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tures are democratic; they stimulate the inventive powers, and spread intelligence. A skilled artisan is in demand everywhere, and his humble workshop can compete with huge factories and unlimited capital. Both of these are gregarious and social. They bring men together to talk and interchange ideas. They are individual, too, because each man's senses and powers are quickened. Agriculture, on the other hand, with all its points of acknowledged superiority, does not quicken and arouse the mind like these. Its operations are more simple and local, and (on the part of the day-laborer) less intelligent. Add to this, that from early times the possession of land has given a dignity which no other has, and we have in the South all the elements of an aristocracy, large landed estates, an ignorant and servile population, and a branch of industry which eminently invites to centralization.

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It was into the midst of such a state of society as this that the tariff of 1842 threatened to introduce the activity and radicalism of the North. What wonder the oligarchs took alarm, and that their Northern allies, by all demagogic arts, and appeals to all the convenient prejudices of the mob, succeeded, four years later, in imposing upon the country the tariff under whose auspices the North was shaken by such financial instability and convulsions as were never before known, while in the South the oligarchy was made secure? For them the crisis was past. We well remember a gentleman from Georgia, the most enterprising of the Slave States, looking back regretfully to the old Whig times, when Georgia was going on so finely in the path of prosperity, - manufactures springing up under the protection of the tariff of '42, wealth increasing, everything promising well, but the Abolitionists spoiled it all. He did not weigh the scales justly; he, a merchant, did not enter into the schemes of the cotton aristocracy. The Abolitionists formed a capital pretext to gather around the Democratic banner all the floating masses, and all those to whom slavery was the chief thing. So the Whig party of the South was killed, and the Abolitionists did it! But the country has never yet recovered what it lost in 1846. When at last the American policy was re-established, the Southern States, bound hand and foot to the slave aristocracy, had already been led into the path of secession.

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So the third great work to be done in the South, after the overthrow of the oligarchy and the introduction of some comprehensive system of education, is the establishment of a truer economical system. Protection - the Morrill Tariff - must save the South, as it has saved the North, from utter, immediate ruin; and we must look to the gradual growth of civilization and prosperity for the rest. It is appalling to think how entirely the resources of this magnificent region have been given over to cotton and tobacco, its soil exhausted, its population growing poorer and more degraded, its special resources hardly dreamed of. Here in New England, by reason of our youth, and the instability and lack of system in our industrial growth, we are far from having reached the European standard in any department. But we are, at all events, quick to learn, and ready to adopt. The South, on the other hand, has chosen to remain stationary, and, even supposing it to come out of this present trial in a mood to be taught and to act, it will be long before its society will be settled, or its depleted population renovated enough to enable it to make progress.

But when the time comes, (and it may come sooner than we think, especially if the plan is adopted of planting here and there military colonies of industrious Northerners or Germans,) it is not easy to set a limit to the height of prosperity this beautiful land may reach. Cotton will be its staple, as heretofore, for the world needs it; but it will no longer be raised by the unskilful and wasteful labor of slaves, and every bale will not be carried away to other lands to be manufactured. The rivers will be lined with flourishing manufacturing towns; the tracts of waste land will be turned into orchards and vineyards and market gardens; schools and churches will attest the new civilization, and society will begin to be governed by the principles of Christianity. We shall not need, when all the resources of the South are developed, to bring olives from Spain, figs from Smyrna, silks from France, or oranges from Sicily. Our broad territory, embracing wide extremes of climate, will be competent to supply itself with the products of all zones, and will know the South especially will know an independence and prosperity of which we have heretofore had only a presentiment.

ART. VII. - REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.

WE translate the following from a late issue of the Paris Journal des Débats. It is a close abstract of a book which must prove of great interest and worth to Biblical scholars and critics. The names of M. Réville and M. Renan carry weight on matters of pure historical research such as are treated in the work the notice of which we translate here. Whatever the latter writes is peculiarly interesting now that he is under ban of heresy, ousted from his professor's chair, and set, in some sort, as the champion, in France, of free thought in theology, and of scientific method in Scriptural criticism.

The Society of the Hague for the defence of the Christian religion proposed in 1854, and renewed in 1859, the following programme:

"It being sufficiently shown, by the most recent criticisms, that the Gospel of Matthew, in its actual form, is not identical with the Logia mentioned by Papias, the Society asks,

"A dissertation establishing, upon credible reasons, the relations of the Gospel of Matthew with the Logia, and fixing, at the same time, the rules to be followed for distinguishing, one from another, the elements of different date contained in the Gospel of Matthew."

The accepted essay was that of M. Albert Réville, pastor of the Walloon Church in Rotterdam. M. Réville has just published his work, a true masterpiece of method, of clearness, of ingenious and impartial discussion.* The devoted labors, which for thirty years have had for their object the criticism of the text of the Gospels, have borne fruit. A question heretofore judged to be insoluble has come to a solution, which, to be sure, leaves room still for much uncertainty, but which is full enough for the needs of history. The way in which the three synoptic Gospels have come to their present wording is, beyond contradiction, as well known as the manner in which all the great historical biographies have been composed. One problem still defies the efforts of criticism, namely, the fourth Gospel. On this point we float still among contradictory hypotheses, although very important results may be held as gained.

