical zeal, is hardly fair to the Bitschlians. He is elsewhere forced to admit that arbitrary and non-essential elements have hampered the development of the Christian idea ; and to admit this is to concede that Harnack's method is not entirely wrong, though his results may be too drastic. Again Dr. Sterrett is severe on those Bitschlians who do not accept the miraculous element in Christianity. One could understand this if the critic had made it plain that he himself did so. Yet it is not clear to me after reading the book, that the writer regards the Incarna- tion and Besurrection as more than outward symbols of spiritual facts or processes. To say that " Historical Christianity was founded on miracles of personality " is not to the point, and would be accepted by almost any follower of Bitschl. Naturally our author has more sym- pathy with Loisy, who strongly insists on the value and necessity of institutional Christianity. But Loisy is justly censured for the divorce he makes between the judgments of faith, which are the utterance of the corporate Church, and the testimony of history, which is regarded as giving no guarantee for these judgments. Dr. Sterrett supplements the foregoing critical discussion by an essay on " The Historical Method ". His standpoint is strongly teleological, and he shows the defects of those who interpret historic development from a merely material (Buckle) or from an economic basis. But though it be granted that the writer is justified in his protest against the ten- dency e.g. in Spencer to construe the more developed through the less developed, yet one finds no adequate recognition of the truth that, when we pass from nature to history, the application of the teleological me- thod becomes vastly more complicated and difficult. The dialectic by which ideas and institutions are supposed to criticise and develop them- selves is no sound guide to the historian in the selection and arrange- ment of his material. And the fact that the " guarantee of the worth and destiny of the finite is only as a member of the total system of the Absolute," is too general and abstract a formula to help him in his valuations. The approach to a Philosophy of History must be on the basis of a broad and a thorough psychology : otherwise speculative theory loses touch with reality. Dr. Sterrett seems to fall into the mistake of hypostatising logical connexion as a kind of self-subsisting principle ; and he overlooks the fact, emphasised by Sigwart, that the ground of real connexion in history lies in the consciousness of the individual. The volume, it should be said, contains an essay on "The Psychological Forms of Beligion," which are treated under the heads of feeling, thought, and will. But the writer appears to me to show no proper recognition of the function of feeling and sentiment in the religious consciousness. Feeling for him, as for Hegel, is a preliminary stage which must be transcended, and he inclines to regard adequacy of conception as iden- tical with the satisfaction of the spiritual personality. More than once he is guilty of the exaggeration of speaking of thinking as in itself a
