Author Description

THIS book embraces nine lectures delivered during the winter of 1906 on the Kerr Foundation before the Glasgow College of the United Free Church. In their first outline, they had also been previously delivered before the faculty and students of the Westminster College, Cambridge. The publishers have presented them in good shape. My best judgment as to the value of the book might be expressed in the statement that I have read large portions of it three times, and each time with increasing satisfaction. The author writes with great fullness of knowledge, and, in spite of the intrinsic difficulty of the subject, in a style that attracts and holds the attention from beginning to end. Not for a long while has any philosophical work fallen into my hands that so largely abounds in quotable passages. My copy is marked through and through, and I shall find frequent practical use for it in coming years.<br> The ultimate problem of at least the last two centuries [says Mr. Oman in the outset] I take to be the relation between faith and freedom, the problem of how faith is to be absolute and freedom absolute, yet both one. In a matter of this kind it must be important to discover how the problem first arose, for, if so vast a task, involving so many dubious experiments, was entered on wantonly, at the bidding of man's restless heart, and not at the call of Providence, if it came merely as an isolated event, precipitated by one rebellious monk, it could more easily be regarded as an unqualified calamity. Beyond question the determining event was the Reformation, for it alone set up the distinction which ended the Middle Ages and created the Modern Time-the distinction between religion and the Church. This was the ultimate meaning of its insistence on the doctrine of justification by faith alone and not by the doctrines or rites of the Church.... <br> --<i>The Methodist Review Quarterly</i>, Volume 57