President Pierce's Message.

211 and conciliatory measures from Mr. Buchanan, with a view to allay the excitement which still exists throughout the Free States, the main object of the present occupant of the White House appears to have been to render the feud between North and South, which he has done so much to provoke, more deadly than ever. The greater portion of the Message consists of a history of the Kansas affair, from the official point of view. In every sentence the unscrupulous partisanship of the chief magistrate is visible. Where he touches upon the conduct of the Border Ruffians and the outrages they committed in Kansas, it is in the vague phraseology of the Circumlocution Office,' and would do credit to the head of the Barnacles.' But when he has to speak of the Republican party, no language is too strong for the horror which he feels at their unparalleled criminality. The supporters of Fremont are accused of having taken advantage of the great liberty they enjoy, under the Federal Government, to conspire against the glorious Constitution of the United States. Their object, he contends, is a revolutionary one,' and, although they know, as he affirms, that the only path to its accomplishment is through burning cities, and 'ravaged fields, and slaughtered populations, and all that is most "terrible in foreign, complicated with civil and servile war,' they persist in their unhallowed purpose, and in carrying it out, seize every opportunity of bringing the laws and constituted authorities of the Union into contempt. Such is the style in which President Pierce takes farewell of Congress.

Meanwhile, a most active system of caballing and intriguing is going on at head-quarters, with a view to make the new Cabinet satisfactory to the South. The great difficulty appears to lie in the selection of men who will carry out the policy of the Slave Power in such a manner as to prevent any farther dislocation of the Democratic party in the North. The New Orleans Delta, which represents the dominant party in the present Cabinet, warns Mr. Buchanan that he owes his election to the vote of 'the South, and to the defiant attitude of resistance which she was 'beginning to assume,' and that he must, therefore, take his policy from that quarter. Other journals belonging to the same party affirm that he owes his election to the votes given for him by Northern Democrats, who were assured by orators without number that he would introduce Kansas into the Union as a free State, and that, should he not do so, the Republican party will gain so large an accession of strength from the ranks of the Democracy, before 1860, as will enable them to return Colonel Fremont, or any other man they may choose. So stands the case of America for the present.

ART. IX.-The Doctrine of Inspiration; being an Inquiry concerning the Infallibility, Inspiration, and Authority of Holy Writ. By the Rev. JOHN MACNAUGHT, M.A. Oxon, Incumbent of St. Chrysostom's Church, Everton, Liverpool.

WERE we to say this is a bad book, we should probably say no more than the author has expected at our hands. But it is a weak book; and in saying that, we suspect that we have said what will be much more displeasing to him. When a man deplores the want of a good book on a subject, and essays to give us what we want, we do not expect a work in which the author himself is obliged to confess at the outset that it contains nothing new. Certainly, a book made up to so large an extent as the present of very old, and very often refuted, objections, is not the book to meet the demand of the times. To attempt to analyse Mr. Macnaught's volume, and to deal with it in detail, would be to bestow more space upon it than it deserves. But the question of inspiration is a great and a somewhat urgent question; and though our own views on this topic have been often expressed, the time has come, we think, in which it behoves us to present those views to our readers in a form as carefully digested, and in terms as explicit, as may be.

We shall, in the first place, glance at some points relating to the evidence in favour of the inspiration of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures considered as a FACT.

1. Every one will feel that human reason must have its province as a judge in regard to any supposed revelation. To suppose that any such communication has been made from God to man, must be to feel assured that it has been attested by its appropriate evidence. The prophet through whom such intelligence comes, must have evidence warranting him to believe that he has become the subject of such illumination. The evidence must be supernatural, but the natural reason of the man will be competent to judge of its value. It will, of course, be only moral evidence. Though supernatural, it will not be such as to preclude the possibility of resistance. But it will be sufficient evidence-sufficient to make submission to it imperative. What is true in this respect of the prophet, must be true of the people to whom the prophet-message is addressed. In their view, the message must take with it its proper evidence-evidence of which they themselves will be the judges. Both in the times of the Old Testament and the New, the people were commanded to try the

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spirits, and were expected to distinguish between divinely-commissioned men, and mere pretenders to such authority. To believe without evidence would be idiocy, and to call that evidence which the reason cannot understand and appreciate would be absurd.

But the evidence of a supposed revelation will not be all external. There will be evidence, either for or against its claims, arising from its contents. On these, also, the reason of man has, in a measure, to form its judgment. The common division of Christian evidence into external and internal, suggests this conclusion. It is supposed in this distinction, that we are capable of distinguishing, in some degree, between what is fit, and what is not fit, to have come from the Supreme Being to our race. It supposes that we not only know that God is, but that we know something as to what he is. If we can know nothing of God, we can know nothing of the proper or the improper in what is said to have come from Him. Apart from revelation, nature is our only source of Divine knowledge. What God is, we can only know from what He has done. But His doings are found in mind and matter, in the moral as well as in the physical universe. It is only by looking to what is ethical in man, that we can judge at all concerning the true or the right in the government of God. Our conception of Deity must be evolved from within. It can only be corroborated from without. If the light which conscience has kindled is not to be followed, then we have no light. In that case, to reject a revelation could be no sin, inasmuch as all capacity for judging of its claims would be wanting.

