the frost.' Now Scripture* exactly corroborates this prophecy, and, strange to say, the History of Josephus, though it is inconsistent with itself in other points, confirms the two points of the prediction; first, that Jehoiakim was murdered, during the siege of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar, and cast out of the city without a burial, having the burial of an ass, as Jeremiah elsewhere predicts (xxii. 19); and that he had no son to reign after him, Jehoiachin, his son, who was left for three months as a tributary prince, being dragged as a captive to Babylon, while Matthaniah, the son of Joash, was made king.† The prophecy of Isaiah xxiii. has received the most awful and particular fulfilment. Even Gesenius, not to name Hävernech and Drecholes, defends its authenticity; and in our language Alexander‡ and Dr. Davidson§ have explained its difficulty, and vindicated its fulfilment; and recently, in Dr. Thomson's Land and Book, the scene is photographed by a vivid pen to show the accuracy of the prophetic language. What means, then, this presumption of Mr. Jowett? He must cease to cast assertions in this unguarded manner. The other sentence on alleged errors in the Bible, affects the New Testament : 'One Evangelist supposes the original dwelling-place of our Lord's parents to have been Bethlehem (Matthew ii. 1, 22); another Nazareth (Luke ii. 4); they trace his genealogy in different ways; one mentions the thieves' blasphemy; another has preserved to after ages the record of the penitent thief; they appear to differ about the hour and the day of the crucifixion; the narrative of the woman who anointed our Lord's feet with ointment is told in all forms; each narrative with more or less considerable variations.' We could be content to leave this sentence to confute itself, with any scholar who is acquainted with modern Biblical criticism, but we rejoin in one sentence to each-No such supposition exists in Matthew; Mr. Jowett should not have written thus, unless he can invalidate Lord Hervey's explanation of the two genealogies, which has set the difficulty at rest; both the thieves blasphemed at first, but one was touched by the spectacle beside him, and cried out (what would be the lesson of this penitence, if it were not that he was struck in the midst of his sin by the vision of majestic sorrow?); the Evangelists do not differ as to the day Comp. Jeremiah xxii. 18, 19; 1 Chronicles iii. 15; 2 Kings xxiii. 34, 37, &c. + See article on 'Jehoiakim and Jehoiachin,' in Dr. Smith's Dictionary of the Bible, 1860. Commentary on Isaiah, in locum. § Introduction to the Old Test. p. 844. See Genealogy of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by Lord A. Hervey, (Macmillan); or 'The Genealogy of Christ,' in Smith's Dictionary of the Bible. Mr. Wilson and Mr. Pattison. 79 of the crucifixion, nor as to the hour.* It is inconceivable that a man of Mr. Jowett's professed scholarship should be unacquainted with the solution suggested by Le Clerc, and now established by the most conclusive evidence, that St. John, on all occasions, reckoned the hours as we do, from noon to midnight, and again from midnight to noon.† These are two distinct incidents, as all modern critics are agreed. Such, then, are the allegations of Oxford scholarship against the accuracy of the Bible. We have a right to demand of our essayists a greater attention to accuracy when they take such ground as they have assumed towards the scholarship of other men. We have said nothing on the essays by Mr. Wilson and Mr. Pattison. The first is on 'The National Church; the second is on 'The Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, from 1688 to 1750.' Mr. Pattison's essay is very able, and the least open to exception of any in the series. We demur, indeed, to some of his statements, and should have been disposed to examine them, had not our space been otherwise so largely occupied. The drift of Mr. Wilson's essay is, that there should be a national church, but one so comprehensive as to be a real, and not a sham representative of the national life. The author tells us that he remains in England for many obvious reasons, though he does not approve of all that England does; and that in like manner he remains in the Established Church, though he is persuaded that it is a church which needs large reconstruction. But in adopting this mode of self-defence, the writer forgets that as a clergyman, he is not only required to submit to what his church enjoins, but to do many things, and to say many things, as being in his judgment in accordance with the Word of God, while he believes nothing of the kind concerning them. The concluding sentences of this essay suffice to show what sort of church is present to the mind of Mr. Wilson, as the church required by present modes of thought: "The Roman church has imagined a limbus infantium; we must rather entertain a hope that there shall be found, after the great adjudication, receptacles suitable for those who shall be infants, not as to years of terrestrial life, but as to spiritual development-nurseries, as it were, and seed grounds, where the undeveloped may grow up under new conditions-the stunted may become strong, and the perverted be restored. And when the Christian Church, in all its branches, shall have fulfilled its sublunary office, and its Founder shall have surrendered the kingdom to the Great Father-all, both small and great, shall find refuge in the bosom of the Universal Parent, to repose, or to Comp. Westcott's Introduction, pp. 314-321, and Ellicott's, 7th chapter. + See Townson's Discourses on the Four Gospels: Reitig in Studien und Kritiken, for 1830, &c. p. 103; and Tholuck in loc. p. 306. be quickened into higher life, in the ages to come, according to His will.' This is the natural issue of speculations which recognise nothing beyond fatherhood in the Divine relations to humanity. But we have said enough concerning this volume to show, that as orthodox believers, we are far from accounting ourselves as vanquished by the deeds of these seven champions. Sceptics and