the Essayists and Reviewers. We believe that they will be among the foremost to admit the force of any argument or rejoinder which makes most against them, and that they will regard their reviewers, so far as they are their opponents, as contributing, in a way of their own, to the common and paramount effort to readjust the faith of Christians to the fruits of new thought, science, and knowledge. Their opponents are the least successful or interesting when dealing with the Essayists and Reviewers as individuals, or with their expressed opinions and the modes of that expression. They engage our attention best, and write to a more effective purpose, when they look beyond these obnoxious individuals, and take a large, wide, free, and generous view of the shock and trial through which the traditional faith of Christendom is passing. They have, indeed, a more urgent and a far nobler task than merely that of refuting a few heretical or sceptical opinions of seven men, who have not advanced a single statement or suggestion that can claim novelty. In common with the devout and believing of the higher-educated Christian men of the age, those who have written and those who may yet write, not as against the Essayists and Reviewers, but in defence of a revealed and historically attested religion, identified with the faithful and true Witness, the Anointed of God, - theologians of the English Church are called upon to aid in insisting that science shall not become synonymous with materialism,that religious doctrines shall not be reduced to the category of opinions, nor the records of revelation to the quality of literature. It is observable that the abler defenders of the old theories and creeds, in answering their impugners, as in the volumes before us, do not generally repair a breach in the walls of the old citadels with the former materials, nor succeed in closing or hiding that breach. The arguments offered to meet modern logical or critical objections are seldom in the strain of the old asserting dogmatism or credulous theorizing; when they are so, they are manifestly futile. The Shorter Westminster Catechism defines God's work of creation as his "making all things out of nothing in the space of six days." Neither of the writers on the Mosaic record in the two volumes before us, conservative as was their aim, venture to

plead for that literalism. They shoot as wide of it as does the Essayist in the heretical volume.

There is one very excellent paragraph in an otherwise exceedingly meagre and most unsatisfactory volume, by the Bishop of London, published in a revised edition, with additions to meet the present emergency.* After telling us, in his Introduction, that, though "most men change or greatly modify their opinions and sentiments in fifteen years" (the interval between his two editions), he has not done so, he says: "The teaching of the Word of God is not to be looked for in obscure texts of doubtful application; not in the minor details of its history; not in the imagery with which God has willed to clothe its heavenly lessons, and adapted them to arrest the fancy or imagination of uninstructed or refined men; not certainly in its adherence to the opinions on physical science which prevailed in the age when it was written, and according to which God allowed it to be moulded, because he never meant to open a short road to the knowledge of common scientific truth through the miracle of revelation. Nothing but confusion can arise from identifying these inferior instruments with the great truths of which they are the vehicle." (p. 13.)

So Professor Browne, writing on Inspiration in "Aids to Faith," after giving us the rather tautological than profound statement," that the divine element is ever such as to secure the infallible truth of Scripture in all things divine," is willing to entertain the supposition, that, "on mere matters of history, or of daily life, prophets and evangelists might have been suffered to write as men." He adds: "All this, of course, is applicable to questions of physical science. Scripture was not given to teach us science, but to teach us religion; it may not have been needful that the inspired writers should have been rendered infallible in matters of science, nor is it at all likely that they should have been directed to teach to the ancient world truths which would anticipate the discoveries either of Newton or of Cuvier." All this is very well,

The Dangers and Safeguards of Modern Theology: containing Suggestions offered to the Theological Student under present Difficulties. By Archibald Campbell, Lord Bishop of London. London: Murray. 1861.

provided no doctrine of the creed is based upon or drawn from any statement in matters of science or history, about which the writers of Scripture were left to their own unaided human powers, and so to the risk of error. But it is undeniable that some of the contents of the old creed are based upon, and find their only support in, some of these uncertain historical and scientific elements of Scripture. What becomes of all the doctrines of the fall of man, the covenant with Adam, etc., etc., if the Scripture account of the unity of origin of our race, the serpent, etc. be invalidated? Besides, in reference to the words we have quoted from the Bishop of London, we might call upon him for a careful canon to prove that, while the opinions of the writers of the Bible on physical science were those which prevailed in their own age, their statements on spiritual science were not the same also.

