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indecency of the passage cited. On which side, in the controversy between the Hegelians and their opponents, lies the scepticism of the Sadducees combined with the arrogance of the Pharisees, must be left to the consciences of the parties; but that for all who call themselves Christians, there is One who ought never to be degraded from the dignity of the Judge to the level of a litigant in our angry contentions, there cannot be two opinions. The Saviour's language, we need hardly say, was not, as is pretty plainly insinuated, of an evasive kind,—such as we too often get from the Rationalists when asked, for instance, whether He really rose from the dead. He did not mean to say, John is the Elias of Malachi, if you are weak enough to believe it; but something quite the reverse-viz., 'If your faith is sufficiently strong not to be staggered by the seeming contrast between the great worker of miracles, Elias, and John, who works none, if you are willing (el OλɛTE) to receive the truth, this reed shaken by the wind is the Elijah of the prophet.' Of course, Bunsen, who makes short work of the Old Testament accounts of Elijah's miracles by branding them as 'popular sagas,' could not interpret the words thus; but he had no right to attribute to Jesus his own 'canon' for the Rationalistic exegesis of prophecy. After Elijah comes Jeremiah, whose heroic ministry he describes with glowing eloquence. We are glad to find that he concedes the substantial fulfilment of his prediction of the Seventy years' Captivity, though how he explains the fact on his theory of mere clairvoyance or introspection (schauen), he leaves us at a loss to say. Further on, we find him dilating upon the prophet's sufferings, in what strikes us at once as being a very exaggerated style. The picture, with all our sense of the hardships of Jeremiah's incarcerations, is palpably overdrawn, and we are amazed to find so stern a critic as Bunsen fondling the legend found in some of the Christian fathers, that the bold confessor was at last even stoned to death as a blasphemer. Little by little, light dawns upon us, and we begin to divine the drift of all this. It is even so. The great discovery is in due time modestly announced. Jeremiah is the Servant of God,' so prominent in the latter half of Isaiah (chap. xl.-lxvi.). The iceberg whose neighbourhood we suspected from the freezing sensations we felt, is down upon us at last. Our most sacred associations are outraged. The fifty-third chapter, the Holy of Holies of the Old Testament, its very Calvary, is invaded afresh by a Jewish conceit, for which the Rabbi (Saadias, A.D. 892-942) who first invented it may be allowed the excuse of desperation, but which certainly does no credit to the Christian Doctor of Divinity who shows himself so proud of the achievement of its independent origination.

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Baruch's numerous Works.

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Our critic further boasts of having succeeded in identifying not only the illustrious Sufferer in that chapter, but also the Great Unknown, to whom Rationalism, which could never forgive Isaiah for mentioning Cyrus by name a couple of centuries too early, long since attributed the so-called Appendix to that prophet. It is Baruch, Jeremiah's disciple, who has described with such pathos his master's martyrdom. 'A generation after Jeremiah, and, if we mistake not, by that disciple of this greatest of all the 'prophets, whose prophecies have been appended by the Synagogue to Isaiah, this great word was spoken:The true victory over the world is the sacrifice of the teacher who consciously offers himself up for the salvation of his people and of mankind from sin.' Our readers perceive that we refer to the 'fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, and to the Servant of God who is there depicted.' Baruch, indeed, makes for the first time a very great figure here. The Chevalier who, since he agrees with others in rejecting the Apocryphal book ascribed to him, possesses no criterion by which to judge of his style, is yet resolved to make him a great literary character. Here is a list of some of his writings, with their respective dates:—

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B.C. 580 The Lamentations.

570

559 555

Desolation and Future Deliverance of Zion and
Judah. Is. xxiv.―xxvii.

Vision of the Fall of Babylon. Is. xxi. 1-10.
55 Epistle to the Jews in Chaldæa. Jer. 1. li.
The World's Jubilee Song over Babylon's Fall.
Is. xiii. xiv.

554 546

545 Edom and Israel, Ruin and Redemption. Is. xxxiv.

XXXV.

The Glad Tidings of the New Jerusalem, and of the
Suppression of all Idolatry. Is. xl.-lxvi.

Besides these numerous and important productions, Baruch is the author of the Book of Job; although there was previously extant an Aramaic popular legend, but with no more pretensions to be considered a real history than the Thousand and One Nights. Of this composition of Baruch, and its twin product of the Hebrew Philosophy, Ecclesiastes, our author speaks as follows:- Job is a Semitic drama of the time of the Captivity. The dramatic element is evolved out of the epos, without attaining to an independent shape. The narrative itself is of Arabian origin, and was known a long time before Ezekiel, by means of an Aramaic popular book. Ecclesiastes is a purely contemplative 'doubting work of the later Persian period. The person of Solomon therein is only drapery, as the conclusion itself expressly

