after all has been thus confusedly whirled topsy-turvy. We shall only allow ourselves to say a few words in reply to the statements more distinctly put forth in the above summary.

With all the Jew's immeasurable superiority above the Greek, he is not one whit behind him, even in the point in which they are here compared. The Greek, instead of having attained to the knowledge of the infinite separation between the divine and the human, and advanced beyond that to some imperfect conception of the reconciliation and union of the two, which was to be effected in the person of Christ, had not yet risen to the conception of a God distinct from, and supreme above, the powers and objects of nature. And when its rising systems of philosophy exposed the fallacies and absurdities of the popular superstition, the Greek religion staggered to its fall, from its inability to grasp and to present that most elementary of all conceptions of the true God, which Judaism had carried in its bosom from its origin.

Nor was the Jew behind the Roman. Judaism was from the first, and through all its course, as unrestricted in its ultimate aims touching the spiritual reign of righteousness, which it was sent to introduce, as Rome was in its unhallowed lust of worldly power. And the frustration of Rome's ambition stands in signal contrast with the accomplished, or at least accomplishing, design of the religion of the patriarchs and the prophets, to whose enlargement it is the highest glory of the temporary successes of the imperial city to have been subsidiary.

Nor do these several religions stand in any thing like a coordinate relation to Christianity. This is, and always has announced itself, not the resultant of the various religious forces previously existing in the world, but the legitimate offspring of Judaism alone. Its God is the God of Abrahamits faith, the faith of Abraham-its believing adherents, the children of Abraham-its inheritance, the promises made to Abraham. The Gentiles, so far from possessing a religion related to Christianity as was that of the Jews, are declared to have had no hope, and to have been without God in the world. And the fact that the gospel found even more adherents from Greeks than Jews, instead of proving the larger antecedent riches of the former, proves rather their deeper destitution and their keener sense of poverty.

Some disciples of the Hegelian school have undertaken to apply the principles of their master to the Old Testament in detail. Vatke in his book, by a singular misnomer called Biblical Theology, distinctly announces it to have been his method, first, to determine speculatively what ideas must have unfolded themselves in the history, and in what order-to

determine, e. g., what the history ought to say as to the progress of religion; and with this settled beforehand, to advance to the exposition. Here his aim is not to verify his theory nor to correct it by the facts, but to correct the facts by it. The strangest perversions are of course the consequence, and that not in theology alone, but in criticism. These ever mutually corroborate or pervert each other. A correct theology is a staunch friend to a sound criticism. And a false theology is apt to betray its unsoundness by the necessity under which it lies of tampering with the truth of the history or with the genuineness of the record. The extravagances of Vatke find a fitting refutation in a kindred work from the same school, Bruno Bauer's Religion of the Old Testament. This is throughout polemical against Vatke, and is equally baseless and destructive with that which it opposes. They are well illustrated by the chemical phenomenon of two poisons equally malignant, acting as the antidotes of each other.

But we have dwelt long enough in the region of unbelief. It is sufficiently apparent that it is vain to look there for a correct estimate of the religion and the theology of the Old Testament. By an easy, though not a necessary reaction from the error of those who would empty the first half of the Bible of its meaning, believing interpreters have gone to the opposite extreme, which, though incomparably less injurious and offensive than the other, is still an extreme, and as such aside from the results of a just exposition, and needing to be corrected. As was already intimated in the outset, the usual method of theology is to reduce the entire Scriptures to one uniform homogeneous mass, from the whole of which thus blended, the system of truth is drawn. The Old Testament and the New are ranged precisely upon a level, and proof-texts are taken. indifferently from one or from the other. No clear distinction is drawn and maintained between their teachings, as to their relative perfection or the clearness of their announcement. Such a distinction is admitted to exist theoretically, and in the general; but practically, and in the details, it is neglected or lost sight of. No adequate conception is gained of the truths of the former economy, as a body, in their relation to the more fully unfolded, or more plainly established truths of the new. The result is, that instead of being gainers, we are really the losers by this method, even in regard to the defence of our Christian theology. Where the germ of a truth lay in the earlier Scriptures, and this meets its legitimate expansion in those that come after, a just and systematic conception of the Old Testament would lead at once to the detection of that germ, however undeveloped or remote in appearance from the form which it was afterwards to assume; and the argument

could be pressed directly and forcibly from that to the unfolded flower and the ripened fruit, while it could be shown, from the system in which it was found, why that truth in particular was in its germinal rather than in its unfolded state. On the method which overlooks the distinction between the Testaments, and throws all together as a common repertory of theological truth, we would, in the case supposed, be obliged, in proving our doctrine, either to force a meaning upon texts which they do not bear, or to admit that the proof is partial and defective, when we might and ought to claim that it is real and complete, all that could be expected or need be desired.

