Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

CHRIST OUR LIFE.*. "The present essay is an enlarged form of a single chapter of a previous work," and is divided into nine chapters, as follows: 1. Statement of Views; 2. Is the Immortality of man directly asserted in the Scriptures? 3. Is the Immortality of all men assumed, or taken for granted, in the Scriptures? 5. Import of the Sentence of Death; 6. The General Tenor of Scripture Language; 7. Several Terms and Passages; 8. Passages supposed to imply the Immortality of the Lost; 9. Collateral Arguments.

The views of the author are, as our readers are well aware, comprehended in the position that the word death means the extinction of being as the termination of a course of punishment. He concedes that the phrase eternal life, means the gift, not of immortality only, but of a happy immortality. The antagonist creed that is commonly received is best stated and defended in the Thesis that Death may stand for other evils than those which involve the extinction of being, and that the concession of the author, that Eternal Life denotes a blessed existence, suggests how this might be the case. In our view, the last position is the only one that consists with the natural interpretation of the Scriptures. We accord to the author ability, research, and an apparently Christian spirit, in the assertion and defense of his favorite tenet.

THOUGHTS BY A PLAIN MAN.t-This little book, we are told in the preface, was originally designed for the columns of a newspaper. The thoughts which it contains have obviously proceeded from a sound understanding and an earnest spirit. No little reflection must have been employed on this unpretending treatise, which stretches over the wide field of the moral government of God; discusses the profoundest principles which have ever tasked the efforts of the human mind, and does not evade the most serious difficulties involved in the system of natural and revealed Theology. The work is short, but there is much important and well presented information embodied within its pages. We would

*Christ Our Life. The Scriptural Argument for Immortality through Christ Alone. By C. F. HUDSON, author of "Debt and Grace as related to the doctrine of Future Life." Boston: John P. Jewett & Co. 12mo. pp. 160.

+ Thoughts on the Administration of God's Moral Government over our Fallen World. By a Plain Man. New Haven: Peck, White & Peck. 1860. 18mo. pp. 143.

earnestly advise our clerical friends to circulate a work that is so well fitted to be generally useful. We quote the following:

"It may be useful here to recall some of the positions taken early in these pages; as,

"That the great purpose of God in the administration of his government over our fallen world is the Consummation of the Kingdom of Christ;'

"That man is author of his own thoughts, and free and able to control his own volitions and acts;'

"That man is so treated everywhere in the Scriptures;' and

"That the administration of God's government must be consistent with his own sovereignty and with man's free agency.'

“In connection with what has already been said, can an honest mind take up the life of Christ, from the day he entered on his ministry, and follow it down to the day of his ascension,-take note of all that he said, did, and suffered; consider the character, manner, and object of his teaching,—and still doubt that the positions above repeated are well taken? Who can fail to see that our earth was fitted up and specially adapted to the wants and uses of sinners in a state of probation? And can it be denied that such adaptation had direct reference to the practical fulfillment of the plan of redemption?

“Idleness is the mother of sin; and how palpable are the wisdom and goodness of God in having laid upon man the necessity of laborious industry. He comes into the world with nothing in his hand. His necessities are immediate and imperative. They are also constant, and demand a daily supply. And he finds in climate, soil, and face of country, with various other surroundings, the necessity of constant and persevering industry. But he finds, moreover, the certainty, with God's blessing, of deriving from the pursuits of agriculture, commerce, and the arts, abundant means to make himself comfortable, and useful to his fellow men and to the cause of Christ. How wisely this for his encouragement." pp. 49-51.

THE DEBATE Between tHE CHURCH AND SCIENCE.*—The design of this volume is to vindicate the fame of that very able writer whose name appears upon the title-page, from what are alleged to have been the unjust attacks of his New England critics; and as the anonymous author repeatedly intimates that there is little chance that a book printed in Schenectady should be read in New England, which is called a provincial district, he has taken care that it should be printed and published at Andover. We advise our readers to read the book, for there are some able discussions in it of the subject matter announced in the title-page.

