1894. Moreover, the progress of historical and antiquarian knowledge had made even the work of Dr Reeves somewhat out of date. A thoroughly accessible edition, brought into line with the learning of the day, was among the many literary desiderata of this bookproducing age.

This want was accentuated and made more widely felt when, some ten years ago, the University of Durham instituted a special examination for the degree of B.D., open, as an encouragement to study, to clergy of a certain standing, whether they were members of the University or not. Among the subjects which candidates for this degree may offer is Church History; and among the subjects which candidates who select Church History must offer is Adamnan's Life of S. Columba. The want which was thus aggravated by Durham has now been most appropriately supplied by a member of that University; and the University with equal propriety conferred the honorary degree of D.C.L. on the new editor just about the time when this latest piece of work of his was leaving his hands for the Clarendon Press. The Preface is dated June 9, and the degree was conferred June 26.

The Preface to the volume gives some account of the literature; and then follows the Introduction on Early Irish History, which tells the ordinary reader all that he requires to know in order to read Adamnan's biography of the Saint intelligently. This Introduction is in seven chapters, which treat respectively of the PrePatrician Period, St Patrick, Saints of the Patrician Period, and the "Three Orders" of Irish Saints, Irish Monasticism, Monastic Schools, Columba in Ireland, Columba in Iona, and Columba's successors, up to and including Adamnan. Where all is so good, it is a little difficult to choose; but of these seven chapters the fourth and fifth on Irish Monasticism and Monastic Schools, may be specially commended to the reader's attention. The list of "authorities cited" nearly fills six pages. Then comes a genealogical table of kings and abbots, ending in Adamnan, ninth abbot of Iona, A.D. 679-704, and a not quite complete list of corrigenda, the latter of which tends to show that in reprinting the text of Reeves the present editor has trusted rather too much to the accuracy of the reader at the Press. How excellently the readers at the University Press, both at Oxford and at Cambridge, do their work many of us can testify from personal experience. Nevertheless, they cannot be expected to be as lynx-eyed as an author or editor.

When we reach the text of Adamnan's Vita Sancti Columbae, we find that Dr Fowler has done four things for us, all very helpful. He has given a marginal analysis of the Life in English, an apparatus criticus for the text, excellent explanatory notes at the foot of each page, and at the end a very useful glossary. As a

specimen of the notes we may take one on the word pistor in chap. x. of lib. iii.

Colgan and the Bollandists, perhaps misled by an error in a transcript, read pictor. This reading has led Keller and Westwood to refer to the passage as supposed evidence of the cultivation of painting or illumination in Iona, while Dr John Smith in his Life of St Columba, has accused Colgan and other Catholics' of wilfully altering the word to justify paintings" (p. 140).

Or, again, on the word missa in connexion with vespertinalem missam in chapter xxiii. of the same book :—

"The original meaning was the same as missio or dimissio, which seems to have been extended to any service at the end of which the congregation was dismissed, and finally to the Eucharist alone" (p. 158).

In modern German the expression Abendmesse may still be seen in the sense of "evening service," and before now has been interpreted to mean "evening communion," a sense which, to a German Roman Catholic, would seem ridiculous.

Between the useful glossary and index Dr Fowler has given a table of references to the passages of Scripture which are quoted in the Vita. They are taken from sixteen books of the Old Testament and thirteen of the New-Genesis, the Psalms, and St Matthew being the writings most frequently used.

Here and there in the notes, and also in the glossary, Dr Fowler calls attention to the interesting fact that some of the less usual words used by Adamnan are also used in the Vulgate, or some other Latin Version of the Bible. This he does either by a mere reference to Rönsch's invaluable analysis of the language of the Itala und Vulgata (Marburg, 1875), as in the case of Amphibalus, Ascella, Minare, Offensus; or, still better, by giving references to the passages in the Bible in which the word is found, as in the case of Appropriare, Humerulus, Papilio. This latter method seems to be adopted only when the word occurs in the Vulgate, and not always then. The following are additional examples, and no doubt a little research would result in the discovery of more :—

Pincerna (I. xvii.), which is used for the monastic butler, instead of the more usual cellarius, is fairly common in the Vulgate (Gen. xl. 1, 2, 9, 20, 23; xli. 9; 1 Kings x. 5; 2 Chron. ix. 4). Hauritorium (I. xvii.) occurs in Codd. Bezæ (d), Veron. (b), and Rehd. (1), for the avrλnua of John iv. 11. Sublimatus est (I. xliv.) is found in the Vulgate (Ezek. xxxi. 10; comp. Job xxii. 12). Pausare, "to rest" (III. xxiii.) occurs also (4 Esdr. ii. 24). Ingeniculatio, kneeling" (II. xxxii.), perhaps is not used in any Latin Version, the word not being required; but the Vulgate has ingeniculans (3 Esdr. viii. 74).

Instances of this kind are of great interest, and tell of various things. Sometimes they explain how new words, or words in new senses, got into the Versions-viz., because of their use in the current dialect. Sometimes they explain how they got into the current dialect-viz., because of their use in a Version that was familiar. How many English words, or uses of words, would have perished but for the Authorised Version!

No one can read Adamnan for five minutes without being struck by his extraordinary fondness for diminutives, which, as a rule, have no point, but are mere substitutes for the simple word. In the glossary we are told that Reeves has made a list of eighty-three such words occurring in the Vita S. Columbae. As Reeves is such an inaccessible book, it would be worth while, in a second edition, which is sure to be required, to give this list, separating single from double diminutives. The latter are not very common, as agellulus, capsellula, monticellulus, and perhaps others. Diminutives are fairly frequent in the Latin Versions, but to nothing like the same extent as in Adamnan; and not very many are common to them and him.

