the Hebrew branch. But was it an instinctive truth? No man has a better appreciation of the historical worth of the Hebrew Scriptures than M. Rénan; few men, from the literary point of view, have so good a right to an opinion. What is the concurrent testimony of these Scriptures? "Your fathers dwelt on the other side of the flood in old time, Terah, the father of Abraham, and the father of Nachor, and they served other gods." The old warrior raises his dying voice to recount what God had done for the people, to entreat them to serve the Lord in sincerity and in truth, and to put away the gods which their fathers had served on the other side of the flood and in Egypt. The "instinct" of the Jewish people appears to have been all the other way. That people was as prone as the nations around them to worship the unseen under visible forms, to fear the powers of nature as independent powers and arbiters of their destiny, and to propitiate them with horrid rites. The history of the Jews is the constant record of this natural tendency, as natural to men who dwelt in the goodly land flowing with milk and honey as to men whose lives were passed in the barren wilderness; natural alike to inhabitants of the valley and to inhabitants of the plain; a tendency which it needed more than human teaching to overcome. The protest against this tendency never ceases long to be raised by special messengers, by seers, and wise men; the people are made to wander in the wilderness, are sold into slavery, are led away captive beyond the river, because the tendency is so inherent and ineradicable, because the protest of law and prophets falls unheeded. The apostolate of monotheism was assigned to the Jewish people; and Israel in her fallen estate may boast of the noblest destiny ever given to a nation to conquer the world with the truth; but Israel, far from being naturally inclined to accomplish its divine work, was educated for it only by the longest and severest discipline.

In spite, therefore, of M. Rénan's criticism, we believe that Job knew God and trusted in him,-not because he himself, or the nation to which he belonged, had discovered the fact that he was, and that in the beginning he had created the heaven and the earth, or because the country and the climate in which he lived made him less sensible to the variety and beauty of outward forms, and less disposed to worship them as divine; but because God made himself known to him, and had not left himself without witness to him, any more than to every other Themanite nomad.

We see not how this opinion is irreconcilable with the strictest historical criticism that does not start with a denial of the supernatural. Even if we accept the "religious-instinct theory of M. Rénan, we are none the nearer to his doctrine.

Supposing it be true that monotheism was instinctive in the Semitic peoples, it is still unexplained how it came to be so. We want to know who put the instinct in them. Is it not just possible that M. Rénan's theory is only an hypothesis to explain the fact, which is inexplicable on any other supposition than that of a divine revelation, that the Jews and kindred peoples did possess greater knowledge of God than the rest of the world?

Our author's statement of the early Jewish belief in the distribution of prosperity and adversity according to the good or bad character of each, appears to us correct. We should refuse to entitle it a system, as though the fact of retribution going on now in this life were embodied in formulas and articles of faith. Parts of the Jewish Scriptures are eminently reflective, and the book of Job among them; but nowhere do we find in them that systematising of opinion which belongs to the later times of Pharisees and dogmatists. The common experience of men proves that, ordinarily, prosperity must follow a virtuous life, and misery be the fruit of a vicious one. The friends of Job are not wrong in stating the fact; their error lies in trying to establish, as an unerring test of man's favour with God, of his righteousness of heart and life, the amount of adversity or prosperity which now falls to him. They accuse Job of secret sins because he has come to great misfortune; they could hardly do otherwise while judging every thing by such a test. Job denies the charge, and asserts that experience proves the test to be false. As a matter of fact, retribution does not always overtake the sinner in this life, nor does the due reward of his works always fall to the righteous. The wicked live, become old, and are mighty in power. And yet he is himself tormented with the strangeness of the dispensation of God towards him. Why is he so sorely tried? He is not unrighteous: "There are no iniquities in my hands; my prayer has always been pure;" "Thou knowest that I am not wicked;" "Till I die I will not remove my integrity from me." His conscience acquits him; and he will not, for the sake of any theory of God's justice, pretend to be guilty of that of which he is innocent. True, he cannot reconcile his suffering with God's justice. He is in the same puzzle as his friends, only he will not accept their solution, that misfortune necessarily implies sin. There is nothing more remarkable in the poem than the intense truthfulness of Job's argument. He will not cease to assert his righteousness, and, notwithstanding his miserable ignorance of the cause why he is thus severely tried, to trust in God and complain to him.

M. Rénan says that there is no solution of the difficulty. God's justice is not shown to be reconcilable with the prosperity

of the wicked and the calamity of the righteous, and the cause of Job's afflictions is left unexplained. We think M. Rénan has missed the point of the discourse of God. He represents it as describing the small place which man fills in the universe, and hence man's incompetence for the high argument; but is it not rather the Divine Wisdom which cares and provides for every created thing, that the discourse is intended to establish? The inference is, that unerring wisdom guides and is one with his justice. We cannot explain the enigma of the world; but we know that the world is in the hands of One who is infinitely wise as well as just.

Ewald's view is too remarkable to be omitted. It seems to us far more satisfactory than that of M. Rénan; and it carries equal weight, as coming from the greatest of Hebrew scholars, as well as the most experienced and penetrating of critics.

