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It is a thing of every-day experience. To-night there is a family in this congregation which before next Sunday will have left the town. If I had not gone, they would have gone. You will say it is a small event to chronicle in this manner. Still it shews, it serves as an example, how common are these local changes which make people who co-existed before co-exist no longer. It shews how hopeless it is to avoid such separations. They are part of our lot. They remind us of the great dispersion; they should make us long for the great reunion.

It is a serious thing to stand on the pier of some seaport town, and see a son or a brother setting sail for India or New Zealand. Such an experience marks, in a thousand homes, a particular day in the calendar with a peculiar, a life-long sadness. And when two hearts have grown into each other by a love real and faithful, and the hour of parting comes-comes under compulsion put upon them, whether by family arrangement or by God's providence when they know that in all probability they can meet never again on this side the gravetell us not that this is a light sorrow, a trifling pain; for the time, and it may be for all time, it is a grief, it is a bereavement, it is a death; long days and years may run their course, and yet the image is there; there, and not there-present in dream and vision, absent in converse and in communion. The Word of God is so tender to us, so full of sympathy, that it paints this kind of parting in all its bitterness. No passage of Scripture has been more fondly read and re-read by severed friends than that which contains the record of the love, 'passing the love of women,' between David and the king's son. That last farewell, of which the Prophet Samuel did not disdain to write the full, the almost photographic history, had in it no pang of unfaithfulness or broken vow: the two friends loved afterwards, in absence and distance; and it was given to one of them to bewail the death, in glorious though disastrous battle, of the other, in a strain of lyric lamentation which for beauty and pathos stands still unrivalled among the dirges and dead-marches of the most gifted minstrels and musicians of earth.

There are partings between souls. I speak still of this life. The sands of Tyre and Miletus were wet with tears when St Paul there took leave of disciples and elders. But those separations were brightened by an immortal hope, and he could commend his desolate ones to the word of God's grace, as able to give them an inheritance at last with him and with the saved. I call that a tolerable, a bearable parting. God grant it to us! How different is it when souls part!

There are partings every day between souls. There are those who once knew each other intimately, called each other friends, who now scarcely know whether the once beloved be dead or living. There are those who have drifted asunder, not because one is a lawyer and the other a clergyman; not because one has had experience abroad of battles or sieges, and the other has led the home life of a merchant or a landowner; not even because seas and lands have permanently separated them, and hands once closely clasped in friendship can never meet again in loving embrace on this side the grave. They have parted, not in body but in spirit. Ghosts of old obsolete worn-out friendships haunt the chambers of this being, to remind us of the hollowness of human possessions, and the utter transitoriness of all affections save one.

Go on then from the partings of time to the deathparting which must come. Set yourselves in full view of that take into your thought what it is-ask, in each several aspect of earth's associations and companionships, what will be for you the meaning of the text-' He saw him no more.'

The life-partings, and the soul-partings, all derive their chief force and significance from the latest and most awful-the one death-parting, which is not probably, but certainly, before each and all. He saw him no more.' That parting which the text itself describes was momentous, was memorable. That consecration

of the prophet by the prophet-that original casting upon him of the mantle, by which his designation was announced to him-now fulfilled in the very falling upon him of the same mantle, as the chariot of fire made its way into the abyss of heaven above-turned a common life, a life of ploughing and farming, prosperous (it should seem) and wealthy, into a life of absolute unworldliness, a life of dedication to God's service, and to the highest interests of a generation. This parting was indeed a meeting. It brought two lives and two souls into one, as no length of bodily converse could have united them. The spirit of Elijah then began to rest on Elisha, when they were parted for ever as to the society and fellowship of the living. It has ever been so with those highest and most solemn unities in which man with man, and man with his God, finds the crown and consummation of his being. It is through the deathparting that the everlasting meeting begins.

The Ascension.

