On the 24th April 1630, he made his will, which has been recently published at the conclusion of his Memoirs by M. Lalanne (Paris 1854). Here is an extract from it :

"I leave to my children the example of my life, of which, for their domestic use, they have the most faithful and clear account that my memory has been able to furnish (he alludes to his Memoirs). Above all, I exhort them to the love of God, to be fervent, sensitive, and constant in his cause, to be willing to spend life and fortune therein, to delight in loving all for him who has given all, to lay down life for the cause of the Prince of life, and thus doing, God will deliver them, and will draw them up from the tomb of death, as he has done me. Let them be slow to take an oath, that they may never violate one any more than their father has done."

Here is another passage from the same will, relating to his

sons:

"At the very time that my eldest son rendered himself the enemy of God and his father, renouncing and betraying both one and the other, and occasioning numberless horrors, my other son Nathan, made himself commendable by uncommon probity both in theory and action, and shared with me the perils brought on me by his brother."

On the 9th May 1630, after a short illness, "satisfied with, not tired of, living life," this remarkable man expired, and God, as he himself words it, " called his soul into his own true rest. He had had no rest here below. His tomb, with the Latin inscription composed by himself, is at Geneva, in the Cathedral Church of St Peter, placed against the wall which is on the right hand on entering through the great door.

His eldest son, Constant D'Aubigné, of whom he speaks in his will as having "betrayed God and his father," finding himself in England at the time when that country contemplated engaging, with the support of the French Protestants, in a war with France, the Duke of Buckingham, desirous of placing Theodore Agrippa D'Aubigné at the head of the undertaking, intrusted his son Constant with the negotiation; but that unfortunate man, on his way to Geneva, where his father then was, passed through Paris, fell while there into the hands of the Jesuits, and betrayed the cause of Protestantism, which drew down upon him his father's curse.

Having become a Roman Catholic, Constant obtained a warrant from the Pope to assist at the celebration of the Lord's Supper by the Reformers. He fell into great wretchedness, and we see by a correspondence between the two brothers, preserved to us by La Baumelle in his Memoirs of Madame de Maintenon (vol. 6), that the eldest had often to invoke the aid of the younger brother Nathan, who, true to the cause of Protestantism, resided at Geneva. Constant was the father of

Madame de Maintenon, and of the Count D'Aubigné.

Madame

de Maintenon became the wife of Louis XIV., married her niece Amable D'Aubigné (her brother's only child) to the Marshal, Duke de Noailles, one of the greatest nobles of the court. It is by this family that the Catholic branch of the D'Aubignés is represented at the present day.

As to the Protestant branch-a far more humble one-it has continued at Geneva, and filled several posts in the government of this small state, as well as in the ministry of the word, and in the military engineering department. Nathan, whose birth it would appear was illegitimate, received from his parent, as we have seen, the testimony of having been "commendable for uncommon probity in theory and action, and of having shared with him in the perils brought on him by his brother." In fact, the unhappy Constant had twice marched with the papists against his father before the last took refuge at Geneva. The Genevese government, wishing to do honour to Theodore Agrippa, offered him the rights of citizenship, but he refused them, declaring himself determined to die a Frenchman. Then the government bestowed these rights, in 1626, upon Nathan D'Aubigné, who, like his father, had rendered services to the state, especially in fortifying the town. His grandson, George Louis D'Aubigné, born the 2d of September 1680, member of the Council of the Two Hundred in 1721, had no son. daughter, Elisabeth D'Aubigné, born the 31st of December 1720, married on the 28th April 1743, François Merle, a French Protestant refugee, who, either in order to conform to the customs of the country, or to prevent the name from dying out through the failure of male issue, joined to his own the name of his wife. François and Elisabeth Merle D'Aubigné had three grandsons, who are now living. William, established at New York; Jean Henri, author of the History of the Reformation, and who resides at Geneva in the home of his fathers; and, lastly, John Anie, formerly Swiss Consul in the United States, and now living in Paris.

His

In conclusion, we return to England, and having presented to her sons, and especially to such of them as occupy a prominent position, the example of a Protestant of the 16th century, we add a maxim of the historian Guicciardini, quoted by D'Aubigné in his Memoirs, "Well organised social bodies, chancing to fall into decadence, are to be restored only in so far as they are brought back to their first original institutions."

Creation and the Fall. A Defence and Exposition of the First Three Chapters of Genesis. By the Rev. DONALD MACDONALD, M.A., Minister of the Free Church, Edinkillie, Pp. 460. Edinburgh: T. Constable & Co.

EDINKILLIE! Not being entirely ignorant of the general topography of Scotland, its places of worship, manses, and schools, we, in our simplicity, supposed that the birthplace of Mr Macdonald's admirable volume, could not be any great secret. Skirting painfully along the wide base of the Little Cairngorm, as it slopes downward to the great valley of the Spey, we, some years ago, spent a long day in autumn in anxious search of an inn. And by some fantastic trick of memory, mayhap beguiled by imagination, we have more than once since then been led to identify the name of Edinkillie with one or other of the side glens or straths, that occupied the front of weary vision, as we now toiled onwards, or furnished, while we lay stretched on the heather, some small food to the day-dream of idleness. Nor, when after more veritable conjecture as to the precise spot of Scottish fatherland, we became more correct in our finding of its longitude, could we, all at once, verify our observation. The name, of this most fertile retreat, is entirely unknown to one of the best gazetteers of the day.

