expect trouble, and make all their arrangements to weep and be melancholy.

2. Those whose faith trusts God only so far as they can understand him. They are as sailors who trust chart and compass only in clear weather, and while in sight of known headlands. They overlook the fact that often God rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm.

3. Those who forget that we have but little knowledge as to what is for our good. God has been wont to use clouds and mountain-tops as coverings and receptacles for great mercies. He has been wont to extend his choicest favors with a disguised or covered hand.

"Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord." Heb. xii. 14.

HERE is one absolute condition of salvation, "holiness." The statement of the condition is as simple as it is important, and needs no exegesis. It asks, rather, for reflection, self-examination, and prayer. The text demands no habit, observance, or ceremony as a condition of seeing God in peace. Nor yet does it ask for certain beliefs or disbeliefs, or for any solitary Christian virtue. It makes demand for the blended, the complex, the aggregate of Christian excellences. All these united constitute holiness, and nothing will answer as a substitute.

Habits of prayer will avail nothing for acceptance except as they have increased one's personal holiness. The habits of prayer that make one better in domestic, social, civil, and business life, will aid in filling the condition of the text.

A profession of religion will avail nothing in itself. For the text does not say that without a profession of religion no man shall see the Lord. It says quite another thing.

Morality will avail nothing, since that is but conformity to human customs, while holiness is conformity to a divine law.

A good creed will not avail, except as it has shaped the heart and controlled the life. To agree in faith with Paul and Calvin gives no assurance of loving and being in their society hereafter.

It is through the heart, and not the intellect, that one becomes savingly related to Christ and affiliated to God.

We have too many plans of salvation, too many theories, too many conditions. There is but one absolute condition - holiness. Let us free ourselves from the obscurities, ambiguities, and perplexities that man's folly or wickedness may have devised, and go back to the simple truth and requisition of God. Let us walk heavenward in the way of holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord."

ARTICLE IX.

LITERARY NOTICES.

An Introduction to the Old Testament, Critical, Historical, and Theological, containing a Discussion of the most Important Questions belonging to the Several Books. By SAMUEL DAVIDSON, D. D. and LL. D. 8vo. London: Williams & Norgate. 1862.

THIS new publication exhibits a marked advance upon the former conclusions of this author concerning the sacred canon.

Its characteristically pretentious title-page is justified by what follows it, so far as an attempt to cover the extensive ground thus mapped out is regarded. But we should much belie our convictions to say that the attempt is successful. The author is considered by his sympathizers as the most learned biblicist among the British Dissenters. He certainly is erudite; but we are sorry for Non-conformist scholarship if this assumption is correct. In all his handling of the sacred writings he has showed but little of the modest self-distrust of the best learning. He speculates with a singularly confident positiveness about matters which we have yet to learn that he and his school have received any special revelation finally to settle.

We have the old controversy of the Elohistic and Jehovistic documents of the Pentateuch revived, although no sufficient answer is supplied why these titles of Deity are interchanged through these independent, antecedent memoirs, thus assumed as the material of the Mosaic

writings. The point, however, is of small comparative importance how these books were brought together. It would not damage the divine authority of the Pentateuch, if one should concede that Moses gathered up his facts from previously existing records to some extent, provided it is held that he did this under an inspiration of God which made the result a divinely authenticated history of the events narrated. But this were a very contrary theory to that of our author's plump denial of the historical reliability of these earliest Scriptures. He contends that these Deuteronomists and others, whose works (he supposes) go under the editorial pseudonyme of Moses, were the legend-writers of their times and people, collectors of the heroic myths of their ancestors to a large degree; thus our history of the world's creation and early occupation passes over to the domain of romantic poetry, and we have a philosophical, speculative, or historical fable where we thought we had a Bible-fact. In this way the critic gets rid of the literalness of most of the patriarchal narrative, as of much of the subsequent Old Testament records.

But this is not all. The denial of the literal sense is only a step to another conclusion the rejection of the supernatural character of the narrations to which the church has from the beginning given the name and honors of the miraculous. Thrown out of the sphere of fact into that of fiction, of course this quality can no longer be affirmed of them. If Moses, or some one, has not reported to us what actually took place as so reported, then God had nothing to do with these affairs in any directly controlling and disposing way. And here we come upon the "Theological" drift and purport of this author. He will expel a false theology so long deduced from the Pentateuch by dissolving this ancient monument of God's being and interventions into thin air. Verily it is not worth while to expend all this hermeneutical toil upon a merely "critical” argument. But when a theology is to be the birth of this labor, that has a practical look which is worth considering. Many like-minded biblicists have really worked in the same doctrinal vein who did not so frankly avow their object. Dr. Davidson is less reticent. He will reconstruct our Old Testament science, critically and historically, that he may reconstruct our religious faith theologically. He begins at the beginning. We doubt if he reaches the end which he so ambitiously announces.