atheists-companionships we must suppose the writers do not covet -may flatter them with having done a great work, with having sounded the knell of orthodoxy, and all that; but let them not be deceived. The prophets of that school have prophesied falsely before to-day. It has been their manner to celebrate victories before they were achieved. So wonderfully self-reliant are they, that it is not in their way to learn modesty from experience. Of one thing we feel assured, that eminent as may be the names of some of the contributors to this volume, if evangelical truth is to fall by their hands, they will need to put those hands forth in quite another manner than seems to have satisfied them in the present instance. We regret that such men should have given themselves to such employment. But if the discussion is to be thoroughly prosecuted, it is well it should be known that the best that can be said on the negative side of it has been said. ART. II. (1.) Le Roi des Montagnes. EDMOND ABOUT. (2.) Trente et Quarante. EDMOND ABOUT. OCTAVE FEUILLET. (3.) Le Roman d'un jeune Homme pauvre. THERE may be two opinions of the destructive powers of La Gloire. Valiant but unappreciated commanders may think gloomily of her shot-proof sides, but there will always be a majority of patriotic, if less-instructed British citizens to strengthen our nerves by proverbial quotations that must ever command our respect. On the whole, we can recline in our easychairs, and be certain that Britannia needs no bulwarks. If the worst happen, our Volunteers, inspired by the formula, 'Up, guards, and at them,' can never know defeat. It is right that our watchdog the Times should bark, but as for French invasion, sir! it is humbug! So says the respectable British citizen in hot disdain of all who hold heretical opinions touching our wooden walls, and we the more heartily agree with him, that we do not as promptly echo his assertions concerning the irresistible influence of French literature, which he as heartily dreads as he heartily despises French armaments. The belief that our homes are menaced by its insidious advances, has been part of our popular creed these two centuries; but our vices of literature are as yet thoroughly national, and probably more so now, than when Congreve imitated Molière, and Horace Walpole affected Gallicism. It is said that, properly administered, the deadliest venom becomes valuable medicine, and homoeopathists, we know, even use among their remedies the poison of the rattlesnake. Will our readers trust us if we attempt to prove that there is some good even in the peculiar qualities of Parisian fiction, and some antidote to our own errors of literature in the properly analysed fruits of outre-manche imagination. Except just praise, there is nothing more rare than just blame, and we think that the popular condemnation of all French novels has, however justified by their faults, been mingled too largely with insular prejudice, and dealt with an insular scorn, that does not serve the ends of criticism. We have been sated with analyses of the worst French romances, until we are as scandalized at the immorality of our neighbours as is comfortable to our self-esteem; and thenthe few who do read French novels send for those just castigated, and the larger public thank Heaven that they are given to read no worse horrors than the deeds of Becky Sharpe, and rejoice that they need no stronger excitement than George Eliott's photographs from bucolic life. It is always well to know for what we thank Heaven. Let us sit under the Upas tree for half-an-hour, and philosophize awhile before we proceed to taste any of its noxious fruit. We might, were we of radical politics, entertain our readers with a preliminary dissertation on the Eil de bœuf and Madame du Barry; we could even allude with propriety to Agnes Sorel, and thus ingeniously meet the Tory slanders which would attribute modern French vice to the reign of terror and the Bonaparte family. But the aspect of our neighbour's light literature is not, we think, to be explained by essays on the court of Louis Quinze, or by the later gossip of Compiègne. Its tendencies belong to our own time, its vices are those of a sick humanity common to us all. We might as well accuse fossil saurians or extinct dodos of infecting the present age with influenza, as blame former society for the aspect of modern romance, or seek in the history of the Middle Ages a reason for the illimitable fiction of our era. The novel now is almost the only form of literary creation. Vanity Fair is our Divina Commedia: Martin Chuzzlewit, our Odyssey. Had Molière flourished in the Paris familiar to us he would have made the fortune of the Bibliothéque des Chemins de Fer; Racine would have charmed us by the pathos of his Tolla, the dignity of his Consuelo. Many wise men have explained this exaltation of the 'prose epic; we need but recognise the fact that our poets and our prophets, our warriors and our 'persons of quality,' all write novels; and in England with more or less success in proportion as they adhere to the great principle of British creation. In French romance there is, if under stricter laws of art, more variety of subject than is allowed by the British public to its purveyors of fiction. With us, one excellence is alone admitted, one quality is indispensable; we are worshippers at one shrine, the priests of which, old or young, dull or brisk, must utter the same incantations. By at once acknowledging the object of our literary devotion, we may better comprehend the rites of the French heretics, which puzzle the frequenters of Mudie's library much as Brahminical mysteries might puzzle a steady but uncontroversial church-goer. We adore realism, in the modern sense of the word, as it is much used by Mr. Ruskin in his earlier works. We profess ourselves honest lovers of truth, which is very right; and we will only accept what is truthful, which is a highly praiseworthy resolve. We prefer truth about an attic, to legends about heaven - still excellent. In enunciating the next proposition, we raise our voices |