When a man's heart is crushed within him by the galling tyranny of sense; when, from the dawning of the day till the setting of the sun, and for hours beyond it, he is compelled to gather straw for Egypt's bricks, and to bake them in the world's scorching kiln, till the spring of life is dried up within, and he is ready to say, Let me but eat and drink and sleep, for there is nothing real but this endless task-work; then, how sweet to say to one's self: ' And a cloud received him out of their sight.' Yes, just out of sight, but as certainly as if the eye could pierce it, there is a heaven all bright, all pure, all real; there is One there who has my very nature, in it toiled as ceaselessly as the most care-worn and world-laden of us all, having no home, and no leisure so much as to eat. He is there-His warfare accomplished, His life's labour fulfilled; He is there, at rest, yet still working, working for me, bearing me upon His heart, feeling for and feeling with me in each trial and in each temptation; and not feeling only, but praying too, with that intercession which is not only near but inside God; and not interceding only, but also ministering grace hour by hour, coming into me with that very thought and recollection of good, that exact resolution and purpose and aspiration, which is needed to keep me brave and to keep me pure. Only let my heart be fully set to maintain that connection, that spiritual marriage and union, which is between Christ above and the soul below; only let me cherish, by prayer and watching, that spirit of soberness, that freedom (to use St Peter's strong phrase in this day's Epistle) from the intoxications of sense, which makes a man in the world and yet not of it-and I too shall at last reach that blessed home where Christ already is, and is for me!

Thus, too, when sorrow comes, when the light of this life is quenched and annihilated by reason of some fond wish frustrated or some precious possession torn away; when I am beginning to say, take away now my life, for there is nothing left to live for-then I look upward and see, if not at this moment the bow in the cloud, the bow of hope and promise, yet at least the cloud-the cloud behind which Jesus is, Jesus the Man of Sorrows, having still a thought for every struggling sorrowing man, and holding in His hand the very medicine, the very balm, for the particular sorrow, the particular void, the particular stroke and pang, of each disconsolate desolate wayfarer towards the home and the rest.

Such is one part of the doctrine-let us say, one utterance of the voice-of the ascension. This is not your home. This life is not your all-no, not even now. Behind the cloud which witnessed the view of the ascending Lord, there, there is your country, your city, your church, your dwelling-place, even now. 'Ye are come,' the apostle says, 'to the city of the living God, to the spirits of the perfected just, to Jesus the Mediator, and to God the Father of all."

Comfort is strength. The very word means it. But we separate the two-in idea at least-and the ascension has both for us. We want not soothing only, but invigoration too. The ascension has a voice of this kind. 'The Lord working with them.' They went forth everywhere, in the strength of the ascension-the Lord working with them. He who is Himself in heaven for us, will have us on earth for Him. We must be His witnesses.

scene of some very fierce struggles in the wars against Mithridates and the pirates; and we are told that the latter war was only ended, not sixty years before the Apostle's birth, by the reduction of one hundred and twenty strongholds and the capture of more than ten thousand prisoners. The dismantled ruins may have easily and naturally impressed the boyish imagination of Saul of Tarsus with a vivid sense of the destructive energy of the military power of Rome; but the Apostle of the nations only remembers these earlier impressions to give them a spiritual application. The weapons of his warfare are not carnal; the standard under which he fights is a more sacred sign than that of the Cæsar; the operations which he projects are to be carried out kept the conquerors of the world at bay. He is invading the region of human thought; and as he fights for God, he is sternly resolved upon conquest. He sees rising before him the lofty fortresses of hostile errors; they must be reduced and razed. Every mountain fastness to which the enemy of Light and Love can retreat must be scaled and destroyed; and all the thought of the human soul which is hostile to the authority of the Divine truth, must be 'led away as a prisoner of war❜ into the camp of Christ. Truly a vast and unaccountable ambition; a dream-if it were not, as it was, a necessity; a tyranny-if anything less vigorous and trenchant had been consistent with the claims of the Truth of God, or equal to the needs of the soul of

Think we, all of us, of that coming day, when the cloud which concealed shall be the cloud which reveals Him. It is a solemn and touching thing to gaze into the fathomless depth of a perfectly clear sunlit or starlit sky, and lose ourselves in wonder and awe, as we vainly search out its mysterious, its ever-growing and multiply-in a territory more difficult of conquest than any which ing secrets. But scarcely less solemn or less touching, to one whose Bible is in his heart, to mark that little cloud, small as a man's hand, which just specks with white the otherwise blue expanse, and which, though it seems nearer, less ethereal, less celestial far than the other, is yet the token to Christian eyes of an ascension past and an advent future. A cloud then received Him. Ye shall see Him coming in a cloud. Knit the two in your thoughts-knit the two in your prayers and your aspirations-live in the twofold light of the angels' ascension-day greeting. This same Jesus which is taken up from you into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go.'

