Great institutions of themselves do little for the light and warmth of the intellectual life, he thinks, and they are very likely to be the sepulchral monuments built over the ashes of the life already extinguished. He takes great interest, indeed, in the symptoms of disaffection and desire for greater liberty among the Roman Catholics of Silesia, but he does not give any hints of the rise of the old Catholic movement; and, so far as the historical church is concerned, his convictions and experience seem to lean more and more towards virtual independency, and to base religion upon personal faith, instead of ecclesiastical communion.

Yet he still affirms, and with greater positiveness, his belief in a science of religion and ethics, based upon the true interpretation of Scripture, and thus, in his way, he accepts the platform of a universal church. Even there, however, he insists upon the duty of individual fidelity, and he denies the existence of any wholesale policy, any cheap and easy way to truth for men in masses. He feels within himself the growing and burning assurance of his own peculiar mission, as leader of a school of interpretation of the Scriptures upon a basis both dialectical and critical. He is sure that the divine thoughts, which seem at first to be so scattered through the sacred books, and to have no scientific bond of connection, are not merely an aggregate of particular revelations placed in external relations, but that they are an organic whole, such as can be set forth from the stand-point of scientific exposition. He believes in a positive biblical dogmatic, and that in the Scriptures there are the stamina of the scientific, as well as of the practical, knowledge of God-the stamina of a true Christian gnosis. He is led by these views to look with mistrust upon efforts at a half-way, superficial interpretation of the Scriptures, such as aims at the mere edification of large numbers, and not at the thorough study of the truth. He speaks with misgiving of the purpose of Hengstenberg's Church Journal, and he commends Tholuck's Commentary upon the Romans, with praise of its good spirit and fresh life, tempered with hints of its inadequate depth and thoroughness.

His thoughts not only turn upon the Bible as an organic whole, but they go forth into nature, and grapple with the mystery of God and the universe. He is persuaded by the living witness within him, that this world of ours is no work of the devil, but a work of God's own holy hand, only tempted and perverted by the devil-that all the movements, powers, and elements have something purely divine at their foundation, which can and should be restored by the omnipotence of divine grace to their original purity. He seems in this way to carry his evangelical ideas into his studies of nature, and to interpret the universe as he interprets the Bible, from the light of God within him. He declares that from his own experience he has learned to understand the practical point of biblical Chiliasm in all its strength, and he would not, on any account, give up the promise of the new heavens and the new earth as presented in the word of God and set forth so gloriously by the prophets. He needs no commentary to interpret to him the yearnings of the creature, the groans of creation for redemption; but he himself, as part of creation, and belonging to nature, joins in that universal cry for the liberty of the children of God.

He has serious illness in his last summer in Rome, and his wife's health was very precarious; but these trials were brightened by many blessings; and nothing seems to have pleased him more than a gift of three hundred dollars from the Prussian government, and an increase of his salary to an amount sufficient to pay his little debts and enable him to live without anxiety. On the whole his pet idea of a positive science of the Scriptures grows, and his letter of December 15th, 1827, to Heubner, is a remarkable essay upon the study of the New Testament, which begins with expressing his grief at being obliged to stay at Rome on a working vocation, instead of being in a position where he could follow the speculative investigations to which God so clearly and so imperatively calls him. He is aware that he does not understand the New Testament, yet he sees the way in which it ought to be understood, so as to show the bearing of all

the parts upon the central truth and life. He sees glimpses of a logica sacra, and of a metaphysica sacra, which shall develop the true method of the study and the true principles of the science of the New Testament. He does not presume to be up to these tasks himself, but he thinks that a century of the combined thought and experience of mankind will be needed to reach the end, and produce the theosophy that is necessary to meet the wants of devout and enlightened souls. He is glad that Rome has in one important respect prepared him for his new carcer at Wittenberg; that it has taken him away from his former dependence upon men of especial religious and theological tendencies, with favorite hobbies to ride, and so rid his mind of the peculiar coloring which they threw over his views, and that now he can return to Germany without prejudice, and with a certain independence, and act as a mediator between different schools.