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The hypothesis of M. Réville upon the composition of the first Gospel is this. The final editor of this Gospel composed his book by combining, 1st, a collection of teachings of Jesus brought together by the Apostle Matthew; 2d, an anecdotical Gospel, written by Mark, the companion of the Apostle Peter; 3d, a certain number of data which he drew from the evangelic tradition around him; 4th, finally, certain data growing out of his personal reflections. The last work of editing was done in Palestine, or in one of the neighboring countries, perhaps in Batanea, whither many Christians fled at the time of the war with the Romans, where relatives of Jesus were found up to the second century, and where the first Christian impulse was preserved much * Études Critiques sur l'Évangile de St. Matthieu. Leyden. Paris, Cherbuliez.

longer than elsewhere. This work of editing took place, according to M. Réville, from the year 80 to the year 90.

The original Logia, collected by the Apostle Matthew himself, are represented to us by the great discourses of Jesus, which fill a good portion of the first Gospel. These discourses, to the number of seven, according to M. Réville, form, when taken out of the context, a complete whole, so that the original Logia which were absorbed in the last edition can be reconstructed to-day. The idea of the kingdom of God is the centre, and forms, beyond contradiction, the wonted pivot on which all the discourses of Jesus turn.

As to the collection of anecdotes from which the last editor of the first Gospel drew the greater part of his narratives, M. Réville establishes, 1st, that a bond of the strictest sort joins the historical groundwork of the first Gospel and that of the second; 2d, that the last editor of the second Gospel had not the first as a source to draw from; 3d, that no more did the editor of the first Gospel have under his eye the second, as we read it to-day. The narratives of the first and those of the second Gospel have for their base a common document, whose primitive form is found sometimes in the one, sometimes in the other. This primitive anecdotical document did not follow the chronological order; it was brief; it must have been written about the year 75. The second Gospel, as we read it now, is but a reproduction of it, slightly modified. The plan of the life of Jesus thus rests, with the synoptics, on two original documents; - 1st, the discourses of Jesus collected by the Apostle Matthew in the years which followed close upon the death of Jesus; 2d, the collection of anecdotes and personal accounts which Mark wrote from the recollections of Peter. It may be said that we have still these two documents, mingled with information from other sources in the first two Gospels, which rightly bear the names of the Gospel according to Matthew and the Gospel according to Mark.

In the Gospel of Luke, the narrative has reached a step further. We perceive the author who compiles, the man who has not directly seen the witnesses, but who has worked over received texts. Luke probably had under his eye the anecdotical collection of Mark and the Logia of Matthew; but he arranges and interprets according to his own feeling. He makes the transition between the authentic Gospels and the apocryphal. The historical value of his work is, in general, rather slight.

There remains, then, the fourth Gospel, that perpetual subject of doubts and contradictions. How is it that, side by side with exact accounts which prove so well the eyewitness, there are found discourses totally different from those of Matthew? How is it that, side by side with a general plan of the life of Jesus, which appears much more logical and much more exact than that of the synoptics, those singular passages are found, where one perceives a dogmatic interest of the editor's own, ideas wholly strange to Jesus, and at times singular indications which put us on our guard against the good faith of the narrator? How, finally, side by side with teachings the most pure,

the most just, the most refined, does that dross and slag (ces scories) appear, in which are seen the interpolations of a heated sectary? To say that we have two Jesuses, that of the synoptics and that of the fourth Gospel, as we have two Socrateses, that of Plato and that of Xenophon, is not to say enough; for, in this case, it is Plato who is the better biographer, and, while lending his master speeches which he could not have made, knows things of capital worth in his life, which Xenophon entirely ignores. Observe, too, that it is necessary to choose between the two schemes, the two being not possibly true at the same time. A man, in fact, cannot be double, and if Jesus, as everything goes to make us believe, spoke as Matthew would have it, he could not speak as John would have it. Here is the great problem which the second half of our century will have to examine in all its bearings. The question of the synoptics, one may say, is settled. That of the fourth Gospel is yet to be resolved. It is M. Réville's duty to bring to this capital problem his exact science, and the force of his rare faculties. ERNEST RENAN.

HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY.

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ONE of the foremost of the living historians of Germany, it will hardly be disputed, is that very able writer and acute critic, Heinrich von Sybel, late a Professor of History at Munich, and now in the same capacity at Bonn. The pupil of Ranke, he has followed in the footsteps of his teacher, without, however, sacrificing his own individuality or denying his own liberal tendencies. He has not been a prolific writer; and is perhaps known to English readers only by a little book lately made up from some of his writings on the Crusades, by no means a good example of his powers, to which allusion was made in our last number. His chief work is the most exhaustive, and in many respects the most valuable, it seems to us, upon the limited period which it covers.* That period was an epoch in the history of men, embracing as it does the beginning of those great revolutions which have changed the political condition of Europe, and made possible those moral and material reforms for which our nineteenth century is to be forever memorable. It includes the overthrow of the French monarchy by the rising democracy of France, the destruction of Poland by the last two partitions to which that unhappy kingdom was subjected, and by which it was finally erased from the list of nations, and the dissolution of the German Empire in the first war with France. And those are the three great events which Sybel undertakes to narrate and explain by keeping always in view the one pervading fact, that everywhere it was the same process going on, at Paris, at Warsaw, at Vienna, everywhere was the feudalism of the Middle Ages decaying and breaking up.

The French Revolution has been written of to such an extent that one might suppose the subject exhausted, for the present at least, were not

*Geschichte der Revolutionszeit von 1789 bis 1795. SYBEL. Düsseldorf, Verlagshandlung von Julius Buddeus. VOL. LXXIII. 5TH S. VOL. XI. NO. III.

Von HEINRICH VON 3 vols. 1855-1860.

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