Illustrative Notes. A Guide to the Study of the Sunday School Lessons, with Original and Selected Comments, Methods of Teaching, Illustrative Stories, Practical Applications, Notes on Eastern Life, Library References, Maps, Tables, Pictures, Diagrams. By JESSE LYMAN HURLBUT and ROBERT REMINGTON DOHERTY. Large 8vo, pp. 365. New York: Hunt & Eaton. Cincinnati: Cranston & Curts. Price, cloth, $1.25.·

The high commendations which we aimed to make of this publication in 1894 and previously might be repeated for 1895. It would be difficult to suggest any detail of help for the Sunday school teacher and advanced scholar which is here omitted. In lesson comments, illustrations, attractive print, and other matters the volume is most superior. For what it intrinsically is we commend it most cordially to the notice of all sincere Bible students in our Sunday schools.

Things of the Mind. By J. L. SPALDING, Bishop of Peoria. 12mo, pp. 235. Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co. Price, cloth, $1.

The chapters on education are in the aphoristic style of Emerson and are as painfully devoid of coherence. But the aphorisms are good and may be useful to the order of mind Emerson inspired. Now and then the essayist stoops to become forcible, as in the following: "That which still survives as literature is what a few heavenly minds have picked up from beneath the hoofs of the herd, whose uplifted snouts pleaded for swill, not for thought." The chapters on "Professional Education" and "Culture and Religion "have a more definite value. The latter is an especially strong and clear discussion of the place of culture in human society. The author's criticism of Renan and Matthew Arnold is masterly, and the whole essay is a piece of thoughtfulness, good temper, and excellent style.

A Treasury of Stories, Jingles, and Rhymes. With One Hundred and Forty Vignette Illustrations in Half Tone after MAUD HUMPHREY. Short Stories; Fairy Tales; Mother Goose Jingles; Verses. By EDITH M. THOMAS, ELIZABETH 8. TUCKER, and HELEN GRAY CONE. 8vo, pp. 251. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Price, cloth, $1.75. From the standpoint of childhood this book is a "treasury" to be prized. The only defect which might be pointed out, if it be such, is the surplus of verse over prose. In illustration and general attraction the book ranks among the worthy holiday issues of the year.

Hypatia; or, New Foes with an Old Face. By CHARLES KINGSLEY. Illustrations and portrait of the author. Two volumes. 8vo, pp. 773. New York: Harper & Brothers. Price, silk, ornamental, gilt tops, $7.

One of the most elegant products of the book-making art-Charles Kingsley's historic masterpiece in a silk dress, adorned as a bride for her lord. In this radiant book the hand of genius pictures the struggle between old paganism and Christianity in the early ages of the faith. In this day of the comparison of religions Hypatia makes for confidence in the superiority of our holy religion.

The Potter's Thumb. By FLORA ANNIE STEEL. 12mo, pp. 351. New York: Harper & Brothers. Price, cloth, $1.50.

Richard Henry Stoddard says of this book, "It has given me a clearer insight of native life in India, its subtleties, its sinuosities, its superstitions, than I have obtained from the Anglo-Indian tales of Mr. Kipling, who writes from without, while Mrs. Steel writes from within."

METHODIST REVIEW.

MARCH, 189 5.

ART. I. THE CREDIBILITY OF THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS.

It is obvious that our Lord's resurrection stands in a very different relation to Christian faith from any of his other miracles. Other miracles are divine authentications of the revelation which he gave. The resurrection is itself an integral part of that revelation. There might have been more or less of those other miracles, and our general conception of the character and work of Jesus would have been still the same. If he had fed the multitudes with a few loaves once instead of twice, if he had raised a dead person to life once or twice instead of thrice, if any one or if some considerable number of the miracles recorded in the gospels had been left unrecorded, or if the record of some of them should be discredited as unauthentic, it would make no essential difference in our conception of the character and work of Jesus or in the general system of Christian doctrine. But if the record of the resurrection were lost or discredited our whole conception of Christ and of Christianity would be radically changed. Something, indeed, of the work of Jesus would be left if the world should lose its faith in his resurrection.

In the wreck of noble lives,
Something immortal still survives.

Whatever changes there may be in men's opinions of Christ and Christianity, human life will always be better for the ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount; human character will always be nobler for the example of sublime self-sacrifice on 12-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XI.

Calvary. But the residue which would be left if the world should lose its faith in the resurrection would not be historic Christianity. It was "Jesus and the resurrection" that Paul preached at Athens. The resurrection was the corner stone on which the faith of the primitive Church was built. Whatever might remain if the resurrection should cease to be believed, it would not be Christianity. It would not be the faith that has made martyrs and missionaries-the faith that has transformed the world's history.

