We have already a Greek text built up on the scientific study of the great uncial manuscripts; for the filling up of the gaps in the material on which the Cambridge Professors worked, we are looking soon for the Peshitto Gospels and it may be the Sahidic New Testament as well. But especially we trust that Oxford will continue and complete the task, so well initiated, of putting into the hands of scholars in a critical form all that Latin Fathers and Latin Biblical manuscripts can give us in aid. The Vulgate is safe in the hands of Bishop Wordsworth and his colleague, many years as it will be before that monumental edition reaches the Apocalypse. Professor Sanday has, we believe, in hand the Latin New Testament of Irenæus; and the question calls for settlement whether the version in which we read that Father already lay before Tertullian, or whether as Dr. Hort, following Dodwell, believes, it emanated from the fourth century only. Equally important would be a New (and indeed an Old) Testament of Cyprian based on a revision of Hartel's text. Next should come a recollation of the three great manuscripts now in North Italy, the codices of Vercelli, Verona, and Brescia; and the corrections, if not bulky enough to warrant a new edition of Bianchini, might be printed separately. The great task that remains, the New Testament of St. Augustine, must probably be postponed till the editors of the Vienna Corpus shall have examined and digested in print some of the vast stores of Augustinian manuscripts that fill every library of Western Europe. Then, when all this and other evidence is collected and collated, we shall be in a position to work back on the underlying texts, and to say, more clearly and more certainly than can be said now, what is the contribution of the Latin Churches from the second century to the fifth for the restoration of the original of the New Testament. We do not pretend to indicate here to what lines results would tend; for such a work we have neither opportunity nor fitness. But the already known closeness of the relation between some early Latin and early Oriental testimony is at least a problem which must receive a critical sifting and an explanation before a text constructed without reference to them can claim allegiance as the nearest representative of the authentic words of the Apostles and Evangelists.

ART. VII. THE SCHOOLING OF THE APOSTLES.

Pastor Pastorum: or, the Schooling of the Apostles by our Lord. By Rev. HENRY LATHAM, M.A., Master of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. (London, 1890.)

We have found the work of the Master of Trinity Hall exceedingly fresh and suggestive, and we hope it will be of great use to a large, and perhaps an increasing, class of minds in which there is a mixture of reverence and enquiry, of true religion and keen interest in this wonderful world. We do not know any book which exactly supplies the want which the work aims at meeting. There are Lives of Christ orthodox and rationalistic, graphic and reflective. There are comments on His words and works both critical and devotional. It is not to be denied that in the perusal of this book one or other of these elements may sometimes be missed. When Mr. Latham advances some interesting and ingenious account of a saying or an act, those who are used to the Biblical criticism of the time may desire some discussion of the question whether a little variation from literal correctness in the record may not be the likeliest solution of the difficulty. And when he treats, in his easy style, of some incident in the sacred life, those who have been used to regard it awe-struck from a distance, may at first sight imagine him wanting in reverence. But the critics will find plenty of occupation for their faculty of enquiry in the interesting views of purpose and intention in the recorded words and work of Christ which are here set forth. The display of a unity of teaching in all the dealings of the Lord with His apostles is, in fact, a critical argument for the genuineness of the Gospel record of a very important kind, too often neglected by the critical school. The devotional reader, on the other hand, will discern no want of real reverence, although the deliberate purpose of the book is to bring out the points in which the Lord's teaching runs parallel with the best experience of ordinary human life rather than those in which it stands apart. The schooling of the Great Master is viewed as if by a university man of the best stamp, suspicious of transports, yet deeply careful of genuine truth. He is highly interested in watching the ways of human nature, and specially the growth and development of the minds of students. And therefore he regards with a delighted interest, which passes easily into devotion, the choice and training for a purpose infinitely important, of a

set of men whom the best educationists might well deem as unfit to be instructed for any such destiny, as they would feel themselves at utter loss how to set about the process of instruction.

Naturally the first and favourite idea with Mr. Latham is to show how human liberty and the distinctness of individual character is valued and used by our Lord in His dealings with the Apostles.

'Christ, we find, draws out in His disciples the desired qualities of self-devotion and of healthy trust in God, without effacing the stamp of the individual nature of each man. He cherishes and respects personality. The leader of a sect or school of thought is often inclined to lose thought of the individual in his care for the society which he is establishing, or to expect his pupils to take his own opinions ready-made in a block. . . . But our Lord was a teacher of a very different kind. He reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth. He was glad when His words roused a man into thinking on his own account, even in the way of objection. When the Syrophoenician woman turns His own saying against Him with the rejoinder, "Yes, Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs," He applauds her faith the more for the independent thought that went with it' (pp. 5-6).

