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the four years of war that these left ineradicable traces upon his imagination. The explanation of his later insight into the spirit of those Southern writers in the strictest sense his contemporaries, can be traced back to this period. The members of this new generation of writers were born before the war, were children during the war and witnessed the conflict, saw the old change into the new, and were themselves workers in building up the waste places. He, too, could easily remember, and had not merely heard of,' the old; while at the same time he belonged to the new. He grew up with this struggling of varied forces and was a pioneer in the new literary and educational movement that had to pass over the Southern States at this time, if the new phases of life were to find expression. It was his good fortune, besides, to have his work allotted him at one of the two new universities, Sewanee and Vanderbilt, both in Tennessee, which, without trammels of older traditions and through their peculiar foundations, were leaders in this spirit of the new. In the study of these forces lies the significance of this movement in Southern life, Southern education, and Southern literature in the last quarter of the nineteenth century; and from this point of view it may be regarded as of peculiar interest that the life and work of the subject of our sketch should have terminated virtually with the closing of the period.

However stimulating and exciting otherwise, the four years of war must have disturbed seriously the opportunities for sound education. Nevertheless, in the above-mentioned "Vita " he states, "I was at school almost without interruption till I was fifteen years old," and "from my teachers I got a smattering of Latin and Greek and of the usual English studies." With the well-known character of the Methodist preacher of the day, his father determined that the boy should have an education, even if nothing else should be be done for him. Peace had hardly been restored, therefore, when the lad's schooling was eagerly discussed by the parents. In 1865, at the age of fifteen, he was first sent to a Methodist institution north of the Ohio River, probably because there

was no Methodist college near at hand in Tennessee or Kentucky. This was the Indiana Asbury, now De Pauw University, located at Greencastle, a small town, fairly typical of the Central West, in rather a flat though slightly rolling landscape, in the western part of Central Indiana. The young boy remained there but a few months, and no glimmering of the future scholar's life yet dawned upon him. He was merely one of the youngest of numerous boys, and his teachers were teachers-this seems the sum of the impressions left. He was, probably enough, too young and very unevenly and ill prepared. He blames no one. With perfect frankness he speaks of this year: "I did nothing, and at sixteen I was again at home."

The father was wise enough to seek the remedy, and was fixed in his purpose that the boy should learn something. From the same frank source we are told: "For the next two years and a half I went to school to Mr. Quarles, a graduate of the University of Virginia, and from him I learned more than I had learned all the time before." Then for two or three years he seems to have stopped school. He probably remained at home, possibly worked on the farm, and lived the usual life of a Southern boy in the country or small town about 1870. But the father was ever anxious and ambitious for the now fully grown young man. Another college was sought out, and this time more happily chosen. Methodist institution in the South, Randolph-Macon College, had been recently moved to Ashland, only twenty miles north from and virtually a suburb of Richmond, Va. He himself says: "When I was twenty-two years old my father induced me to go to Randolph-Macon College, Virginia. There I was taught in my favorite studies by men who had studied in Germany, and by their advice I was led to come to Leipzig in the summer of 1874."

The oldest

Going to Randolph-Macon was the turning point in his life. Three men moved mountains for him and remained life influences. The Rev. James A. Duncan, D.D., the elder, was President, one of the most gifted and sympathetic pulpit speakers of his day. Casting aside denominational

a philosopher, a historian. If he publishes an essay in theology, he is entitled to be treated as a theologian. If he errs, justice demands indeed that he be beaten with many rods-the greater the offender the less does the offense need charitable extenuation. And we mean by this very critique to express indirectly, but all the more effectively therefore, the great esteem we have conceived for Mr. Fiske.

In conclusion, a few considerations shall be jotted down. which may perhaps help some disappointed reader.

Why the hypothesis of a quasi-human god? Because of the long pedigree of the idea? Surely not. Its movement from the single phenomenon to the group of phenomena, and thence to the larger synthesis beyond definite mental grasp, has the appearance not of a victorious progress, but of an ignominious egress before the conquering idea of mechanism. The difference between Aryan south of the Hindu-Kush and Aryan in Europe-is it not largely one between dreaming the whole, as spirit, and handling the parts, as mechanism? Surely this can yield little contentment to the theist.

