natures in Christ, the divine within the human. What is human is finite; what is divine is infinite, and they cannot be conjoined in one person. It is a self contradiction. The answer is, it may be a mystery; it is so more or less, but it is no self-contradiction. And it is just the same mystery, which we find in ourselves and in all nature,-the union of the infinite with the finite, in such wise that the latter is not abolished and lost, but ever remains. The objection sounds strange enough on the lips of a philosophy which asserts the essential divinity of all humanity; which has no trouble about the deification of every child of Adam, and sees no self-contradiction there. How God can be in man, how man can be his absolute subject, a fresh creation of omnipotence every hour, and yet be a self-conscious responsible moral agent, is a mystery which has not yet been resolved. How God can be in nature, where the infinite is ever becoming finite, is a mystery which has never yet been resolved. The line where one passes over into the other eludes our clumsy analysis. Pantheism denies the fact, and resolves the finite in the infinite Atheism denies the fact, and resolves the infinite in the finite. Herein they rush into mysteries just as inscrutable, and make the verdict of the human consciousness a lie. In the humanity of Jesus Christ, a humanity sinless and complete, there is also the union of the infinite and the finite, but a union in such degree as brings God vastly nearer to ourselves than in a human nature depraved and darkened by sin, and vastly nearer than in dumb nature around us; a union in which the finite is so turned into living transparencies that herein the Word becomes the perfect image and manifestation of the Godhead. In the Johannean speech and imagery it is God not only in first things but in last things; not only in the centres of infinite being, but in the lowest degree of the finite, even to the material clothings of our human nature which were lighted up with the transfigurations of his glory. God in nature. is power, majesty, beneficence; God in our sinful humanity is conscience with trembling apprehensions of the divine justice. God in Christ is Fatherhood, justice, mercy, love, tenderness, forgiveness, sacrifice, the inmost heart of God lavished on the creatures of his hand. It is a revelation which the world waited for and needed to be prepared for. It unitizes its history and lights up its annals to day. It meets science in its gropings upward at the vanishing point of its discoveries, and transfigures nature in a light which is above nature, turning it into living types of the same spiritual realities which revelation had brought into more open view. But there is a more practical objection often urged against the Logos doctrine. It takes Christ out of our human sympathies and loves. He ceases to be our example, our brother whom we may follow through like temptations and victories. Make him like one of ourselves, a development of our own human nature, under like conditions of frial, suffering, and help from God, and how encouraging to follow in his steps! Make him divine, as no other human being ever was or can be, and how vain must all our efforts be to imitate his virtues and put on his perfections and graces! We should be very sorry to abate admiration of any one who has been smitten with the loveliness of the character of Jesus, seen merely on his human side. That it has vastly exalted the ideals of the world, as to what constitutes the worth and glory of a perfected manhood, and the direction towards which we must strive for its attainment, is certainly true. That class of the virtues which are hardest to practice, and which, in the world's estimate, were scarcely reckoned at virtues as all,-forgiveness, meekness, love of enemies, love of man as man, complete self-consecration in the service of the race,-are manifest in Jesus Christ not only as the loftiest ideals, but as the most concrete realities, clothed in flesh and blood like our own, and as such, flinging perpetual rebuke on all our selfish strifes, angers, and eninities, and in some degree charming them into silence and peace. But if Christ is our pattern, so is God in precisely the same sense, and as he is revealed in the Christ himself: "Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect." Be ye followers of God, as dear children." Must God, too, be brought down within our finite proportions, in order that we may follow him? Or shall we not gratefully acknowledge rather, that the ideals which shine down upon us from the Divine Perfections, are all the more worthy of our aspiration and love because no dimness has come over them from our corrupt earthly exhalations? And how true it is, that these ideals never would have been furnished us through sheer development, and that they come down to us out of heaven, as imaged in a humanity in which dwelt the fulness of the Godhead bodily! And if eighteen hundred years of culture and progress, with all the added appliances of education and philosophy, still leave those ideals burning far above us in their solitary splendor and beauty, away in the depths of in finite space, Christ as a mere example which I am to follow and overtake, is no such vas encouragement after all. There it shines,-a star in the heavens of royal brightness and magnitude, but I cannot reach it. If Jesus