Job is not censured for questioning the cause of his calamity, but for his manner of doing it. He acted foolishly in challenging the justice of God, because he was ignorant of the cause why his trials were sent; for, as the discourse of God shows, God's justice is as much a part of himself as his wisdom. The object of the poem is not to teach blind, unquestioning resignation. Nowhere do the sacred writers evade the difficulty, or fail to justify the ways of God to man, when they counsel resignation to the divine will. The spirit of their teaching is, that calamity is no necessary proof of sins committed, for it is not necessarily the punishment of them. Earthquakes and pestilences visit good and bad indifferently; and though calamity which arises from human wickedness most sensibly affects the guilty, yet it stands in no real relation to the inner worth of a man; for the most guilty may enjoy for a time the greatest happiness, while the most innocent may be plunged into the deepest suffering. Calamity cannot destroy the immortal spirit of man. Therefore calamity must have a different aim to that which the old belief, grounded upon the wisdom of the ancients and maintained by Job's friends, supposed. Although it comes upon man as an enemy, it calls forth his hidden strength, it makes him conscious, and raises him to the idea of the unfailing, undying spirit within him; it is in the struggle, and in the victory which results from it, that man shares in the divine life and is truly free. It is true that calamity descends from parents to children; yet to every young member of the race is given a spirit whereby he may overcome the evil of the calamity and live in communion with God (Deut. xxiv. 16; Is. xxx. 29 sqq.; Ezek. xviii. 1 sqq.; St. John ix. 3). Hence Ewald concludes that calamity is a phantom above which we must rise by the knowledge of the eternal nature within us; to which nature worldly

prosperity can add nothing, and from which worldly misfortune can take nothing away.

We think this view represents the whole teaching of the Scriptures, and goes down to the very root of the question. We think it expresses the meaning of our Lord's assertions of the universality of God's blessings, of the falseness of conclusions drawn from outward misfortunes as to his favour or disfavour, of the purpose of chastisement in the classical passage concerning it in Hebrews xii. But we have not been able to find in the book of Job this complete solution of the question, which we think our Master, and none before, solved for us. The only solution we can discover in Job is the trust of the patriarch in God, by whom he will not cease to hold fast; whose justice he may question and doubt of, and yet will not in his extreme misery disbelieve; and further, in his hope that he shall see his Avenger; that at one time or other, whether now or in the future is not in question, he will assuredly see him for himself with his own eyes.

We now take leave of our translator and his essay; and in doing so we thank him heartily for the most delightful translation which he has given us of a poem which will ever engage the attention of thoughtful readers of every country. We lend a glad and willing ear to the results of his studies and criticism, though the spirit and principles of that criticism are not our own. And we tell him with confidence that the more diligently the Hebrew Scriptures are read by the light which philologists and critics of his temper and learning can throw upon them, the deeper will grow the conviction that these very Scriptures not only contain records of the doubts, inquiries, and struggles of the human spirit in past days, but speak now to us men in human words the voice of God.

E

ART. III. THE ROMAN INDEX OF FORBIDDEN BOOKS. Index Prohibitorum Librorum, Sanctissimi Domini Gregorii XVI. Pontificis Maximi jussu editus. Romæ, 1841, ex typ. Rev. Cameræ Apostolicæ.

Decreta Sacra Congregationis Em. et Rev. Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ Cardinalium, a Sanctissimo Domino Nostro Pio Papâ IX., sanctâque Sede Apostolica, Indici Librorum prava doctrinæ, eorumdemque proscriptioni, expurgationi, ac permissioni in universâ Christiana Republica, præpositorum et delegatorum. Romæ, ex typ. Rev. Cam. Apost.

Ir is said that a great emperor in his retirement, having laboured through many councils and campaigns to suppress by a forced arbitration the dissent of the German Reformers, at length confessed the difficulty of making all men think alike. That, indeed, is an undertaking to which in our day the most absolute of mere temporal monarchs will no longer pretend. Only that hybrid sovereign who claims by a right divine to rule the whole spiritual realm of Catholicity, as well as his little remnant of an Italian sovereignty, must keep up wherever he can throughout the world an ostensible uniformity of opinion. And so long as Pius the Ninth, by the continued presence of those brisk and formidable acolytes of his pontificate, who wear the red breeches and wield the "holy bayonets of France," retains in temporal subjection nearly half a million of Romans, he is enabled, at least in Rome, to chastise and drive out erroneous and strange doctrines, by inflicting substantial penalties on those who publish or peruse them. There is but scanty occupation for the printing-press, therefore, in the city of the Popes, where that modern engine of dynamic intelligence is fenced about by sacerdotal jealousy with a very complex apparatus of restraints. A twofold clerical and political censorship is established there, which extends to every sort of lettered communication addressed to the public eye,-from the most important books in a library to the handbill affixed upon a wall, or the simple inscription on a stone in the Protestant graveyard, where you must not carve the Christian promise of a resurrection over the heretical stranger's tomb.

Few and insignificant, then, are the employments that can be safely allowed, in the vicinity of the Papal Court, to that typographic art, once parent of the Protestant Reformation, and always too apt to be perilous to the health of souls. It may be used by the priesthood themselves, or by the church-beadles, to multiply those queer placards in the street, by which people are invited to favour with their presence, next Wednesday, a benefit performance, theatrically speaking, in favour of that individual saint who next takes his turn in the calendar for one of