Local Committee, will be a yet stronger inducement. To many plausible, talking women of the least meritorious sort, the opportunity of stating a case before a Board of gentlemen is an exciting variety in life; it is a sort of public appearance, and it affords scope for ingenuity and the gift of speech. This is the case, more or less, everywhere, but especially in London. The two organisations which are thoroughly fitted for the work of investigation are the Charity Organisation Society and the Poor Law Guardians. All cases which it is possible to suppose may be fit and worthy cases for wise charity should be remitted to the voluntary Society for investigation, and by means of that Society, and its connections, provided for, if found worthy. Under such circumstances, with such an important and recognised part to play in the beneficent regulation of charitable effort and of the education of the poor, the Charity Organisation Society would never want funds. We can imagine few things more valuable than that it should be linked with such a public department as the School Board. Cases rejected by this Society as unworthy of special charitable aid, and all cases which are evidently, on the face of them, unworthy, or coarsely common, or likely to be grave and permanent, should be remitted for investigation to the Guardians of the Poor. It is their business to test poverty, to sift applications for relief, to detect and reject cases of imposition. Such a business requires great and special knowledge and experience, and special agents and organisation. The Poor Relief Department already possesses all these; the School Boards have them not, and are not organised to obtain them. Are they to become a second Poor Relief Department? are they to add this to their other functions? Unity, consistency, economy, all demand that the work of legal investigation should all be done by the authorities whose chief and proper task it is to do such work. The Scottish Education Act makes provision for this. We cannot doubt that the English Act will, in the coming Session, be amended in the same sense.

In several points of detail the compulsory provisions under the Act are seriously defective, and must certainly be amended, -especially as to the evidence which is to be held admissible against a parent. But we shall not enter upon such points of detail. Here we think it more important, with our lessening space, to say that, without indirect legislation to sustain and encompass the direct compulsory provisions of the Act, the work of direct compulsion can never be accomplished. As yet no thorough work has been accomplished, even in London;

in many large towns, as Leeds, compulsion is as yet but a threatening word. The mere word and threat will soon cease to inspire awe. Where, as in some parts of London, attempts are being made really to carry out compulsion, the parents will soon find out the loose meshes in the Act and the Byelaws, and will sometimes be able to defy, and sometimes to evade, the Board's attempts at prosecution. Already, it is said, the voluntary co-workers with the London Board on its Committees, both East and West, and on both sides of the river-without whose co-operation it is impossible for the Act to be carried out in London-are not at all disposed rigidly, or even vigorously, in some instances, to carry out compulsion according to the Bye-laws. We fear lest, in this respect, matters may probably be worse rather than better, in twelve months' time. The attendance at the London Board Schools shows that the most important part of compulsion, which is to secure regular attendance, is as yet an utter failure. The absentees at the Board Schools, on an average, number forty per cent., a degree of irregularity much beyond that of voluntary schools. So things are, in our judgment, likely to remain, unless large and comprehensive measures of indirect legislation are brought in to supplement and sustain direct compulsory legislation. In the language of one of the suggestions of the Wesleyan Committee, we must repeat in this article what, in substance, we have repeatedly said before, that "the principles of the Factory, Factory Extensions, and Workshops' Regulation Acts ought to be applied to all classes of children employed in labour," and "that no child or young person should be allowed to work either half time or full time without having, in either case, passed an appropriate examination, in a manner satisfactory to one of Her Majesty's Inspectors of Schools." We know perfectly well that even this supplementary legislation would prove to have its leakages, its very wide and loose meshes, and could not always be applied. But it would greatly help, both morally and by its direct legal pressure. We need all manner of helps and aids to get the work done. Where one Act fails, another may succeed. The indirect legislation would cause a large part of the community to learn that, in order to get benefit from their children's labours, they must secure their children's education. The leaven of such a lesson would operate most beneficially in influencing the whole population. The London Board, and other Boards, have acted on this principle in their Bye-laws. The principle ought to be embodied and enforced as statute law for the whole land.

When all is done, however, that law and administration can do, many will still be unreached. Berlin, Hamburg, New York, agree to teach us this lesson. In the "lowest deep" that School Boards can reach, there will still be found that there is "a lower deep." "There will still remain "-we close with the weighty words of the Wesleyan Committee-" a large number of vagrant and neglected children-the very class which most urgently needs Christian help and educational elevation-whose case can only be met by the efforts of voluntary philanthropy, assisted, under proper regulations, by grants from public funds."

