an inward connexion with the consciousness of God, and into the relation of these present circumstances to the Bible, as the worldmirror for mankind.

The second part of this first and introductory book consists, accordingly, of such a preliminary discussion.

The sixth and last book, again, is made up of the fundamental outlines of a method for the understanding of the Bible in the light of universal history.'

From the Chevalier's eloquent commendation of the Bible to the reader, supposed to be painfully oscillating between the opposite and yet related tendencies to scepticism and superstition, foiled at every turn, and ready to sink a victim to despair, we gladly extract the following, which, though not untainted with the vicious influence of his false philosophy, must be allowed to be a fine passage upon the whole :

'To whatever quarter you may look, nothing, save the moral conscience and the world's history is left you. But it is not outward histories you desire to learn. No, it is the history of thine own spirit and of its eternal primeval thought (!) during the thousands of years that thou wantest to contemplate, and that in the mirror of a historical book comprehensible to all. For if thine aim be of the right kind, thou takest thought for thy brethren. Should there exist a book containing the history of God amongst the children of men, that, for certain, must be the code whose sure and infallible interpreter might and must be the all-uniting Spirit. Yes, that is what thou seekest. It must be a book which speaks to thee of reality, and accordingly of what is temporal; which tells thee what kind of consciousness of God (Gottesbewusstsein) has actually governed the world's history. But you as little desire an outward history as a philosophical system; a pious legend, moreover, as little as a profoundly significant myth. The book must possess a true historical core, and must reflect for thee true personal and human consciousness. It must have a

unity within itself, a centre of light to clear up what is obscure, and an inner element answering to the outward. It must show thee what is eternal and what is temporal, the eternal as temporal and the temporal as eternal. It must give thee an answer to the questions: Whence comes this race of man? Whither goes it? for on that point, ultimately, thou layest all the stress; something within thee asks for knowledge of this kind, no longer out of curiosity, or thirst for learned information. It is the purely human within thee which, with divine power, impels thee to ask, Whence came I? Whither am I going? What must I become?

'But just because there is this longing within thee, because this faith lives in thee, the belief that the realities of history, rightly viewed, go forth to meet such a longing, and warrant it, the belief that there must exist such a divine response precisely for our times; for this very reason, I say, mankind is in possession of such a book. This book is

called by thy people, is called by the world in which thou livest, 'The Book,'The Scripture;' and in the highest sense is The Book.

"The Book' is its name, for it is the Book of mankind, which is God's own congregation. In the congregation and out of the midst of the congregation did it originate; it belongs to mankind as the great universal congregation spread over the earth and throughout the centuries. The Christian possesses the larger half in common with the Jew; the Mohammedan nations, the youngest children of the Book, acknowledge both its heroes, and preach in harmony with

them.

'The histories of this book are God's Word to mankind. A Word, it is true, in servant form; but so is everything Divine which moves over the earth: so is the Divinity itself, as eternal thought of coeternal existence in the world. A book of fragments, it is true; but in these fragments breathes a living spirit. A book, it is true, composed in poor speech, but in words which do not pass away, since every human heart bears witness to them. A book of thousands of years, full of seeming contradictions, like nature and man, and the history of our race; yet ever young and one in itself by virtue of the unity of the Spirit, whence it proceeded, just as creation is one in itself, with all its oppositions, yes and even by means of its oppositions. A book of the wise, and yet intelligible to every child, in the same way as the nature of God, i.e., according to the measure of its understanding; a book written in dead languages, and yet eternally living in the tongues of the nations.

'Open its first and last leaves. The first tell thee whence thou comest and whither thou goest. From God to God, from the Eternal through the temporal to the Eternal. They tell you, you will what you ought, if you only resist as little the eternal laws of your being, as the earth, on which you walk, the power of attraction. What they tell thee, has preserved mankind during thousands of years from the most perilous byepaths; from unbelief in the form of the worship of fate, or in the shape of the absurd opinion of chance, or of the assumption of a schism within the eternal thought itself (Fatalism, Epicureanism, Dualism).

That, and much else besides, which may grow clear and intelligible to thee, the first leaves of that book mean and say. But the last leaves, that mysterious book of the revelations of a seer, with which this Bible closes, are they not sealed with seven seals? Only believe, and thou loosest them all, if thou hast received within thee God's message of salvation, and if from the centre of this consciousness of God (Gottesbewusstsein), thou lookest within thee and around thee, and with reason and moral earnestness contemplatest the eighteen hundred years which lie between these visions and thine own times. Then, perhaps, the book will tell thee moreover, that as then so now an old world is near its end, and that the present time is pregnant with a new one-on this earth, in this generation of the children of men.

'Only with all this forget not one thing: That which is outside

Bunsen's Rationalism.

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ourselves must be learned in order to be understood; and no man knows what he has not learned-neither your clergy and popular orators nor you yourself. Hast thou really ennobled thy curiosity into a thirst for knowledge, thy thirst for knowledge into a thirst for salvation, and brought thy thirst for salvation into harmony with love and reason before searching into the mysteries of the world's order, and its revelations?'-Pp. 92-96.

