a harmony of the four Gospels, called Heliand.' This last was widely known and highly prized. There are extant traditions of its popularity in Germany and England. It is written in a dialect to be understood by both nations. There has been much conjecture as to the authorship. Schmeller thinks it was written by an English missionary. Grein wished to identify it with that of the translation made in the time of Louis the Pious, but with no success. Evidently this version is of the ninth century, and the production of some ecclesiastic intimate with the Scriptures, and at least aware of the apocryphal Gospels; for he tells us that many disciples of Christ endeavored to write God's holy word with their own hands in a magnificent book; only four were chosen, and to them were given "God's power, help from heaven, the Holy Spirit, and strength from Christ: maht godes helpa fan himila helagna gest craft fan christa." Now, be it remembered that about the time this form of poetry became so general, English missionaries returned to christianize their kinsfolk in the old homestead; hosts of them, under Willibrord and Boniface, invaded Friesland and Germany, bringing with them the light and life of the Gospel and the Church. They were not unmindful of the experience and traditions of other days in their own country; that which was so skilful a weapon in the hands of Cedmon, and Aldhelm, and Bede himself, they did not neglect. It may have been the same songs they repeated; it was certainly the same in sense, and in the same spirit, that they sang. It is Cedmon who still speaks.

3

Nor is he forgotten later. The sole manuscript of his works that is known to be extant is of the tenth century, and even that is fragmentary. It is divided into two books, and of these only the first is continuous; the second is hopelessly broken up. The MS. is in the Bodleian Library. It is illuminated. Some of the scenes represented are evidently those which, in that early day, must have been enacted in the Miracle-plays. The tradition of the creation and fall, as preserved in these plays, is that handed down by Cedmon. But in this manuscript we must not look for the identical poem that Cedmon sang. In passing from generation to generation for three centuries, various changes must have imperceptibly entered into the text. A version in the West-Saxon dialect might not conform to that in the Northumbrian; meddlesome scribes

1 J. Andreas Schmeller, Stuttgart, 1830. This is mainly a print of the Cotton MS. in the British Museum.

2 Poema istud non solum in Anglia, sed etiam in Germania et quidem Wirceburgi extare, teste G. Eccardo (in Monum. vet. Quaternione Lipsiæ MDCCXX. fol. 42, et in Comm. de rebus Franciæ or. MDCCXXIV. tom. ii. fol. 325), jam pridem inter antiquitatum curiosos rumor fuerat.-Schmelier, Prefatio Editoris, p. viii.

3

* This places Miracle-plays a century earlier than the date usually assigned to them.

might occasionally undertake to improve the poem; others again might be too ignorant to write it correctly; and so from one cause to another, while the general tenor would remain, special passages might read differently. This accounts for the discrepancies in the reading of the opening lines of the poem, as found in King Alfred's translation of the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History, and in the manuscript. No doubt, Cedmon would be at some trouble to identify the songs he sang with the present transcript of them. But he is not alone in this respect. Imagine Tasso coming among the gondoliers of Venice as they chant his Jerusalem Delivered. And would not Shakspeare and Eschylus be equally at a loss to recognize in our modern texts of their masterpieces the verses they indited? The MS. belonged to Usher, who gave it to Francis Junius or Dejon. This latter it was that assigned the poem to Cedmon, and as Cedmon's had it printed in 1655. And Dejon had a friend to whom he communicated his literary projects; that friend was then in his forty-seventh year, and was meditating a grand epic; he saw this MS.; no doubt he possessed a copy of the printed poem; it decided his subject and its treatment; the materials he had collected for a Miracle-play he made use of in this new project, and forthwith he produced a work of great genius. That man was Milton, the poem was Paradise Lost.

Here terminates the direct and immediate influence of Cedmon. Beyond whatever of expression and allusion may have been preserved by Milton, or passed into our thinking, that influence is for us dead. We may rehabilitate his life and imagine the times in which it was spent; but those times are past, and with them the magnetism of his influence. It remains but as a record. His poetry has no responsive chord in the modern heart. Another poet must come amongst us, with faith as lively and genius as brilliant, whose song shall thrill the age, and whose burning words will thaw out the ice of skepticism that is settling upon it hard and fast.

Johnson's Life of Milton, Works, vol. ii. p. 33.

THE HUMAN SOUL AND BODY.

THEIR UNION CONSIDERED WITH REFERENCE TO DIFFERENT THEORIES FOR EXPLAINING THE NATURE OF MATERIAL SUBSTANCE.

"Where there is no knowledge of the soul, there is no good."-Prov. xix, 2.

THE whiceen and must

HE hypothesis which any one adopts in philosophizing about the union between man's soul and body, must depend not only on the theory employed by him for explaining the nature of the soul itself, but also on the theory followed by him in explaining the essential constitution of matter, or the nature of material substance. This union of soul and body in man has, at the best, its obscurity and mysteriousness, as St. Augustine observed (De Civitate Dei, lib. 21, cap. 10), and as acknowledged by all the greatest Christian philosophers; but yet there are some general truths bearing on the subject which can be known by natural reason, more or less clearly and distinctly, and which it is good not to allow the "scientists" or modern scientism" to involve in doubt and darkness.