DR LIDDON.

man.

The particular opposition to the work of Christ which the Apostle encountered at Corinth was indeed less The REV. HENRY PARRY LIDDON, D.D., intellectual in its form than the Galatian Judaism, or D.C.L., Canon of St Paul's, and Ireland Professor than the theosophic angel-worship which was popular of Exegesis in the university of Oxford, is author at Colosse, or than the more sharply-defined hereof the Bampton Lectures for 1866, the subject sies of a later time which, as we know from the pasbeing The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour; toral epistles, threatened or infected the churches of also Sermons Preached before the University of Ephesus and Crete. St Paul's Corinthian opponents Oxford, Some Elements of Religion, being Lent resisted, depreciated, disowned, beyond everything else, Lectures, &c. Dr Liddon was educated at Christ the Apostle's own personal authority. This, however, Church, Oxford, and took his degree of M.A. in was the natural course of things at a time when single 1852. From 1854 to 1859 he was Vice-principal apostles well-nigh impersonated the whole doctrinal of the Theological College of Cuddesden; in not as one who was reasserting a personal claim of any action of the Church; and feeling this, St Paul speaks 1864 he was appointed a prebendary of Salisbury sort, but merely and strictly as a soldier, as an organ, I Cathedral. The volume of university sermons might say, as a function, of the truth. The truth had was originally published under the title Some an indefeasible right to reign in the intellect of man. Words for God, but that title was soon dropped-The Apostle asserts that right, when he speaks of bringwisely we think-as ' liable to misconstruction and ing the whole intelligence of man into the obedience of in deference to the opinion of critics.' The author Christ. Now, as then, Christ's Church is militant here says his volume makes no pretension to be a on earth, not less in the sphere of thought than in the volume of essays. 'An essay belongs to general sphere of outward and visible action; and St Paul's burnliterature; a sermon is the language of the ing words rise above the temporary circumstances which Church.' Dr Liddon, however, is an eloquent called them forth, and furnish a motto and an encouragepreacher, whose pulpit ministrations are highly fight in the ranks of the same army and against the ment to us who, after the lapse of eighteen centuries, prized, and appear to want no other graces of literature than those which he adopts.

Faith and Intellect (2 Cor. x. 5).

Here is an Apostle of the Lord Jesus who uses the language of a soldier. He is planning a campaign; nay, rather he is making war: he glows with the fire of a genuine military enthusiasm. The original Greek which he uses has in it a vigour and point which is lost, to a great extent, in our English translation. The writer might almost be a Roman general, charged to sustain the honour of the Empire in a revolted province or beyond a remote frontier, and bent upon illustrating the haughty maxim which defined the duty of an imperial people

To spare the vanquished, but to crush the proud.
Indeed, it has been urged that the recent history of
Cilicia itself may have well suggested this language to
St Paul. The Apostle's native country had been the

same kind of foes as he did.

Remark, first of all, that it is 'the undue exaltation of' intellect with which the Church of Christ is in energetic and perpetual conflict. With intellect itself, with really moral and reasonable intellect, with the thought of man recognising at once its power and its weakness, its vast range and its necessary limits, religion has, can have, no quarrel. It were a libel on the allwise Creator to suppose that between intellect and spirit, between thought and faith, there could be any original relations other than those of perfect harmony. Paradise could have been the scene of no such unseemly conflict as that which we are considering; and here, as elsewhere in human nature, we are met with unmistakable traces of the fall of our first parent. A range of granite mountains, which towers proudly above the alluvial soil of a neighbouring plain and above the softer rocks at its immediate base, speaks to the geologist of a subterranean fire that at some remote epoch had thus upheaved the primal crust of the earth with convulsive violence. And the arrogant pretensions of human thought in the

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children of Adam speak no less truly of an ancient convulsion which has marred the harmony of the faculties of the soul, and has forced the mind of fallen man into an attitude which instinctively disputes the claims of revelation.

The Mysteries of Nature.

