modern Athenians still more marvellous, when they can look around the world as it now is, and say, "the great lever which moves it is knowledge-is intellect!"

Was it knowledge, was it intellect, which raised and fostered the Oxford delusion of 1835-1845; and threatened for a time to subvert the whole church and state of England? Is it knowledge or intellect, which is hurrying men, at the present moment, in an exactly opposite direction; and leading some of the same individuals, who, in 1840, believed the legendary miracles of the middle ages, to reject, in 1860, the miracles of the New Testament? Was it knowledge or intellect, which, in 1848, suddenly overthrew almost every throne in Europe, and then, in less than three years, replaced despotism in its seat again? Was it knowledge, or intellect, which cast the whole power of the greatest European kingdom into the hands of a Paris mob; and then, in some thirty months, surrendered that power to a despot? Truly, instead of dreaming that intellect rules the world, we might with much more rationality recal the old statesman's words, and say, "See, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed !

II. After Dr. Temple's mild and moderate opening, we are favoured with a much stronger dose. The most daring writer of the whole seven comes forward. Yet even he has adroitness enough to use a cloak. Bold as Dr. Rowland Williams is, there are some things which he deems it more prudent to quote from the German than to present as his own. In place, then, of an "essay," he gives us a "review." He takes up the whole circle of Bunsen's wild profanities, and thus brings into the compass of forty-three pages a mass of reckless infidelity, compared with which the writings of Voltaire and Paine were comparatively harmless.

We cannot review this review, or even enumerate half its criminal absurdities. A single Egyptian tradition of the most apocryphal kind, suffices, in Bunsen's eyes, and in the eyes of his reviewer, to prove that Moses knew nothing of the subject on which he was writing, and that the present human race is probably at least twenty thousand years old! (p. 55.) The long lives of the first patriarchs are "relegated to the domain of legend, or symbolical cycle." (p. 57.) The following sentence is Dr. Williams's own: "That there was a Bible before our Bible, and that some of our present books, as certainly Genesis and Joshua, and perhaps Job, Jonah, Daniel, are expanded from similar elements, is indicated in the book before us, rather than proved, as it might be." (p. 62.) Isaiah's prophecy "is composed of elements of different eras." In Zechariah's, we find "three distinct styles and aspects of affairs." "The man Daniel is to be distinguished from our book of Daniel." The book of Jonah " contains a late legend, founded on misconception." (p. 77.) These are not a tithe of the monstrosities which Dr. Williams pours forth as glibly as if they were neither nauseously absurd, nor revoltingly profane.

The main object, however, of this paper seems to be, to get rid

of the very idea of Scripture Prophecies. This is attempted by a rapid and approving survey of Bunsen's assaults on this department of Scripture evidence. We must condense, as much as we are able, two or three of Dr. Rowland Williams's pages. He thus writes:

་་

"Even Butler foresaw the possibility that every prophecy in the Old Testament might have its elucidation in contemporaneous history." Bishop Chandler is said to have thought twelve passages in the Old Testament directly Messianic; others restricted this character to five; Paley ventures to quote only one." "Coleridge threw secular prognostication altogether out of the idea of prophecy." "But in Germany there has been a pathway streaming with light, from Eichhorn to Ewald, throughout which the value of the moral element in prophecy has been progressively raised, and that of the directly predictive, whether secular or Messianic, has been lowered." "To this inheritance of opinion Baron Bunsen succeeds. Knowing these things, and writing for men who know them," "he dare not say, though it was formerly said, that David foretold the exile, because it is mentioned in the Psalms. He cannot quote Nahum denouncing ruin against Nineveh, or Jeremiah against Tyre, without remembering that already the Babylonian power threw its shadow across Asia, and Nebuchadnezzar was mustering his armies. If he would quote the book of Isaiah, he cannot conceal, after Gesenius, Ewald, and Maurer have written, that the book is composed of elements of different eras.' "If he would quote Micah, as designating Bethlehem for the birth-place of the Messiah, he cannot shut his eyes to the fact, that the Deliverer to come from thence was to be a contemporary shield against the Assyrian. If he would follow Pearson in quoting the second Psalm, Thou art my Son,' he knows that Hebrew idiom convinced even Jerome the true rendering was Worship purely.'"'* "Fresh from the services of Christmas, he may sincerely exclaim, 'Unto us a child is born;' but he knows that the Hebrew translated Mighty God,' is at least disputable; and that perhaps it means only Strong and mighty one, Father of an age;' and he can never listen to any one who pretends that the Maiden's child of Isaiah vii. 16, was not to be born in the reign of Ahaz, as a sign against Pekah and Rezin. In the case of Daniel, he may doubt whether all parts of the book are of one age, or what is the starting-point of the seventy weeks; but two results are clear, that the period of weeks ended in the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes, and that those portions of the book which are supposed to be specially predictive, are a history of past occurrences up to that reign." "Some passages may be doubtful, one perhaps in Zechariah, and one in Isaiah, capable of being made directly Messianic, and a chapter in Deuteronomy foreshadowing the fall of Jerusalem. But even these few cases tend to melt, if they are not already melted, in the crucible of searching inquiry." (pp. 65-70.)

