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to this-that it is impossible for God to make a supernatural Revelation, i. e. a revelation distinguishable and distinct from the actings of each man's mind. They argue that, because there are diversities of opinion amongst men on religious subjects, because there are disputes about the interpretation, genuineness, and text of Scripture, Scripture cannot be a Divine Revelation in the ordinary sense of the term. But this amounts, after all, to saying that God cannot cause truths, which are essential to man's welfare, to be committed to writing. For, if He be supposed capable of making a revelation in this shape and way, it follows, as a matter of course, that the moment it is committed to writing, it must be capable of being perverted-the ingenuity of man will always enable him to explain in various senses any document whatever that may be put before him. It is impossible to suppose a case in which questions may not be raised by persons of a speculative turn, on any documents, however clearly they may be expressed. There is not a book in existence on religious subjects, which may not be in some way differently interpreted; and if it be an ancient one, there will also be difficulties about the text, the genuineness, authenticity, &c. Criticism will in time find difficulties in any book or document.

And yet, notwithstanding this, have we any shadow of a reason to assert that God may not take this mode of communicating his will to man? On what authority, or by what process of reasoning, can we arrive at such a conclusion? It is granted that such a procedure does not infallibly conduct men to the truth-to unity in the faith! In the practical working of the system, there are many things which seem like defects and anomalies; it is not a system of optimism: there is no mechanical process by which the minds and actions of all men are brought into submission to God's will. But, if these anomalies and imperfections in the operation of the system on man, or (more correctly speaking) if these aberrations of the human will and intellect be reckoned on as an argument against the fact of God's having made a revelation (as we believe Him to have done) in Holy Scripture, or against the possibility of His making any revelation in written documents, then we say with confidence to the sophists who argue thus, that their arguments put an end to revelation altogether. They cut themselves off from the possibility of believing in any revelation at all. Our proof of this position is as follows:

Those unbelievers who reject the written word of God, and hold it to be a mere collection of old chronicles and fables, fall back upon the reason, or instinct, or conscience of man, informed directly by God himself, as their guide in religious questions. They will not have so uncertain a guide as Holy Scripture joined

with the instructions of God's ministers, and the traditions of the Catholic Church of all ages as a check on the license of private speculation. No this is not sufficient for them. They must have an infallible and divine monitor within them. Now, then, let us ask of these sophists, Is THEIR MONITOR INFALLIBLE? If they reject Scripture, and the creeds of the universal Church, because they have not created unquestioning agreement in all points amongst men, what can they say for their own boasted reason, instinct, divine light, or Logos? Has that reason or light led them to unity? Has it cast Strauss, Lessing, Tom Paine, Coleridge, Hare, Neander, Arnold, Maurice, Froude, Newman, and Ward, exactly in the same mould of doctrine? Are there no differences to be found amongst those who recognize the inward light? Quakers, Unitarians, Rationalists, Mystics, Deists, enthusiasts of all kinds, recognize equally the inner divine light; and yet, is there a single point on which they are agreed? The result, then, is, that these advocates of the boasted supremacy of the human intellect, as divinely informed, are driven to the conclusion that there can be no revelation-that God has no means of making known His will to man; for the same arguments which they employ against the Scripture Revelation are equally valid against the revelation which they suppose to be made to every individual. And there is but one step from this to atheism. For how can they believe that there is any God, if they do not allow Him the power even of distinctly telling man his duty? What a notion of God is this! What a helpless Deity they must picture to themselves! The deities of Greece and Rome, soiled as they were with impurities, would yet be far preferable to such a useless Being as this. Of one point we may be sure, that any one who conceives the notion of a Deity without the power of teaching, ruling, and exercising Almighty power over man, is a mere fiction of imagination; and that any one who professes to acknowledge such a God is not a worshipper of the TRUE GOD, but of an idol conceived in the vanity of his own heart.

The faith of the Christian stands on a foundation far elevated above the contests and uncertainties of philosophy falsely so called. It is rooted in depths where the sophist is unable to penetrate, and ascends in its majestic simplicity into regions of high thought and holy meditation, where the Scribe and the Sadducee, the Reasoner and the Speculator of this world, are left at an immeasurable distance beneath. Believing in that which the world around us tells him-in that which the voice of consentient humanity attests to him-the existence of an Almighty Creator and Ruler, on whose awful decree the happiness or misery

of man is dependent,-believing also in the power of God to reveal this will to man, for his salvation-the Christian knows, not only from the testimony of all around him, but from the voice of conscience guided by the Holy Ghost, that God has indeed revealed Himself to us, and that the Scriptures contain this Revelation, and are His Word. He is rational in this belief, because he acts on the same motives on which his belief in all past events and facts depends. He knows that, if he were to doubt the grounds on which Scripture, i.e. on which the facts and doctrines of Christianity depend, he might just as reasonably doubt every event in history, or even question the evidence of his senses. He knows that high probability, amounting to moral certainty, and founded on experience, and moral reasonings, is all that we can attain to in this life. There is nothing which may not be disputed and questioned. Therefore, without entering on the vain and useless speculations which Philosophy would place in his way, he remains rooted and grounded in the faith," "being persuaded in his heart of hearts that "holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost"-that "holy Scripture is given by inspiration of God"-that "if they hear not Moses and the Prophets," the Apostles and Evangelists, "neither would they be persuaded though one rose from the dead" before them! And it is this holy simplicity of faith, which the "wicked dreamers" of philosophy "falsely so called " cannot realize themselves, and seek to destroy in others. May their unholy work come to nought! and may some of them be led, before it be too late for themselves, to return from the soul-ensnaring speculations of infidelity, to the sobriety, humility, and consistency of that faith which the unlettered Apostles planted, and which will survive all speculations and all philosophies.

