thing else with it that the most fervid supranaturalist can desire.

Thus, p. 29, "If history repeats itself by fresh instances of eternal principles. . . . the old description may become a new prophecy. . . . . And if a holy organization on a spiritual type takes the place of old Israel in God's favour, it may be argued that the threatenings and promises of the old were typically intended of the new; intended not by the prophet, but by the Providence which wields nations, patriots, tyrants, and their destinies, painting in the past the picture of the future."

Again, p. 158, "We need not exclude from the region of devout metaphysics a speculation, how far the dread Being, to whom our thoughts are known long before, may have calculated the impulses of his ancient worshippers and their expression, so that things spoken of old might become applicable again; the songs of Zion become hymns of the church, the praise of King David be transferred to a mental king, the prayer for Solomon, the sorrow of Jeremiah, possibly the birth of Hezekiah repeated in the greatest (we must not say 'the only') Christ."

And, p. 169, "We may even find a pleasure, which if not severely logical, is yet not altogether mystical in turning memory into hope, and in saying to ourselves, though God did not see fit to build up the kingdom of Hezekiah, as Micah expected, He has given that hope a glorious transfiguration by building up a spiritual dominion of One who was the Son of David in figure and poetry—whether in flesh we hardly know. Though the twelve tribes have not found a reunion, which as a thing local and national would not affect any spiritual faith, the hearts of men in distant nations may be knit together by the free Spirit which once spoke narrower, and now speaks wider hopes. The Holy Land is wherever God is. The prophets are wherever free men worship in truth." Once more, p. 224. "Some portions are so local and temporal as the exaltation of Mount Zion above other mountains, that our own Master, Christ, the only infallible interpreter, has reversed them by his doctrine, and taught his followers that the fulfilment of such things lies in their expansion; hence they fulfil 84

VOL. XXXVIII.-NO. IV.

in such a sense as that in which the forest of to-day fulfils the acorn of a millenium ago."

Here is a confession that in the orderings of God there is a correspondence between the utterances of the prophets wrapped in the temporary forms of the ancient economy and the spiritual and enduring realities of the gospel. The whole Old Testament is thus one vast prophecy of the New, of which the verbal predictions of the Messiah are but the culminating points. And the more attentively this correspondence between the Old and the New in God's kingdom is studied, the more conviction will ripen into certainty that we are not in the region of accident or human caprice, but of Divine foreordination. And the more narrowly we inspect the coherence of this great preparatory scheme in the Old Testament the more thoroughly we shall be satisfied that the Messianic predictions are not isolated phenomena, nor accidents in the scheme, but component and important parts of it; that these utterances must have been shaped by the Divine prescience as truly as the whole scheme was prearranged of God; and that in the Divine intention these utterances carried from the first those ideas which we now find to be involved in them. And if God designed them, who shall prove that men did not in a measure comprehend them? That the prophets themselves, and the people to whom they were addressed, did not, to a greater or less extent, penetrate to their real meaning?

After the evidences, which have been given, it might well be thought superfluous to accumulate further proof of how completely Dr. Williams denies the presence of anything supernatural in the prophets. They have a mission from God in no other sense than all men of great and pure ideas, conscious of the truth and value of what they utter. It will, however, contribute to a juster understanding of the rigour with which he presses his fundamental principle, to state in a word how completely he rates them as men on a level with other men. The association of Sophocles, Cicero, and St. Paul (p. 37) finds repeated parallels in the combination of the prophets with the bards and philosophers of other lands, and even with Turkish dervishes, Popish confessors, and enthusiasts generally. Their sentiments though often commended are sometimes represented

as less liberal and just than those found elsewhere. They are spoken of as under the influence of human passion, frequently vindictive and governed by a narrow and contracted patriotism. When they enter into the region of politics they mistake their sphere and give injudicious advice, such as princes were justifiable in declining to act upon. "It is the old quarrel," he says, p. 366, "between the unseen and the seen, faith and flesh, the prophet and the soldier, the preaching Covenanter and counselling Cromwell, the simplicity which asks for prayers against cholera, and the statesmanship which recommends the removal of dirt." The false prophets and the true are put upon a level, and the strife between them is made the ground of a charge that there were factions in the prophetic order.