The Debate between the Church and Science; or, the Ancient Hebraic Idea of the Six Days of Creation. With an Essay on the Literary character of Tayler Lewis. Andover: Warren F. Draper. 1860. 12mo. pp. 437.

There are also some vastly amusing passages in it, which are almost as good "as a play." We extract a passage or two, assuring our readers that there are a great many left of the same sort. We cannot but tender to Professor Lewis our sincere sympathy, in the affliction that Providence has sent upon him in this overzealous friend.

[ocr errors]

The drift of the ecclesiastical mind in New England is towards philosophical religionism. Analyzing the ideas expressed by Philosophy and Religion, it appears that the phrase philosophical religion expresses a self-contradictory notion. Trois is the essential thing in the one,-Faith, in the other. In a philosophical religion, or where there is a strong tendency that way, the philosophical element tends to kill out the religious; and in a region infected with philosophical religionism, there will be a general tendency to philosophize, rather than to believe. Men will construct systems for themselves; and shades of belief, or rather of unbelief, will be developed in gradation from the most orthodox philosophical religionism to undisguised atheism.” p. 60.

[ocr errors]

"As might have been expected from his pursuits, our critic has turned to a pious naturalism. He feels the coldness, he sees the barrenness of philosophical religionism, and he seeks for something, after which his moral nature pines, in the teachings of Nature. The old religion still inspires him with awe, and kindles him with devotion; but he loves to put into the lips of Nature truths breathed only in revelation. He tinges her pale cheeks with pantheistic rouge; and very dear is his soul's communion with his Egeria, who whispers so much truth, or seems to whisper. Hence the voice from Schenectady, which broke in on his matins and vespers, warning that the Nature-Nymph knows not the supernatural,—has no eternal, unerring word for the soul,-seemed to utter in his ears words of profound infidelity.' That warning he heard, and that was all he would hear; that he understood, and that was all he would understand. Blind and deaf to all but that, he goes forth pro aris et focis. As came the book of Waldense or Bohemian of old to some well-fed, well-comforted, well-honored abbot, warning of the vanity of things to him venerable and personal, and seeming to threaten the passing away of all that was good and profitable on earth, so came to his comfortable study the book from Schenectady; and in the irate professor reappears the abbot, his astonishment, his very sincere rage, his overbearing manner, his bluster, and his barbarous Latin." pp. 61, 62.

"Time furnishes one parallel to the genius of Lewis, so exact that it might almost lead one to believe in the old doctrine of metempsychosis. The only name which that of Lewis suggests, is the name of the greatest of Frenchmen— the name of Pascal. The genius of each is the same. Each has the same mathematical genius, fitted for the safe examination of abstruse problems, and irresistibly compelled to grapple with them. In each is the harmony of the ideal and the practical. Great as writers, they are greater as men. Each have heroic fealty to truth, making them earnest in its defense, unsparing in the exposure of its counterfeits,-Bayards in the world of mind, without fear, without reproach. Each are masters of resistless logic, terrible invective, keen sarcasm, delicious

irony; the wit of each is allied to unearthly sadness; and each, in their true devotion to truth, make it subservient to fairest reasoning. The writings of each have passages of crystalline clearness, in which abstruse ideas are pictured with the brilliancy of poetry, and the accuracy of mathematics. They are endowed with an imagination entirely unique, a revealing rather than a creating faculty, effective of all the sublimity imagination can awake, yet resolving itself into clearness and far-reachingness of intellectual vision. Nor are their lives so unlike as it might seem. The one throws all his soul into a contest with the order of Jesuits; the other, into a contest with an age more jesuitical than the Jesuits.