March 22d, 1828, Rothe informed Heubner of his final decision to go to Wittenberg, in a letter which is well called a psalm of thanksgiving. Tholuck is to succeed him at Rome, and on June 7th Rothe started for Naples, that he might see Southern Italy before returning home, and also enjoy the baths of Ischia. He entered fully into the satisfactions of the journey, and, returning by way of Rome and Florence, on September 30th he is at his post in Wittenberg, to enter upon what he regarded as the work of his life. Here the first volume of Nippold's charming biography ends, and we must await the coming of the second volume in order to complete our estimate of Rothe's life, and to show the amount and the characteristics of his work.

Thus far he stands before us in a very interesting light, and even if no memorable distinction in the world had been attached to his name, no thoughtful reader could refuse to say that a rare spirit has been portrayed in this passing sketch. But as we look upon him now, with our knowledge of the signal part that he was called to play in the thinking and the activity of our time, we cannot but trace with great interest the promise of the man who now, in his thirtieth

year, turns from Rome towards Wittenberg, and who probably is destined to bring the thought of Germany as strongly against the Romish dogmas and rule as any man since Luther's day. He went quietly away; but in him there was a prophetic power mighty enough to have been denounced in the decrees of the Vatican, and to have brought down the anathema of Leo XII. He was to be, in some respects, the most significant opponent of Rome in our century, so far as the German race is concerned. He stood up, from first to last, for the direct communion of each soul with God through Christ, and he had no patience with the dogma that the only communion is in the hands of the Romish priesthood, and in the form of the wafer of the Roman mass. He set forth the necessary relation between Christian ethics and personal faith, and he deduced all virtue and all duty from the divine root in the life of God within the soul, with his utter protest against the legalism that draws all duty from ecclesiastical laws.

He read nature and history in the same way, from within outward, and the universe was to be the theatre of the final triumph of personal faith and virtue, and history was to record the evolution of true manhood in civic virtue and union without priestly domination or ecclesiastical conventionalism. Thoroughly Christian and a devotee as he wasan à Kempis in piety, he was almost a Voltaire in iconoclasm; he kept little, if any, place for the historical church, and, instead of advocating a Church either above the State, or on a level with the State, or under it, he was for making the State virtually the Church, and leaving religion, like education, as part of the civil service, and very much under the same superintendence as the fine arts. But weak and unsatisfactory as his idea of church organization was, his stay at Rome helps out our interpretation of its motive, and the memorable attitude of Germany now in reference to Romanism speaks out in thunder tones the meaning of his protest against the empire that claimed to rule the world in the name of heaven. Within and above all those speculations

upon the tyranny of the old church we may hear the voice of the mighty German manhood that has spoken, as we have said, from the days of Hermann to those of Luther, and kindled such love in Rothe's own parents for old Fritz and the great fight against the old Latin oppressors which is now seen to be the peculiar mark of modern history. In Rothe, scion as he was of the reign of Frederick the Great, German thought, perhaps unconsciously, communed at Rome with. the mind of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the Caesars of the North held counsel with the Caesars of the capitol and the forum, and all the while the Eternal Spirit was calling them to Christ and the church in a way that eye hath not seen, but the new ages may show forth.

ARTICLE V.

THE USE OF WITH NEGATIVE PARTICLES.1

BY REV. C. M. MEAD, PROFESSOR AT ANDOVER.

THE following is an attempt to ascertain the Hebrew usus loquendi in the matter of universal and partial negations. The subject is but lighly touched upon in the Hebrew grammars. E.g. Bush simply says, "The particles and 1 (1), not, when used with

all denote a universal negation." Similarly, Kalisch, “In connection with the particle of negation has the meaning of none, nothing." Gesenius says, "In connection with bb, when the latter is not followed by the article and therefore means any one, anything, it [] expresses the Latin nullus, none. ... But the case is different when is made definite, where it means all, the whole." Ewald

1 The author was led to undertake this investigation by his studies in connection with the Revision of the Authorized Version of the Bible. It was begun in the assurance that little labor would be required in order to settle a question which as yet seems not to have been carefully examined. It must be frankly confessed that, while the labor has been immensely greater than was anticipated, the result is less satisfactory than was confidently hoped. But it is, to say the least, some satisfaction to have learned, in an effort to discover a law, that there is no law to be discovered.