BOOK REVIEWS.

ORIENTAL RELIGIONS AND THEIR RELATION TO UNIVERSAL RELIGION. By Samuel Johnson, with an introduction by O.B. Frothingham. Persia, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1885.

This is the third volume of the series, and was not quite completed at the time of Mr. Johnson's death in 1882. The other volumes, on India and China, created much interest in the world of religious and ethnical study, a prominent London publisher and literateur saying to a friend of the present writer that nothing more would need to be written of China for the next quarter of a century. Max Muller testified to the high value of Mr. Johnson's work.

In the study of the various religions, the author finds in each some peculiar manifestation of the universal religious sentiment. In Southern Asia he clearly sees nature almost absorbing the individual and hence a pantheistic vagueness and vastness in which man does not realize a complete sense of personality. But in the North and West the same Tudo-European race comes to a self-conscious individuality and there is the "evolution and worship of personal will." Mr. Johnson's first chapter on "Symbolism" brings out this epoch of will development as illustrated by the Persians,—the human soul impressing itself upon the material world—and finding outside itself natural emblems to express its religious life. "Symbolism is mediation between inward and outward, person and performance, man and his environment." "Work is the image man makes of himself on the world in and through nature." Mr. Johnson finds the personal element becoming supreme in these people of Northern and Western Asia.

Perhaps there has never been so philosophical and satisfactory a treatment of the Fire-Symbol, which, however, our author says is not peculiar to the religion of Persian Zoroaster, as we find in Mr. Johnson's chapter under that head. As light, heat, cosmic vital energy, astronomical centre, as all producing and all sustaining force, the sun and the other burning and brilliant objects lighted therefrom, furnish very much of the symbolism of all religions. "The Sun of Rightousness" is a favorite figure with Jew and Christian. It is doubtless as incorrect to characterize the Persians as "fire worshipers" as it would be to say that Christians, who use the same symbol, give their worship to the symbol rather than the Being symbolized. Still our author finds this emblem a very important one in the religion of the followers of Zoroaster and thinks he detects a progress in thought and civilization marked by the coming of the people to give religious regard to the sun and heavenly bodies, instead of fire kindled by human hands—a new stability of being corresponding with the passage of early people's art of nomadic or shepherd life into agriculture with its fixed abodes and domestic associations.

The two deities of the Zend Avesta, Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and the evil in perpetual conflict, could not have been conceived of in Southern Asia where the human will is kept under, and where self-consciousness is so moderately developed. This battle is in the Avestan faith and morals largely in the human breast, and is the same that Paul is conscious of in the combat he describes between himself and sin that was in him. The Avestan Morals are brought out by Mr. Johnson in their original and exceeding purity.

But the larger sweep of Mr. Johnson's purpose carries him into an exhaustive and most interesting consideration of Persian influence upon the Hebrew faith and thought—through the conquests of Cyrus and Alexander—and through Maurchæism and Gnosticism—down to Christendom.

Mahometanism is, in our author's mind, the culmination of the religion of personal will, and he devotes many glowing and instructive pages to bringing out the meaning and heart of the religion of Islam, especially in its later and in its more spiritual developments. The final object of the volume is to show the relation of the religion of personal will to universal religion.

Of course our author has not been foolish and unfair enough to portray the perversions and lapses of this particular type of Oriental faith and ethics; but his aim has been to set forth its essential principles and to show how they spring from the universal root.

The study of comparative religions, and hence of the universal religion, is one of the characteristics and glories of our time. Once every people despised, as a religious duty, every nation and every religion but its own, and sword and fagot were employed, as under divine command, to exterminate all strange manifestations of religious sentiment. Now the advance guard of civilization is giving itself to devout and thankful study of all the religions under the sure impression that they will prove to be one in origin and essence: and so a sweeter human sympathy and a more complete unity are beginning to be realized among men.