The editor, who apparently prefers "connexion," has not succeeded in keeping "connection (which even compositors at the University Press will print, if allowed to do so) out of his pages (p. 158). But it is no doubt the editor, and not the compositor, who prefers "Vergil," which to some of us seems to be indefensible. Vergilius, if you like—yet even that is not necessary, as the editor himself seems to admit (p. 131); but “ Vergil" is neither Latin nor English. “Baeda" is all right for those who like to be particular; and "Bede" is also right, and for English people (we agree with Canon Bright 1) very much to be preferred; but would not "Baede" be intolerable?

But, in conclusion, why ought students of Church History to read the Life, written near the close of the seventh century, of a saint who died near the close of the sixth ? The editor, at the close of his instructive Introduction, gives us the answer to that question in the words of those who are best qualified to judge-viz., those who have made a special study of Adamnan. Because this biography is "the most complete piece of such biography that all Europe can boast of, not only at so early a period, but throughout the whole Middle Ages" (Pinkerton). Because it is " an inestimable relic of the Irish Church; perhaps, with all its defects, the most valuable monument of that institution which has escaped the ravages of time," and is "one of the most important pieces of hagiology in existence" (Reeves). Because it is" one of the most vivid, most 1 Waymarks of History, p. 280. Longmans, 1894. Dr Fowler always has "Bede."

attractive, and most authentic monuments in the History of Christianity" (Montalembert). Dr Fowler has done no more useful piece of work in all that he has done for literature and archæology, than in making this exceptionally valuable document accessible to all English students. ALFRED PLUMMER.

Studies in Theology.

Lectures delivered in Chicago Theological Seminary. By the Rev. James Denney, D.D. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1894. Pp. viii. 272. Price, 5s.

No such reviving note has been heard in our theology for many a day as this which is so clearly given forth by Dr Denney. Some months ago, in a Church Congress at Exeter, Dr Sanday, of Oxford, called attention to the change which marks religious thinking both in Church and non-conforming circles at present, as compared with a time twenty years earlier. At that time the first effects of more critical study had been to engender vagueness of belief and impatience of dogma. Now, as he thinks, the riper fruits of such study are beginning to appear. "It has already strengthened and defined, in the minds of recently educated preachers and writers, such doctrines as those of the Trinity, the Logos, the Atonement, and the union of the Christian with Christ." In Scotland our case has never been that which Dr Sanday's words describe for the Churches of the sister country. We have always had competent systematizers. In the last generation we had theologians like the late Principal W. Cunningham, who, with logical completeness, treated evangelical doctrine as a direct inheritance from the Reformers. All along, even since the new learning began to tell, we have had a succession of able exegetes and commentators interpreting its results for us, both in Old Testament and New Testament theology. But what we have lacked is the reconstruction of our doctrinal system in the maturer lights of modern scholarship. More than a promise of this advance we have now in the work of Dr Denney, as already in that of Dr James Orr, whom he duly associates with himself by frequent citation.

Dr Denney believes in systematic divinity. Every page pleads for the solidarity of Christian belief. His thoughts move in battalions. They have a commander, a standard, and a purpose in their movement. His mind is possessed with an instinct for consistency, which in a constructive theologian is really a form of the instinct for truth. His mental attachment is to the permanent rather than to the provisional elements in religious thought. Keen

to miss nothing which the progress of criticism and exegesis furnishes, he is strong in his hold of the fundamental; skilful in his use of what is new to illustrate it; comprehensive in his judgment of the relation of the accidental to the essential. The book does not profess to be more than a sketch or a series of studies, but it carries great principles through every one of these, and tells us how easily the author could enrich us with further applications of them. It marshals some of the chief doctrines of evangelical theology in open array and in presence of their foe,-the only rival system of the Christian facts which in our day requires to be taken seriously by the systematic theologian.

Dr Orr, in his masterly "Kerr Lecture," was the first of British writers, so far as we have noticed, to ring out a prolonged defiance to this Ritschlian or so-called New Theology. Dr Denney carries on the campaign with persistence and point. Nothing could be more seasonable, when there is among our religious writers and preachers so much of this tendency, often unconfessed and probably unconscious. But there is an element in this sketch far more valuable than the polemic-viz. the reconstructive. Like most of our recent able theological essayists, Dr Denney takes as his starting-point, and, indeed, as his centre, the relation of the Person of Christ to the entire Christian system. Faithful all through to the fulness of New Testament teaching, the book is particularly successful in bringing out its witness to the Divine, Living, and Present Christ. The favourite motto "Back to Christ" is fairly and lucidly dealt with, and its defect supplied. "The Christian religion, as the New Testament exhibits it, is the religion of men who believe that Christ lives and reigns in grace, and that they themselves are in living fellowship with a living Lord who does all things perfectly in them and for them. . . . It might sound, perhaps, too paradoxical to say that no apostle, no New Testament writer, ever remembered Christ; yet it would be true in the sense that they never thought of Him as belonging to the past. The exalted Lord was lifted above the conditions of time and space; when they thought of Him, memory was transmuted into faith; in all the virtue of the life they had known on earth He was Almighty, ever-present, the living King of Grace. On this conception the very being of the Christian religion depends; but for it that religion could never have been born, and without it, could not survive for a generation. . . It is not because He lived, but because He lives, that we have life also." With a similar convincingness and force Dr Denney brings out the centrality of the Atonement in Apostolic teaching; that the work of Christ in relation to sin and to man's reconciliation to God is in the New Testament a "luminous, interpretable, and interpreted fact"; that it is the culminating point in revelation; not the insoluble