ART. II.-1. Hebrew Characters derived from Hieroglyphics. The original Pictures applied to the Interpretation of various Words and Passages in the Sacred Writings, &c. By JOHN LAMB, D.D., Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. London: J. W. Parker.

2. A Vindication of Protestant Principles. By PHILELEUTHERUS ANGLICANUS. London: J. W. Parker.

3. Biblisches Realwörterbuch zum Handgebrauch für Studirende, Candidaten, Gymnasiallehrer und Prediger, ausgearbeitet von DR. GEORG BENEDICT WINER. Dritte sehr verbesserte und vermehrte Auflage. Leipzig: bei Carl Heinrich Reclam, sen. IT has become quite the fashion among our modern illuminati to represent the religion both of the Old and New Testament as largely impregnated with heathen elements. The period during which this adulteration was mainly effected is said to have been the Babylonish captivity, when the Hebrews were brought into close communication with the Medo-Persian magi. No longer crippled by ritual observances, and charmed (it would appear) by the sublimer teaching of their conquerors, they speedily lost that exclusive sternness which had characterized their forefathers: the "hostile odium," which Tacitus remarked in their estimate of all foreign systems, and which a far greater than Tacitus recorded of them as they "sat down and wept by the waters of Babylon," was for a while most mysteriously suspended; and, with all the alacrity of emancipated youth, they proceeded to enrich the doctrine of Moses from the treasures of Gentile philosophy. Nor, in the opinion of the authors to whom we are alluding, was this facile and free-thinking spirit confined to one school or faction: it soon conciliated a very general welcome, among priests and prophets as well as the ignoble vulgar; and, if we except a small remnant which was hereafter to expand into the sect of the Sadducees, the Hebrew nation returned from their brief exile thoroughly converted to the Zend-Avesta.

As a first consequence of this change, the dualistic principles of the magi were henceforward current in Judæa. To the one supreme Lord, the Author of all good, was conjoined Ahriman, the source of all evil,-modified, it may be, by the peculiar temperament of the Jews, and distinguished by a Semitic, instead of

a Zendic title, but still essentially the same being as in the creed of Zerdusht, and subsequently in that of the Manichees. In support of this hypothesis, we are assured that, before the Babylonish exile, the Hebrews had no demonology whatsoever; that Satan, the chief of reprobate angels, was, in a dogmatic sense, altogether unknown, there being in fact no room either for his existence or his agency, so long as moral evil was regarded as man's own act, so long as the penalty was believed to be entailed by his own unsolicited transgression. God was (they tell us) the proper source (ausgangspunct) of all unhappiness, and every calamity inflicted upon men was a necessary and immediate exertion of His righteous vengeance (Winer, ii. 384).

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From the same eventful epoch, we are instructed to date the angelology" of the Hebrews, including under that term their dogmatic teaching on the subject, both of good and fallen angels. Presentiments, it is confessed, there had long been of intelligences ranking above man; as, for example, the genii of popular tradition, which owed their origin (we are told) to an imperfect apprehension of the omnipresence of the Deity, and served as so many points d'appui for grasping theological abstractions: yet never till the Hebrews were initiated into the learning of the Parsee magi, had their conceptions of superhuman beings gained any degree of maturity, or any systematic conformation. Then it was that the Amshaspands of Ormuzd, together with the subordinate Izeds and Feruers, re-appeared in the angelic orders of the Rabbins, and, through them, in the pages of the New Testament while their demonology found its type in the corresponding arrangement of the antagonistic kingdom of darkness.

In other words, if we are to believe the writers whose views we have just been stating, a revolution took place in the religious system of the Hebrews, at the period of the Babylonic exile; and Sadduceeism, which confessed" neither angel nor spirit," was, in the age of our blessed Lord, the legitimate representative of the patriarchal creed.

Now the historical incongruities of this theory are so many and so inexplicable, that we might have reasonably left it to silent reprobation; and had its influence been wholly restricted to the other side of the German Ocean, such most likely would have been our decision. But, alas! there is too much evidence that the plague is fast spreading even here, that the locusts of a profane philosophy are threatening to consume our own goodly heritage; and to remain silent in such a case is to abandon our proper calling, nay, it is to provoke the still deadlier plague of a judicial darkness," by which of old time the locusts were succeeded.

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