sins, the trials, but from the duties, the connections, the moral and religious fate of the world.” The title itself is a “glaring misnomer.” “That which distinguishes Christ, that which distinguishes Christ’s Apostles, that which distinguishes Christ’s religion—the Love of Man—is entirely and absolutely left out. Had this been the whole of Christianity, our Lord Himself (with reverence be it said) had lived, like an Essene, working out or displaying His own sinless perfection by the Dead Sea; neither on the Mount, nor in the Temple, nor even on the Cross. …”
“Christianity had been without any exquisite precept for the purity, the happiness of social or domestic life; without self-sacrifice for the good of others; without the higher Christian patriotism, devotion or evangelic principles to the public weal; without even the devotion of the missionary for the dissemination of Gospel truth; without the humbler and gentler daily self-sacrifice for relatives, for the wife, the parent, the child. Christianity had never soared to be the civiliser of the world. ‘Let the world perish, so the single soul can escape on its solitary plank from the general wreck,’ such had been its final axiom. The Imitation of Christ begins in self—terminates in self. The simple exemplary sentence, ‘He went about doing good,’ is wanting in the monastic gospel of this pious zealot. Of feeding the hungry, of clothing the naked, of visiting the prisoner, even of preaching, there is profound, total silence.”
No doubt this omission of the social aspect of Christianity is a characteristic of the book. But it does not prelude that aspect, and is not incompatible with it. There is nothing to indicate that the writer was neglectful of the active duties of his profession, and if we assume that he devoted himself to the works of mercy which he was called upon by his vows to do, those who have to work hardest by sickbeds and in haunts of sin will best appreciate how great was his need of the retired and silent hours of which this book bears witness. In the history of that Divine Life to which the Dean makes reference, we are told that in the midst of His