as I listened to that many-voiced sea. A new love and sympathy for this wondrous song grew up in my mind. It seemed the very echo of nature from the seat where beauty and music sit enthroned in the heart of genius. It is worthy to be the heart of the language of Greece. But the Bible was the heart of the English.

The laws and ballads of Rome (the heart of the Latin language) have been stronger food for heroes than the hearts of lions. The trumpet blast which rings through the pages of Livy and Plutarch has roused the heroism of all succeeding generations. Here are the stories of heroes whom Shakspeare rejoiced in more than in all the great names of Greece. Here are the heroes whose trophies gave the old knights of France no sleep,-who inspired the men and women of the first Revolution, when Madame Roland carried Plutarch's Lives to church, and wept that she was not a Roman. This has been called the Bible of France, and it is worthy to be the heart of its courtly language.

But our Bible was the heart of the English. A thousand years this book had been waiting the advent of the English race. As in the geological eras, so in the history of man, in the progress of redemption, advance is not in the continual development of a single race. Singularly developed individuals of a race give promise of a higher type; a new race springs up and realizes the type, while the old race decays. To the Jews, for example, the Christian Apostles came as the harbingers of a new type. The new race came, but not from the Jewish or other Shemitic stock. A new and different race were to embody the advancing ideal, while the Shemitic stock, having borne its flower and fruit, stands barren and decaying, as if exhausted by the ripening of such a fruit. In the English at last came the race which was to be the race of the Bible.

It was in no spirit of scholarship or literary enthusiasm that the English Bible was made. The Saxon race had received Christianity with an intensity of feeling like their old Berserker madness. Not Dante had such appalling visions of hell, or such rapt musings of heaven. Wyckliffe and his fellows wrote

to save the men of their own blood from everlasting burnings, to show them the way to everlasting joys. They put their whole souls in the work. The spirit of the English race was in them. The Spirit of the living God was with them. The special providence which guided its growth may be considered a kind of inspiration. It is more than accurate. It is felicitous and moving. It is full of living idiom, which no scholastic art, no unconsecrated genius could suggest, idiom instinct with devotion, full of harmony and a majestic simplicity. It is no copy of the common speech. It was always above it, an ideal, which the English heart has recognized from the first. These true prophets laid themselves so closely to the heart of the Bible, that the yet plastic language which they spoke, run in the moulds of the Hebrew and Greek, repeated the idioms, and caught the spirit of inspiration. Far as the throbbings of this mighty heart were felt, so far the language grew into organized English, so far the English grew into strength; and to this day every part of the language is pervaded by its influence. No one has ever yet known how to move the English people, whose style has not its life-blood from this great heart of the English speech.

If we choose to carry on in a loose fashion the figure of growth,-in Chaucer we see the senses complete. His lungs are in full play. He shouts as he walks afield, and greets the rising sun. His eyes see, his ears hear. He knows the smell of clover and new hay, and the taste of the tankard.

"And always roaming with a hungry heart,
Much had he seen and known, cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments;
Himself not least, but honored of them all:

And drunk delight of battle with his peers."

"Ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free heart, free forehead."

"Since Chaucer was alive and hale,

No man hath walked along our roads with step

So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue

So varied in discourse."

But Shakspeare is the exponent of the English language in its ripe manhood.

We need not try to point out the merits of Shakspeare. We only remark in pursuance of our theme, that this genius of Shakspeare was a new gift to the world. It is not to be found in Saxon. It is not to be found in Norman. It is no development of Saxon or Norman. It is not classical. It is not romantic. It is new. It is Shakspearian. It is English. Criticism which long stood aghast before him, has now made itself new laws from the study of him, and judges all genius by its relations to him. Again, this genius of Shakspeare is marked by the same characteristics which have been pointed out in the English language. The unbounded stomach, under the craving of which we have seen the language taking up words from every quarter, is equally plain in Shakspeare. Nothing comes amiss to him. All moods of both sexes of all ranks of all nations in all ages are food for this hungry heart. Spirits are his familiars. Nature has no mood strange to him. No animal or green thing but has its speech for him; there are books in the running brooks, sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

The same analytic spirit which in the language uses only roots, and dissects and displays every relation of things, and refuses to stereotype compound associations, is also prominent in Shakspeare. He lays open the finest movement of all human hearts and minds. Landseer did not enter more intimately into the innermost nature of a dog. All things in his pages, as Goethe says, are like watches with crystal faces, through which every cog of every separate wheel is displayed.

