interesting sights. Fine hill scenery, north and west; fine river scenery, witness the Wye; grand views over country; campaign views I would say, only very few of my readers would know the word, and not every dictionary would explain it; and then the remains of an extinct civilization; ruins from the Romans; ruins of castles built in Norman days; ruins of abbeys spoliated at the Reformation; ruin of chapels everywhere; ruins of villages of later date.

The ruins of chapels are singular and singularly numerous, and far more have been swept away. Chepstow contained three, of which only one is known, even if that is a chapel, and others are supposed. And along the roads you often come upon four walls with a campanile, and you can see the place of piscina and aumbrey, of sedilia also and hagioscope; and from the valley or the water side, from the hill top or the castle ballium went up the solemn prayer at the offering of the Christian sacrifice. "Comparisons are odious," but to those who know what worship is, more of worship is suggested by these four walls, witnesses though they have been of an overlaying of truth with error, than in that modern pile which contains the school and schoolmaster's house, and is used as a chapel of ease.

But where is our Roman town this while? Never mind, it is where it has been eighteen hundred years! Five millia passuum, (what long legs those Romans must have had to make only a thousand steps to a mile,) from the Wye; three from the Severn, that is the locality. You go away along the Newport Road from Chepstow; and you pass through it, over it, beyond it, and know nothing about it! You look for earthworks; for the fossa and vallum, and you can't see them; you see a modern parsonage; a large old farmhouse; a church rebuilt almost; and cottages. This is Caerwent; the camp of Gwent; Venta Silurum. Gwent was the old name for this fertile strip of land between the rivers; and here was a town and fortification, par excellence, the camp of Gwent!

But now retrace your steps a little. Look at that piece of wall; it is not a garden enclosure; walk along the side; try and loosen the hanging stones, they won't

come out; that old Roman mortar holds them tighter than the quarry's grasp; and that long stretch of wall overgrown in places with bushes and trees, but in this direction measuring five hundred yards, and in another three hundred and eighty, forms a perfect parallelogram and is the boundary of old Rome's outpost.

It is snug, quiet and sequestered, one wonders how they came to fix upon the site. But here is a brooklet, now running through marshy, boggy meadows; still called a river, the river Nethern, and it runs into the Severn, just by a fine old Roman camp. Most likely eighteen hundred years ago, it was a navigable river; with its mouth open to receive Augustus if ever he dropped over with the current from that place four miles higher up which retains his name; and to carry him in his passage from Trajectus Augusti, which we now call Aust, towards Carleon, another of his towns and fortresses. And then, too, it was in a district thickly populated, probably with aborigines. There is Dinham, whence the grand Caractacus sallied forth upon them, only two miles off; and then from the Grey Mountain and neighbouring hills, troops of the barbari would come down and render necessary that lofty wall, and those bastions strengthened on this side with ditch and bank.

And what a wall it is; nine feet thick of masonry, so solid, that with all its height of twelve or eighteen feet, it has not moved an inch, either under the pressure of the earth banked up against it inside, or from the subsiding of the soil which lies below outside. Where the industry and labour of idle ones has succeeded in digging out a hollow, there the wall stands over it without dropping a stone; and there where one large piece has been detached, it stands sharp and hard as ever.

At one corner we scramble up, now we are in the enclosure. It is but an apple orchard, and sheep browse about. The surface is irregular and rough; in one place the turf has been removed, and excavations made, and there is the ground-plan of a house with rooms small, and halls large, but with the flues remaining by which the Roman could raise the temperature of his house in Britain. Several houses were here, more than in the rest of the enclosure, perhaps it was the more quiet side

of the garrison town. Now we see that the church and the farm house are within the fortification, but this is of course an accident of modern days; we will hardly fancy that the church here is like S. Paul's cathedral, which does stand upon the site of a temple of Diana.

The high road goes through the middle of the city once a cross road went through it north and south. Southward they could lead out the horses to water; northward towards the enemies' land, the gateway must be small. Up through a cottage garden there seems to be a gateway; it must have had a circular head and two great cut stones remain, one in its proper place on the jamb, the other in the rubbish.

