s
and methods of life. It could not be otherwise in any effort to
harmonize the mutually contradictory teachings of the conflicting
schools of religious thought and practice in this complicated faith.

On the other hand, we see in this Song an honest and an able attempt
to bring the many tenets of that faith into a consistent whole. And we
cannot help feeling that, while the view of God and man here
presented, and the ways of salvation here enunciated, are not
satisfactory, yet we find scattered through its pages gems of thought
and beauties of religious conceptions and instruction which are beyond
cavil, and which to-day _seem_ to satisfy many millions of our
fellow-men.

But, at the close of a careful perusal of the book, one feels that it
is radically unsatisfying.

In the first place, it is wanting in any power for life. In order to
feel this, one has only to compare it, for a moment, with the Gospels
of Christianity. We find here philosophical disquisitions on the
Divine Being which few men can understand and none can hope to
harmonize. In the Gospels, on the other hand, we see presented a
scheme of life which, at the same time, satisfies the highest
philosophy and is perfectly intelligible to the most simple-minded.
Here a bewildering number of mutually contradictory ways of life are
urged upon us, not one of which can appeal in fulness and power to the
common man. There do we find one clear way of salvation--the way of
faith in Christ; and in order to walk in that way the power of the
Divine Spirit is promised to every one, even to the humblest soul and
to the greatest sinner, that he might accept the Christ and live in
and through Him a holy and a righteous life.

Above all, we have here represented an incarnation the records of
whose doings, in the sacred writings of the Hindus, shock us by their
immorality and disgust us by their coarseness. And yet he arrogates to
himself the nature and the functions, as he makes upon us the demands,
of the supreme Deity. There, on the other hand, we witness the
spectacle of the Christ who so lived the divine life, and whose
immaculate holiness is so overwhelming, that His claim to be one with
the Godhead brings no shock or sense of incongruity to any one to-day.
He has so impressed men of all generations that untold millions, in
all lands, have felt no hesitation in believing Him when He says, "He
that hath seen me hath seen the Father." Here do we indeed find the
supr