This is well expressed and very truc. And we may apply it by way of example to the Church of later times. The Catholic Church has been wider and freer than the sects, but we may well confess that even the Catholic Church has not been as Catholic as her Divine Founder in allowing for the play of individual character and patiently waiting its development. How admirably also may we note this characteristic of the Lord's dealings in His heavenly government of the Church after His Ascension. It is imperishably stamped upon the pages of the New Testament. The Tübingen critics will have it that men who took such different views of the Gospel as St. Paul and the Twelve, must needs have been at open war; that evangelists who regarded the life of Christ so differently as the Synoptists and St. John, cannot possibly have lived in the same age. But these expositors of the lecture-room were unable to understand the liberty of the Gospel or the wide scope for difference of aspect, and for the play of mental tendency, and the preparations of race and circumstance, which can find place in a system that is not a theory but a life.

'The training of the disciples,' says Mr. Latham, 'was partly practical, turning on what they saw our Lord do and were set or suffered to do themselves, and partly it came from what they heard

I want the reader to go along with me in marking how this training of the Apostles was adapted to generate the qualities which the circumstances of their situation demanded when Christ left the world' (p. 7).

The reader has no difficulty whatever in going along with Mr. Latham, for his detail of the elements of the Apostles' spiritual education is very interesting, and being founded on the general capacities and needs of humanity, is constantly felt to have its application to the Church in all time and to ourselves. First, the Apostles were chosen as good, honest, literal-minded men who would perform their chief duty of witnesses in such a manner as to win confidence. Then they were gradually schooled, through their companionship with the Lord during His wanderings, into confidence in His person and His life. They were trusted with responsibility when He sent them out two by two. And when He was taken from them by death, it was not long before He was again restored to them; and the same personal intercourse, with the same responsibility to work under Him among men, was re-established in a wider and more spiritual form. And in the Lord's oral teaching many characteristics lead us to mark that He was preparing His hearers for a work that was to grow and expand. His terse sayings, His parables, are seed-thoughts, meant and adapted to germinate within the mind and produce, not dull reciters of lessons by rote, but living thinkers and workers.

Mr. Latham would have us see in the omissions of the Gospels the same onward look towards future expansion. The Lord taught no ritual, because that is something which should vary according to times and places, and it would not have been well that what was fit for Judæa and for that age, should have been imposed upon Churches far removed in manners, language, and time. And the omission of a formal and doctrinal record by the Lord Himself of what He came to teach and do, has the same adaptation to the free growth of the Church. If the Lord had left writings, they would have been worshipped in the letter. They would have encouraged a bibliolatry which some indeed in later times, and under the pressure of revulsion from Rome, have tried to use towards the story of the Lord's life as we have it, but which it is not at all fitted to receive. For it is the record of the living tradition of the Apostles, committed to writing only at a considerable period after the Lord's death.

'When matter has come down by oral tradition men can hardly worship the letter of it. We possess only brief memoirs collected by

men, the dates and history of the composition of which are far from certain, so that room is left for criticism and judgment. The revelation of God is, therefore, not so direct that men will be awe-stricken and shut their minds at the sight of it; but human intelligence can be brought to bear on the records, whereby their meaning is brought out, and men's intellects are braced by the exploration of lofty regions' (p. 14).

It is very easy, indeed, to see how much better this character of the Gospel records falls in with the Catholic than with the Protestant theory. According to the latter conception the Church fills the position of a servant who respectfully furnishes us with a Bible and retires, leaving us to make what we can of it by ourselves. But the Church has ever been a living teacher and witness to men, and something more still; she has been the living body in which men think and grow, and which thinks and grows with them into ever-increasing familiarity with Him who is the head. Mr. Latham very rightly notes the peculiar fitness of memoirs by contempcraries, or those who were familiar with contemporaries, to make us acquainted with people in their own intimate characIt is, we suppose, this adaptation of memoirs to enable us to know personalities-not what men did, but what they were-which gives them a charm so much greater than formal history. We desire to know formal history in order to trace the world-movements of races and kingdoms. But, for our own delight and improvement, we must have from cach great period, and each centre of important events, some diary or collection of letters composed at ease, without formality or the design of completeness, to teach us what sort of men these were in themselves, apart from the great historical results which force us to think of them less as men than as impersonal powers. And the deepest, truest, holiest instance of this fitness of memoirs to acquaint us with a personality is furnished by the Gospels.

ter.

Mr. Latham very happily takes the words of St. Paul, 'the secret things of their hearts are made manifest,' for the burden of his chapter upon Revelation. For its leading thought is that God is revealed to us in the revelation of ourselves. It is in this character that God's messages are presented to us even in the Old Testament: as things true in themselves and harmonizing all man's knowledge, intellectual and moral-something which every true man is bound to accept by its self-evidencing nature and its consistency with everything that he knows. But above all does this appear in the manifestation of Jesus Christ. When He comes,