Plainly, we want to believe in a God. It helps us to fight the battle of life. It helps us to survive and to develop. "But it is not true!" says the atheistic evolutionist. "What is truth?" we reply. For any man it is that which can be thought and believed by him with entire intellectual satisfaction. If theism helps men to survive, then there must come the day when there shall be none alive to deny it: it will be truth to all mankind. For the present it is truth to us. And because we wish you equipped as well for the struggle of life as we are, therefore we wish you also could believe as we.

This is at all events an honest answer-which can be ridiculed, but which admits of no sensible rejoinder unless that atheism tends to survival," a thesis hard to maintain, since by many it is claimed that there never was an atheist.

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But why a quasi-human God? Because anthropomorphism is inevitable. It is merely a question of more or less. There can be no valid objection to anthropomorphism so long as it be not irreverent, immoral, or obscene. Rightly, we think, does Mr. Fiske insist that "Infinite Person" is no more in

adequate than "Infinite Force" as a description of God. But we cannot agree with him when he says that " we see a rational principle at work" (p. 143). What we do see is happenings susceptible of rational explanation at work; on the other hand we also see others which obstinately refuse, whatever our ingenuity, so to be construed. Thence we may conclude to a God not rational, but either partly rational or preter-rational. The former leaves us without God; the latter vindicates deity just as our religious sentiment would expect. Moreover, should it be argued (as it has been) that the Deity came only to consciousness and reason at a relatively recent date; that with him as with man progress has not been the result of meditation (cf. p. 107), so that he did not first plan and then execute—our answer would be that if he be preter-rational, it was surely not so with him, for even we, as we advance in reason, tend more and more first to think and then to do.

Now, clearly, our God, to be worshipful, must be conceived not only as all-wise but also as omnipotent; yet by his allpower we do not mean to imply that he can do all that is thinkable, but always the very thing he wants to do. If, therefore, arguing of course from mere human analogy, we find a reason why he should have wished to do just what he has actually done, we shall find no cause for doubting his omnipotence in the fact that he did not do otherwise.

Before, however, the all-goodness of God be discussed at all, we must make up our minds as to what we understand by goodness. Do we mean efficiency? Do we mean kindness to other beings (ourselves and such as we sympathize with), or do we mean love of what they have it in them to be?

Now moral evil is but a variety of that which causes painpain in this case to our moral being. Pain always comes of arrested or overstrained functions. There are three ways of behaving toward it: to shrink, wail, complain, and cringe; or to resent it and make matters worse; or, lastly, to utilize it. But how? Clearly for development. Necessity is the mother of invention, proverbial wisdom tells us, and necessi

ty is in the last analysis pain. If one function by arrest or overstrain causes anguish, set another function into operation which will give a pleasure capable not only of neutralizing the pain, but of absorbing it so as to become an ecstasy. Thus in our despair new powers are discovered and developed; the bliss of victory—nay, even the pride of stubborn resistance, meeting with ultimate defeat-reconciles us to the hardships of battle. There is "the joy of seeing how much one can stand," the pride of power over one's self, which are of themselves no mean compensations. Thus the agonies which forced us to reach and overleap the bounds which circumscribed our power became at the time swallowed up in the sense of growth, and were afterwards sweet in their bitterness, as the price of achievement and the test of virtue. It is nevertheless quite clear that to all cowardly wailers or foolhardy protestors against the economy of pain, it must appear a discouraging, paralyzing, and destructive horror. Just because to him who is at-one with the divine creative purpose it is the pressure of the fashioning holy hand which he trusts, even to his own undoing; therefore to him who insists upon considering himself a finished product, it must seem the interference of some malign enemy of God. For God as creator is also destroyer, as the history of our earth testifies. Like the artist, he makes and chooses a resistant material that the mastery of the ideal may be the more triumphant. But he is in love less with one idea than with a series of ideas; and each one of the series is an ideal to him in turn, so that stuff becomes product, and then product is again stuff with reference to further product. Each step of the whole process is an indulgence of creative energy, a delight; and every stage, however protracted, is but a sweetness long drawn. out. To him there is no "dreary period" as to Mr. Fiske; nor is there to the man who sees the long history of life as that of God's creative bliss.

Now as to the other meanings of good. Is God good-that is, kind to us? Surely not in the sense of making it easy for us, singing us soothing lullabies and providing sweetmeats for half-awake moments. But kind in the sense of