tion of the eternal and ultimate value of the specifically human and earthly. We must conclude that the mystic has missed something of the profound and unique meaning of the doctrine of Incarnation in its highest developement. This is the real truth underlying the somewhat exaggerated and undiscriminating attacks on Roman Catholic mysticism, which are associated with the names of A. Harnack and W. Herrmann. It would be an exaggeration to assert with Harnack that the mystics 'always lacked their full momentum so long as they took any notice of whatever was outside of God and the soul',1 or with Herrmann, that when the mystic has 'found God', he has left Christ behind '2; but it is undeniable that the mystics never realized the full significance of the fact that God's supreme revelation of Himself took the form of an ordinary human and temporal life in the world.

But on the other hand, Christianity does a great deal more than furnish a vague support of the popular view of eternity: it also supplies its corrective by emphasizing the complementary truth grasped by the mystic. Christianity could never allow popular imagination to depict heaven as simply the intensification of all it happens to find most pleasant on earth. And it provides an objection to such wild ideas deeper even than their intellectual absurdity. For, side by side with the Incarnation which is the guarantee of self-realization, it sets the Cross, the symbol of self-denial. If Christianity teaches anything clearly, it teaches that all human visions and aspirations are clogged and marred by sin. Hence, whatever we may ultimately keep in eternity, we must abandon all to possess it. We must give up our very lives if we would save them. The kingdom of God is a pearl of great price which cannot be bought for less than all that the merchant has. While this sacrifice is being accomplished we must see in a glass darkly, and every human imperfection is but another speck of dust which clouds and blurs the vision. This truth may be realized in a fervour of

you' seem to shew that after putting his penitent in the path of salvation, John had decided scruples about continuing the acquaintanceship. The case then is very much in point.

1 Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte iii p. 382, quoted by Herrmann The Communion of the Christian with God p. 23.

2 Herrmann op. cit. p. 30.

religious humility or in the colder £t of common sense; but it remains the first great lesson to be learned by all. This, the mystics have seen with overwhelming clearness; and, not despairing, they have caught the glow of everlasting hope which lurks in its fullest appreciation. They have felt with an intense conviction that the love of God is the one ground and support of eternal life, and that indeed there are many human colours which can by no means be made to lie on such a canvas. Popular faith may, in virtue of the Incarnation, legitimately claim that this teaching taken by itself and in an exclusive sense is onesided, and that all the best in human individuality and particularity must be preserved. But the very same religion, which alone supports its claim, forbids it to pretend to know how much eternity can keep or how the mortal can put on immortality.

In any case, it must always be recognized that one supreme problem which confronts any church claiming catholicity is to combine in the society, if never completely in the individual, the heroism of the mystic path of renunciation with the no less divine normality of the ordinary religious life. Both elements are essential to a true religion; yet each seems to exclude the other. There are three conceivable ways in which a harmony might be effected.

The first, and perhaps the most obvious, is to make the experience of the mystic in all cases finally normative, and to assign a merely educational, though very real, value to those popular beliefs which tend to find eternity in and through the purest forms of earthly attachment and desire. This view indeed is at once defensible and attractive; and no doubt it has been widely held by thoughtful and Christian minds. The only real objection to it lies in the suggestion the foregoing pages have put forward, that the general religious feeling of mankind seems to centre in a claim which the Gospel-story appears in a measure to admit and justify, but for which the mystical heaven cannot be stretched to find a place. If this is so, it is difficult to represent the mystical view as simply a higher level of religious thought up to which the popular mind can naturally expand and develope. And then the terrible danger begins to shew itself, of admitting two doctrines and two lives, an exoteric and

an esoteric way, within the fold of the Christian faith; and we become entangled in all the evil duplicity of the system which Clement of Alexandria so light-heartedly set forth.

The second solution is to adopt a boldly anti-mystical position and, while admitting the value abnormal experiences may have for certain oddly constituted individuals, to declare roundly that to consider them as in any sense special manifestations of God's presence is, broadly speaking, a mistake. This conclusion, however, would be contrary to the whole bent of true Catholicism; and we have seen that, once mysticism is rightly understood and criticized, neither ethics, nor science, nor theology, could justify us in disparaging a side of religious experience the worth of which has been so abundantly proved in the past, and for which there is still such ample scope in the present. It is just the loss of that sense of direct contact with the eternal which is perhaps the most dangerous weakness of the modern world.