The wonderful world in which we men pass this stage of our existence, whether the higher world of faith be open to our gaze or not, is a very temple of many and august mysteries. You will walk, perhaps, to-morrow afternoon into the country; and here or there the swelling buds, or the first fresh green of the opening leaf, will remind you that already spring is about to reenact before your eyes the beautiful spectacle of her yearly triumph. Everywhere around you are evidences of the existence and movement of a mysterious power which you can neither see, nor touch, nor define, nor measure, nor understand. This lives speechless, power noiseless, unseen, yet energetic, in every bough above your head, in every blade of grass beneath your feet. It bursts forth from the grain into the shoot, from the branch into the bud; it bursts into leaf, and flower, and fruit. It creates bark, and fibre; it creates height, and bulk; it yields grace of form and lustre of colour. It is incessant in its labour; it is prodigal of its beauty; it is uniformly generous and bountiful in its gifts to man. Yet, in itself, what is it? You give it a name; you call it vegetation. And perhaps you are a botanist; you trace out and you register the variety of its effects, and the signs of its movement. But after all you have only labelled it. Although it is so common, it is not in reality familiar to you. Although you have watched it unthinkingly from your childhood upwards, and perhaps see in it nothing remarkable now, you may well pause in wonder and awe before it, for of a truth it is a mystery. What is it in itself this power which is so certainly around you, yet which so perfectly escapes you when you attempt to detect or to detain it in your grasp? What is it, this pervading force, this life-principle, this incomprehensible yet most certainly present fact, but an assertion of the principle of mystery which robes the soil of God's earth with life and beauty, that everywhere it may cheer the faith and rebuke the pride of man! Yes, when next you behold the green field or the green tree, be sure that you are in the presence of a very sacrament of nature; your eye rests upon the outward and visible sign of an inward and wholly invisible force.

Or look at those other forces with which you seem to be so much at home, and which you term attraction and gravitation. What do you really know about them? You name them: perhaps you can repeat a mathematical expression which measures their action. But after all you have only named and described an effect; you have not accounted for, you have not penetrated into, you have not unveiled its cause. Why, I ask, in the nature of things, should such laws reign around us? They do reign; but why? what is the power which determines gravitation? where does it reside? how is it to be seized, apprehended, touched, examined? There it is: but there, inaccessible to your keenest study, it remains veiled and buried. You would gladly capture and subdue and understand it; but, as it is, you are forced to confess the presence of something which you cannot even approach.

And you yourselves-fearfully and wonderfully made as you are-what are you but living embodiments, alike in your lower and your higher natures, and in the law of their union, of this all-pervading principle of mystery? The life-power which feels and moves in your bodies successfully eludes the knife of the anatomist, as he lays bare each nerve and each muscle that contributes to the perfection of feeling and movement. Yet how much more utterly mysterious is your human nature when you examine its higher aspects; when you analyse mind, and personality, and that marvellous mystery of language,

wherein thought takes nothing less than a physical form, and passes by means of a sensible vehicle from one immaterial spirit to another!

ISAAC TAYLOR-DR WARDLAW.

A long series of works on theology and mental philosophy-ingenious in argument, and often eloquent though peculiar in style - proceeded from the pen of ISAAC TAYLOR (1787-1865). Mr Taylor's father was an artist and engraver, a nonconformist, who afterwards became minister of an Independent congregation at Colchester, and subsequently at Ongar in Essex (ante, 174). Ísaac Taylor was born at Lavenham in Suffolk. He first commenced writing in the Eclectic Review. He seems to have early settled down to literature as a profession. In 1822 appeared Elements of Thought; in 1825, The History of the Transmission of Ancient Books to Modern Times; in 1826, The Process of Historical Proof; in 1829, The Natural History of Enthusiasm. At that time the belief that a bright era of renovation, union, and extension presently awaited the Christian Church was generally entertained. Mr Taylor participated, he says, in the cheering hope, and his glowing language and unsectarian zeal found many admirers. The tenth edition of the volume is now before us. Discord, however, soon sprung up in Oxford; and Mr Taylor, in some papers on Ancient Christianity, published periodically, combated the arguments of the Tractarians, and produced a number of works, all of a kindred character, illustrating Christian faith or morals. These areSpiritual Despotism, 1835; Physical Theory of Another Life, 1839; Lectures on Spiritual Christianity, 1841; Saturday Evening, 1842; History of Fanaticism, 1843; Loyola and Jesuitism, 1849; Wesley and Methodism, 1851; Home Education, 1852; The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 1852; The Restoration of Belief, 1855; &c. In 1856, Mr Taylor wrote for the North British Review a long critical analysis of the works of Dr Chalmers, which gave great offence to many of the leading supporters of the Review, and led to its suspension for some time. With cordial admiration of the character and exertions of our great countryman, Mr Taylor questioned if much of his writing would live. The works of Dr Chalmers, he said, were deficient in method, in condensation, and style; his reasoning was also frequently inconsistent, and his opinions were hampered by adherence to creed, or to the systematic theology of Scotland. The following extracts will give an idea of the style and manner of Mr Taylor.

Rapid Exhaustion of the Emotional Faculties.

From Physical Theory of Another Life. Every one accustomed to reflect upon the operations of his own mind, must be aware of a distinction between the intellectual and the moral faculties as to the rate at which they severally move; for while the reasoning power advances in a manner that might be likened to an increase according to the rule of arithmetical progression, and which consists in the adding of one proposition to another, and in the accumulation of equal quantities; it is, on the contrary, the characteristic of the passions, and of all intense sentiments, to rise with an accelerated movement, and to increase at the rate of a geometrical progression. Even the milder emotions of love and joy, and much more the vehement sensations,

such as hatred, anger, jealousy, revenge, despair, tend always towards this sort of rapid enhancement, and fail to do so only as they are checked, either by a sense of danger connected with the indulgence of them, or by feelings of corporeal exhaustion, or by the interference of the incidents and interests of common life. Especially it is to be noticed that those of the emotions which kindle or are kindled by the imagination, are liable to an acceleration such as produces a physical excitement highly perilous both to mind and body, and needing to be speedily diverted. And although the purely moral emotions are not accompanied with precisely the same sort of corporeal disturbance, nevertheless, when they actually gain full possession of the soul, they rapidly exhaust the physical powers, and bring on a state of torpor, or of general indifference.

to petrify the heart, has been already adverted to, and it receives a signal illustration in the monkish life, especially in its more perfect form of absolute separation from the society of man. The anchoret was a disjoined particle, frozen deep into the mass of his own selfishness, and there embedded, below the touch of every human sympathy. This sort of meditative insulation is the ultimate and natural issue of all enthusiastic piety; and may be met with even in our own times, among those who have no inclination to run away from the comforts of common life.

Hebrew Figurative Theology.

From The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.

Now this exhaustion manifestly belongs to the animal unanimity, speak of God relatively only; or as He is The Hebrew writers, one and all, with marvellous organisation; nor can we doubt that if it were possible related to the immediate religious purposes of their to retain the body in a state of neutrality, or of perfect teaching... It is the human spirit always that is the quiescence, from the first to the last, during a season of central or cohesive principle of the Hebrew Theology. profound emotion, then these same affections might ad- The theistic affirmations that are scattered throughout vance much further, and become far more intense, than, the books of the Old Testament are not susceptible of as it is, they ever can or may. The corporeal limitation of the passions becomes, in truth, a matter of painful con-bution; and although they are never contradictory one a synthetic adjustment by any rule of logical distrisciousness whenever they rise to an unusual height, or of another, they may seem to be so, inasmuch as the are long continued; and there takes place then within principle which would shew their accordance stands the bosom, an agony, partly animal, partly mental, remote from human apprehension: it must be so; and and a very uneasy sense of the inadequateness of our to suppose otherwise would be to affirm that the finite strongest emotions to the occasion that calls them out. mind may grasp the infinite. The several elements of We feel that we cannot feel as we should emotions are Theism are complementary one of another, only in relafrustrate, and the affections which should have sprung tion to the needs and to the discipline of the human upward are detained in a paroxysm on earth. It is thus mind; not so in relation to its modes of speculative with the noblest sentiments, and thus with profound thought, or to its own reason. grief; and the malign and vindictive passions draw will not build up a theology, in a scientific sense; what Texts packed in order their tormenting force from this very sense of restraint, they will do is this: they meet the variable necessities and they rend the soul because they can move it so little. of the spiritual life, in every mood, and in every possible

:

Does there not arise amid these convulsions of our nature, a tacit anticipation of a future state, in which the soul shall be able to feel, and to take its fill of

emotion?