"Pascal having surveyed all truth, projected a work which should embody that survey. The substance of it exists in fragments. What he did first for himself, then as preparatory to his work, that Lewis has done for himself. Something, too, of that which Pascal did for his work, he has done; and from all that he has written, it might be possible to compile a book of thoughts so wide in their range, yet so related, so ultimate yet clear, so wise, so true, and many of them so condensed, pointed, and felicitous in expression, that it would be worthy to be laid beside that of the great Frenchman." pp. 310, 311.

NOTITIA EDITIONIS CODICIS BIBLIORUM SINAITICI.*-Many of our readers will remember the interest which was excited, some eighteen months since, by the announcement, that a very ancient manuscript of the Old and New Testaments had been discovered in the East by Prof. Tischendorf. We have, in the pamphlet before us, recently received from Leipsic, a detailed account of this manuscript, and of the way in which it was found, together with an encouraging assurance that it will soon be published. One can scarcely read the author's simple story, without partaking in his own joyful feelings, and uniting in his expression of gratitude to God for this great gift to the church. He had been enabled by the favor of the Emperor Alexander of Russia to make a third journey to the Orient, in the beginning of the year 1859, and was making a short visit to the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, where, some fifteen years before, he had discovered certain fragments of a most ancient codex of the Septuagint version. On the fourth of February, 1859, the very day on which he had made arrangements for an early departure for Egypt, he

* Notitia Editionis Codicis Bibliorum Sinaitici, auspiciis Imperatoris Alexandri II. susceptae. Accedit Catalogus Codicum nuper ex Oriente Petropolin perlatorum ; item Origenis Scholia in Proverbia Salomonis partim nunc primum partim secundum atque emendatius edita. Cum duabus tabulis lapidi incisis. Edidit AENOTH. FRID. CONST. TISCHENDORF. Lipsiae: F. A. Brockhaus. 1860. 4to. pp. 124.

[blocks in formation]

happened to be walking with the steward of the monastery. The conversation turned quite naturally upon the great subject of the author's labors and investigations. The mind of his companion being awakened to interest by the conversation, he informed the author, on their return from their walk together, that, in his own apartment, he himself had a copy of the Septuagint, and, as they entered the room, he presented it to him, as it was, rolled up in a cloth. Tischendorf unrolled the cloth, and found, to his astonishment and delight, not only a very large portion of the Old Testament, but also the whole New Testament, without even the smallest part wanting, together with the Epistle of Barnabas and a fragment of the Shepherd of Hermas-and that too the very codex which, so early as 1855, he had declared to be the oldest of all the Greek manuscripts on parchment, which still survive. So overjoyed was he, that, unable to sleep, he spent the night in transcribing the Epistle of Barnabas, and then, on the following day, he obtained consent of the monks to have the manuscript forwarded to him at Cairo. After his arrival there, he further persuaded them to present it, through himself, as a gift to the Emperor Alexander, and thus it was brought to St. Petersburg in November of the same year. By the merest accident, as it seemed, had it been preserved from destruction, at the first, as a useless thing, and then again, by the merest accident, did it become known to this critical scholar, by whose means it will now be made the property of the world. We have abundant reason for thankfulness, that these seeming accidents were all really ordered of the Divine Providence and goodness, so that after hope had almost died away, the treasure was at length so wonderfully discovered.

Of the manuscript itself the author gives a description, and adds, at the same time, some pages of the text. In the Old Testament, it contains a portion of the Chronicles, the poetical books from Job to the Song of Solomon inclusive, Isaiah, with a portion of Jeremiah, the Minor Prophets, with the exception of Hosea, Amos and Micah; and of the Apocryphal books, Tobit, Judith, a portion of the Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus. We have not given the order of succession here, but, in the New Testament, we have, first, the four Gospels; secondly, the Epistles of Paul, that to the Hebrews being placed between the second to the Thessalonians and the first to Timothy; thirdly, the Acts of the Apostles; fourthly, the Catholic Epistles; fifthly, the Apocalypse;

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »