system be to the ignorant, and unthinking, and depraved masses of mankind, to instruct them in righteousness or restrain them. from vice? Those who advocate this view may deem it a purer and more disinterested morality, but so far as the virtue is real it has grown from a religious and Christian root, from a belief in God and immortality. When once severed from its root it may retain its beauty for a while, but like cut flowers will soon wither and perish.

We have thus seen that in the four great departments of intellectual and moral culture, Poetry, History, Philosophy, and Ethics, the Bible is a text-book of education not only superior to all others but supplying that which no others can supply, the primordial facts and principles on which all true knowledge rests, the divine and fontal light in which the human mind, at least its higher faculties, are first awakened and nourished. Without this primal and quickening nurture-the divine Ideas emanating from the Bible and reflected in Christian literature, a mind fed solely on the facts of history and science, or the abstractions of logical and mathematical truth, might become a repository of learning, or a reasoning and calculating machine, but not a living soul.*

I might show, did time permit, that the Bible is a book also of practical wisdom for the race in the various departments of moral, social, and political science; the true Statesman's Manual, in which the principles of all law and justice, of human government and political economy, as well as personal

66

* One of the most striking and saddest illustrations of this is furnished in the experience of the late John Stuart Mill as related in his Autobiography. Excluded in his childhood from all knowledge of the Bible and all direct influences of Christianity, which he was taught to regard as false, he was brought up by his father in the dry light and barren formulas of logic and kindred sciences,-the all-annihilating power of analysis being the only faculty cultivated-till, at the age of eighteen, as he himself tells us, he found himself a mere reasoning machine," a prodigy of learning and reasoning power, but famishing for the bread of life. Awakened at length, in a musing mood, to the utter worthlessness of all his knowledge, he fell into a deep melancholy,—the natural pining of a soul made for truth and fed on husks,-from which his first relief was found in reading the poetry of Wordsworth, which is alive and saturated throughout with the spiritual truth and sentiment derived from Christianity.

morality and well-being, are embodied in precept or example, for the practical guidance of mankind. It was the rejection of. the Bible and its principles which led to the horrors of the French Revolution; and a similar rejection of divine wisdom and an absolute trust in mere human reason unverified and uncorrected by experieuce, is the source of all the radical and revolutionary social theories of the present day. In the Bible, and the Bible alone, we find the origin and true idea of those great and divine institutions, the Family and the State; the principles and conditions of political and civil liberty, by the study and practice of which nations can alone work out their political salvation. In one department only of what is commonly included in our systems of education is the Bible lacking in instruction-that of physical science, and this only because not needed, God's other grand revelation of Nature being all sufficient for this end: And this end will not be fully reached, science will not be worthy of its name, till it becomes not a mere tracing of material links, or a microscopic inspection of the mere letters of this book, but a reading of God's thoughts in the Creation, in sympathy with the mind of its great Author; till it learns also that there are other divine thoughts higher and deeper than these, for which another reve. lation is needed and is given.

I have purposely omitted to speak of the Bible as a book of Religion and spiritual culture, revealing to man God in his higher revelations to the human soul, and the way of life and salvation as made known in the Gospel. This, though the chief end of the Scripture revelation, and although the highest of all culture, the summit and crown of a true education, is that, alas, which has least attraction for the natural or unspiritual mind. Possibly the separation of this supreme end from other and subordinate uses, and the unwise presentation of it by religious teachers, giving rise to endless religious controversy and sectarian divisions, is one great reason of the disesteem into which the Bible has fallen in our day. As Christ prefaced his higher spiritual teaching and his divine cure of the soul by acts of healing to the body, so the Bible may best win its way to men's hearts as the book of life and salvation, by first ministering, and showing its adaptation to minister, to the

intellectual and moral nature, which, as well as the soul or spiritual nature, is made in the divine image, and can be enlightened and saved only by communion with the divine. Word, the mind, and thoughts of God.