We have expressed strongly our dissent from one of the leading principles advanced by Professor Jowett in his noble Essay. It is, that the Bible is to be interpreted just like any other book. We wish to say a few words on this point, for it seems to us to suggest matter almost wholly overlooked in the new controversy now in agitation, matter, too, of paramount importance. Heartily convinced we are that the true solution of many of our present perplexities is to be found in correct views of the Scriptures, and that our faith in revealed religion will find a sufficient assurance in the unique peculiarity of the Scriptures, and in a method of receiving them and interpreting them conformed to that speciality of character and quality which distinguishes them from all other writings. To say that the Bible is to be interpreted like any other book, is to advance a statement which will recommend itself by its simplicity, its convenience, and the seeming ease with which it may at once be applied. In one sense or mode of receiving it, it will have the tone and character of an obvious truth. If the assertion means only that, in reading and interpreting the Bible, we must use our minds and eyes, and follow the rules of grammar, and regard the meaning of words and the construction of sentences, and seek for the sense in the mind of the writer, and so forth, it would be as absurd to question the rule as it would be to transgress it or set it at defiance. But

Professor Jowett does not advance the rule only in this obvious and simple sense. He means much more by it. He puts it to much more extended uses, and in so doing, we venture modestly, yet confidently, to assert, he begs a question of vital importance, assumes a point not proved, commits himself to a position which prejudices his whole inquiry, and yields up one of the most precious and tenable of the grounds of faith. For it is not true, in any other sense than the simple and easy one we have allowed, that the Bible is to be interpreted like any other book. It is not true, indeed, that any one book is to be interpreted like any other book. On the contrary, the rules of interpretation are to be adjusted to each particular volume to which they are applied, because, when they go beyond the mere province of grammar, they are affected and decided by the character and design of the book. Each class of literature has its own special and peculiar method of interpretation, and the reader or interpreter must adapt its own to each. We might almost say, indeed, we will say, that each single work in each department must be interpreted by special rules adapted to each such work. It would not do to apply the same rules of interpretation to Æsop's Fables, Paradise Lost, The Pilgrim's Progress, and Newton's Principia. No skilled reader interprets by the same rules, beyond those of grammar, the Letters of Oliver Cromwell and those of Horace Walpole. We apply to a book in each class of literature, and to some extent to each different volume in the same class, some specific and appropriate canons, and comments, and modes of construction and of apprehension, adjusted to the peculiar subject-matter, the animus of the writer, and any distinctive quality of the composition. Now the large and pregnant questions with which theologians and religious teachers have to deal, are, among many other fundamental ones, such as these: Has the Bible as a whole a character which isolates it from all other written compositions, -a peculiar and distinctive quality, intent, origin, sanction, element, or purpose, making it a book sui generis? If so, then what is the nature of this peculiarity of the Bible? And next, what are the specific rules of interpretation to be adapted or applied to it? We deal with these questions in a way most satisfactory

to our own minds, by opening the New Testament, and marking there how peculiarly Jesus Christ used the Old Testament, and with what wonderful effect, too, on the minds of his own disciples; and how, in their turn, and with precisely the same wonderful effect, they used the same Scriptures in addressing and converting others. The way in which Jesus Christ used them is frequently and most significantly defined as " opening the Scriptures." He certainly made his hearers to see in them, and to feel from them, what they had not seen or felt before. He found in them significations, suggestions, and lessons which those who had read them in temple and synagogue for scores of years had not dreamed that they contained. Through those inner significations and those veiled meanings and those capacities of higher use which he found in the Hebrew Scriptures, he unmistakably won disciples whom his miracles and his own direct lessons would not have won. We are dealing here with simple facts, which lie patent on the historical record. We refer to the same facts when we add that these first Christian disciples, after their master's removal from them, did, all over Judæa, Samaria, and Asia Minor, make use succesfully of the same method in winning the most prejudiced and obstinate of hearers to the same discipleship. They made the Old-Testament Scriptures, then received with reverence, furnish reasons and arguments for the acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah. How did he and they do this? We answer by repeating the phrase, they "opened the Scriptures." The ground on which they proceeded whether an assumption or a truth to which Heaven offers many sufficient testimonies was, that the Holy Spirit, a divine illumination, with prescience and prediction and a spiritual insight, had had an agency in the composition of the Old Scriptures, and had buried under their mysterious hidings lessons which would afterwards be of high avail; and that the same Holy Spirit-communicated under the Gospel to those who officially corresponded to the subjects of it under the old dispensationopened and unburied these hidden things. The simple inference, then, is, that when Christ and his Apostles opened the Holy Scriptures, the Holy Spirit, through them, disclosed the full meaning of some of its own former oracular utterances.