same prophet would be accomplished, and the Prince of Peace establish his quiet and uninterrupted reign."

Christianity, though it might adopt the language of these systems, was yet in its scope and purposes entirely independent of them. It was a moral revelation; with no purpose but to establish spiritual relations between man and the Creator. It must find therefore its true explanations not in systems but in the moral nature of man; and in consistency with this its moral character, the only deviation from the course of nature, in our Author's view, was the birth of the Saviour from a pure Virgin. How much such an admission implies, we will not ungraciously inquire. Mr. Milman seems to us rather to symbolize the Virgin Mother with the softer and gentler idea of Christianity, than to state it as a theological fact, essential to the views of dogmatic divines. He even brings into friendly parallelism the martial Roman tracing his origin to the nursling of the wolf, and the gentleness and purity of Christ taking its rise in the bosom of the Virgin Mother. His whole view of this subject seems sentimental and mythical, not dogmatical or historical, and merges in the poetry and tenderness of Wordsworth :

"Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost

With the least shade or thought to sin allied;
Woman, above all women glorified,
O'er-tainted Nature's solitary boast;
Purer than foam on central ocean tost,
Brighter than Eastern skies at day-break strewn
With forced roses, than th' unblemished moon
Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast,
Thy image falls to earth. Yet sure, I ween,
Not unforgiven, the suppliant here might bend,
As to a visible power, in whom did blend
All that was mixed and reconciled in thee
Of mother's love, and maiden purity,

Of high with low, celestial with terrene."

We cannot sufficiently express our admiration of the calm and noble fidelity to Truth in which Mr. Milman deals honestly, righteously, with whatever subject comes before him, without the thought ever crossing his mind, certainly never staining his page, as to what parties or systems of opinion the Truth might serve, or the Truth might injure. We select the following as one out of many instances:

"Even the expression, the remission of sins,' which to a Christian ear may bear a different sense, to the Jew would convey a much

narrower meaning. All calamity, being a mark of the divine displeasure, was an evidence of sin; every mark of divine favour therefore an evidence of divine forgiveness, The expression is frequently used in its Jewish sense in the book of Maccabees. 1 Macc. iii. 8; 2 Macc. viii. 5, 27; vii. 38. Le Clerc has made a similar observation, but is opposed by Whitby, who however does not appear to have been very profoundly acquainted with Jewish phraseology."-(Vol. i. p. 103.)

We have sometimes to regret the want of concentration, the absence of the best and closest attention of his mind, in Mr. Milman's History. This is manifested not only in carelessness and feebleness of style, but in meagre and slurred interpretations, in not taking time to gather and reveal the finer connections of a passage. The beautiful conclusion of the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of St. Matthew, where our Saviour defends the consistency and fidelity of John the Baptist, even after he had received from him a message of impatience and offence, is thus slenderly and unsatisfactorily disposed of by Mr. Milman. He would make it appear as if Christ was justifying the people for considering the Baptist as a prophet, instead of justifying the Baptist, notwithstanding his seeming defection:

"It was no idle object which led them into the wilderness, to see as it were, a reed shaken by the wind,' nor to behold any rich or luxurious object for such they would have gone to the courts of their sovereigns. Still he declares the meanest of his own disciples to have attained some moral superiority, some knowledge, probably, of the real nature of the new Religion, and the character and designs of the Messiah, which had never been possessed by John. With his usual rapidity of transition, Jesus passes at once to his moral instruction, and vividly shows, that whether severe or gentle, whether more ascetic or more popular, the teachers of a holier faith had been equally unacceptable. The general multitude of the Jews had rejected both the austerer Baptist, and himself, though of so much more benign and engaging demeanour. The whole discourse ends with the significant words, My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.'

Now this, we must think, is in the coldest and most slovenly style of spiritless and slurred interpretation; and it is this that so often renders Mr. Milman's Life of Christ of no value, except for the mere information it contains, which is always considerable. To make our objection clear, we will endeavour to supply at some length, the fullness of meaning, and the finer connections in this passage, which Mr. Milman has taken no pains to collect.