In this passage there is much to which we object but who does not see how the religious feeling of the author gets the better in general of his Gnostic headpiece? We are scarcely over the threshold of the second book, however, into which he thus ushers us, ere we begin to feel half stifled in the atmosphere of Rationalism in which we find ourselves. The introductory sections profess to give an account of the distinctive character of the consciousness of God (Gottesbewusstsein) as it existed amongst the Hebrews. Their two great fundamental ideas, we are told, were the unity of the human race, and the conception of a kingdom of God. Man formed in the image of God, and the destiny of mankind to become ultimately the subjects of a universal kingdom of righteousness and truth, this is the substance of the teaching of the law and the prophets. Prophecy is next treated of, and is resolved into magnetic clairvoyance, selfinduced at the will of the seer, but distinguished from that of our Regent-street séances, by not being mercenary and by being employed for moral ends. In an additional section on the subject, the author insists strongly on the necessity of conceding' more scope to the quasi-supernatural element in prophecy, than the Rationalist expositors are in the habit of doing, although, of course, nothing beyond the phenomena of magnetic clairvoyance is on any account to be admitted. The last of these introductory sections shows from the name Jehovah, and from another name of God, Ani-hu ( I am He'), employed in the so-called song of Moses (Deut. xxxii. 39), (which composition, however, Bunsen attributes to the time of Israel's subjugation under ChushanRishathaim,) the necessity of acknowledging a metaphysical element in the Hebrew consciousness of God. In these designations of the Divine Being he finds, as usual, his own philosophical system, although he does not go so far as to assert that the Hebrew seers were themselves such deep thinkers, as to draw such momentous conclusions from them.

Our minds being thus suitably prepared we are now admitted without further ceremony into the presence of 'the four leading personages who represent the Hebrew consciousness of God. These are, Abraham the friend of God, Moses the lawgiver and prophet, Elijah the seer and popular leader, and Jeremiah the

prophet of the falling kingdom. Here the criticism of the oldfushioned Rationalist septuagenarian of Eichhorn's.school forthwith comes into play, and the handle once turned, the wellremembered tunes are ground off to the end. Our oldest accounts of Abraham's life were written in the age of David and Solomon, but the supplementary writer of the eighth century before the Christian era, to whom we owe the Book of Genesis in its present form, has added much valuable matter. What we have to believe about Abraham on the strength of these late traditions is summed up thus:- To express the thing in one sentence: Abraham is the oldest moral personality in the 'world's history; the revelation made to him is, like all true ' revelation, internal history of the spirit within itself, and accre'dited to Abraham by its moral reasonableness, by the power of "the act of faith to bless, and, in the light of the world's history, by the human character of the thought arrived at, and by its permanent effects down to the present time.' Abraham, in fact, was simply a great reformer, who substituted circumcision as a less abhorrent and more moral expression of the profound idea which lay at the basis of the human sacrifices of his Mesopotamian countrymen, viz., 'that the natural must perish and be 'absorbed into the spiritual, and the finite be consumed by the 'infinite.' This led to his being persecuted as a heretic and blasphemer of Moloch, and to his exile from his fatherland to Canaan, where his posterity became the depositaries of this earliest form of Protestantism.

Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, where, as we learn from the newly-published sequel of the Chevalier's great work on the history of that country, they had sojourned about fifteen centuries, till, at the instigation of the Washington who headed their revolt, the angel of death, in the shape of a numerous army of Palestinian Shepherds (the Hyksos), smote the firstborn of that devoted land. With such new light reflected from the monuments of the Nile valley, we may well hold cheap the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch! In fact, that lawgiver wrote hardly anything-nothing at all, indeed, so far as we can discover from this section of the work; though elsewhere, it is conceded that the ninetieth Psalm may possibly be from his pen. Many, however, of the religious and political institutions of the Jews are really to be traced to him; but such ordinances as are of an outward character were for the most part only wrung from him as concessions to the rude condition of the people. The statements that God 'talked with him as a man talks with his friend,' and that he 'saw the face of God,' import his profound faith in the moral

John the Baptist not Elias.

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ordering of the world, just as in like manner his call upon Mount Horeb is explained as a purely subjective transaction. For the Japhetic equivalent of the Semitic expression, the face of God,' is simply Providence.' The only authority we possess for the facts of his eventful life, is an 'epic' description belonging to the times subsequent to Solomon.

Our accounts of Elijah, in Kings, have also come down to us in no other form than a late narrative, in which we readily perceive a mixture of scanty historical notices with popular sagas. His triumph over the priests of Baal at Mount Carmel, for instance, was due to the people's sense of the powerful contrast between the orgiastic rites of his rivals, and the holy seer's simple prayer, inspired by reason and conscience. The voice of the Lord to him at Horeb, was nothing more than an inward voice. Bunsen even hints that our Lord's words (Matt. xi. 14) concerning John the Baptist, 'If ye will receive it, this is Elias which was for to come,' prove Him to have been a Rationalist.

'This saying,' he remarks, 'affords the surest canon for the understanding of Malachi's prophecy, and all of a like kind. Only he can appropriate this word of Jesus, who apprehends the prophecy spiritually, that is, rationally. How easy, from the stand-point of the old and modern Phariseeism and Sadduceeism, to lay hold of these words and to charge Jesus of Nazareth with doing violence to the Word of God, with unbelief or hypocrisy, falsehood, and fanaticism, on account of this expression! Either (it might have been said) thou believest in the prophecy or not; we have here to do not with a subjective view, nor with evasive phrases: come, speak out, and either do homage to the popular belief, or to reason! Such at that time was the spirit of the hypocrites, sophists, and blockheads! And so at all

times!'

Bunsen himself does not believe that Malachi, in any sense, predicted the appearence of John; but thinks he meant by his Elijah, the promised Deliverer of the oppressed and subjugated people, who was to appear upon the earth before the day of judgment; and he appeals in support of this view to John's own answer in the negative to the deputation from the Sanhedrim. To us, the Evangelist John's remark appended to his account of the deputation, And they that were sent were of the Pharisees,' seems highly significant, and is to be understood as an intimation that the question-Art thou Elias?' was addressed to the Baptist in the Pharisaic sense of a metempsychosis, and was accordingly answered by Him in the negative. But whether this or any other solution of the apparent contradiction between our Lord and His forerunner be preferred, nothing can justify the