of some of the chapters for distribution on "Prison Sunday." Legislators who are charged with the study of state correctional institutions owe it to their constituencies to ponder this work, and it should be forced upon their attention in all possible ways. In no other book can one find the most essential questions so well treated for the American public.
Social Regeneration. By Jacob A. Biddle. Hartford: The Student Publishing Company, 1896, pp. 325.
To do justice to the writer we must permit him to speak for himself. A few quotations will make much commentary unnecessary. "The New Testament and the New Science agree in placing sociology in the list of physical sciences. . . . In the order of sciences it comes in after zoology, viz., physics, astronomy, geology, botany, zoology and sociology. Together these constitute the universal science of biology or theology." Observe the reason for this remarkable nomenclature Biology is confounded with theology because "God is Life itself. . . . Life is God. Biology is theology." Really one needs a year's legal notice of such violent changes in phraseology in order to prevent heart disease from the shock. We do not dispute the right of the author to use common words in such strange ways, but we need a new dictionary to help us understand a random passage.
Perhaps the author's most cherished contribution is chapter 8, "The Cooperative Parish of the Holy Catholic Church." This might be called "a clergyman's dream of a local Utopia." It is unsafe to trust a paraphrase; we must use the author's own words when he describes what ought to be. After the conventional socialistic arraignment of capitalistic society the author constructs in the air a society which is eminently satisfactory—to himself. "Suppose now that they organize themselves into a cooperative parish."
"It is based upon the conception that all authority in government comes from the Power who made and rules the planet. It is a theocracy. . . . Its duty is to keep its members at peace with God, in fellowship and love with each other, in health of body, and supplied with all the necessaries of life. It is supported and managed by the people, for the people, upon the principle, that each shall give to the community according to ability and receive according to need. They