No man has in most respects been better fitted for this study than was the lamented author of these books. Mr. Johnson was almost or quite "a religious genius," with an enthusiasm of faith in the invisible and the idea, which few men have ever shown; and his devoutness was equalled by his catholicity. His religious lyrics enrich our Christian psalmody, while his published discourses, mingling philosophical light with fervor of a transcendent faith in God and man, rank among the grandest utterances from the American pulpit and platform. No American can afford to miss the power and influence of such a mind; and no student of religion should fail to have in his possession Johnson's Persia.

S.C. Beane.

"THE OVERSHADOWING POWER OF GOD. A synopsis of a new philosophy concerning the nature of the soul of man, its union with the animal soul, and its gradual creation through successive acts of overshadowing and the insertion of shoots, to its perfection in Jesus the Christ; with illustrations of the inner meaning of the Bible, from the Hebrew roots; offering to the afflicted soul the way of freedom from inharmony and disease. By Horace Bowen, M.D.; transcribed in verse by Sheridan Wait, with chart and illustrations by M.W. Fairchild. Vineland, N.J. New Life Publishing Co., 1883."

This book of Dr. Bowen's opens into a field of thought that has heretofore mostly escaped the survey of theologians and philosophers: classes that are supposed to be in pursuit of essential truth concerning both God and man. Its leading aim seems to be to present a reliable clew to those truths by an unusual interpretation of the Scriptures as a revelation of creative order. The author stands with a comparatively small class of ardent explorers who have come to see "the light of the world" under a new radiance; a radiance that actually gives it the breadth and power of its claim.

Dr. Bowen's personal career in coming to this light, as related in the preface, is full of interest; and this preface is impressively wrought with the system of creative law that he aims to outline, and that the verse of Mr. Wait labors to elaborate. This author is firmly loyal to the sacred Scriptures as divine revelation, and, as such, he aims to show that, in their inmost sense, they systematically unfold the creative process, which consists of divine operations in the human soul by which, through varied series of growth, it becomes fully conjoined to, and illuminated with creative life—the light and life of Jesus, the Christ. The process from Adamic to Christ states of soul, Dr. Bowen finds was effected through successive births by "the overshadowing power of God;" so the immaculate conception of the virgin, that gave "the highest" full embodiment in Jesus Christ was simply a revelation of the ultimation of creative power in outward realms; as such, "was the completion of the plan for the creation of man, through a serial gradation of over-shadowings, or the sowing of seed and the insertion of shoots"—this "individual case being but the universal method of God in creation."

Dr. Bowen goes on to show the relation and bearing of this ultimate order of creative life in the human form to the mental and physical conditions of man, and holds it to be the saving term to our human nature, in all respects.

The body of the book, consisting of nearly five hundred pages of "verse" by Mr. Wait, is an ingenious elaboration of the principles and forms of this order, especially as it is found held in the Hebraic Roots, throughout the incomparable system of divine revelation. But, indisputably, the treatise would have been far more forcible and impressive if it had been dressed with the direct and vigorous style shown by the author in his preface. Not the least in significance in this remarkable publication is a pocketed chart by Miss Fairchild. But the whole must be perused and pondered in order to give proper impressions of its real value. To the mind of the writer of this brief notice, the book will greatly aid the struggling thought of this manifestly transitional era, in that it points so distinctly to the oncoming theological science that is to effect a complete revolution in prevailing conceptions of creative order.

W.H.K.

PHILOSOPHIÆ QUESTOR: or Days in Concord. By Julia R. Anagnos. Boston: D. Lothrop and Company.

This is a little book—only sixty pages—but it is entirely unique in its plan and style. Its purpose is to give an outline sketch of two seasons of the School of Philosophy. To secure this purpose, the author has taken as "a sort of half heroine the shadowy figure of a young girl;" and, as seen to her, the proceedings of the school are sketched. Most of the persons and places have fictitious names; Mr. Alcott is called "Venerablis;" Concord, "Harmony;" the school, "the Acadame." Mr. Emerson retains his real name; the girl, who observes and writes, is "Eudoxia."

One who opens the book will be apt to read it through, not as much for its real value as for its quaint style and sometimes beautiful expressions.