Are we singular in our anxiety to assign a local habitation as well as a name, to the activities of an earnest, masculine, and independent mind? We trow not. There is obviously some pleasure-some profit there is decidedly, in quietly speculating on the manifold influences, alike creative and suggestive, that have been exerted by the familiar landscape of such a man's home-the sheltered wood in Anwoth where Samuel Rutherford, fashioned in deep solemnity of spirit, as at the glowing gate of heaven, his stringent arguments for present truth and painful duty, or the well-trod garden path at Bishop Auckland where the author of the "Analogy," not more profound in his inquisition for truth than patient in its elaborate consolidation, pursued his stedfast walk.

Are our readers prepared to receive some small aid from us in the form of advice? Let them then take up Mr Macdonald's substantial volume, and leisurely marking the many titles of the works on manifold topics to which he so conscientiously refers, as having been his auxiliaries in research and argument, calmly reply to the question-Is not "Creation and the Fall" a remarkable result-an emphatic specimen of what may be accomplished by the man of enthusiastic concentration of faculty and sturdy onward exertion? All laud and honour to this most painstaking and successful workman in the great laboratory of

arduous and sustained effort! Far removed from any of the important centres of literary activity, with no ready access to the stores of information in their great public libraries, and spending his daily life in an obscure and "sequestered nook," with little of encouragement amidst his secluded labours, save in his own ardent zeal to promote the interests of sacred truth and science, his volume is replete with interest viewed simply as a literary fact. Displaying manifold tokens of ripe erudition, independent judgment in its applications, and a lively habit of full and consecutive research, it may well startle into some small confusion of face others, who, in more propitious circumstances, have for the passing hour made themselves mainly remarkable by crude abortive theory, or dull trading in thoughts and learning not their own.

At present, we have no intention of following Mr Macdonald across that wide field of investigation, the goodly fruits of which he has not more diligently than successfully gathered. Would it not also be more notable than that share of vanity which falls to the lot of even the most modest man, to expect even one of our most resolute readers to accompany us in anything like a formal rehearsal of the many important problems of scriptural criticism and scientific debate that occur in his dense and crowded pages?

Rather different is our present aim. We have a shrewd deliberate ambition of being practical. Guided by the author, we will endeavour so to follow him as, in the first place, to indicate in some measure the present value, to the church of Christ and its individual members, of that style and method of discussing and vindicating the high claims of divine truth which he has pursued; secondly, we will faithfully attempt to point out what appear to us to be some of the most prominent and impressive features in his complex train of thought, and then, briefly advert to one or two points at which he has failed to enforce our full concurrence.

And in the outset, we venture to hazard the thought, that if at all disposed to overlook or depreciate the peculiar seasonableness of Mr Macdonald's work, we might, we think, be fairly challenged to test, calculate, and declare the amount of evil omen to the faith and spiritual wellbeing of the church of Christ in the general tone, tendency, and fashion of the most aspiring literature of the day, which appears to us to be sharply antagonistic to the entire record of Christianity, viewed as a matter of fact, and, therefore, as such, entitled to be not differently treated from any other question of external evidence. And we might also be pertinently expected to express a rational judgment regarding the most suitable and likely means of arresting the probable issues in evil of a phase of religious opinion similar to what has

been recently set forth by the present Dean of St Paul's, (who, as our readers need not to be told, is eminent by force of native genius, broad lofty culture, and varied learning) in the sixth and last volume of his History of Latin Christianity.

"What distinctness of conception," says Dr Milman, "what precision of language may be indispensable to true faith; what part of the ancient dogmatic system may be allowed silently to fall into disuse, as at least superfluous, and as beyond the proper range of human thought and human language; how far the sacred records may without peril to their truth be subjected to closer investigation; to what wider interpretation, especially of the Semitic portion, those records may submit and wisely submit, in order to harmonise them with the irrefutable conclusions of science; how far the eastern vail of allegory which hangs over their truth may be lifted or torn away to shew their unshadowed essence; how far the poetical vehicle through which truth is conveyed may be gently severed from the truth;-all this must be left to the future historian of our religion. As it is my own confident belief that the words of Christ, and his words alone, the primal, indefeasible truths of Christianity, shall not pass away; so I cannot presume to say, that men may not attain to a clearer, at the same time more full and comprehensive and balanced sense of those words, than has as yet been generally received in the Christian world. As all else is transient and mutable, these only eternal and universal, assuredly, whatever light may be thrown on the mental constitution of man, even on the constitution of nature, and the laws which govern the world, will be concentred so as to give a more penetrating vision of undying truths. Teutonic Christianity (and this seems to be its mission and privilege), however nearly in its more perfect forms, it may already have approximated, may approximate still more closely to the absolute and perfect faith of Christ; it may discover and establish the sublime union of religion and reason; keep in tone the triple-corded harmony of faith, holiness, and charity; assert its own full freedom, know the bounds of that freedom, respect the freedom of others. Christianity may yet have to exercise a far wider, even a more silent and untraceable, influence, through its primary, all penetrating, all pervading principles, on the religion of mankind.”

Remarkable words! Not so much as conveying the mature, full mind of the author of the "History of the Jews," in whose hands the Semitic Scriptures were, some five-and-twenty years ago, in some respects far from being gently treated, as because of their affording, perhaps, the most adequate and significant, expression of the most recent date, of sentiments and anticipations by no means confined to him and one or two others of similar persuasion. Ominous words! Embrace them in their spirit and tendency, and how subtile, evanescent, shadowy, must all hitherto accredited truth speedily become!

Let no one mistake us!

We are no bigoted votaries of a