It is to confound the nature of the two dispensations to attempt to bring every thing into the old, with the same fulness and distinctness as in the new. Thus, there are plain intimations in the Old Testament of a trinity of persons in the Godhead, and the deity of the Messiah is very largely taught; and yet the attempt to make these fundamental doctrines of Christianity equally prominent in Judaism, must lead to the forcing of texts and to resting upon insecure arguments. The immortality of the soul was a part of the creed of ancient saints, but there is no need of assuming that they knew all which Christ and his apostles have taught us. And while, no doubt, Moses and the patriarchs knew far more of religious truth, and of the plan of mercy, than many are disposed to allow, still this does not justify the extravagant lengths to which others have gone in their ideas of the extent of revelation made beyond that which has been left on record; so much so, indeed, that it is hard to see how they would defend themselves against traditionists who claim this very thing in regard to the New Testament. Similar extravagant assumptions have been made with regard to their acquaintance with scientific and all other truth, as though Moses must have known as much about the origin and constitution of the universe as that Being who commissioned him, or as though dishonour were put upon our first father, by supposing him ignorant of steam or of the electric telegraph.

It is an error not to recognise the seeds of New Testament doctrine in the very earliest portions of the Old Testament; but then it is also an error to confound those seeds with the perfect growth which sprang from them. There is, in this, no approach to Manichean or to Gnostic depreciation of the Jewish Scriptures. These emanated from the same divine source with the writings of the apostles. They are equals of the lat ter in inspiration, and in their spirit and essence they are of the same universal and perpetual obligation. There was that about them, however, which was temporary. Their revelations of truth, however clear and glorious in themselves, were, as

compared with those which have succeeded them, partial and imperfect, designedly so; and it casts no imputation upon the wisdom or goodness of their Divine Author that they were so. It is from failing to recognise this, that the types have been made in many hands to teach all the mysteries of the Christian faith; and the prophecies have been found so full and explicit, as almost to render the gospels superfluous. A just idea of the relation of the two economies will save us from all temptation to allegorise, to multiply our assumption of double senses to a needless and unprofitable extent, or to employ any of that variety of means and applications which have been adopted to bring out meanings from the text which evidently are not there, to the neglect too often of the meaning no less important and far more obvious in its bearing upon Christian truth which really is there. From these and the like errors on the part of interpreters, it has happened many a time that the arguments drawn from the former dispensation to the present, even where there is abundant room for them to be strongly built, and on independent foundations, are vitiated by a needless and unworthy petitio principii.

The little treatise which has suggested this train of remark is not a Theology of the Old Testament, but simply Prolegomena, in which the writer's views are given as to the outline of such a work, and the principles upon which it should be conducted. It is written with not a little ability; but some of the sentiments which it betrays cannot be regarded as unexceptionable, at least by American theologians. Oehler is a strenuous defender of the supernatural character of the Old Testament, and of its intimate connection with the New. And from occasional glimpses of his sentiments, we are led to infer that upon many important theological questions he would be found to be right. But the development theory which he has adopted, and seems disposed to carry out in the most rigid manner, has vitiated his views of inspiration, and leads him not unfrequently to an undue depreciation of the Old Testament. Nevertheless, we shall be pleased to see his promised work, whenever it appears; for whatever its deficiencies or its errors, we hardly think that it can fail to prove a valuable contribution to a much neglected branch of theological literature.

He divides Old Testament theology into three portions, as found respectively in the books of Moses, in the writings of the prophets, including both the prophecies properly so called, and the theocratic history, and in the writings of the sacred poets. The system of religion, as revealed through Moses, lies at the foundation, and includes within itself both the patriarchal and the ante-patriarchal revelations. These being presented in Genesis, under the aspect of a preparation for, or an introduc

tion to, the covenant of God with Israel, belong properly to the Mosaic system itself, as a constituent of its religious faith, as the account which it gives of its own origin.

This Mosaic system was further enlarged, on the one hand, by the providential leadings of God in the history of his people, and by the inspired communications of the prophets. This falls under the second division. Then the third shows how it was again enlarged on the other hand, by the struggles and questionings which it occasioned in the minds and hearts of holy men, as they strove to fulfil its tasks, to master its principles, and to solve its problems. What he says under this head looks very much as though he meant to deny any other influence of the Spirit of God in this part of Scripture than that exerted in the sanctification of the writers. The lyric poetry of the Psalms is the domain of religious feeling, striv ing to reconcile existing contrarieties between the idea and the outward manifestation, not by pointing to a future realization, which is the method of the prophets, but by seeking a realization in their own experience, and by faith already appropriating the blessings of a salvation yet to be achieved. The didactic poetry of other books is the domain of reflection. In Proverbs, the enigmas and contradictions of the present state are almost lost from sight, in the contemplation of the divine order which has been established and now exists in the world. And the realization of the divine purpose, by an active conformity to the will of God, is presented as at once the duty and the wisdom of man. In the book of Job, these enigmas have forced themselves upon the soul with all their formidable difficulties, and in the struggle after their solution which ensues, anxious questionings are awakened as to the truth of the Old Testament idea of God, or the reality of his providential government. The book, though not without some presentiments of a higher solution, takes refuge at last in the mysteries of the divine wisdom, and then falls back again into the view of the matter from which it had set out as confirmed by the events at their close. In Ecclesiastes there has been the same struggle, and it has been fought through; but the result is not the solution, but despair of it. The highest wisdom is placed in resig nation; man is to use the things of this vain world as he best can, committing all to the sovereign pleasure of a sovereign God. A conviction is thus reached of the insufficiency of the Old Testament stand-point, and a negative preparation is thus furnished for the clearer revelations of the New, the positive preparation being given in the writings of the prophets.

In conclusion, we only add, for the information of such of our readers as may feel an interest in the subject, a few words respecting the better class of German works in this depart