bishop of Cologne, besieged and demolished Milan. But not a word of the Magi, their sepulchre, or their translation. This passage of history is neither true, nor simply false, but it is allegorical, according to that conventional language of symbols and substituted ideas, of which Professor Rosetti has shewn that the Ghibellines made frequent if not continual use, in his work Sul Spirito Antipapale, &c., the solid and convincing parts of which are unfortunately much weakened in their effect by attempting to carry his system into puerile and ridiculous minutiae. The Prophecies de Merlin (a virulent work of the same anti-papal and, for the most part, anti-christian faction) makes use of the three Magi as a symbol, the precise import of which I leave to those who have more accurately studied this malevolent gibberish. The three kings of Tarsus, Arabia, and Saba, will go to the Dragon of Babylon with gifts, the first with a knife, the second, an olive branch, and the third, a box of ashes. The Dragon will refuse the olive, as being a sign of peace with the believers in FitzMary, which peace he would never make, and the ashes, as being the symbol of his own inevitable death, and will only accept the knife, in earnest that he would slay all who did not believe in him. Then he will bid the three kings return into their own country, but he will cause them to be conducted to the ministers of hell in the desert of Babylon, from whence they shall never return; and ten thousand knights who shall undertake the †quest of the three kings, shall perish in the undertaking. The quest of the Magi shall have more adventures than even that of the saint Greal. The golden girdle which bound the three bodies into one faggot, is an indication of mysticism in the narrative made by William of Newbridge.

So much for the legends with which folly, imposture, and an unhallowed curiosity have filled the world. But we may, by a little reflection and sober reasoning, arrive at a moral certainty concerning the Magi. The mission of Christ was not an open and general one. It was addressed unto Israel first, that the chosen children of Abraham might receive it, and be the vehicle for imparting its blessings to the Gentiles, and be to the rest of the world what their own Levi had been to them, "a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a peculiar people." For the Gospel, said Paul, was "the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Hellenist" or Pagan; and "it was necessary that the Word of God should first have been spoken to you, § but seeing ye put it from you..... Lo! we turn to the Gentiles." The necessity lay in the covenant with Abraham-"Ye are the children of the prophets and of the covenant which God made with our fathers, saying unto Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the earth be

*For instance, when he insists that the word tal (i.e. such) wherever it occurs in Dante, or his school of writers, represents the three initials of Teutonico Arrigo Lucemburgese! He might as well, or better, have said Thronus Augusti Latinus, but the best of all is to abstain entirely from such frivolities.

+ Prophecies de Merlin, xlii. xliii.

Rom. i. 16.

Acts xiii. 46.

blessed.* Unto you first, God, having raised up (i. e. brought into existence) his son Jesus, sent him to bless you, &c." The Gospel of Jesus belonged of right to the children of the covenant, and it was only upon their waiver and refusal of it that the Gentiles became entitled to receive it through a different channel. These are known things, and uncontrovertible. But the covenant, and the law in furtherance and execution of the covenant, were given to the twelve sons of Jacob, and not to any in particular. The disputes which arose among their posterity in the reign of Rehoboam did not affect the question. Because the subjects of Jeroboam, like those of the house of David, were doomed only to a corrective punishment, and were or are reserved for the redeeming mercies of God, who had promised to take the stick of Joseph which is in the hand of Ephraim, and the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, and to be "gracious to the remnant of Joseph," and that he would teach Ephraim to say, "What have I to do any more with idols? I have heard him, and observed him. I am like a green fir tree. From me is thy fruit sound." These things, again, are known and uncontrovertible. But there can be scarcely any reasonable doubt, that the tribes of the kingdom of Samaria were not restored by Zerubbabel under Cyrus. The restoration promised to them is as distinctly national, tribule, and territorial, as that of the sister commonwealth; and the liberty which was then afforded to individuals of going (for returning it was not) and crowding into Jerusalem and its district, would not support the veracity of the Lord's very explicit promises on that head. I have formerly made the important remark, that the contrary was a matter of notoriety+ among the Jews in Hadrian's time. Seeing, therefore, that Israel abode at a distance in the kingdoms of the East, and that Israel was as fully entitled to the refusal of Jesus, as the men of Judah to whom he was immediately sent, and that, before God could "turn to the Gentiles," it was 66 necessary that He should first have spoken to them," we are bound to suppose that He provided some adequate means of making to the banished seed of Abraham a legal tender of their covenanted rights. But we cannot collect that any offer of the Gospel revelation, previous to its publication to the Gentiles, was made to any people other than the Jews, except the Magi. The Israelites had been removed into "the cities of the Medes," and their situation was to the east of Palestine, which renders the words "from the sun-rising" as apt to them, as they are absurd when applied to Tartessus and Sheba.

