his art among the crowded resorts of men, he stood specially in need of a training which should brace and nerve him for the work. Yet it appears that the only part of his early education at all carefully tended was precisely that least calculated to give him the nerve in which his mental constitution was lacking. For a temper in need of a tonic treatment, the weekly concert at which, "when a boy of twelve years old, he could lead with unfailing steadiness" on his violin, must have been peculiarly hurtful. There was not much incident in Mr. Woodward's early life. Having passed quietly through his Oxford course, he married and settled down, at the age of two-andtwenty, in the curacy of Belturbet.

His whole character was most unlike, and strangely out of harmony with, that conventionally ascribed to the Irish clergyman. Wholly without Celtic blood, shy, retiring, sensitive, thoughtful, speculative, without one element of the popular preacher, the zealous partisan, the active propagandist, his sympathies were altogether alien from those of the men of perfervidum ingenium, amongst whom his lot was cast.

Mr. Woodward at Belturbet was in the world's eye a conscientious and painstaking clergyman, exact in the discharge of his sacred functions, and of unblemished character in private life. With the Teutonic sense of duty being done as duty, he laboriously exercised himself in the office of his profession, though all the while he had no satisfaction in his work, nor any real belief in the divine truths which he officially and officiously set forth. But he was being led by a path which he knew not.

His own account of the great change which passed over him in the year 1804, "the more remarkable, as Mr. Woodward was himself most distrustful of sudden conversions," may best be given in his own words. He had been much impressed by the reality of religion in some persons into whose society he had been lately thrown. They were not to his taste; nevertheless he could but feel, "whatever the errors of the people may be, it is clear that religion engages their attention, and occupies their mind." He asked

"What, if I sit down for my own sake to read the Scriptures, not as a mere task of duty, not as the study of my profession, not to obtain knowledge for others, not to criticise its curious passages; but that I may find what it is that can make them so attractive to these people. . . I did sit down and take my Bible, and read the whole of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and in that reading (how it happened I cannot tell, or what was the mode of operation upon my mind I cannot tell-God knoweth)-in that reading a change, such as I neither looked for nor could have conceived, came over my whole soul, and passed upon my whole nature. It was not that any new

truths were communicated to my understanding, that any rational doubts were answered, that any peculiar scheme of doctrine estab lished its claims to my adoption. No; it was as if Heaven was opened to my soul, as if eternity had begun, as if I had commenced to run my everlasting course, It was a reality of waking bliss, of which I had never before formed the slightest imagination. I felt for the first time that religion was true, that there was a life beyond this life, that there was indeed a God that judgeth the earth. . . . The conviction, which above all others cheered my heart, was that the grand transition had already taken place; that I had passed the Rubicon; that I was not to wait till death for the commencement of the eternal day; but that I had already seen the outgoings of the morning; that the sun that now arose would never go down; that I had awoke from sleep, and would never close my eyes again. Such passages as the following rushed upon my mind (quoting John v. 24, viii. 51, xvii. 3, xi. 25, 26). The fear of death, which had all my life-time held me in bondage, was in a moment gone. . . . The deeptoned horror with which I had viewed, or rather fled from the view of, scenes which lie beyond the grave, had vanished, and left behind it a looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God."

Comment upon such a narrative would be an impertinence. I suffice it to note of Mr. Woodward, that "for fifty nine years he continued to look back on the sudden change here described as the all-decisive moment of his life."

Of those fifty-nine years, fifty-one were spent by Mr. Woodward in the quiet discharge of his duties as rector of Fethard. What his work in that parish must have been may be inferred from the simple statement, that whereas, when he became rector, it was the established custom on Sunday that

"While the ladies attended Divine Service, the gentlemen assembled in a house near the Church, and whiled away the time in conversation about sport, or local politics. Mr. Woodward lived to see his parishioners unequalled, I believe," (says his biographer) "for their punctual attendance at Divine Service, not only on Sunday, but on Wednesday, and at the monthly celebration of the Holy Communion. I have witnessed in Fethard Church what I have never seen or heard of elsewhere, the presence at the Lord's Table of every adult member of the congregation."

It would far transcend our necessary limits, were we to attempt anything like an analysis or abstract of the forty essays and twenty-one chapters of thoughts and reflections, which, with the prefixed memoir, make up this charming book. In reading it, there are two writers, very unlike each other, of whom one is continually reminded. The one is Pascal, the other John Foster. At one time, when reading Mr. Woodward's essays and thoughts, we seem almost to be following the thoughts of John Foster; at another time his reflections are just such, though perhaps less profound, as Pascal might

have suggested. Whatever their subject or occasion, however they may fall in with, or diverge from, the common track of religious thought, there is ever in Mr. Woodward's writings that undefinable tone of the spiritual mind, which pervades with its etherializing influences his descriptions of even the most gross and material questions of ecclesiastical polemics.

Whether he be writing to the young dragoon, or to the unhappy "Princess of Connemara ;" whether the subject of his discussion be "the fine gentleman," or "the distinguishing marks of a Christian ;" whether he be narrating some passages of his former life, or looking forward to the happiness and varieties of condition in the future state; every sentence breathes the spirit of one to whom the love of God in Christ had been manifested in no common sort, and within whose soul the absolving influences of the Blessed Spirit dwelt.

THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Prehistoric Times. By John Lubbock, F.R.S., &c. Williams and Norgate.

Adam and the Adamite. By D. McCausland, Q.C., LL.D. London, Bentley.

GEOLOGY and theology, the history of the earth, and the history of the races of men who inhabit the earth, have been hitherto studied as distinct sciences, each pursuing its own independent path, and the researches of the one tending little to throw light on those of the other. So long as the geologist recognized this distinction, and left on one side the inquiry as to the origin and antiquity of man as a study on which his science furnished no data whatever, the objections which had once been raised against geology on the part of believers in the historical truth of the Mosaic narrative, seemed in a fair way of settlement. A truce on the old controversies between Genesis and Geology had been agreed to. The terms of that truce were these: that as human remains were not found in those strata with which geology was concerned, the origin of man should be treated as an event later in time than any to which geology assigned an epoch. In return for this concession, the advocates of the Bible were prepared to give up the whole traditional view of six literal days of creation, and to allow that the formation of the present crust of the earth extended over immense periods of time, far

greater even than the wildest chronology of the Hindus and Egyptian tables. Believers in the Bible may have given different meanings to the word "days," as spoken of in the Mosaic narrative. One class understanding it of six successive visions of the epochs of creation, given to Moses, each vision lasting a literal day. Another class took the word "day" in its figurative sense, to mean a period of time, as the "day of the Lord" is often spoken of in Scripture. But, however interpreters might differ as to the meaning to be put on the word "days," it was agreed on all sides not to disturb the Concordat which had sprung up between Genesis and Geology, but to render to reason the things which are reason's, and to faith the things that are faith's.

But this truce between science and religion has not been of long duration. If Chalmers and Conybeare, Hugh Miller and Buckland, had lived a few years longer, they would have seen the boundary which they had drawn between Genesis and Geology broken down, and, like the wall which the Romans erected in the north of our island to keep out the incursions of the Picts and Scots, the rampart has been pierced in many places, and the history and origin of man on the earth has been claimed as an outlying province of geology, on which he claims the right now to enter. Palæontology, or the natural history of extinct species and forms of animal and vegetable life, is a science itself but of yesterday. Begun by Cuvier and Lamarck, and carried forward to its present state of advance by Owen and Agassiz, geologists are naturally proud of their achievements in this direction, and unwilling to treat the history of man as a sacred precinct, within which they may not intrude. Everywhere they say, and not without reason, research is pushing the old traditional theories out of men's minds. Men once believed that the earth was an immense plain, held up in space by the four corners, and around which the sun revolved once in twenty-four hours. They once believed that the Torrid Zone was uninhabitable, on account of the intense heat of the sun, and therefore treated the notion of there being antipodes as too ridiculous to be even seriously entertained. They once took for granted, not only that the Noachian deluge drowned all the human race save eight souls, but also that it submerged the highest mountain tops in all quarters of the world; and the frequent discovery of shells and other exuviæ of the sea were maintained by Woodward, and a host of early geologists, to have been brought upon the land by the universal flood. Curiously enough, when, a century ago, the geologists thought that the trace of aqueous action found on the tops even of volcanic mountains was an incontestable proof of the literal exactness of the narrative of

the Noachian deluge, Voltaire tried to account for these shells as thrown away by pilgrims returning from the Holy Land. Infidelity has long since changed its ground of attack, and now is as anxious to commit the advocates of the Bible to the old diluvian theory, as in Voltaire's time it was to evade it. Controversies thus change their bearings; and what was once a strong point for the orthodox interpreter, is now seen to be untenable. It is his wisdom, therefore, to retreat in time before the rising tide, and not allow the sacred deposit, for which he contends, to become the derision of the age, by his absurd and unscientific way of defending it.

Still, however, the tide advances, and the question presses again for settlement. Where are we to take our stand; where are we to say to the rising tide of science, " Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed"? The point where we may safely take our stand is with the history of the beginning of man. Naturalism may take, if she please, all the lower creation for her own. The development even of higher forms of life from the lower seems to us to be less an irreligious, than an unscientific hypothesis. For, as far as the vital truth of Theism is concerned, it is just as atheistic to suppose God interfering only on occasions, called catastrophes, or periods of transition, and leaving it, between these periods, to the government of natural laws, as it is to say outright that God does not interfere at all. Between the God of the Epicurean and the God of the Academy, new and old, there is so little to choose, that we would as soon believe in the one as the other. In Him we live, and move, and have our being; this is the only form of Theism worth contending for. If the geologist, therefore, supposes, as Sir C. Lyell seems to do, that the difference between us and him is expressed by the difference between the catastrophist and the uniformitarian theory, he is mistaken. The theory of catastrophes is the more reasonable of the two, and therefore we adhere to it; but we do not care to say that it is the most religious. Whether such a gorge, for instance, as the Via Mala in the Alps, was made by the slow action of water working uniformly through untold epochs of time, or is due to a sudden fissure of the mountain caused by internal fire,-whether the bare peak of the Matterhorn was worn away to the needle point that it now is by glacial action continued for ages, or to an upheaval which brought it up the jagged cone such as we now see it, cannot touch the question of the Being of Him, who, before the mountains were brought forth, or ever the earth and the worlds were made, is God from everlasting and world' without end. Such questions are purely scientific, aud do not touch theology, even remotely. I object to Sir Charles Lyell's