Selfishness of the Anchoret.

From The Natural History of Enthusiasm.

The ancient monkery was a system of the most deliberate selfishness. That solicitude for the preservation of individual interests which forms the basis of the human constitution, is so broken up and counteracted by the claims and pleasures of domestic life, that though the principle remains, its manifestations are suppressed, and its predominance effectually prevented, except in some few tempers peculiarly unsocial. But the anchoret is a selfist by his very profession; and like the sensualist, though his taste is of another kind, he pursues his personal gratification, reckless of the welfare of others. His own advantage or delight, or-to use his favourite phrase-the good of his soul, is the sovereign object of His meditations, even if they embrace the compass of heaven, come round ever and again to find their ultimate issue in his own bosom; but can that be

his cares.

true wisdom which just ends at the point whence it started? True wisdom is a progressive principle. In abjuring the use of the active faculties, in reducing himself by the spell of vows to a condition of physical and moral annihilation, the insulated says to his fellows, concerning whatever might otherwise have been converted to their benefit, 'It is corban;' thus making void the law of love to our neighbour, by a pretended intensity

of love to God.

That so monstrous an immorality should have dared to call itself by the name of Sanctity, and should have done so too in front of Christianity, is indeed amazing, and could never have happened if Christianity had not first been shorn of its life-giving warmth, as the sun is deprived of its power of heat when we ascend into the rarity of upper space.

The tendency of a taste for imaginative indulgences

occasion of that life.

the figurative theology of the Scriptures (and this must
If we were to bring together the entire compass of
would be easy

be the theology of the Old Testament),
to arrange the whole in periphery around the human
spirit, as related to its manifold experiences; but a
hopeless task it would be to arrange the same passages
Absolute Being. The human reason falters at every
as if in circle around the hypothetic attributes of the
step in attempting so to interpret the Divine Nature;
yet the quickened soul interprets for itself, and it does
the fears, the hopes, the griefs, the consolations of years
so anew every day, those signal passages upon which
gone by have set their mark.

A son of Isaac Taylor, bearing the same name, and Vicar of Holy Trinity, Twickenham, is author of an interesting volume, Words and Places, or etymological illustrations of history, ethnology, and geography (third edition, 1873). Mr Taylor bids fair to add fresh lustre to the 'family pen.'

DR RALPH WARDLAW (1779-1853), of the Independent Church, Glasgow, was author of Discourses on the Socinian Controversy, 1814, which have been frequently reprinted, and which Robert Hall said completely exhausted the subject. Dr Wardlaw published various sermons and theological essays, and was a learned, able divine, and a very impressive preacher. A Life of Dr Wardlaw was published in 1856 by Dr W. L. Alexander.

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other publications of Mr Dale are-The Sabbath Companion, 1844; Commentary on the Twentythird Psalm, 1845; The Domestic Liturgy and Family Chaplain, 1846; &c. Mr Dale, while at college in Cambridge, published some poetical narratives, The Widow of Nain, The Outlaw of Tarsus, and Irad and Adah, afterwards collected into one volume, 1842. Mr Dale was a native of London, born in 1797. He was for some time Professor of English Literature at the London University, and subsequently at King's College. He died in 1870.

The Bridgewater Treatises form a valuable series of works on the theology of natural history; The Earl of Bridgewater (1758-1829) bequeathed a sum of £8000 to be invested in the public funds, and paid to persons appointed by the President of the Royal Society to write and publish works on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation. The works so produced are- -The Hand, its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as evincing Design, by SIR CHARLES BELL, Professor of Surgery in the university of Edinburgh (1774-1842); Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology, by DR WILLIAM BUCKLAND, Dean of Westminster (1784-1856); The Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man, by DR THOMAS CHALMERS (1780-1847); The Physical Condition of Man, by DR JOHN KIDD; The Habits and Instincts of Animals, by the REV. W. KIRBY (1759-1851); Chemistry and Meteorology, by DR W. PROUT; Animal and Vegetable Physiology, by DR P. M. ROGET (1779-1869); Astronomy and General Physics, by DR W. WHEWELL (1794-1866). The names here given afford sufficient evidence of the judicious administration of the trust. The President of the Royal Society called in to his aid, in selecting the writers, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London, and it is creditable to their liberality that the first of the treatises was assigned to a Presbyterian minister-Dr

Chalmers.