It has been the task of this essay very dimly and uncertainly to suggest that the theology of the Cross and the Incarnation seems to make a third way of reconciliation possible, a way in which these two sides of religion, which seem so profoundly opposed, may in the end be found true complements of each other. The Cross represents the negative side of the Christian call, the aspect of renunciation and suffering. The Incarnation and the Resurrection convey its positive gospel of consecration and life. To all Christian lives both elements are essential, and, indeed, in one very real sense they are inseparable from each other; for the renunciation which belongs to the Cross is rooted in the grand affirmation of God's all-sustaining love and presence, while consecration is only possible on earth through self-denial. Yet it may well be that some are called to set forth more especially than others the life of renunciation; and it would appear that it is only at the level of renunciation, when the realization of the Cross absorbs the consciousness almost to the exclusion of other aspects of Christian truth, that man attains a special and mystic sense of contact with the Divine. Certainly in a sinful world it is not hard to understand why an experience of eternity which transcends the Cross cannot be granted to the human soul. The mystic apprehension of Christianity, therefore, though supremely true, is partial; and

it is the failure to recognize this incompleteness which has sometimes led mystics into an inhuman detachment hardly less repulsive than ordinary sin. In using this language it is not for a moment implied that the normal Christian life, which seeks to consecrate rather than to renounce, is on a higher plane than the mystic's. Only, as the life in the carpenter's workshop found its true fulfilment not on Calvary but in the Resurrection, so the ordinary Christian's life is not fulfilled in the mystic's visions. Both look, or should look, for a consummation beyond the highest flight of the human spirit upon earth.

We must, then, accept to the full the tremendous teaching of the Cross. We must insist as strongly as any mystic that the man who loves anything on earth more than Christ is unworthy of Him, and that the Christian, whether in the workshop or in the monastery, must take up his Cross daily to follow his Lord. Yet we need not forget that it was in the workshop of the carpenter that the Son of God first revealed Himself as man. However much the life of utter renunciation may inspire us, we may yet doubt whether it has entered even into the mystic's heart to conceive all the things that God hath prepared for them that love Him. And, finally, in religious matters it must always be borne in mind that sometimes it is the mouth, not of the expert, but of the babe, which is uttering the deepest truth.

O. C. QUICK.

201

JOHN WORDSWORTH, BISHOP OF

SALISBURY,

AND HIS WORK ON THE VULGATE NEW
TESTAMENT.

THE death of John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury, on the 16th of August last, deprived the English Church of one of its foremost theologians. Born in 1843, he was not yet old either in years or in mental activity, and his physique, which was stronger than the average, seemed to promise many more years of study and labour. But the heavy work which was habitual with him when he was well, and which he forced himself to do when he was ailing and weary, told on him at length; the early part of 1911 was marked by a long illness; and though he seemed to have recovered fairly well by the summer, he was still weak and easily tired; then there came a sudden heart-attack, and he was dead.

Other pens have borne witness to his greatness as a ruler in his diocese, and as a leader and counsellor in the Church; to the manysided activities of his crowded life; to the earnestness and simplicity of his character, and to the affectionate disposition which made him, in spite of a somewhat cold and preoccupied manner, a man of many friends. In this JOURNAL it may not be amiss to call attention to the services he rendered to the study of Theology. The long list of books and pamphlets following his name in Crockford's Directory includes work in almost every department of that study, in apologetics, Church history, dogmatics, liturgica, and textual criticism; in every one of these he had made contributions of permanent value to the subject; it is sufficient, as proof of this, to mention his Bampton lectures, his Hale lectures on the Swedish Church, his Ministry of Grace, his addresses on the Holy Communion, his numerous pamphlets on Anglican orders and Ordination problems, his treatises on The Ministry of Penitence and on Bishop Sarapion's Prayer Book, and his share in the exhaustive report on The Ornaments of the Church and its Ministers which was published by a sub-committee of Convocation in 1908. But it was in the work of textual criticism that his talents especially lay, and it is by what he achieved here that he will be longest remembered. The name of John Wordsworth will always be connected with the series of Old-Latin Biblical Texts, and with the Oxford critical edition of the Vulgate; and it is in the hope that other scholars may wish to know something of what he did and of his methods in doing it that I have ventured to write the following account.