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says, (?) although such a remark is quite superfluous.' He pays Baruch a high compliment when he says the stand-point of the book of Job is that of the German philosophy from Leibnitz to Hegel, although without its dialectic forms." One or two other items of the Rationalist stock-in-trade remain. For instance, the faded tricolor Zechariah. To the two prophets of that name recognised by the elder pundits of the school-viz., the son of Iddo, (chap. i.-viii.), and the son of Jeberechiah, (ix.-xi.), we have now the name of the third added, to whom the remainder of the book belongs-viz., Urijah, the son of Shemaiah, (Jer. xxvi. 20-23). Of Hengstenberg's masterly refutation of the entire scheme no notice is taken. Again, that oft-exploded device of the pagan Porphyry, the Maccabean Daniel, is vamped up afresh, with a very novel embellishment, it is true-viz., that Daniel himself (whom other Rationalists besides allow to have been an historical personage, although not the author of the book that bears his name) lived in the time, not of the Babylonian, but of the Assyrian captivity! The history of Jonah is expressly styled a myth, spun, as Bunsen believes, out of certain figurative expressions of the prayer in the second chapter (vv. 2, 3, 5), which he admits to be the genuine production of the Hebrew prophet of that name. He compares the fable of Arion carried through the sea on the back of a dolphin, which he thinks was developed in like manner out of Arion's Hymn to Poseidon, preserved by Elian. This must be admitted to be as ingenious as it certainly is perverse. Of the objection from our Lord's words, Matt. xii. 40, he gets rid by the flippant assertion, that these words are those of the narrator, not those of Jesus. This is what Johnson called knocking a man down whom you cannot shoot fairly with the butt-end of the pistol.

Our space will not permit us to follow the Chevalier through the remaining portions of the volume. They treat of the leading ideas embodied in the general view of things taken by the Prophets and Psalmists respectively, of the Hebrew consciousness of God as exemplified in the national polity and philosophy; and lastly, of the beliefs and aspirations of the two centuries before Christ; the whole concluding with a comparison of the Hebrew with the Pagan-Semitic and Mohammedan religions. By way of appendix, we have a number of Excursus, relating to biblical questions, which could not be so fully discussed in the body of the work.

There is much in all these sections which we had noted for remark; but the Christian feelings of our readers must have been already sufficiently pained by our previous exposures. As for the Chevalier, we must leave the psychological problem,

Results of Bunsen's Speculations.

509

to which we referred at the outset, unsolved. We admire him for his genius, his learning, and the noble stand he has made for religious freedom, and we by no means underrate him for his many and great virtues both public and private. But how, with his evident desires, and his earnestly expressed intentions, to labour in these pages for the restoration of belief in the Bible, he could have treated it as he has done, we are utterly at a loss to comprehend. But we see what havoc the pwтov fevdos of a false philosophy, the impossibility of a miracle, makes in the pleasant paradise of the soul, even in the case of the very best disposed. What trees of life it roots up, what rivers of truth it cuts off at the fountainhead, what paths of softest sward, and green alleys of delight, it strews with rugged flint! This plan of pacification, what is it but to make a wilderness, and call it peace? You tell us the Bible is the Book of Mankind, and you confiscate it for the use of the few dozens of believers in the Almighty Syllogism; that it is the Mirror of the World's History, and you dash it into a thousand fragments!

To ourselves, as Englishmen, the publication before us suggests some weighty lessons. The author, as we have seen, has lived among us so long as to have become, in his general opinions and tastes, more than half an Englishman. He is, moreover, a man of strong religious feeling. But what must be the natural tendencies of that 'higher criticism,' as it is called, among our German neighbours, seeing the work it has done even in such a mind? The Hegelian, pantheistic jargon, which pervades this performance, and the sweep of destruction which the author sends over the documentary proofs of revealed religion, while still professing himself a believer in it, give us a significant token of what we may ourselves expect from the prevalence of such speculations in this country. We may hope, indeed, that our English common sense will be found proof against not a little of this nonsense; and an influence much above that will, as we earnestly trust, be vouchsafed to us. But the tendency of things on which we have to reckon, and which it will behove us to oppose ceaselessly and to the utmost, is that which seems to aim at showing how small a residuum of anything really Christian may be retained, and a man be still entitled to call himself a Christian. The effect of this licence in Germany has been, as we have shown, so destructive of everything that may be honestly called Christianity, that the rush now is in the direction of a servile Puseyism, as a half-way house, we fear, towards a still more servile Romanism. An utter contempt of the past has thus prepared the way for a base surrender to it. Chevalier Bunsen looks on with amazement, and would call the renegades from their course, not

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seeing that it has been precisely such teaching as his that has put them on this false track, and that every utterance he makes acts upon them only as a stronger impetus Romeward. We hope to be more than ever vigilant as to what is doing among ourselves in this way. Sound and honest criticism we shall be prepared to welcome, come whence it may; but we shall spare no pains to expose the pretentious, the hollow, and the mischievous.

ART. IX.-Papers relative to Disturbances in China.

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THE question which has been put to issue by the Dissolution of Parliament is, substantially, whether the Government of this country is to be conducted henceforth by the present Ministers, or is to be transferred to a combination of parties whose distinguishing characteristics, if installed in power, resting neither in their Chinese policy nor in their general principles of domestic legislation, would be marked simply by a difference of administrative ability. For while, on the one hand, it is generally agreed that the leaders of opposite parties in the House of Commons have long ceased to be actuated by any broad distinctions in their first principles of home government, it is clear, on the other, that whatever were the Administration now in power, it would have no alternative but to adopt the Eastern policy initiated by Sir John Bowring, and sanctioned by Lord Palmerston.

The latter of these considerations is very obvious. If Lord Palmerston's Government had unhappily withdrawn in consequence of the recent decision of the House of Commons, a new Administration must have been formed upon the principle either of adopting, as now inevitable, a line of policy which its members, nevertheless, professedly condemned, or of yielding to the insults and the perfidy of the Chinese Commissioner. In the former event, the only appreciable result would have been found in an increased difficulty of bringing the Chinese authorities to terms. In the latter, the massacre of our subjects in China, for which such a decision would be the signal, and the consequent extinction of our eastern trade, would have involved us, not in a renewal of the present isolated measures of retaliation, but in the prosecution of a deadly war.

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