We saw that the English has a new gamut of sounds, unri valled in their compass and nearness to nature. It is Shak speare who has best proved this. This master musician best knows how to "run with a quivering hand in a thousand moods over all the chords of the soul." His syntax and his idioms are characteristically English. Simplicity and fitness rule every general syntactical combination, while an all-pervading and transforming imagination creates at every line some wonderful plexus of words, which seems, like a ganglion of nerves,

not simply to transmit, but concentrate and intensify the action of the mind. And finally the great heart of the English speech, the Bible, sends its vital currents through every page, through every phase of his speech.

The glory and influence of Shakspeare are not bounded by the shore of Britain. A great German Philosopher of History, Baron Bunsen, pronounces him: "The great prophet of human destinies on the awakening of a new world. His histories are the only modern Epos, as a poetical relation of the eternal order in a great national development. They are the Germanic Nibelungen, and the Romanic Divina Commedia both. united and dramatized, and the dramatic form was the natural organ of the Epos of an age ripe for the realities of life and full of action."

And the greatest master of language,-its most profound historian, and its most trustworthy prophet, I mean of course, Jacob Grimm, has said: "It is not without significance that the greatest and most transcendent poet of the new time, in distinction from the old classics, used the English speech. This speech of his may, with full right, be called a speech for the world. It will go on with the people who speak it, prevailing more and more to all the ends of the earth. In richness, reason, and compression no living speech can be put beside it." Such is our birth-right. The treasures of this prevailing tongue are ours. This noblest development of ideal language, this grand daguerreotype of the English race, the study of philologers and philosophical historians, this language of the Bible and of the Protestant religion, this tongue of freedom is ours. We speak the tongue which Shakspeare spake, and Chaucer, and Milton, and Bacon, and Locke, and Sidney, and Webster. The glories of these great names, the glories of this conquering language, are ours. Let us acknowledge ourselves debtors to our mother tongue. Let us study it with earnestness, and treat it with reverence and love. The English scholars have been the worst enemies of the English language. They have studied Latin and Greek till they have lost command of the English idiom; some of them till the free English heart has left them, and they have gone over to Rome altogether.

How many of our colleges even now study the English Bible, and Shakspeare, and Milton, as they do Homer and Horace?* And yet these English books are infinitely more worthy to be known, and this language a better field for philological study. May it not be said, when the historian of this language sums up the proud story of its progress, that the last and most difficult of its conquests was that of the brotherhood of American scholars?

By E. A. LAWRENCE, D.D., Professor in East Windsor Theological Seminary, Ct.

THE Edwardean Period in the history of New England Theology, forms its negative character in a practical and doc. trinal Protest against the three great mistakes or errors of the preceding period. Of these, some notice was taken in a former number of this Journal.

The first is the Half-way Covenant, sanctioned by the Synod of 1662. The second is the converting efficacy of the Lord's Supper, as maintained by Mr. Stoddard in his sermon published in 1707. "In this sermon," says the biographer of Edwards, "he attempted to prove that the Lord's Supper is a converting ordinance." This is what President Edwards called Mr. Stoddard's "particular tenet about the Lord's Supper." The third error is, what was termed the "accep tableness of unregenerate doings." The first led to the second, as the second did to the third. The three were in part the cause, and in part the effect of that decline in practical godliness to which the "Great Awakening" under Ed

*The philological study of Milton and Shakspeare is a regular part of the course for the Junior year in Lafayette College, and it is pursued to some extent in Columbia College. The experience of these two institutions has abundantly established the practicability and value of the study.