Christ, as he beams upon me from the only biographies which we have of him, taken in the whole range of his nature, and the whole height of his excellency, is a model which I am expected to imitate and translate into my daily life, then he is no encouragement to me, but condemnation and blank despair. How long must I attain before, standing up to challenge the world, I can say, Which of you convinceth me of sin?" How long before I can tell my hearers, "Ye are from beneath; I am from above?" How long before I can announce to them, "All that the Father hath is mine," or "No man knoweth God but me, and he to whom I shall reveal him?" At what stage of my moral progress may I become so at one with Almighty God, that I may consider myself his purely embodied reason, and speak in my own name, and from my own self-consciousness as from God himself, and bend his bow and launch his thunders? The hour is coming when all who are in the graves shall hear my voice, and shall come forth,-they that have done good to a resurrection of life, and they that have done evi!, to a resurrection of condemnation." Or when from my super-augelic acquirements may I announce," I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, and I hold the keys of hades and death?" To make Jesus Christ my model throughout, would not crown me with all human graces and excellences, but would place me a fantastic figure on the heights of heaven, gesticulating in its lightnings and outlined for a moment on its thunderclouds, the next moment to disappear in its consuming fires. " The Authorship and Historical Character of the Fourth Gospel considered in reference to the Contents of the Gospel itself. A Critical Essay by WILLIAM LANDAY, M. A., Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. London: Macmillan and Company. 1872. Duodecimo, pp. 307. An examination of the objections to the Gospel according to John. The author writes in a good spirit, but in no other respect is his work equal to that of Dr. Sears. His defence is not marked by any strength or freshness, and some of his theories are not tenable. The Works of Aurelius Augustine, Bishop of Hippo. A new Translation. Edited by the Rev. MARCUS DODS, M. A., in Connection with the Donatist Controversy. Rev. J. R. KING, M. A. Octavo, pp. 530. Pelagian Works of Saint Augustine. HOLMES, D. D. Octavo, pp. 430. Vol. III, Writings Translated by the Vol. IV, The AntiTranslated by PETER These volumes, the continuation of the excellent edition of Augustine's works in English, are for sale in this country by Scribner, Wilfred and Armstrong, 654 Broadway, New York. A Guide to Reading the Hebrew Text. For the use of Beginners. By the Rev. W. H. VIBBERT, M. A., Professor of Hebrew in the Berkely Divinity School. Andover: Warren F. Draper. 1872. Octavo, pp. 67. This very useful book has been prepared not as a grammar, but as a guide to the reading of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. The author's experience in teaching has shown him that the fluent reading of the text is one of the greatest difficulties which the learner has to encounter. All who have studied or taught Hebrew will appreciate the trouble with which this obstacle is overcome. The book is well printed in clear type on good paper, has evidently been carefully prepared, and is well adapted to its purposes. The Last Twelve Verses of the Gospel according to St. Mark, vindicated against recent Critical Objectors, and established, by JOHN W. BURGON, B. D., Fellow of Oriel College and Gresham Lecturer in Divinity. Oxford and London: James Parker and Company. 1871. Octavo, pp. 333. A thorough and exhaustive investigation of the genuineness and authenticity of the disputed verses at the close of the Gospel according to Mark. Wide research, patient examination, unwearied labor appear on every page, and the various arguments are pursued and presented with a fulness which leaves little to be desired. We commend the book to those who feel an interest in questions pertaining to the text of the New Testament. Mr. Burgon pays a deserved compliment to a valued contributor to the QUARTERLY. He refers to one scholar whose position he commends, and adds in a note: Allusion is made to the Rev John A Broadus, the author of an able and convincing paper in THE BAPTIST QUARTERLY for July, 1869, in which the words and phrases contained in St. Mark xvi. 9-20, are exclusively examined. If the present volume should ever reach the learned Professor's hands, he will perceiv that I must have written the present chapter before I knew of his labors (an advantage I owe to Mr. Scrivener's kindness), my treatment of the subject and his own being so entirely dif ferent. But it is only due to Professor Broadus to acknowledge the interest and advantage with which I have compared my lucubrations with his, and the sincere satisfaction with which I have discovered that we have everywhere independently arrived at precisely the same result. British Quarterly Review. April:-1. The Poetry of Matthew Arnold; 2. The Modern Newspaper; 3. The American Civil War; 4. Pope and his Editors; 5. The Licensing System; 6. Sir Henry Holland's Recollections; 7. Kidnapping in the South Seas; 8. The Conference of Nonconformists, Contemporary Literature, History, Biography and Travels, Politics, Science and Art, Theology, Philosophy and Physiology. Edinburgh Review. -1. Burn's Rome and the Campagna; 2. The Royal Institution; 3. Guizot's Memoir of the late Duke de Broglie; 4. Mr. Miall on Disestablishment; 5. Letters and Discoveries of Sir Charles Bell; 6. Oceanic Circulation; 7. The Works of John Hookham Frere; 8. The Life and Times of Henry Lord Brougham; 9. The Claims of the United States. London Quarterly Review.