how wonderful a series of poets conspired to give shape and continuance to the vast delusion; how at the critical conjuncture one man arose who made the daring attempt to embody the fantasy of ages in himself; and how, though in his own person he failed and died for his failure, his followers found multitudes foolish and slow-hearted enough to believe in his delusion, and to propagate what has since become the prevalent faith of the world.

Of course, this represents the worst phase of infidel Rationalism. Not all the Rationalists are of this extreme type: in fact its representatives and patriarchs are fast dying out. But the same spirit of restlessness under the yoke of Shem infests a large host of biblical critics, who do not desire to throw it off altogether. Many of them accept the fact that Christianity is a development for the world of Judaism for a nation; but they compound for their submission by demanding license to reconstruct the records of that great development after their own fashion. And that fashion is endlessly diversified: every man has his theory, his interpretation, his view, through the whole gamut of empirical skepticism, of which a denial of inspiration, however, is the key-note. Many of them are men of consummate learning, and of perseverance which no labor can damp while life continues its pulsation. Some of them are acknowledged as the highest philological authorities in the sacred language, and all its cognate dialects: their grammars and dictionaries are as yet the most popular, notwithstanding the latent infidelity which lurks amid their roots and derivations.

It would take many pages to sum up the theories which have been adopted by those who would save the Bible as a whole, but who think it requires a thorough reconstruction. They are toiling now with prodigious ardor upon their several schemes for reconciling the Bible to Geology, Chronology, and commonsense; and every year brings to light some new scholar busy with his own particular "Bible-work." We thought that we were pretty well acquainted with the old Rationalist "supplement hypothesis" and crystallization theories" and "JehovahElohistic fragment-compilers;" but Dr. Kurtz opens up a range of more modern reconstructions, which will require that we begin our studies anew before we can present our summary to the reader.

These laborers in the dark are toiling, like the poor Israelites about whom they write, to make bricks without straw. The Babel they build is perpetually crumbling under their hands, before one has time to tell its towers. Meanwhile, it is an unspeakable comfort to know that they provoke the pious emulation of other men, as learned and as furnished with all subsidiary instruments as themselves; and, as far as we can judge, every new contribution to theological exegesis is soon matched, if it is not anticipated, by another equally full of sound research, and written on the right side.

Dr. Kurtz, Theological Professor in Dorpat, is a very voluminous, and at the same time a very careful, writer. What is still better, he is a thoroughly evangeli cal, right-hearted man, whose reverence for the word of God is as profound as his study of it is exact. These two volumes are the first installment of what will be his greatest work; but he had prepared for it by several lesser treatises, which have been partially absorbed in this publication. His Bible and Astronomy has been very much valued in Germany, as being the best attempt to solve the great questions which science has raised upon the Mosaic account of the Creation. An able abridgment of it is prefixed to the present translation; and it will be read with much interest, on account of its happy admixture of speculation and good sense, by many who will dissent from a considerable number of its conclusions. It may be mentioned also that he is the author of a succinct Manual of Church History, which, as we perceive, is destined to take its English place by the side of Neander and Gieseler.

The present work is avowedly a History of the Old Covenant, that is to say, a history of the dealings of Providence with the Jewish people, as the elect race in which God preserved, and by which he transmitted, the great mystery of redemption to be accomplished in the fullness of time. This is a simple statement of the author's design: to trace the great Evangelical Preparation, the preparatory history of the Incarnation, from the time when the divine purpose narrowed the sphere of its operation to the stock of Abraham. But the elaborate way in which the historian reaches and establishes his particular object is singularly characteristic of the German mind. That mind was never yet known to plunge in me

dias res. The proper starting-point of this work is the covenant of God with Abraham; but that starting-point is itself a goal which we must reach through three hundred pages of preliminary matter. For the introductory history of the preAdamite earth—which was left, according to a theory common in Germany, without form and void as the result of the fall of angels—the author is of course not responsible, as it was not prefixed through any design of his, though, had it been so, it would not have been at all surprising. And, as it respects the Introduction proper, we have no complaint to make against it; on the contrary, it opens up a great deal of very valuable discussion, and is generally of equal importance with the rest of the work.

"The Incarnation of God in Christ, for the salvation of man, constitutes the central point in the history and in the developments of mankind. The fullness of time, for which all preChristian history was merely meant to prepare, commences with this event, and rests upon it. In the preparatory stage, history took a twofold direction. In the first, man's powers, left to their own bent, resulted in the various forms of pre-Christian Heathenism. The second, guided and directed by divine influence, constituted pre-Christian Judaism. These two series of developments differing not only in the means, but also in the purpose and aim of their development-run side by side, until, in the fullness of time, they meet in Christianity, when the peculiar results and fruits of these respective developments are made subservient to its establishment and spread. The separation of these two series, and the point where the distinctive development of each commences, dates from the selection of one particular nation. From that time onward every revelation of God clusters around that nation, in order to prepare it, so that ultimately the climax and the final aim of all revelation, the incarnation of God, might be attained in the midst of that people, and thence a salvation issue, adapted not only to that nation, but also to other nations. The basis of this history is a covenant into which God entered with that nation; and which, amid all the vicissitudes and dangers attending every human development, he preserved and directed till its final aim was attained. This covenant, whose object was a salvation which was to be accomplished, is designated the Old Covenant, in conmade with all nations, on the basis of a salvation which, in the fullness of time, had actually been accomplished."-Vol. i. p. 1.

tradistinction to the New Covenant which God

Consistently with this general statement, the author gives a rapid but suggestive sketch of sacred history from the

creation, as it was preparatory to the vocation of the father of the Israelites. The calling of Abraham was the new beginning of a series of developments of which the incarnation was the fulfillment and end; and thus the history of the Old Covenant, having begun by giving a particular aspect to God's general designs, ends by being merged in a general covenant with the whole race in Christ. The covenant with Abraham is regarded as preeminently the covenant of the Old Testament. Former covenants were merged and for a season, so to speak, lost in this; while the subsequent covenant on Mount Sinai was merely a subordinate appendage. We shall state briefly our author's views on both these points.