Every now and then in clearing yards, fresh foundations are traced; but there are not many finds of value in a money point of view. That old man will tell you it was a wonderful place till "Oliver Cromwell" threw it down, and he claims antiquity for the church tower, or for its foundations, of a thousand years. His memory may not be correct, and his account of history may vary from that which is generally received; but there is Caerwent the British city; the Roman fort and town, the country village now; stranded by the stream of time, as its river is silted up; in a district of cornfields and orchards waving their fruits where warriors assembled under their eagles and the standards of their hosts; and the bills alone look down unchanged; grey with their limestone outcrop; decked with the gorse and heather, in pink, and red, and yellow, perhaps unchanged from the long antiquity when Briton resisted Roman; and Roman came up hither at last to look across from point to point capped with his fortress and secured with his camps. And that Severn has rolled on through all the change of scene and time and circumstance, and everlasting hill and unfailing river tell of an endurance of work which is not man's work but of the Worker of all, whose own plan and purpose is being carried out through the ages of man's generations: by the efforts of this people and of that nation; in this victory and in that defeat; until a day shall come when men shall learn war no more and the kingdom shall be the LORD'S.

JOB: THE TEACHING OF EARTHLY THINGS.

THERE is perhaps no Book in the Bible more difficult to understand aright than the Book of Job. The Revelation of S. John may occur to the reader as palpably contradicting this statement, but though this latter treats of things far more remote from human ken, it is all revealed to the Apostle directly from above, and as such claims implicit faith. Very much of the matter it contains is necessarily unintelligible for the present, but we know that the time will come when it will be made plain by being fulfilled in its real meaning; as the prophecies concerning our LORD's humiliation, rejection, and suffering were hidden, until the events revealed their true significance.

The peculiar difficulty of the Book of Job lies in discovering the true way of understanding the arguments of Eliphaz and his two companions. At the conclusion we are told that they had not "spoken of GOD the thing that was right;" there must therefore be fallacy in some of their statements. The principal error seems to be, the implied if not explicit assertion that GOD's chastisements, and indeed all the calamities of this life are direct judgments, and that they justify us in concluding the sufferers from them to be wicked above other men, a mistake against which our LORD expressly guards His disciples.

We certainly cannot err in receiving as dogmatic truth,, not only as inspired narrative, such passages and sentiments in this book as are referred to, and cited in other parts of Holy Writ; for instance the saying of Eliphaz, quoted by S. Paul, "He taketh the wise in their own craftiness," with the prefix "it is written."

Job has been supposed to have been a contemporary of Moses; he could not have lived earlier, for the grandson of Esau, Teman, was the ancestor of a tribe by the time of Job, as we must infer from the designation of Eliphaz, as the Temanite. Bildad, the Shuhite," seems to have been descended from Shuah, a son of Abraham by Ke

turah. "Elihu, the Buzite," was only collaterally so descended, being of the family of Aram, or Ram (as here) who was the grandson of Nahor, Abraham's brother.

3

The land of Uz seems to be synonymous with the land of Edom, for we read in Lam. iv. 21, "O daughter of Edom that dwellest in the land of Uz." The name Uz may have been derived from a grandson of Shem,1 or perhaps more probably from one of the grandsons of Seir,2 the Horite; we know that Mount Seir was the possession of Esau. And in Deut. ii. 12, we are told that "the Horims dwelt in Seir beforetime, but the children of Esau succeeded them, when they had destroyed them, and dwelt in their stead." These names seem to fix the country and kindred of Job almost beyond dispute, and at the same time to account for a knowledge of the true GOD, which we are apt to suppose was even then confined to the Israelites.

Job was probably a mighty chief, for he says, "I chose out their way, and sat chief, and dwelt as a king in the army." (Chap. xxix. 25.) The whole chapter is replete with descriptions of his former greatness and honour. The sudden transition from that exalted and influential station to abject poverty, bereavement, and loathsome disease, must have enhanced the bitterness of his trial; which it only needed the cruelty of his friends to complete; yet at the first stage of his affliction, viz. poverty and bereavement, the testimony of GoD is, "in all this Job sinned not." After he was smitten in his own person it is, that "he sinned not with his lips." Lastly, he spake with his tongue, and lo, sin lay at the door; for he cursed the day of his birth.

Let us learn from this that the first access of calamity is not always, nor perhaps often the deepest point of trial. Sympathy is then awake and ready to do what it can,its full extent has not yet been measured, that is learnt by degrees; and besides, habits of self-control and self-respect are not impaired or broken down all at once. Hence the wisdom of the caution, " be not weary of His correction." The second lesson is that, though no doubt there was 1 Gen. x. 23. 2 Gen. xxxvi. 28.

3 Deut. ii. 5; Josh. xxiv. 4.