The religion of the Magi, worshippers of Oromazdes, Mithras, and Arimanes, prevailed under various slight modifications from Cappadocia and the Mount Taurus, eastward, to Bactriana and the Indus. There is every probability that the tribes of Samaria, who "feared other gods, and walked in the statutes of the heathen," at the time of their captivity, and had then been more than seven hundred years in exile, had long since been Magians when our Lord was born. Pru

dentius does not hesitate to affirm that so it was in his days, and is an author who deserves the credit of not having spoken at random:

"Who doubts, who knows not, of old Jacob's seed*

That some are exiles yet, captives decreed

In Persia's realms and fealty to remain,
And now no more their country's rites retain,
But, leaving them, barbarian laws adopt,

And have their father's garb and language dropp'd,
Their nurse, sweet Sion, banish from their thought,
And, of their ancient home remembering nought,
Its mystic canons break, and take in hand
The abomination of a foreign land."

There would be a most revolting incongruity in holding that some one nation, out of the herd of gentiles, was invited to a premature knowledge of truths, which were to be gradually, by apostolical preaching, diffused among the different peoples of the earth. But the supposition that men of authority were summoned from the tribes of Israel, to see the infant Messiah, and announce him to their people under the sanction of their miraculous voyage and return, and went home to their dwellings crying in the wilderness of the east, "prepare ye the way of the Lord," is congruous and perfect in itself, while it makes perfect the inviolable word of Divine promise. They came not in the guise of Persians, Bactrians, or other heathens, asking, "Where is he that shall enlighten the nations," or "save the world;" but with the purely national interrogation, "where is he that is born King of the Jews?" That attribute of the Messiah was not only the least interesting to the nations of all that could be ascribed to him; it even excited their jealousy, and does even to our days, in which all who regard it as more than a vague allegory, are looked upon with an unfavourable eye. But it was the very question of all others which the men of Israel, if invited at the end of the weeks to salute Messiah their Prince, would ask.

I suspect that some inkling of these truths has formerly existed, although the vestiges of it are (so far as I know) faint. The Prester John of Abyssinia (says Fray Luis†) never marries a wife who is not of the lineage of the three Magi Kings, because he esteems them alone to be worthy of the line of David. What? a Jew by descent (as he pretends) think a Gentile the only fit ancestor of his wife, and a Christian by faith think the same of a Pagan! No; this implies the reunion of Israelitish and Judaic blood. The following is from the Prophecies de Merlin‡-" a man of the lineage of the Jews and Samaritans shall be present at the birth of the dragon of Babylon, and he shall see an enemy like the form of a dragon, and act the part of the star which led three kings to Bethlehem.' I am mistaken if the Prester John (a being in some respects imaginary, and the anti

Pope of the mystical anti-Christians) be not here signified, and if the daughters of the Magi, mentioned by Fray Luis, be not the Samaritan part of his lineage.

If the Magi were the messengers in the power of Elias, who were to prepare the tribes of Jeroboam for that which John had announced to those of Rehoboam, it follows of course that their mission was abortive, and bore no good fruit in the days of the preachers; for Israel has never known the Lord. But we have also reason to be convinced, that the party who were led to Bethlehem received into their hearts the seed of the gospel, and that it vegetated there, and afterwards increased unto their salvation. Because, it is an absurd and untenable doctrine, that God would ever elect unsuitable vessels for his own especial purposes, or send an unbeliever to implant faith in others. We may therefore be assured that the Fathers were rightly informed, or guessed aright, that they were in due season baptized by Thomas, or Bartholomew, or some apostle of the East. Nor is it improbable that the Romish legendaries also guessed aright, that they bore witness in death to the truths which they had announced to a hardened generation, upon whom there was blindness for a time.

H.

ON ST. LUKE, xxi. 32.