PROFESSOR JOWETT.

The REV. BENJAMIN JOWETT, a native of Camberwell, and born in 1817, was elected to a scholarship at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1835, and became a Fellow in 1838. In 1842 he commenced his career as tutor, which he held till 1870, when he was elected Master of Balliol College. In the interval, Mr Jowett held several appointments and published several works. In 1855, on the recommendation of Lord Palmerston, he was appointed Regius Professor of Greek, and the same year he published a Commentary on the Epistles of St Paul to the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans. In 1860 he contributed an essay on the Interpretation of Scripture to the volume entitled Essays and Reviews. In this essay, and also in his commentary on St Paul's Epistles, Professor Jowett was charged with having promulgated heretical opinions, and the case was brought before the Church courts, but dismissed on the ground of the inapplicability of the statute under which the proceedings had been instituted. In 1871 the learned professor published the result of many years' labour, Plato's Dialogues translated into English, with Analyses and Introductions, four volumes.

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On the Interpretation of Scripture. The difference of interpretation which prevails among ourselves is partly traditional, that is to say, inherited from the controversies of former ages. The use made of Scripture by Fathers of the Church, as well as by Luther and Calvin, affects our idea of its meaning at the present hour. Another cause of the multitude of interpretations is the growth or progress of the human mind itself. Modes of interpreting vary as time goes on; they partake of the general state of literature or knowledge. It has not been easily or at once that mankind have learned to realise the character of sacred selves from human eyes as circumstances change; it is writings-they seem almost necessarily to veil themthe old age of the world only that has at length understood its childhood. (Or rather perhaps is beginning to understand it, and learning to make allowance for its own deficiency of knowledge; for the infancy of the human race, as of the individual, affords but few indications of the workings of the mind within.) More often than we suppose, the great sayings and doings upon the earth, thoughts that breathe, and words that burn,' are lost in a sort of chaos to the apprehension of those that receives only a conventional interpretation, even when come after. Much of past history is dimly seen, and the memorials of it remain. There is a time at which the freshness of early literature is lost; mankind have turned rhetoricians, and no longer write or feel in the spirit which created it. In this unimaginative period in which sacred or ancient writings are partially unintelligible, many methods have been taken at different times to adapt the ideas of the past to the wants of the present. One age has wandered into the flowery paths of allegory,

In pious meditation fancy fed;

another has straitened the liberty of the Gospel by a rigid application of logic; the former being a method which was at first more naturally applied to the Old Testament, the latter to the New. Both methods of interpretation, the mystical and logical, as they may be termed, have been practised on the Vedas and the Koran, as well as on the Jewish and Christian Scripbeing not that they have hidden mysterious or double tures, the true glory and note of divinity in these latter meanings, but a simple and universal one, which is beyond them and will survive them. Since the revival of literature, interpreters have not unfrequently fallen into error of another kind from a pedantic and misplaced use of classical learning; the minute examination of words often withdrawing the mind from more important matters. A tendency may be observed within the last century to clothe systems of philosophy in the phraseology of Scripture. But new wine cannot thus be put into old bottles.' Though roughly distinguishable by different ages, these modes or tendencies also exist together; the remains of all of them may be remarked in some of the popular commentaries of our own day.

More common than any of these methods, and not peculiar to any age, is that which may be called by way of distinction the rhetorical one. The tendency to exaggerate or amplify the meaning of simple words for the sake of edification may indeed have a practical use in sermons, the object of which is to awaken not so much the intellect as the heart and conscience. Spiritual food, like natural, may require to be of a certain bulk to nourish the human mind. But this 'tendency to edification' has had an unfortunate influence on the interpretation of Scripture. For the preacher almost necessarily overflow with the subject; even if he have the power, he oversteps the limits of actual knowledge; his feelings has seldom the time for accurate thought or inquiry; and in the course of years spent in writing, perhaps without study, he is apt to persuade himself, if not others, of the truth of his own repetitions.

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