country, since he was supposed to be a friend of the Germans. The author certainly had good oppor tunities for observation, since he shows in almost every line that he has been on the field, testifying of what he himself witnessed. "Money Mad." By CORTLAND MYERS, D.D. Fleming H. Revell Company, New York, Chicago, and Toronto, 1917. 71⁄2 x 5 in., iv-96 pp. 50 cents net. The publishers say on the "jacket": "In four breezy chapters Dr. Myers shows how a man may make, save, and give money without doing violence to his conscience or. standing as a member of the Church of Christ." This is largely true. Nevertheless that fact does not excuse either author or publisher for permitting such loose writing to go through as this: "I can hardly believe this is true that the average minister's salary in America now, with the high cost of living, with his good clothes that he must have, with his family, with his books, the average salary is $600 a year" (p. 27). Such careless sentences are not rare. The Church and the Man. By DONALD The foreword of this little book, written In Memoriam of its author (killed in action on the Somme in October, 1916), says that "his great aim, and his great achievement in theology, was the interpretation in life of the learning of the schools." In the first How to Fill the Pews. By ERNEST EUGENE ELLIOTT. The Standard Publishing Company, Cincinnati. 51⁄2 x 8 in., 304 pp. $1.50 postpaid. The author of this book pronounces it, "the genuine, unadulterated 'stuff' on church attendance." There is really a mass of it, written by many pens, and giving the results of wide experience. There are in it suggestions enough, if wisely followed up, to fill all the pews in about all the churches. These suggestions are varied enough to fit every local condition. PROGRESS OF THE WAR IN EUROPE May 4.-Turks claim defeat of British troops in 8. New Teuton attack with two divisions in 10.-Italians capture Monte Corno, with 100 pris- 15.-French-Italian forces in Albania begin three 19.-Australians recapture Villa-sur-Ancre, with Ger on Nor 23. German airmen bomb British hospital, kill ing many patients, nurses and doctors. Air at tack on Paris killed one and wounded several. Transport Moldavia, with American troops, was torpedoed and 56 soldiers were lost. 25. Costa Rica declares war on Germany. 27.-In new offensive Germans capture the Chemin des Dames and reach the Aisne River. Attacks in Flanders and near Locre failed. Italians capture Monte Zignolon with other positions and 870 prisoners and twelve guns, 28.-Germans add six miles to previous gain of four miles, northwest of Reims, taking eleven towns. On the Lys front Teutons were repulsed. 29.-Allies are forced back from four to six miles on wide front between Reims and Soissons, the latter town falling to Germans. 30.-Germans gain four miles in center of Soissons salient, but are held on the flanks. 31.-Germans reach the Marne, claiming captures of 45,000 prisoners and 400 guns in the drive. June 1.-Germans extend drive six miles along western side of the Soissons salient. 2.-Allies hold Germans to extreme gain of three miles on west of Soissons salient. 1 We will continue this digest until the end of the war. STOPFORD AUGUSTUS BROOKE, LL.D. Was born at Letterkenny, Donegal, Ireland, 1832; educated at Kidderminster; Kingstown; Trinity College, Dublin; took Downe's Divinity Prize and Vice-Chancellor's Prize for English Verse; ordained, June, 1857; curate of St. Matthew's, Marylebone, 1857-59; of Kensington Church, 1860-63; chaplain to Princess Royal, Berlin, 1863-65; minister of St. James's Chapel, York Street, 1866-75; hon. chaplain to the Queen; minister of Bedford Chapel, 1876-94; seceded from the Church of England, 1880. Published Monthly by Funk & Wagnalls Company. 354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York. (Adam W. Wagnails, Pres.; Wilfred J. Funk, Vice-Pres.; Robert J. Cuddihy, Treas.; William Neisel, Sec'y.) VOL. LXXVI AUGUST, 1918 No. 2 The Devotional Hour XVIII. The Prophet and His Tragedies THERE will always be in the world a vast number of persons who take the most comfortable form of religion which their generation affords. They are not path-breakers; they have nothing in their nature which pushes them into fields of discovery-they are satisfied with the religion which has come down to them from the past. They accept what others have won and tested, and are thankful that they are saved the struggle and the fire which are involved in first-hand experience and in fresh discovery. The prophet, on the contrary, in whatever age he comes, can never take this easy course. He can not rest contented with the forms of religion which are accepted by others. He can not enjoy the comforts of the calm and settled faith which those around him inherit and adopt. His soul forever hears the divine call to leave the old mountain and go forward, to conquer new fields, to fight new battles, to restate his faith in words that are fresh and vital, in terms of the deepest life of his time. We used to think-many people still think— that a prophet is a foreteller of future events, a kind of magical and miraculous person who speaks as an oracle and who announces, without knowing how or