But it is when passing from the mind of man, as constituted by the Creator, to its condition as depraved by circumstances and habit; and when passing from this disordered world within, to the no less disordered world without, that difficulty thickens upon us. Still, the highest conception we can form of the moral excellence possible to the nature of man, is that which we should account as proper to him; and the highest conception we can form of the perfection possible to God, is that which we should account as proper to Him. Descartes was right-our capacity to conceive of Infinite Perfection must have come from Infinite Perfection. The capacity implies its object. The deity of human conception is not greater than the Deity who made us capable of that conception. It is such faith in God that must determine our faith in regard to any communication said to have come from Him. Whatever may seem to be at variance, either within us or about us, with such perfection in the Divine Being, must be a variance only in seeming.

2. But there is much in the spirit of our times to which the idea of inspired communications from God to man is very unacceptable. Religion, we are told by some, is a sentiment, not a creed. It has its seat in the emotions, not in the intellect. Its object may vary, but it is everywhere a response of the affections, and everywhere in substance the same. It is an instinct of our nature-we may say that of it, and that is about all we can say. To ask whence it comes is about as futile as to ask whence comes our power of seeing or hearing. Man is religious, as he is social, because he is a man, and the because in either case can be traced no higher.

But this trenchant kind of talk, like much beside in the same quarter, consists, at best, of half-truths. It is a fact, that religion in man is thus necessary and indestructible; but it is also a fact, that the moral nature of man is something much above instinct, and that for this reason his religion should be regarded as something much above that mere brute tendency. It is true, the sentiment of religion is universal, while its objects change; but it is also true, that this change may be from false objects to true ones, and that the natural effect of this change may be to call forth pure sentiment in the place of the impure. The truth that the moral element in the objects of worship does much to determine the moral feeling of the worshippers, is elementary enough-but even this truth such men have to learn. as religious and moral truth shall be thus accounted as of little So long or no practical value, nothing can be more natural, than that the idea of the intervention of the Deity to uphold and diffuse such truth by inspiring prophets and apostles for that purpose, should be utterly repudiated.

We must add, that the spirit in which the scientific studies of our age are often prosecuted, is scarcely less onesided than are the dreams of the sentimentalist. The one may seem to be all phantom, and the other all exactitude, but they have their tendencies in common. The spirit which underlies both is a selfsufficing spirit. It is a spirit which is content to be alone, and to be the regulator of its own ways. There is much to be done; but its fancy is, that whatever needs to be done it can do. Mistakes of all sorts may be inevitable, but mistakes natural to our condition are mistakes about which there need be no apprehension. So, too often, does the student of science choose his course. He is. concerned with the laws of things, and with nothing more. He is busied among sequences, and ascends no higher. If he knows anything of a Deity, it is of a Deity who is afar off. The universe is a great machine, its Maker has set it a-going, and now he has only to look at it and to see it go. His

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interference with it, in any way, would be accounted an intrusion. It would be an attempt to amend his own work, which must imply imperfection. It would be to disturb the order which he has himself established. It would be, in brief, to undo what he has done. Miracle, accordingly, is supposed to be impossible; or, if not impossible, it is hard to conceive of the amount of evidence that would suffice to establish it.

It is not easy to conceive of a habit of thought less favourable than this to the idea which regards truth as having come to man by a special Inspiration from the Almighty. The gulf between such philosophical belief, and all Christian belief, is great. According to this philosophy, the Deity does not live with His creatures, but apart from them; and, as a natural consequence, His creatures do not live with Him, but apart from Him. Having so far mastered the domain of physics, the investigator learns to reason upon the same principles from the material to the immaterial, and both mind and matter are brought under the same common law of forces. These forces are so adjusted as to connect penalty with many of the forms of moral wrong, but they do so only in part. To escape this form of penalty is to escape penalty altogether; and the chances of escape are many, and the expectations of escape are boundless. The laws of God are in the place of God; the man's concern begins and ends with these laws, and not with the law-maker. The natural issue is, that piety should come to be a particular form of prudence; and that religion, in its best state, should come to consist in selfishness refined and systematized into its worst. Men must unlearn such speculations-must see that physical laws are one thing, and the law written in the heart another, if they are to attain to any rational conception of moral government, and to possess any disposition to listen favourably to what may be said in favour of the doctrine of inspiration.

Men who see the condition of man in this light, of course belong to the class who regard the ethical intelligence of man as sufficient to his need as a religious being. This class embraces men who partake, in other respects, of a wide diversity of thinking. But wherever this opinion obtains, revelation in any special form is precluded as superfluous. The presumption is, that every man's best light must be supposed to be that which he brings with him into the world-that if the case be not so, the blame must be with his Maker, not with himself. What right men have to give law in this manner to the Creator, determining for Him what He may or may not do, never seems to enter the thoughts of such speculators. Were they a little more mindful of the world of facts which bespeak man's great need of reli