self-complacency on their lips. Eleven years passed away; the foreseen contingency arose; the solemn convention and the deliberate plan were ruthlessly and insolently torn to pieces; the very war and dismemberment which were to have been precluded came to pass in their worst form; the integrity of the Danish dominions, which the treaty of 1852 was to have secured, has been more utterly destroyed than it could have been had that treaty never been designed; and Great Britain, anxious, honest, blundering old soul, found herself in the position, first, of proposing in congress a plan for that very dismemberment she had persuaded the other great powers of Europe twelve years before to join her in denouncing as a thing not to be permitted, and secondly (if floating rumours be true) of urging the nomination as heir and possessor of the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein of that very Duke of Augustenberg whose claims it was her especial business in the treaty of 1852 to negative, adjudicate against, and buy off. It is no doubt possible enough, in home as in foreign politics, to look too far ahead, to be too anxious to forestal coming dangers, and to tie up and regulate the future. But thus much of philosophy and forecast we have surely a right to desire and demand of those who aspire to take a lead in public life, that they shall determine distinctly in what direction it is wise and beneficent that all legislative changes and all administrative action shall tend; and that they shall then take heed that their whole conduct shall work to guide the vessel of the State in that direction and to that end; that they shall form to themselves some rational and feasible ideal of England's future, and shall work with steady and converging purpose, as far as in them lies, towards the realisation of that ideal. At this point of our national history, for example, everyone fit to lead, everyone called upon either by position or by temper to speak, to write, to act, to vote, in political concerns, is bound, we think, to have some clear convictions, and some resolute intentions, on the two following points. First.-Is Great Britain henceforth to assert and to maintain her old position as a first-rate influential European power, who must have a voice, and use it, in every European question, difficulty, and dispute; must. as of yore, never be silent, and never speak without enforcing respect for what she says? Or is she to admit frankly, and without recalcitration or regret, and without having the admission driven in upon her from without, that recent changes in naval and military art, and other political events, have altered her relative position, and with it her social duties, and that she is by no means inclined to deplore or resist the change; that she does not choose, after duly considering her obligations, her vulnerability, and the progress which certain modern ideas and doctrines have made among her people, any longer to keep up such a military force as alone would enable her to impose her will upon reluctant peoples, or to take an active and supererogatory part in continental quarrels; that she holds it inconsistent with her dignity to meddle in them by counsel and homily alone; and that therefore she is determined henceforward to look after her own concerns more, and after those of other nations less than heretofore-satisfied that she is, and will always be, able to suffice for her own defence and her own guidance, but that she will do well to abandon the pretension or the wish to defend all the feeble or to guide all the foolish? Secondly.-Is that tendency which has undoubtedly set in, and which to many seems so desirable, and to many more so irresistible-the tendency, namely, to extend more and more the popular element in our system, to hand over more and more political power and political preponderance to the numerical majority, that is the less educated portion, of the people— is this tendency one to be cherished, though moderated and guided in its rate of action, or one to be dreaded, checked, and counter-worked? The means by which this tendency is to be forwarded or resisted, is a question of measures, of strategy, of feasibilities-about which those who think and wish alike may well differ and split asunder into sections. The feelings with which the tendency is to be regarded-the estimate of the consequences which will ultimately flow from it, should it prove permanent and successful-involve principles which lie at the very root of statesmanship, and separate earnest men, not into sections, but into parties-not into disagreeing workmen, but into hostile ranks. The above are questions of directions and of ends; and without clear convictions regarding them it appears to us that a man can scarcely make a single step in public life without disgraceful vacillation and many miry falls. W. R. G. 159 ART. VI.-ON THE RELATION OF THE PAULINE EPISTLES TO THE HISTORICAL BOOKS OF THE Die Apostelgeschichte nach ihrem Inhalt und Ursprung kritisch untersucht. Von Dr. Eduard Zeller. Stuttgart, 1854. Paley's Hora Paulina. New edition. Law. 1861. Christianity in the Cartoons referred to Artistic Treatment and Historic Fact. By William Watkiss Lloyd. London, 1863. A great change of opinion has taken place within the last hundred years among free investigators of the origin of Christianity, as to the relative value of the two main constituents of the New Testament-its historical and its epistolary contents, the ἐυαγγέλιον and the ἀποτολικών of the ancient Church. The English Deists of the last century, Chubb, Morgan, Bolingbroke and others, regarded Paul as the great corrupter of Christianity; and the same feeling was expressed, not perhaps with the same earnestness, in a well-known book which appeared some years ago, and was ascribed to Jeremy Bentham,-Not Paul, but Jesus. This prejudice against the Apostle of the Gentiles sprang out of strong aversion to the narrow and bitter Calvinism which took its stand on certain passages of his writings, and boldly defied expulsion. But with all due respect for these celebrated men, be it said—their own prejudice was a narrow one, resulting from a misapprehension of the nature of Christianity, and a want of insight into the conditions of its historical development. It implied a onesidedness of view, almost inseparable from that verbal interpretation of a spiritual power, that inability to distinguish the essence from the form of a religion-which took possession of men's minds at the time of