This work will come as a timely ally to the Oxford Essayists, who, it would seem from the latest intelligence, are licensed by the proper authorities to go on as they have begun without fear of parliamentary or ecclesiastical hinderance. The Word of God is adjudged to be fair game for the sharp-shooters of the "Neo-christianity" skirmishers

henceforth to the end of the dispensation, provided they are careful not to riddle with their rifle-practice the words of Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Council.

John Albert Bengel's Gnomon of the New Testament. Pointing out, from the Natural Force of the Words, the Simplicity, Depth, Harmony, and Saving Power of its Divine Thoughts. A new Translation. By CHARLTON T. LEWIS, M. A., and MARVIN R. VINCENT, M. A., Professors in Troy University. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 925, 980. Philadelphia: Perkinpine & Higgins; New York: Sheldon & Co.

1862.

JOHANN ALBRECHT BENGEL was a minister of the German Lutheran Church, who died in 1752. An eminent theological writer, he fortunately did not confine himself to that department of literature, but turned his superior Greek scholarship to the careful exposition of the Gospels and Epistles. The Gnomon was published in 1734. "It produced a sensation in the theological world, and was one of the most valuable contributions to sacred literature which the century afforded." No writer of his times in Christian science stirred the public mind more deeply than Bengel. Besides his thorough erudition, he threw an enthusiasm into his work which kindled like interest in others. He was the Moses Stuart of his day—a fearless, chivalrous leader of the vanguard of New Testament exegesis; but though stirring up powerful adversaries, always bearing himself as a Christian scholar should, who knows that he is working for times to come as well as those then present. He kept his scholarly ardor unexhausted to the last, dying "almost with his proof-sheets in his hands."

The vitality in his writings, which impressed his contemporaries so strongly, has saved from the flood of oblivion this master-piece of his labors. In these almost two thousand pages of generous octavo, we have this genial, sharp-eyed, veteran commentator reproduced with elaborate and careful editing to place him in position with a hundred years' advance of this branch of scholarship. The result is a very unique and instructive work. A running accompaniment of bracketed interpolations supplements the curt, crisp, pithy criticism of the original, making a biblical mosaic of rare value, not, indeed, without a flaw, here and there; as in Vol. II., pp. 617-619, on Heb. vi. 4–8. Bengel has something of Matthew Henry's quaint vein, at times. You can see a witty smile lurking at the corner of his mouth even when his eye is moist with the dew of devotion. His sententiousness is admirable. He is not a preaching expositor, though it is manifest

that he is full of the best of sermons. In the Latin version, he has always kept his place on the shelf of some English and American students. But no one need now forego the pleasure and profit of his acquaintance, at the almost fabulously low price at which these two plethoric volumes are offered. We strongly counsel our ministerial brethren to afford themselves the luxury of the "Gnomon."

The Works of Washington Irving. Sunnyside Edition; in Twentyone Volumes. New York: G. P. Putnam. 1861.

THE disproportion is almost absurd between this noble library of graceful and genial literature, and the paragraph or two with which we, nevertheless, must do ourselves the favor of welcoming its arrival upon our shelves. Glancing along its well-filled volumes, we feel a new admiration for the quiet industry and kindly genius which have enriched our American letters with this affluent contribution. Fortunate in the love of his countrymen beyond most authors, and rewarded by a popularity from first to last which was remarkably, though not entirely, free from rivalry and detraction, Irving had the additional good fortune to revise his entire life-work for posterity in the ripeness of his autumnal age, and to leave the treasured wealth of mind and heart in charge of a personal friend as well as worthy publisher, whom it is a pleasure to thank for the luxury of tinted paper, wide margins, and clean typography. The gatherers of anecdote about the quarrels, wrongs, and miseries of authors must forever give a wide berth to the peaceful, placid annals of the prosperous possessor of Sunnyside.

We prize this writer for just the traits which made him hesitate to prepare a full edition of his works for this intenser generation. They refresh us by their contrast to the hot-pressed literature of these times. There is no more of the sensation-style in them than in a page of Goldsmith. We are fatigued by no extravagance, are annoyed by no distasteful impertinence; while the sly humor and the generous sensibility everywhere oozing through allure us along with a delightsome satisfaction. It might be too much to expect that a return to these earlier volumes would revive the exquisite relish which they excited thirty years ago, when we were juvenile readers of the "Sketch Book" and "Bracebridge Hall." But their fascination lingers yet, like a spring morning transmuted into the softer glow of an Indian summer. If our young people must have something more piquant than these healthful writings furnish, which we sincerely hope is not the general fact, we are sure our elder people, who have retained a more simple and natural taste, will renew their acquaintance with this old favorite