LITERARY NOTICES.

I. FOREIGN THEOLOGY.

HENGSTENBERG'S KINGDOM OF GOD.

History of the Kingdom of God under the Old Testament. Translated from the German of E. W. Hengstenberg, late Doctor and Professor of Theology in Berlin. Two Volumes. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark. 1872.

ONCE more, and now for the last time, the " Foreign Theological Library," gives to English readers a work from the pen of the devout and learned Hengstenberg. It was fitting that his long labours on the Old Testament should close with this, in some respects, the fruit and summary of all. The heavy apparatus of learning is here laid aside, and the results only of his peculiar studies appear, as he traverses the field of the Old Testament to show the progressive history of the revelation of God's will. For nearly fifty years he was the patient servant and interpreter of the elder Scriptures, entering that service when it stood low in the esteem of a sceptical and irreligious generation. When Rationalism was pouring unmeasured contempt upon the Old Testament he accepted the issue involved, and gave himself to a warfare of defence on its behalf, which extended along the whole line of criticism, history, and theological discussion. From the beginning he fought towards a high, central truth, which his spiritual insight had discerned, and which was never obscured to his vision through all the years of conflict. He avowed the unity of the Scriptures, and the dependence of the New Testament upon the Old, in entire opposition to the piecemeal criticism to which they had been surrendered. His convictions were deep and steadfast, and his warfare unremitting, till, under his leadership, men like Hävernick and Keil arose, to reach, by lines that he had indicated, results beyond those he had himself attained. In these volumes, published, since his death, the veteran scholar remains faithful to the principles of his career. They are a kind of final manifesto in which, with confidence undiminished indeed, but softened and mellowed in utterance as becomes the closing words of a faithful witness, he renews the confession of his youth.

The reader will do well to notice a fundamental principle in Hengstenberg's history of the religious development of Israel. The relation of God to that development is ignored by many who have treated the subject. At the close of his Commentary on Leviticus, Kalisch, for instance, speaks of " the marvellous religious edifice of the Hebrews as their own and patiently achieved creation;" and Ewald writes as though all progress in the sphere of religion, and every movement towards the better knowledge of God, were due to the progressive growth of man's religious faculty. The Messianic hope, which gathers strength in the Prophets while the temporal fortunes of Israel are waning, is chiefly assigned to two causes: "first, the fact that the growing struggle between foreign nations and Israel was really a struggle between heathenism and true religion, and second, the vivid memory which every state of the better kind retains of the dignity and destiny that it has once enjoyed." This is to make man's faculty or instinct of religion the only revealer of religious truth, a principle widely assumed in the looser theology of our own day. Ewald treats the history of the people of Israel throughout as a purely natural process of development. As has been well said, "His book is out and out anthropocentric." But Hengstenberg is ever theocentric. The kingdom of God means with him much more than man's thought respecting God: it is God revealing Himself "at sundry times and in divers manners," moulding for Himself through the ages, upon the basis of positive revelation, a community within which, in the fulness of time, His Eternal Son should be manifest in the flesh, and over which, in its ultimate and glorious development, He should reign as Redeemer and Lord. It may be imagined what contempt Hengstenberg from time to time endured at the hands of rationalistic writers, but he lived to see a wholesome change in the general aspect of German theology, toward which he himself had contributed not a little. Auberlen says of him, "Hengstenberg and his scholars have prepared the way for the more recent view of the Old Testament as a revelation. Impartial history acknowledges this great service on the part of this much abused man." Delitzsch ascribes to him "the imperishable merit of having reconquered for the Old Testament theology its old confidence of belief, which had almost perished in the freethinking and levity of the age."

The second volume of the present translation is prefaced by a fitting tribute to Hengstenberg's memory, in the shape of a comprehensive essay on his life and writings. Though short, it is complete and faithful, giving the outlines of a noble character, and an appreciative estimate of the long series of works which have made his name so familiar among us. The service rendered by this Essay is one of which the English student often stands in need. Most of the German writers whom the "Foreign Theological Library" introduces to us are men prominent in the religious life of their own country; some leaders of thought, some by weight and worth of character, and others by the part they have taken in ecclesiastical or university