We are told in the commencement of this chapter, that in his prison the Baptist heard of the works of Christ. The very word, prison, in connection with that child of the wilderness who lived beneath the open sky, and held converse only with Nature, suggests to us the physical irritations that must have tortured and clouded his faculties, and the morbid thoughts that must have eat into his soul. What misery greater to an impassioned reformer, whose spirit burns to do its work, than to have his hands tied, and plucked from the living world to whom his mission was, to be cast into the objectless solitudes of a dungeon! What mind could bear that heavy arrest upon its impetuous movements, that turning into contemptuous mockery of its nursed and much-loved schemes, without a bitter re-action? In this melancholy of spirit stray echoes are wafted to his dungeon of the preaching of Jesus. His heart grows darker and more perplexed as this contrast breaks upon him, of his own condition with that of Him whose way he prepared. Why should it be so? Why should he, one of the prime agents in the coming Reformation, thus be laid aside like a broken tool? Where were the signs of the Messiah's kingdom? Was there not unnecessary delay? Was Christ acting in the spirit of his mission? Why not take upon him, at once, his great office, and restoring the sceptre to Israel, set up at once that revival of the best days of Judaism, which was the Kingdom of God, in John's conception of it, that the Messiah was to establish? We do not believe that these brooding thoughts generated in the Baptist's mind suspicion or unbelief, for that is inconsistent with the character of the man, and with all the rest of his history; but we believe that owing to his Jewish apprehensions of what was the Christ's true Kingdom, they produced perplexity, disappointment, and impatience, and that this impatience found vent in his message to Jesus, "art thou he that should come, or must we look for another?" a message not conveying, we think, the language of unbelief, but the language of admonition and advice, a prompting of Jesus to use speed and despatch; an excited, impatient, perhaps querulous remonstrance against delay. How calm is the answer of Jesus! He asserts nothing of himself. He appeals to facts: let them speak for him. He does not declare himself to be the Messiah in answer to John's message, for with their misconceptions, he was more anxious to introduce new views of the Messiah's purpose, than to challenge attention to himself as the Christ, whilst they were yet unprepared to learn the true character which the Christ should bear. He cited his works, as vouchers for himself—they not only proved, -they did something to unfold the true scope and nature of his

mission. They were explanatory of its spirit and purpose, as well as demonstrative of its authority. They would do something to open John's mind to the true character of God's kingdom on the earth. They would unfold aims that looked farther than any resuscitation of Judaism:-" Go and show John again the things that ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight; the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them;" —and the answer is closed with that pointed admonition addressed rather to the feelings in John's mind that suggested his message than to any thing that the message itself contained, an admonition not of direct reproof, but sufficient to awaken John to new patience, thought, and faith, " and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me."

When the messengers departed, Jesus turned to the multitude, and addressed them upon John's character, deeming it, perhaps, necessary to vindicate his consistency. John was not inconsistent but impatient, and his impatience arose out of his Jewish views of the kingdom of God, which, supposing to be in a great measure temporal and outward, he thought might be hurried on and precipitated. These two characteristics of John, Jesus brings into notice, his firmness and his unenlightened impetuosity. He appeals to the people for their sense of John's character. He was no undecided man, infirm of purpose, and wavering in his testimony that preached in the wilderness,-shaken like its own reeds, and yielding to every influence like the tall grass of the desert that bends and shivers in the blast. He who abode in the wilderness, because it was a type of himself, was not likely to go back from his faith. He was no courtier clothed in fine raiment, soft and silken, neither in mind nor body, to be open to seductive influences, or liable to caprice. The passed word of that lofty and rugged spirit would be, like the past itself, irrevocable. Such a man would be more liable to be obstinate and impetuous in an error than apt to change. The sterner class of minds are always the most uniform, and the reason is that they are not open to a wide range of influences. of influences. Sternness of temper accompanies contracted sympathies; it is connected with narrowness of thought, and John was narrow. He was thus by nature likely to be inflexible in his once delivered testimony that Jesus was the Christ; but narrow in his conceptions of the objects and purpose of the Christ, and therefore impatient and impetuous under his disappointed expectations. The source of this impatience Jesus plainly declares was in John's ignorance of the true aims of the Messiah's mission. He deemed that the kingdom of heaven might be gotten by violence,-that the violent

might take it by force, that the Christ might long since have taken unto him his great power and reigned. He did not know that the kingdom of heaven suffereth no violence, and cometh not by observation, for the kingdom of heaven is within the soul. Though the last and greatest of Jewish prophets, yet in the scope and vision of his spirit he was only a Jew; and in the knowledge of God and of Providence, the very least in the true kingdom of heaven would be more enlightened than he. This is John's mind laid open: and thus did Christ generously defend his consistency while he traced his querulous message to its

source.

That John was offended in him, suggested to Jesus' mind the melancholy recollections of past failures, and that the Jews were offended both in John and in him. They rejected alike the austerities of the one, and the human sympathies of the other. The one was insane and a fanatic: the other was too like themselves to be the great prophet of God. "But Wisdom is justified of all her children." John had his mission; and Christ had his. The world did not understand them; but they have conquered and changed the world. Each in his place was the instrument that Providence required. God fits the workman to the work; and the result has proved that his wisdom is justified.

We cannot read the record of sorrowful and depressing remembrances which this train of thought summoned before Jesus without a keen feeling of the painful trials and disappointments of that tender and sympathetic mind. There flitted before his quick thought the scenes where he had spent his strength for nought, the cities on whose homes and people his spirit had shed its best energies and love,–and shed them only to be like water spilt on the ground, and that cannot be gathered. Devoted to them, life and mind, there comes back to him no return but this recurring experience, that they were offended in him. "Then began he to sorrow over the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not." Nazareth, Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum, are all before him, pressing their bitter memories on his fainting heart; all sought and lost; toiled for but not won; sought by works that might have averted heathen Tyre and Sidon from their desperate courses; and ministered unto by one, who if he had preached unto Sodom might have awakened even it to repentance, and stayed the fiery indignation of Heaven. But mark how Jesus calms and reassures this depression of a moment. "I thank thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that though Thou hast hid these things from the worldly wise and prudent, Thou