There is a profound contrast between the habits of thought, the intellectual atmosphere, of the first century and the nineteenth. Then, the science of nature was in a rudimentary state of development and had produced very little effect upon the general habits of thought. The doctrines of the unity of nature and the universality of natural law had scarcely been formulated by philosophers, and had not entered at all into popular thinking. Faith in the preternatural was universal, and ready credence was given everywhere to any alleged or imagined prodigy. Then, Herod could believe that John, whom he had beheaded, had risen from the dead, and the Roman populace could expect that Nero would return from the realin of shades and once more curse the earth with his presence. It was in that environment that the faith in the resurrection of Jesus was born. Can that faith survive in the very different intellectual atmosphere of the present age? The question is one of profoundest moment. It is the belief of many earnest and thoughtful minds that the faith in the resurrection must go with other beautiful myths and legends belonging to a stage of intellectual development which the world has outgrown. That is the teaching, for instance, of Robert Elsmere -a work which kindles our sympathetic admiration, not more by its vividness of delineation of character and its intense pathos, than by the profound sincerity and religious earnestness with which it is inspired. In that truly great and noble book the idea is continually presented, sometimes by direct assertion, sometimes by implication or insinuation, that the conception of the resurrection survives now only in the realm of emotion -that it can have no place in the intellectual life of this age.

Apparently in utter unconsciousness of the difficulties which the spirit of this age finds in the way of belief in a miraculous

event, many of the teachers of Christian evidences simply point to the apparently honest contemporary testimony to the fact of the resurrection, and confidently declare that no fact in ancient history is so well attested. It is doubtless true that the weight of testimony which can be marshaled in behalf of the resurrection is greater than that on the strength of which most facts of ancient history are believed; but the truth of that proposition is by no means sufficient to establish the credibility of the resurrection itself. We can no more judge of the adequacy of testimony to establish belief in any particular allegation, without regard to the character of the allegation, than we can decide whether a bridge is sufficiently strong without considering whether it is to bear foot passengers or railway trains.

It is, indeed, unnecessary to spend much time in proving that a miracle is possible. Nothing short of absolutely complete know!edge of the system of nature could entitle us to pronounce any allegation impossible a priori which is not self-contradictory.* That nature is governed by a system of law, that all the events of nature are linked together in a determinate and formulable order of coexistence or succession-this is the postulate with which science begins, and the belief which impresses itself upon the mind with deepening intensity of conviction as science advances. But, while it may be taken for granted that there are laws of nature, it is a very different question whether we have yet discovered those laws. Any formula which we call provisionally a law of nature is only a generalization of such facts bearing upon the class of phenomena in question as may be within the scope of our present knowledge. As that knowledge must always be incomplete, the supposed law can never attain the standard of certainty, but only that of a higher or lower degree of probability. In regard, even, to those laws which are based on the most extensive experience and the most thorough analysis of that experience, the possibility must always remain that some new fact may come to our knowledge which will contradict the supposed law. That the sun will rise to-morrow at the time predicted by the astronomers is extremely probable, but not certain. It is possible that the sun

"Whatever is intelligible and can be distinctly conceived implies no contradiction, and can never be proved false by any demonstration, argument, or abstract reasoning a priori." -Hume.

may fail to rise. A new fact contradicting one of our supposed laws of nature would show, not that nature is lawless, but rather that our supposed law was only true approximately or within limits, that it was not exactly true, and that the real law is more complex than our provisional formula. So long, then, as human knowledge falls short of omniscience we cannot be warranted in pronouncing impossible a priori any allegation which involves no self-contradiction.*

But the possibility of miracle is one thing; the probability of miracle is a very different thing. While no one of those generalizations of our experience which we call provisionally natural laws can reach the standard of certainty, there are many of them which attain an extremely high degree of probability. Some of these generalizations rest on a collection of observations so immense and so thoroughly analyzed that the occurrence of a new fact which will contradict the generalization, though not absolutely impossible, is enormously improbable. Here we reach the ground of Hume's famous argument against the credibility of miracles. Hume's position is substantially that a miracle is a priori so enormously improbable that the falsity of any supposable amount of human testimony is more probable than the truth of the alleged miracle. The sophistical form in which Hume stated his argument has been justly criticised, and criticised by the agnostic Huxley, as well as by Christian writers; but the force of the argument depends, not on the sophistical form, but on the truth which it contains. That truth is that the amount and quality of testimony necessary to establish belief in any allegation varies with the a priori probability or improbability of the allegation, and that accordingly there may be allegations so enormously improbable that no supposable array of testimony would render them credible. Suppose all Roman historians of the century commencing with the death of Nero whose works are extant agreed in the assertion that Nero rose from the dead. Would such agreement establish in our minds a belief in the truth of the allegation? We answer, without hesitation, "No."

* A more complete analysis of the conception of natural law, showing the impossibility of certainty in any such generalizations, we have given in an article, entitled "The Degree of Probability of Scientific Beliefs," published in the New Englander and Yale Review, January, 1891; republished as chapter iff in Twenty-five Years of Scientific Progress, and other Essays, New York and Boston, 1894.