capital defect. Professor Caird's thought seems to move always within the circle of a certain rigid philosophical scheme, a kind of intellectual mechanism into which everything is forced. So familiar has long practice made the author with this scheme, that he never finds any difficulty in assigning what he is dealing with to its precise place therein, and that he too often contents himself with the merest suggestion to the reader as to the process of thought necessary to justify that assignment. But it is not the reader alone who is apt to suffer from such a method, its dangerous consequences are liable to affect the author himself. The very facility which we cannot help admiring is fraught with danger in such knotty questions; one cannot but fear that a telling habitual phrase, not thoroughly probed, a convenient and too easily-used label, not seldom conceals even from Professor Caird the real difficulties of his position.
The central thesis of the lectures is indicated by the title—the Evolution of Religion. That there has been a gradual unfolding of the spiritual germ, the God-consciousness, in the mind of the human race, and that this continuous and necessary religious development, rather than a series of supernatural and catastrophic divine inter-positions constitutes the true revelation of God to man,—this is what Professor Caird seeks throughout to demonstrate, and this demonstration of the necessity of its evolution he offers as the Philosophy of Religion. The evolution of religion affords the clue to the interpretation at once of the peculiar significance of Christianity, and of its community of character with other religions. Christianity does not stand apart from other religions, in proud self-isolation; the web of religion is one and seamless, and Christianity itself, if we are to have a philosophy of it, must be shown to be consecutive and coterminous with the other religions of mankind. Its distinction and "uniqueness" lie in the fact that it brings to the birth of a clear self-consciousness all the elements which, in the pre-Christian forms of religion, are struggling for articulate and conscious expression. In this sense, and in this sense alone, Christianity is the universal and absolute religion. Nor does the evolution cease with Christianity. The Christian religion itself, as it now exists, is the result of a long course of evolution,—apostolic, catholic, protestant, the end of which is not yet.
This idea of the evolution of religion in general, and of Christianity in particular, developed with great skill by Professor Caird, is of undoubted value. Such a philosophical interpretation of the principle of evolution as he offers is specially welcome at present, when the