On the 53rd of Isaiah Dr. Williams writes:

"Bunsen puts together, with masterly analysis, the illustrative passages of Jeremiah, and it is difficult to resist the conclusion to which they tend. Jeremiah compares his whole people to sheep going astray,

*Of course, St. Paul's citation of this Psalm in Heb. i. 5, is of no value in Dr. Williams's eyes.

and himself to a lamb or an ox brought to the slaughter. He was taken from prison, and his generation, or posterity, none took account of he interceded for his people in prayer, but was not the less despised, and a man of grief; so that no sorrow was like his; men assigned his grave with the wicked, and his tomb with the oppressors; all who followed him seemed cut off out of the land of the living, yet his seed prolonged their days; his prophecy was fulfilled, and the arm of the Eternal laid bare: he was counted wise on the return; his place in the book of Sirach shows how eminently he was enshrined in men's thoughts as the servant of God; and in the book of Maccabees he is the grey prophet who is seen in vision fulfilling his task of interceding for the people. This is an imperfect sketch, but may lead readers to consider the arguments for applying Isaiah lii. and liii. to Jeremiah. Their weight is so great, that if any single person should be selected, they prove that Jeremiah should be the one." (p. 73.)

Such is Dr. Williams's own deliberate judgment touching the 53rd of Isaiah. Doubtless Dr. Williams knows as well as we do, that in the 8th of Acts we find Philip sent by the Spirit specially to instruct the Eunuch that this 53rd chapter of Isaiah was a prophecy of Christ. But what of that? Does not Dr. Williams know better than Philip, and has not he, too, the Spirit as well as Philip? On this point he thus speaks :

"The sacred writers acknowledge themselves men of like passions with ourselves, and we are promised illumination from the Spirit which dwelt in them. Hence, when we find our Prayer-book constructed on the idea of the church being an inspired society, instead of objecting that every one of us is fallible, we should define inspiration consistently with the facts of Scripture and of human nature. These would neither exclude the idea of fallibility among Israelites of old, nor teach us to quench the Spirit in true hearts for ever." (p. 78.)

Thus, in plain English, the "Essays and Reviews" stand on the same footing as the Acts of the Apostles. Fallibility attaches to both; "inspiration" belongs as much to the one as to the other!

But if we were to traverse the whole of Dr. Williams's fortythree pages, we might fill one half of our present number. Whole books of Holy Scripture are thrown overboard as palpable forgeries.* "Heaven is not a place, so much as the fulfilment of the love of God." (p. 82.) In fact, nearly all the rationalistic infidelity of Germany is concentrated in these forty-three pages.

Still, Dr. Williams's part in the work seems especially to be, to get rid of the idea of Scripture Prophecy. And that task he has performed with the zeal of a thorough partisan. As we have seen, -if St. Paul differs from him in opinion (as in Heb. i. 5.), then St. Paul is wrong;-if Philip the Evangelist, led by the Spirit, interprets Isaiah liii. of Christ, then Dr. Williams, who professes

As at p. 84, where we read, "The second of the Petrine epistles, having alike external and internal evidence against its genuineness, is necessarily surrendered.”

But justly

to be also led by the Spirit, corrects Philip's error ! does one of the other essayists, Mr. Pattison, remark, at p. 328,

"What Scripture lost, was gained by one or other of the three substitutes Church authority, the Spirit, or Reason. Church authority was soon found untenable: the Spirit then came into favour, along with Independency. But it was quickly discovered, that on such a basis only discord and disunion could be reared."