:

The covenant of grace into which God entered with our first father, before Paradise was left, and on the very scene of his fall, determined with the Flood. In the which had preceded the Deluge had not language of our author: "The economy attained its goal, namely, to exhibit salvation by the seed of the woman." If this purpose was not to be given up, the former development had to be broken off by a universal judgment, and a new one to be commenced. The whole antediluvian history of the kingdom of God was an utter failure: sin prevailed and increased universally and even the pious descendants of Seth yielded to the general contagion. The human character of the race was marred and perverted by the mysterious intercourse of angels and men; so that a new beginning was imperatively needed. The sinfulness was universal, and it was more than mortal sinfulness: it became necessary that the race should begin again with one man; and that man was found. The history of this first sad stage of man's relations to the divine government will be read with much interest; but it must be read with great caution. The disquisitions on the sinful elements already present in the world, on the tempter, the cherubim, the commerce of the sons of God with the daughters of men, and other topics which rise on that ancient enchanted ground, are learned and exhaustive, and, on the whole, temperate. We might expect that a German theologian would be driven, by his instincts, to side in every case with the more mysterious interpretation. But he is not always wrong in following his instincts; and Dr. Kurtz, in particular, is too thorough

ly orthodox to allow speculation to lead him astray in any essential article of faith.

The renewal of the covenant with mankind, in the person of Noah, began afresh the probation of mankind. Man's sacrifice expressed his sinfulness and hope of salvation; and God, on his part, restored his benediction to the earth, and man's preeminence upon it. The new world was placed under a dispensation of forbearance, (Gen. 8: 2,) until the fullness of time. Ararat pointed to Calvary in the far distance: but Sinai lay between; and a preliminary law was given as the first elementary schoolmaster, containing the basis and commencement of the law given afterwards upon Sinai. This Elohim covenant was entered into with all nations; and the rainbow, spanning all the earth, was the Lord's secret handwriting and attestation, to be always legible when the dark storms, recalling a former judgment, gave place to the shining of the sun which assures a present, and predicts a future, grace. But this general covenant stands in close connection with the preeminence which was destined for Shem in the history of the great preparation for the fullness of time. Jehovah, in Noah's prophecy, is to be the God of Shem; Elohim, the God of Japhet, will enlarge his race and borders, but only so that ultimately it shall find its spiritual way to the tents of Shem. Canaan is, for a long season, placed under the curse. Meanwhile, sin, in all the three races, went on, as before the flood, to its consummation. Another flood was not to purify the earth; but a new development must begin in the history of the covenant. A fearful punishment, which contained the prophecy of an ultimate blessing, descended upon the race which made Babel their tower of defiance. The nations were suffered to go their own was of heathenism; the prodigal son was permitted, under a certain awful divine sanction, to go into the far country, carrying his perverted traditions with him, until the great meeting again in Christianity with his elder brother.

But it was not until the call of Abraham that Heathenism and Judaism began their distinctive development. The father of the faithful was taken out of the midst of an idolatry which was universal, and in which the reserved and predestinated race of Shem participated. He began a new beginning, as distinctively the third as

Noah's had been the second, after Adam's the first. There was, after him, no other beginning till Christ came to end and to begin all things. The giving of the law on Mount Sinai was no interruption of this development, as the flood and the dispersion had broken off former developments. The history which commenced with Abraham was an entirely new history, and continued unbroken till the judgment which Titus was called to execute against the covenant people. "The giving of the law on Mount Sinai is only a high point, although the most prominent, in the history between Abraham and Christ. It is not the commencement of a new history. True, it is called a covenant; but it does not differ essentially from that with Abraham. It does not stand in the same relation to the Abrahamic as the latter to the Noachic covenant. The covenant with Noah was made with all mankind; the covenant with Abraham was made with him as the ancestor of the holy people, while that on Sinai was made with the people as the seed of Abraham."

All this is certainly true, as far as the definition of the author's object is concerned. He did not undertake the history of revelation, which would have set the whole Bible before him; nor the history of the kingdom of God, which would have embraced all the economies of the divine dealings from the first promise to the consummation of Christ's glory in his saints; nor the history of the preparation of the Gospel which would have included the former half of this last vast subject; nor the history of the Theocracy, which commenced with the giving of the law; nor that of the Noachic covenant, which would terminate with the Christian missions that brought the descendants of Japhet into the tents of Shem. But his object is to give the entire history of the Old Covenant, entered into with one people in the person of their father Abraham, and continued through a series of vicissitudes, of which the following is the author's summary:

"The history of the Old Covenant passes, from its commencement to its termination, through six stages. In the FIRST stage it is only a FAMILY-history. During that period we are successively made acquainted with each of The twelve sons of the latter form the basis of three patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. the national development. In the SECOND stage these twelve tribes grow into a PEOPLE, which