In the light of this wonderful adaptation of the Bible to the human mind, its correlation to every faculty and want of man, and its manifold design as a book of education for the race, we may see the unwisdom, the downright folly, as well as wrong and wickedness, of the policy of excluding such a book from our public schools. Better, by far, to exclude the light of the sun, and light our school-rooms with gas and kerosene. As well exclude all knowledge of the world illumined by the sun, all history and literature-which is more or less saturated with the truths of the Bible-and confine our instruction to the abstractions of logic and mathematics, and call that education, as exclude that light from heaven which alone interprets and supplements and systematizes our earthly knowledge into one living and organic whole; which completes the circle of knowledge by revealing its two fundamental principles and opposite poles-God and man-and their relations one to the other.

To sacrifice the Bible as a text-book of education in deference to the narrow prejudices, whether of infidels or Romanists, or to an unenlightened political expediency, is-to adopt the striking image of Coleridge-"like digging up the charcoal foundations of the temple of Ephesus, to burn as fuel on its altars."

We may see also from this survey, the falsity of that narrow view which regards it as merely a book of religion in the technical sense; and to that still narrower notion, which is getting to be prevalent, that it is a book of a past age, which is becoming outgrown and obsolete, and is to be superseded by the new illumination. Certain human dogmas and crude interpretations that have attached themselves to the Scriptures may be superseded and dissolved by the new light continually breaking forth from God's word, as some old theories of the universe are dissolved in the light of modern science; but the Bible itself can no more grow old or obsolete than Nature itself. When morning and evening outgrow their pristine beauty, or the seasons cease to be new every year, then will the histories and

biographies of the Bible lose their freshness, and fail to interest and instruct the race. When the stars grow old in the sky and the sun wears out his garment of light, then the truths of the Bible will become obsolete. When the law of gravitation loosens its hold on the atoms of the globe, then the Ten Commandments will cease to be binding on the life and conscience of men. Nay, not so; for heaven and earth shall pass away, but this Word shall never pass away.

Let this conviction of the permanence and universality of the Bible, its correspondence with Nature in its manifoldness, its grandeur and its divinity, get full possession of the minds of parents and teachers; let it be exalted in the estimation of older persons, and it will find a way of being exalted in the estimation of the young. Let it become a household book, as it was with our fathers and mothers, as well as a book for Sundays and Sabbath schools. Let it reclaim and recover its place in our day and common schools as a text-book of education for the mind, as well as a book of devotion, by which all study is to be sanctified and all knowledge illuminated. Above all, let its blessed truths and precepts be made supreme in the heart and life, and it will need no other or higher exaltation.

ARTICLE VIII.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THE BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY.*

The ordinary idea of the first chapters of Genesis has hitherto been, that they are revelations which had no foreshadowings, officially recorded for all time. To explore these records in the interests of science, to compare them with like records, possessed by the Gentiles, to modify them by allegorical interpretations even, has been counted the next thing to a denial of their inspiration. But, sober thought on such an idea shows it to be without adequate grounds, except that of an arbitrary a priori assumption, that Moses had the only knowledge possible in the case. When it is remembered that Moses lived long after Abraham, that he was learned in Egyptian wisdom, and doubtless, as a scholar, knew something of Chaldean learning, the ground taken by modern scholarship, that these chapters are compilations from different existing legends, seems the more tenable. That the "Oriental Peoples" had legends on the Creation, the Fall of Man, the Deluge and other primitive events, there is no denying. Nor is there any need of denying it, as this admirable volume shows. M. Lenormant is not only a believer in revelation, but a devout confessor of what came by Moses, as well as of what came by Christ. In this exploration of Chaldean, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Phenician tradition, he discloses a prodigality of thought and skill allied to great variety of pursuit, and diligent manipulation of what he has secured. He "spoils the Egyptians" by boldly using for Christian purposes materials, which, if left unused, might be turned against the credibility of the Mosaic records.

From the mass of tradition here examined it would seem that if these ancient legends have a common basis of truth, the first part of Genesis stands more generally related to the religious history of mankind, than if it is taken primarily as one account, by one man, to one people. The difficulty of tracing all the distorted legends to the Mosaic narrative would seem to be greater than to hold that the Mosaic narrative was conditioned, in form at least,

* The Beginnigs of History: According to the Bible, and the Traditions of Oriental Peoples. By FRANCOIS LENORMANT. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.