We leave Dr. Williams, then, to settle this point with Mr. Pattison, and proceed to the third Essay,-Mr. Baden Powell's. III. This will not occupy us long: but it serves, taken in connection with what went before, to make the plan and purpose of the book quite clear. Dr. Williams having disposed, to his own satisfaction at least, of the idea that there are predictive Prophecies in Scripture, Mr. Baden Powell deals with the next grand feature in the case, and boldly denies the truth and reality of the Scripture Miracles!

He approaches this subject under the guise of an essay on the Evidences of Christianity. He opens the question by a scornful depreciation of all writers on the evidences; every one of whom, he considers, has failed in the task he has undertaken. But, for his own part, Mr. Powell takes ground so closely resembling that of Hume, that it is not easy to distinguish between the two. Miracles, in his view, are facts which no amount of testimony can suffice to establish. We will quote some of his own words:

"The enlarged critical and inductive study of the natural world, cannot but tend powerfully to evince the inconceivableness of imagined interruptions of natural order, or supposed suspensions of the laws of matter, and of that vast series of dependent causation which constitutes the legitimate field for the investigation of science." (p. 110.) "Intellect and philosophy are compelled to disown the recognition of anything in the world of matter at variance with the first principle of the laws of matter the universal order and indissoluble unity of physical causes.' (p. 127.)

Mr. Powell's main principle appears to us to be very like Materialism. He thus states it:

"All highly-cultivated minds and duly advanced intellects have imbibed, more or less, the lessons of the inductive philosophy, and have at least in some measure learned to appreciate the grand foundation conception of universal law, to recognize the impossibility even of any two material atoms subsisting together without a determinate relation-of any action of the one on the other, whether of equilibrium or of motion, without reference to a physical cause of any modification whatsoever in the existing conditions of material agents, unless through the invariable operation of a series of eternally-impressed consequences, following in some necessary chain of orderly connection, however imperfectly known to us." (p. 133.)

Does not this theory virtually shut God out of his own world?

And does not Mr. Powell, in fact, though in his own phraseology, plainly state as much in the following passage?

"The more knowledge advances, the more it has been, and will be, acknowledged that Christianity, as a real religion, must be viewed apar from connexion with physical things." (p. 128.)

It follows that the greater part of the Bible, which deals, throughout, with physical things, must be held to be untrue. So Mr. Powell plainly states; saying,

More

"The first dissociation of the spiritual from the physical was rendered necessary by the palpable contradictions disclosed by astronomical discovery with the letter of Scripture. Another still wider and more material step has been effected by the discoveries of geology. recently, the antiquity of the human race, and the development of species, and the rejection of the idea of creation, have caused new advances in the same direction." (p. 129.)

It appears that the main duty committed to Mr. Powell by the contrivers of this volume, is, to deny and repudiate the Miracles of Scripture, just as Dr. Williams has rejected the Prophecies. And he has shown no lack of zeal, or of confidence, in this work. As a general principle, he assures us that, "If miracles were in the estimation of a former age among the chief supports of Christianity, they are at present among the main difficulties, and hinderances to its acceptance." (p. 140.) For, "In nature and from nature, by science and by reason, we neither have, nor can possibly have, any evidence of a Deity working miracles; for that we must go out of nature and beyond reason." (p. 142.)

Once or twice, Mr. Powell, very unintelligibly, speaks of miracles as "objects of faith." But how can that be an object of faith, which is declared at the outset to be inherently impossible? Shall we suppose that Mr. Powell means to accept an impossible thing as a fact, on the sole authority of Scripture? No, this cannot be what he means, for he exults in discarding the plainest statements of Scripture in several matters. He is glad to "reject the idea of creation;" and greatly prefers "the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature." (p. 139.) What other or

Still, he

higher idea of a God he receives, than that of "the great Pan," we find it hard to imagine. In truth, of all the writers of the present volume, Mr. Powell is the one who seems to have made the furthest advance on the road to absolute Atheism. thinks it expedient to wind up with the following phrases :"The reason of the hope that is in us, is not restricted to external signs, nor to any one kind of evidence, but consists of such assurance as may be most satisfactory to each earnest individual inquirer's own mind. And the true acceptance of the entire revealed manifestation of Christianity will be most worthily and satisfactorily based on that assurance of 'faith' by which the apostle affirms we stand;' and which, in accordance with his emphatic declaration, must rest, 'not in the wisdom of man, but in the power of God.'" (p. 144.)

Vol. 59.-No. 270.

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