why, far-off, coming occurrences that are communicated to him. To think thus is to miss the deeper truth of the prophet's mission. He is primarily a religious patriot, a statesman with a moral and spiritual policy for the nation. He is a person who sees what is involved in the eternal nature of things and therefore what the outcome of a course of life is bound to be. He possesses an unerring eye for curves of righteousness or unrighteousness as the great artist has for lines of beauty and harmony, or as the great mathematician has for the completing lines of a curve, involved in any given arc of it. He is different from others, not in the fact that he has ecstasies and lives in the realm of miracles, but rather that he has a clearer conviction of God than most men have. He has found him as the center of all reality. He reads and interprets all history in the light of the indubitable fact of God, and he estimates life and deeds in terms of moral and spiritual laws, which are as inflexible as the laws of chemical atoms or of electrical forces. He looks for no capricious results. He sees that this is a universe of moral and spiritual order. If he is an Amos he will refuse to fall in line with the easy worshipers of his age who are satisfied with the old-time religion of "burnt offerings" and "meat offerings" and "peace offerings of fat beasts." His soul will cry out for a religion which makes a new moral and spiritual man, "makes righteousness run down as a mighty stream," and sets the worshiper into new social relations with his fellows. If he is an Isaiah he will refuse "to tramp the temple" with the mass of easy worshipers; he will have his own vision of "the Lord high and lifted up," with his glory filling not only the temple, but the whole earth, and he will dedicate himself to the task of preparing a holy people and a holy city for this God who has been revealed to him as a thrice-holy God. If he is a Jeremiah he will not accept the view that the traditional religion of Jerusalem is adequate for the crisis of the times. He will insist that true religion must be inwardly experienced; that the law of God must be written in the heart, and that the life of a man must be the living fruit of his faith. He will cry out against the idea that the moral wounds and spiritual sores of the daughter of Jerusalem can be healed with easy salves and cheap panaceas. The supreme example of this refusal to go along the easy line of contemporary religion is that of One who was more than a prophet. His people prided themselves on being the chosen people of the Lord. The scribal leaders had succeeded in drawing up a complete and perfect catalog of religious performances. They supplied minute directions for one religious duty in every detail, real or imaginary, of daily life, and the world has never seen a more elaborate form of religion than this of the Pharisees. But Christ refused to follow the path of custom; he could not and he would not do the things which the scribes prescribed. He broke a new path for the soul, and called men away from legalism and the dead routine of "performances" to a life of individual faith and service which involves suffering and self-sacrifice, but which brings the soul into personal relation with the living God. St. Paul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees, a rabbinical scholar of the first rank, a man rising stage by stage to fame along the path marked out by the traditions of his people, came back from his eventful journey to Damascus to take up the work of a path-breaker and to set himself like a flint against the old-time religion in which he was born and reared. Luther, a devout monk, an ambassador to the papal court, a professor of scholastic theology, discovered that he could not find peace to his soul along the path of the prevailing traditional religion, and he swung, with all the fervor of his powerful nature, into a fresh track which has blest all ages since. These are some of the supreme leaders, but every age has had its quota of minor prophets who have heard the call to leave the old mountain and go forward and who have fearlessly entered the perilous and untried path of fresh vision. As we look back and see them in the perspective of their successful mission to the race, we thank God for their bravery and their valiant service, but we are apt to forget the tragedy of their lives. Nobody can enter a fresh path, or bring a new vision of the meaning of life, or reinterpret old truths-in short, nobody can be a prophet -without arousing the suspicion and, sooner or later, the bitter hatred of those who are the keepers and guardians of the existing forms and traditions, and the path-breaker must expect to see his old friends misunderstand him, turn against him and reproach him. He must endure the hard experience of being called a destroyer of the very things he is giving his life to build. Christ is, for example, hurried to the cross as a blasphemer, and each prophet, in his degree, has had to hear himself charged with being the very opposite of what he really is in heart and life. To be a prophet at all he must be a sensitive soul, and yet he must live and work in a pitiless rain of misunderstanding and at |