After what has been said it will surprise no one to hear that he speaks contemptuously of a book-revelation, and denies the reality of miracles. These are disposed of either by naturalistic explanations, or by denying the trustworthiness of the records in which they are found. In regard to the resurrection of Christ he holds the following hesitating and non-committal language, pp. 426, 427:

"Who can read the fifteenth chapter of 1st Corinthians, and say that the evidence of a community, summed up by St. Paul within thirty-five years of the event, leaves no stronger assurance on the mind than we possess as to the addition of fifteen years to Hezekiah's life, specified in 2 Kings xx., we know neither when nor by whom, and transcribed in this appendix (Isaiah xxxvi.—xxxix.) some years, we know, after the hymn of Hezekiah had existed as a separate fragment? That Christ rose bodily from the grave on the third day, rests historically on the belief of the hundred and twenty men, who met in the upper chamber (Acts i. 15-22). The most natural account of their belief is that it had a correspondent fact; this is enough to strengthen the hope of believers in Christ. If the evidence from the first day to our own has satisfied friends without satisfying foes, and so wants the compulsory force of demonstration (as there are signs of its passing through an oral stage) this may show it was not meant to be a foundation, but a confirmation of the faith which enters within the veil. To those who receive Christ as the Son of God, his death seems far more miraculous

than his resurrection. Those who acknowledge him but as the Son of Man, must feel his teaching to be an element of credibility in the subsequent story. The worthiness of the occasion, the dignity of the person, the nearness of the attestation, the importance to mankind of the immortality involved in the event, and the ever recurrent necessity of belief in this or some kindred pledge of our destiny, remove Christ's resurrection out of the category to which the specification of Hezekiah's fifteen years and the return of the shadow on the dial belong. It may be of God's goodness that He would not rest our faith absolutely on display of power in the past, lest learning should avail more than piety, and scholars believe more immediately than the meek of heart; He may give adequate assurance as a reward to those who without seeing have loved, yet not change the idea of faith, which is to endure as seeing the unseen; at any rate, the event best attested in the New Testament, the most sacredly associated with our hope, and most important, if we hold it, in all history, deserves a nobler use than polemical employment to bias interpretation elsewhere."

His attitude upon some of the questions now agitated in church and state, may be inferred from the following passage, pp. 217, 218, with which we shall conclude our notice of this volume.

"The extent to which Isaiah interposed in the policy of his times, resembling in that respect Ambrose and the more statesmanlike of the Fathers, renders it natural to ask, what would have been his judgment on some of the questions of our age. We can hardly imagine the developments of our commerce, our colonies on every sea, our boundless luxury, with abject poverty by its side, as entering into his conception. Yet the sentiments in which his large genius would have indulged, are too clear from the expressions which he used of Tyre and her merchant princes; we may fear that much explanation from our economists would have been needed to reconcile him to some of our social inequalities. We may be too sure, no explanation would have induced him to tolerate such laws of entail, as transmit encumbered and unimproved estates, with an inheritance of debt, while by logical necessity they render the tiller of the soil little better in physical well-being than the serf, sometimes

in moral aspiration, than the cattle which he drives. This remark should not be understood as if we were bound in the light of the gospel and of reason to consider the arrangements of Providence exhausted by the economy of Palestine; only if arrangements change, moral principles are permanent; at least it would be well, amidst professions of devotion to the Bible, not to close the eyes of our mind altogether to what the sacred writers would have said, had they been writing of ourselves. Again, as regards provision for the external maintenance of religion, nothing is clearer than that whatever theory excludes religion from the commonwealth, leaving men to guess what should be right in their own eyes, would have seemed to the prophet national atheism. By divine right he would have par liaments or presidents, no less than princes, govern and be governed, and the priest's lips keep knowledge. He would not have expected the living coal from the altar to touch the lips. of crazy volubility in preference to those of a rightful officer. Yet no system which hardened itself in a tradition of forms or suppressed fresh truths and confessed itself a stranger to inspiration, and incapable of profiting by experience, could have satisfied him. He might, in an historically descended society, have borne articles but few and not inconsistent with each other or with their adjuncts; prayers he would probably have had fixed, but not without elasticity of provision for circumstances and for creative devotion; whatever creed he had beyond a promise to fear the living God, could have been neither a forgery, nor have contained malediction. Most alien of all from his own mind, would have been an ecclesiastical system without faith in the unseen, or one which broadens religion by depriving it of all which breathes life. He would as little understand the claim of a majority, as that of a priesthood, to decide what only God can make true."