Religion

348 LITERARY AND pmLOSOPillCAL STUDIES occurred to many that the distinctive attribute of mankind, including his vaunted intellectual powers, may reflect in unsuspected ways the characters and experiences of ancestors so remote and strange as to be not recognizably human. On the basis of such generalities it is easy to envisage here an enticing field for thought and speculation, but in actuality it seems always to have proved too shrouded in the mists of ignorance for profitable exploration. In his latest book Professor Berrill of McGill University has undertaken such an exploration, and a remarkably successful one at that, for he has returned with accounts of wonders most unexpected. Professor Bereill is a distingnished zoologist who has specialized in the study of embryology. In this book he has attempted to provide a broad analysis of human mentality in terms of what is known or what he can surmise about the evolutionary history of man. It is a most exciting story, told simply and vividly, in which the history of mankind is traced through vast periods of time, from life in the tree-tops, life in in the caves, through the glacial periods, through floods and famines to the present day. So bald a description belies, however, the essential character of Professor Berrill's book. Much of its interest and power derives from the unassuming and personal note struck in the opening chapter "I Who Speak," which is maintained throughout. This book may represent an important contribution in the scientific study of human evolution, but the conviction grows, as chapter succeeds chapter, that it was the author's deep and manifold interest iIi human problems rather than his zoological knowledge and curiosity which drew him to his subject. There is a tbrill of pride as he surveys the heights to which the human race has struggled ahove the level of his ancestors and, despite his awareness of the acute problems now bred by man's intellect, he speaks with confidence of man's capacity to climb further up the heights that tower still above us: "-this is no place to stop halfway between ape and angel." VII. RELIGION W. S. McCullough A lecture foundation (in this case the Alexander Robertson Lectures of the University of Glasgow) which directs that the lectures shall be "in defence of Christianity" is bound to force the lecturer into a rather familiar pattern of thought. This condition, however, was accepted by LETTERS IN CANADA, 1955 349 Dr. J. S. Thomson, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity of McGill University , Montreal, who delivered the 1954 lectures on the subject, The Hope of the Gospel (Ryerson, 188 pp., $2.25), and he has succeeded in producing a commendable discussion of his theme. His basic position is that the Christian Gospel arouses in the soul the saving power of hope. Some of the chapter headings will indicate the general development of the subject: "Hope in Human Life"; "The Gospel before the Gospel"; "The Gospel of Jesus"; etc. It cannot be said that Dean Thomson is entirely successful in explaining why the Gospel which Jesus proclaimed was in certain important respects different from the Gospel of the Apostolic Church. And the layman, when he reads, "Faith in God must always be immediate and personal ... our faith is a response to a divine overture.... At the same time,. faith cannot be self-generated : it reaches the soul as a gift of grace in a revelation," will doubtless ask how a theologian can have it both ways. Another scholar from the McGill Divinity Faculty, Professor G. -B. Caird, has put us in his debt by giving us The Apostolic Age (Duckworth [Thomas Nelson], 222 pp., $2.50). This book surveys the history of the early Church from the Resurrection to the end of the first century. This period involves a good many debatable matters, and it is not to be expected that the author's views will always command consent. For instance, the statement that Jesus realized that his baptism by John "was .also his initiation into his death" will be queried by some. But such points are usually of relative unimportance, and the book as a whole must be described as...