the Reformation, and for more than two centuries affected with its consequences the freethinking and the orthodox alike. In the broader historical light now thrown on these subjects, we see clearly that Paul was the indispensable complement to Jesus. If without the idea of a Christ, Paul would have wanted the grand distinguishing inspiration of his ministry; without a Paul, as a vehicle to convey it through the length and breadth of heathendom, the pure spirit of Christ would have been absorbed into the arid soil of Judaism, or served only to water some small sectarian oasis of renovated Jewish life. Criticism, too, has shown that the most ancient and authentic monuments of our faith are contained in the undoubted Epistles of Paul; and that however intense the interest which must always attach to the Gospels, opening as they do such precious glimpses into the life and working of the great Prophet of Nazareth, they are nevertheless of later date, and in the form in which we now possess them, are a less direct expression of primeval fact than the apostolic letters, which grew at once out of the necessities of the oldest Church, and show us without any interposed medium of tradition what it was and how it felt. In tracing the origin of Christianity, we must set out from the Epistles of Paul. Here we have the earliest notice of the great social movement which ultimately revolutionised the world. This is a reversal of the once recognised order of handling the question. But it is an undeniable result of the latest and soundest criticism, and we must look it fairly in the face, and accept its legitimate consequences. Between the Gospels and the Pauline Epistles, according to the arrangement of our received text,* occurs an interesting book, the production of one of the evangelists, which serves as a bond of connection between them, professing to give an account of the labours of the chief apostles, more especially of Peter and Paul, in founding the Christian Church, and describing the state of things which occasioned the epistolary contents of the New Testament. It was an ingenious and original thought of Paley's, to establish the truth of the history and the genuineness of the correspondence, by tracing such indirect and consequently such undesigned coincidences between them, as would furnish a proof that the matter of the letters could not have been suggested by the history, nor the history have been drawn from the letters, but that both originated independently in a common basis of actual fact. To a certain extent Paley makes out his case. In regard to the larger and more important Epistles of Paul, the evidence which he obtains by this process of their genuineness is irresistible; nor is the inference less obvious, that underneath them must have lain a substratum of history, corresponding in its broad outlines and prominent facts with that which is contained in the book of Acts. But these are the very points which hardly require so elaborate a proof, for the most sceptical have never contested them. The foregone conclusion so deeply fixed in the old Pro Cod. Vatican. puts it after the Gospels, and immediately before the Catholic Epistles; Cod. Alexandr. in the same place; Cod. Cantabr. (which does not contain the Epistles), places Acts at the end of the Gospels arranged in a different order-the two Apostles first, Matthew and John, then Luke and Mark; Cod. Sinaiticus, between the Pauline and the Catholic Epistles, and Wetstein follows the same order in his edition. Lachmann and Tischendorf conform to the order of the Vatican. These variations in position do not at all affect the object of the book, which is to connect the ministry of Christ with that of the Apostles, and supply an historical commentary to the Epistles. testant mind of Europe, which Paley's argument was rapturously hailed as corroborating, he certainly did not with all his ingenuity establish; viz., that the Acts and the Epistles are in such perfect harmony, as to justify the use of both as religious authorities, from which texts can be cited to regulate practice and settle controversy. He adduced evidence in support of his case up to a given point, and in the right direction, but not all the evidence that was necessary to establish the conclusion demanded by the religious opinion of the time; and its deficiency would have been perceived at once, had not the prepossessions of the jury outrun the statement of the advocate, and put into it what it wanted. It applied to a particular aspect of the credibility of Christianity the same kind of reasoning which Dr. Lardner had already employed on a more extended scale. When the rationalism of the last century became dissatisfied with the old evidence of the witness of the Spirit, it turned to historical proofs for the assertion of its faith; and these demonstrated satisfactorily, that Christianity could not be a fiction, but filled a clear and definite place in the history of the world,-by the agreement of the main facts recorded of it, with what was known from other sources of contemporary persons and events. And valuable evidence this was, though it did not meet the postulates of the popular theology; for the old positions were retained with the adoption of a mode of proof that no longer sufficed to sustain them. Lardner proved beyond a doubt, that Christianity was a great historical fact; but he did not prove, that the Scriptures of the New Testament could be used as nearly every Protestant of his day affirmed they ought. Paley proved that we possess genuine Epistles of Paul; but he did not prove that our existing record of the history which underlies them is throughout a reliable record, not coloured in places by the traditions of conflicting parties, nor veiled at times in a cloud of irresolvable myth. Since Paley's time, that branch of philology which investigates the origin and component parts of ancient books-applied with a scientific thoroughness of procedure before unknown,has in various directions revolutionised the opinions of the learned, and compelled them to accept results which would once have been scouted as extravagant and absurd. It is beginning also to be felt, that the Bible must cease to be regarded as a book by itself, but must be brought within the sphere of ordinary human sympathies, and tried by the immutable laws of human thought; and that if we would know what it really is, and penetrate to its inmost life, we must wholly discard the old assumptions respecting it, and criticise it with |