s for external realities.

There is another explanation which the Archbishop is too shrewd to pass
over in silence. Perhaps others said those things for Jesus, perhaps
they "attributed to him sayings which he did not utter." But this, the
Archbishop says, only multiplies the difficulty and the astonishment;
for, to put it briefly, his biographers in that case were as good at
predicting and inventing as himself. And why not? Do we not know that
the story of the woman taken in adultery, which is finely told, and has
all along been thought to contain some of Christ's most characteristic
teaching, does not exist in the earlier manuscripts? It was invented by
an unknown writer. And if one unknown writer could (and did) invent this
story, other unknown writers may have invented every part of the Gospel
narratives.

The attempt to make Jesus sponsor for himself is the last refuge of
hard-driven Christians. The frame of mind it evinces is seen in Dr.
Benson's interpretation of the exclamation "I thirst," ascribed to
Jesus on the cross. Crucifixion produced an intolerable thirst, and the
exclamation is very natural; but Dr. Benson says that Jesus meant "I
thirst for souls," and and adds that "no man can doubt" it. Such are
the shifts to which Christians are reduced when they cling to faith in
defiance of reason.

Dr. Benson's "living theology" is dead theology. It is sentimentalism
and make-believe. Perfectly scriptural doctrines are cast aside
while others are arbitrary retained. Vague talk about "Christ and him
crucified" takes the place of time-honored dogmas, logically deduced
from the "Word of God," and stamped with the deliberate approval of
councils and synods. Christianity, in short, is becoming a matter
of personal taste and preference. The time is approaching when every
Christian will have a Christianity of his own.

This is the moral of the Archbishop's volume. Had space permitted we
should have liked to notice other features of his sermons. In one place
he says that "the so-called Secularist is the man who deprives things
secular of all power and meaning and beauty." We think that he deprives
Christianity of all meaning, and that being gone its "power" and
"beauty" are idle themes of wasted eloquence.

MR. GLADSTONE ON DEVILS.

When the Grand Old Man crossed swords with Professor Huxley on the
miracle of Gadara, he spent all his time in discussing whether the pigs
belonged to Jews or Gentiles. The more s