only broke down more completely the boundaries between God and nature. Horace represents an absolute humanism to which the gods are only names. He is graceful and amiable, but he is also hopeless of the future. He confesses that the Roman world, with all its external greatness, is irrecoverably corrupt and lost. Rome, as Livy had said, cannot endure either her vices or their remedies.And so the classical poetry which has run this course confesses its own insufficiency as an expression of the truth with regard both to God and to man. Man needs not so much instruction as example. The personality of God and his distinctness from nature need to be shown by an incarnation of God in humanity.Man's freedom must be demonstrated by one in whom the law appears drawn out in living characters. Dr. Disselhoff has given to the world a new and valuable argument for the divinity of the Christian system in his elaborate demonstration from the poetry of the ante-Christian and extra-Jewish world that the humanity which is ever groping after God cannot, without special divine revelation, find him. His copious citation of passages from the poets makes this book an excellent handbook and directory for the study of the history of religion. Co., I897 Pp. viii + 447. $3."As IT costs but little to make generalizations," says somewhere Mr. Burke, " they may as well be brilliant." Generalizations concerning the origin of the idea of God and of religion as frequently appear as Richmonds confronted Richard Third on the field of Bosworth. Totemism, androgynism, or sex relation, deification of the dead, are successively exploited as the fundamental element of religion, the genesis of the idea of God. Mr. Grant Allen attempts to rescue the ghost theory of Herbert Spencer from the discredit into which it has fallen. The form of religion is mistaken for its essence; the occasion of its manifestation is confounded with the ultimate principle.Pathology is substituted for psychology. Primitive and advanced psychology undergo a violent breach of continuity. The Aristotelian the poetry of Vergil, which makes Rome the type of divine providence, only broke down more completely the boundaries between God and nature. Horace represents an absolute humanism to which the gods are only names. He is graceful and amiable, but he is also hopeless of the future. He confesses that the Roman world, with all its external greatness, is irrecoverably corrupt and lost. Rome, as Livy had said, cannot endure either her vices or their remedies. And so the classical poetry which has run this course confesses its own insufficiency as an expression of the truth with regard both to God and to man. Man needs not so much instruction as example. The personality of God and his distinctness from nature need to be shown by an incarnation of God in humanity.Man's freedom must be demonstrated by one in whom the law appears drawn out in living characters. Dr. Disselhoff has given to the world a new and valuable argument for the divinity of the Christian system in his elaborate demonstr...
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