e Benson a fool. But is any one in danger of doing so?
Would not every one admit some ability in the unhereditary recipient
of fifteen thousand a year? Parsons are not a brilliant body, but to
wriggle, or climb, or rise to the top of the Black Army involves the
possession of uncommon faculties.

The Archbishop is seldom eloquent, in the popular sense of the word;
but his style has a certain force and color, always within the limits of
exquisite breeding. If he consigned you to Gehenna, he would do it with
bland graciousness; and if he swore at all, he would swear in Latin. His
language in these sermons, as in another volume we noticed a year
ago, is pure and nervous, with an etymological reason for every word.
Sometimes he is quite felicitous. Now and then he uses metaphor with
skill and illumination. The habitual concreteness of his style shows the
clearness of his perceptions. Occasionally he is epigrammatic "Strong
enemies," he says in one place, "are better to us than weak friends.
They show us our weak points." Finer and higher is another passage in
the same sermon--"The yearning of multitudes is not in vain. After
yearning comes impulse, volition, movement." It would be difficult, if
not impossible, to better this, unless a great poet cast it in the mould
of a metaphor.

We confess that, on the whole, we have read the Archbishop's sermons
with some pleasure, as well as with much attention. It is to his credit
that he defies a superficial reading. We do not expect to find another
volume in the series at all comparable with his. Dr. Maclaren, who comes
second, is on a lower level, and the next descent to Mr. Price Hughes is
a fall into a slough of incapable and reckless sentimentalism.

_Living Theology_ is the title of the Archbishop's volume, but this is
a misnomer, for the title belongs only to the first sermon. It misled us
in this general application, as it will probably mislead others. We took
it to be a setting forth of so much theology as the Archbishop thought
_living_, in contradistinction to what he allowed to be _dead_. But we
find a very miscellaneous lot of sermons, sometimes rather on Church
work than on Church teaching. The title, therefore, is what Walt Whitman
would call "a suck and a sell." Yet it is hardly worth while to labor
the complaint, for titles are often better than the pages that follow
them. Sometimes, indeed, a writer puts all his head into the title, and
the rest of the book display