Pure materialism can scarcely be recognized as constituting any genuine system of philosophy at all; for the spirituality of the human soul is among the first truths which it is the office of philosophy to demonstrate, and it is then treated as a fundamental principle in every system; the schools of philosophy dividing, not on this truth of the soul's immaterial and spiritual nature, but rather on the consequences derivable from it. The materialist denies that man has any principle in the composition of his nature that is not purely material; and he asserts, therefore, that man has no spiritual soul, he is only body. It follows, then, that the present inquiry concerning the nature of the human compound, or the nature of that union which is between man's soul and body, cannot be addressed directly to the materialist; the spirituality of the human soul is here supposed, and as he denies that truth he must be left to pursue his own investigations, "with the snout of grovelling appetite," into "dirt philosophy." Materialism may be justly characterized as the lowest and grossest type of thought or learning which lays claim to be called speculative science and reasoning; pure idealism, an opposite extreme, is the absurdest and most abhorrent to reason. As the idealist denies the objective reality of things external to the mind, neither can the subject herein proposed be rightly discussed with him; for he more completely than even the materialist repudiates all the realities and all the first principles which must be postulated, when the question to be

argued is, what is the nature of that union which is between man's soul and body?

But even among those who admit, or, at least, do not deny, that there is a principle in man superior to mere matter; that man's ideas are objectively real, and, consequently that the outer world is made up of physical realities, there are many theories proposed for explaining the intrinsic nature of the visible substances around us; and it is no wonder, then, that the advocates of those conflicting theories hold very divergent opinions concerning man as having a nature that is both corporeal and intellectual. These various systems, devised to explain the nature and essential constituents of material objects, may be ranged with, perhaps, sufficient comprehensiveness, under three principal classes, or three leading hypotheses. Ist. The hypothesis according to which the ultimate elements. or components of bodies are really simple entities. 2d. The theory which reduces all the visible creation to persistent force, and the modifications of this one persistent force. 3d. The theory that matter or body is, of its nature, a compound substance, which is really and physically extended. It is plain that these theories must furnish very different answers to the questions: How is man at the same time both corporeal and intellectual in his nature? Are matter and spirit so united in man as to constitute him one nature, one personal being? Are matter and spirit associated in companionship, by an accidental and extrinsic union, without constituting a compound nature that is really one? Are soul and body commingled; or are they united into one substance chemically, as oxygen and hydrogen unite chemically, so as to constitute one substance, water?

It is not proposed, in this article, minutely to state and describe the theories of matter above classified, nor to recount the manifold systems which may be included under these heads. But it will not be amiss here to consider some general truths which cannot be ignored, not only if we would reason correctly concerning the nature and essential constituents of material substance, but also, if we would rightly conceive the unity of man's nature, especially as no argumentation on any subject can lead to valid results, which starts from erroneous first principles, or from premises false in fact. This subject of inquiry is one in which Bacon's celebrated rule of induction has legitimate application; for surely no theory for explaining the intrinsic nature of matter is genuine or really valid, which is not a logical deduction from known facts. An hypothesis that is arbitrarily assumed a priori, must either directly deny evident facts, or else it must, with Procrustean violence, force those facts into required shapes and dimensions; for example, Fichte chooses to assume that the human mind makes the objects of its own ideas, VOL. IV. -4

and that external things could have no share in the production of those ideas; it is, therefore, denied by him that the objects of thought possess any other reality than that which is subjective to the mind having those thoughts. This is a sweeping denial of facts, which is made in order to meet the requirements of theory. The human mind naturally comes to the knowledge of things. really and physically existing, only by means of their action and the effects produced by that action. Man can know a cause to be simple by first knowing its effects to be such as none but a simple cause can produce; just as he can also know a cause to be complex or compound by means of its effects; as, for example, when the geologist observes in the strata of the earth's surface effects which he may legitimately conclude could have been produced only by the combined agency of heat, air, and water. This relationship of cause and effect, by which one is distinguished from the other, and by which the one being apprehended the other thereby becomes known, is evident to our minds, and it is perceived by way of a primitive fact, just as color is perceived through the eye by way of primitive fact. Hence, inductive reasoning is based on this general principle as its logical criterion: we may legitimately conclude from actual effects to their cause or sufficient reason. Applying this method of reasoning, which our minds naturally pursue whenever we investigate facts, to the study of man's nature, we may analyze that nature, and learn by means of its various action the real components or constituent principles of that nature. Following this logical process, the great mass of mankind have always agreed upon a few well-known general conclusions; as, for example, man's body, in common with the mineral, has specific gravity, reflects light, has quantity or volume, etc.; in common with the vegetable, it has vital growth, by intussusception and assimilation of nutriment; in common with the brute or irrational animal, it has sensation, self-locomotion; finally, what is peculiar and specific to man among all objects of the visible creation, he judges intellectually, reasons, knows the supersensible, and wills deliberately. Since man thus combines in himself all grades of perfection that are discernible in the universe, he is not inappropriately styled a "microcosm," or "little world," "the epitome of creation."

The desire for change, or fondness for what is new, may happen to be as disastrous to the cause of genuine philosophical truth (and genuine truth is in itself not subject to mutation), as it has sometimes proved to be to the efficacy of unchangeable principles in the moral order. It is not more strange for Cicero to comment on the fact noticed by him, that no hypothesis is so absurd as not to have been defended by some philosopher, than it is to find Sallust to have reproved the generation of his day for seeking after