To the Editor of the British Magazine.

SIR,-A writer in your Magazine (p. 54), concerning the Prophecy of Jesus, has made some observations upon a passage in the Remarks on Genesis, vol. ii. p. 261. Although we totally differ on the interpretation of that prophecy, yet I am willing to derive information from any quarter. The question at issue is, whether yɛvɛà, in St. Luke, xxi. 32, means, simply, that generation, or the Jewish nation. There are numerous and decided instances of its signifying a generation; are there any in which it as decidedly means a nation,-for instance, the Jewish nation, as distinguished from the Greek or Roman nation? As the Septuagint was translated by different hands, at different times, we cannot be surprised at occasionally finding a word used with various degrees of latitude, when it occupies only a subordinate place in a sentence; but when the word contains the leading idea, the translators were careful to use it with strict attention to its proper meaning. Thus, in the examples of yɛveà brought from Schleusner, it does not mean the Jewish nation, Xaòc,t as distinguished from other nations, Ovn. The passages, Gen. xxxi. 3, Lev. xxv. 41, mean no more than returning to their friends; Lev. xx. 18, cut off from that generation;

That is avowed by one of the most extraordinary of them, Wm. Postel.

+ I committed an error in saying, "that writers on the millennium strive hard to give to γενεά, the sense of ἔθνος, nation;” I ought to have said λαός, people, for ἔθνος is applicable only to the Gentiles.

and Jer. xviii. 3, refers to the tribe of Judah. There is no expression in the Septuagint so common as i λaòs ouros, this people, the Jewish nation: "Then the Egyptians shall hear it, for thou broughtest up this people in thy might from among them." (Num. xiv. 13.) "What one nation in the earth is like thy people?" (2 Sam. vii. 23.) Where does ǹ yevεà avrn occur in this sense? In the sense of the present existing generation, it may be found in Ex. i. 6, " And Joseph died, and all that generation;" in Num. xxxii. 13, and many other passages. The writer seems alarmed at the idea of seeing the expression, "the Son of man coming in the clouds with power and glory," allegorized away, although he reduces it to a vision in Matt. xvi. 28; and probably he would not hesitate to allow the hard fate of its being allegorized to befal the immediately preceding expression," the sun shall be darkened, and the stars shall fall from heaven." (Matt. xxiv. 29.) For my own part, I cannot but feel infinitely more alarm at the idea that St. Matthew said any thing "improperly" in his Gospel, or that he was liable, like uninspired men, to fall into mistakes from "inadvertency." Neither does it afford me any consolation to be assured that St. Mark or St. Luke wrote their Gospels afterwards, “in the earnest desire to rectify whatever was defective in that which went before;" for neither St. Mark nor St. Luke enjoyed the advantage of being an eye-witness, as St. Matthew did. Mahomet practised the very politic artifice of delivering his Koran piece-meal; and as his scheme gained strength and consistency, he dealt out its successive chapters to rectify, even to the plain contradiction of, the former ones. But the Author of our faith needed not to wait the gradual establishment of Christianity to correct and amend his gospel. St. John, indeed, records some discourses not mentioned by the other evangelists, but nowhere has he rectified the inadvertencies of his predecessors.

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The writer says, there is another scripture often coupled with Luke, xxi. 32, " Verily there be some standing here which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom." A nice distinction is then made between "till they see the Son of man coming," and "till he cometh." "The words, until they see,' are of a very different import (prophetic vision) as applied to those days of abundant inspiration. (If it was so abundant, how came St. Matthew not to be preserved from inadvertency ?) John was not in his state of nature, but was in the spirit,' when God said to him, 'What thou seest, write in a book;' and he saw heaven opened, and beheld a white horse,' &c.; in like manner John did not taste of death before he had seen the kingdom of God." With this conclusion I agree, except its being in like manner. Jesus saith unto Peter, " If I will that he tarry until I come, (not till he see me coming,) what is that to thee?" (John xxi. 22.) I cannot suppose that prophetic vision was meant here any more than in Matthew xxiv. 30, "All the tribes of the earth shall see the Son of man coming." From the passages here quoted, the coming of the Son of man seems to intimate the conclusion of the Jewish polity.

I have always considered it an uncontroverted point in scriptural criticism, that when two or more inspired writers omit or vary ex