A delightful characteristic of Toy’s book is its transparent clearness and sobriety, which will make it interesting reading, even to those who are acquainted with the writer’s authorities in their original sources. Almost entirely new, as well as most suggestive, is the justice which Toy does to the law in recognising it as a factor for good in the history of religion. In this point Toy is not only up to his date, but beyond it. It is true that even the Pharisees have made some advance in the estimation of the liberal school. They are no longer condemned _en masse_ as so many hypocrites. It is even admitted that there were a few honest men among them, such as Rabban Gamaliel, the teacher of Paul, or R. Akiba, the patriot of Bethar. We are now too polite to be personal. But with regard to the law, on the other hand, there is at present a markedly opposite tendency. The general idea seems to be that, as the doctrine of the resurrection of Christ must be loosely interpreted in a spiritual sense, it must logically have been preceded by a universal spiritual death, and the germs of the disease which brought this death about are to be sought for in the law. Hence the strained efforts to discover in the law the source of all religious evil,—cant, hypocrisy, formalism, externalism, transcendentalism, and as many “isms” more, of bad reputation. It was probably with this current representation of the law in view that Toy, when speaking of the Levitical legislation, and of its fixing “men’s minds on ceremonial details which, in some cases, it put into the same category and on the same level with moral duties,” asks the question: “Would there not thence result a dimming of the moral sense and a confusion of moral distinctions? The ethical attitude of a man who could regard a failure in the routine of sacrifice as not less blameworthy than an act of theft cannot be called a lofty one” (p. 186). The answer which he gives is more favourable than such a leading question would induce us to expect. He tells us that, “in point of fact, the result was different” (_ibid_). “The Levitical law is not to be looked on as a mere extension and organisation of the ritual.... Its ritual was, in great part, the organised expression of the consciousness of sin” (p. 226). Of the law in general Toy says that it had “larger consequences than its mere details would suggest,” for it “cultivated the moral sense of the people into results above its mechanical prescriptions,” and “it developed the sense of sin, as Paul points out” (Gal. iii. 19), “and therewith a freer feeling, which brought the soul into more immediate contact with God” (p. 227); whilst in another place he reminds us “that much of the law is moral, and that no one could fail to see a spiritual significance beneath its letter” (p. 245), and he even admits that “the great legal schools which grew up in the second century, if we may judge by the sayings of the