-1. The State of English Architecture; 2. Thomas Carlyle; 3. Trade with China; 4. Masson's Life of Milton; 5. Modern Scepticism,-The Duke of Somerset; 6. The British Parliament, its History and Eloquence; 7. Diaries of a Diplomatist; 8. Education, Secularism, and Nonconformity; 9. Concession to the United States. THE BAPTIST QUARTERLY. ROGER WILLIAMS AS AN AUTHOR. Publications of the Narraganset Club. Volumes I-IV. Providence, SOME books have a natural longevity. They are not of a merely temporary or local use, but have a vitality and enduring power in them which carries them beyond the time in which they are born. They live and keep their hold in virtue of a truth in them over which change and time have no power. But most books are written for their day, and expire with it. They have their use for a season; but the world soon gets beyond them. Their office is finished, and they are left behind, dropped out of the living thoughts and present uses of men, and at length out of their memories. The dead literature of the world,—not only the useless which is known to antiquaries, but that which is absolutely dead and vanished forever,—it is almost fearful to contemplate. It contained the purest efficacy and extraction of living intellects; but not a trace of it is left. And that which has managed to survive has much of it only the dried, preserved life of the mummy, and is kept for antiquarian curiosity rather than for any real human service. And yet many of these books have an historical beyond their intrinsic value, so that they come to resurrection, and a new though limited use on this account. Such resurrections have become quite common of late years, with the multiplication of historical students and the increased vigor given to historical inquiry. A large number of works belonging to the initial periods of American (385) VOL. VI.-No. 4. Y history have been recovered from oblivion. Some, like the manuscript of Bradford's History of Plymouth, have been recovered after long disappearance. Some, of excessive rarity, whose existence depended on the preservation of a single copy, have been reproduced in sufficient number to make them accessible to all historical students, and perhaps to insure them against any future extinction. The more important works, like Winthrop's New England, Morton's Memorial, and later Bradford's Plymouth, together with such documents as were gathered up in Rev. Alexander Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrims and of Massachusetts Bay, and the Colonial Records of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Rhode Island, and Connecticut have been followed by the exact reprint of some of the rarest tracts and volumes, such as Mourt's Relation, Lechford's Plain Dealing, Wood's New England's Prospect, and Johnson's Wonderworking Providence. To these are to be added the Publications of the Narraganset Club, of which four large and handsome volumes have already appeared. The club has undertaken to issue a literal reprint of the works of Roger Williams, reproducing the minutest errors of the press, the ipsissima verba of the original edition. All his extant works, except three, have already appeared, carefully edited, together with one of John Cotton's intimately connected with them. It is proposed to give some account of these works, and a review of Williams as an author. Writing books was not his profession, was rather the accident of a very busy life. His great work was the Providence Plantation. Having founded Rhode Island on a principle which then first incorporated into a civil polity has been ever since working its way into the law of all civilized states, he needs and could take little additional honor from any performances of his pen. By this he would be known to the last syllable of recorded time, though his books had sunk into Lethe and disappeared, as until quite recently seemed likely to be their fate. It is nearly two hundred 1 This inestimable book, after being lost for nearly ninety years, was found in 1855, in the Episcopal library at Fulham, and has since, through the kindness of the late Bishop of London, been published by the Massachusetts Historical Society. The manuscript was known to have been used by Morton, Prince, and Hutchinson in the composition of their works What was its fate after Hutchinson's publication of his second volume, in 1767, remained unknown. In 1849 Bishop Wilberforce, in his History of the Protestant Episcopal Church in America, referred to a "manuscript history of the Plantation of Plymouth in the Fulham library." The identity of the quotations from it with language preserved by Morton and Prince led to the belief that it was Bradford's lost history, which on examination it proved to be. When Prince used it in 1736 it belonged to the library kept in the tower of the old South Church, in Boston. In 1775 that church was occupied as a riding-school for the British cavalry; and then it was, probably, that the book was taken away and carried to England."-Palfrey, History of New England, i, 136. |