ble were it not that Mr. Kinglake was by the side of Lord Raglan on the knoll, and states what he saw with his own eyes.

After this there were some sharp encounters on the left of the field, between the close battalions of the Russians and the extended lines of the English, in which the steady pluck of the British troops and the superiority of "line over column" uniformly carried the day in the face of superior numbers. The retreat commenced. Here again the utter inefficiency of the Russians strikes us with renewed astonishment. They had eighty-six pieces of artillery, of which seventy-two were in organized field-batteries. Only two of the whole number had been captured. They had three thousand cavalry drawn up on the top of the slope on which the infantry engagement was in progress. Yet not only was neither of these great instruments of war employed to turn the swelling tide of English victory, but during the retreat no attempt was made to protect the brave battalions from the dreadful fire of the English artillery, or to stay the movement from degenerating into disorderly flight.

At the other extremity of the battle-field, where the French army was engaged, the fighting had, according to Mr. Kinglake, been confined mostly to artillery practice, the several divisions of the French army having been disposed in such order that, though they retained a considerable part of the Russian troops in that neighborhood, there was still no infantry engagement in that part of the field. Mr. Kinglake here, perhaps, does some injustice to the French generals, all of whom (with the exception of Bosquet) owed their position directly or indirectly to their relation to the Emperor in the days of December; but it still remains probable that the victory was essentially an English victory, and that the qualities of the French troops were not fully exhibited until later in the campaign.

We must say a word of the style in which this work is written. Mr. Kinglake is the first example we remember to have met of an author whose early style is more mature than his later. The language of Eothen, published when the author was a very young man, is remarkable for its strength, freshness, and freedom from the common sentimentalism of

Eastern travellers. The language of the present work, on the contrary, though still in many portions vigorous and picturesque, is constantly relapsing into passages which are absolutely ridiculous, and which would be ridiculous in the composition of a school-boy. We have no room for many examples, but we will mention his inflated allusions to Lord Stratford de Redcliffe," the great Eltchi," as he loves to call him. He is never tired of talking of "the grand overhanging of his brow" and "the light that kindled beneath"; of "the thin disciplined lips," of his willingness to "make the elaborate world go back into chaos," rather than suffer St. Arnaud to command the Turkish troops. We venture to quote also, as characteristic of the kind of fine writing to which we refer, this description of the gallant Lacy Yea, when his regiment was about to engage a Russian battalion.

"What man could do, he did. His very shoulders so labored and strove with the might of his desire to form line, that the curt red shelljacket he wore was as though it were a world too scant for the strength of the man and the passion that raged within him, but when he turned, his dark eyes yielded fire, and all the while from his deep-chiselled, merciless lips there pealed the thunder of imprecation and command," and much more to the same purpose. Strange that an Englishman past middle age, a barrister by profession, and a member of the House of Commons, should be capable of making a laughing-stock of a brave man by such a description!

But we must stop. Mr. Kinglake's two volumes end with the battle of the Alma on the 20th of September. He proposes to close the whole work with the death of Lord Raglan, which occurred in the following June, two months before the fall of Sebastopol. He will have use for all his courage if he is to tell the truth and the whole truth of the condition to which the English army was, during that period, reduced. And if he finally does describe that condition with the minute detail of the present volumes, he may prepare for a yet more savage denunciation from his English reviewers than he has yet met.

ART. VI. THE COLENSO CONTROVERSY.

1. The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined. By the Right Rev. JOHN WILLIAM COLENSO, D. D., Bishop of Natal. Part I. London. Oct. 4, 1862.

2. Part II. of the same.

London. Jan. 24, 1863.

3. St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, newly translated and explained from a Missionary Point of View. By the Right Rev. J. W. COLENSO, D. D., Bishop of Natal. New York: D. Appleton &

Co. 1863.

If anybody should assert that the political constitution of England or France were such as to keep the English or French chemists blind as to chemistry, or the English or French geologists blind as to geology, it would be said that he asserted an absurdity or impossibility. We should be told that a political constitution, from the nature of the case, had nothing to do with physical science. Nay, we should be told that it could not control physical science if it would. We should probably hear that truth grows all the better for being trampled upon; with some imaginary studies upon the botany of the camomile. For it has grown to be a thing taken for granted, that a discovery in physical science is instantly adopted all over the world as a part of the common property of the world. It was not three months after Daguerre announced his process, before the Waterbury mills were rolling out daguerrotype plates in Connecticut, the New Jersey manufacturers putting up tripoli to polish the plates, and Young America in general staining its fingers with iodine in repeating Daguerre's processes. It was not four weeks after ether was first administered in Boston for painless surgery, before the experiment was repeated in London, in Edinburgh, and in Paris, before it ceased to be an experiment, and a new truth was recognized for surgery and for humanity.

But if from this statement regarding "physical science" we be obliged to drop the word "physical," — if we have to speak of one of the moral sciences, and, in especial, of theological science, the statement no longer holds good. A set of conclusions which have been substantiated by the theologians of VOL. LXXV. 5TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. I.

9

all countries but one, or by the great majority of them, including, as we shall try to show, the leaders of all great subdivisions of the Church, may be kept out of a single nation by a kind of quarantine, asserted and maintained by its government. It is, of course, to be expected that conviction regarding discoveries in physics shall be obtained more rapidly than conviction in discoveries in morals or in mental phenomena. "Seeing is believing," men say; or, in Latin, แ Segnius irritant animos demissa per aures

Quam quæ per oculos,” &c., &c. ;

which means, as it would appear, that the irritation spoken of is more slow, as well as more blunt, in its operation. But, for all this slowness, such discoveries advance, and those who deal in them think they advance more surely because of their slowness. Yet this sure-footedness is not so steadfast but it may be hindered and completely thwarted. It seems that it is in the power of political authority to restrain a discovery in theology, and keep it outside the frontiers of a nation, by laws not unlike those by which men try to keep out plague or yellow-fever. The Colenso controversy, so called, has substantiated this very remarkable fact. It shows that, by a series of Articles framed more than two hundred years ago, the Crown, Lords, and Commons of England have kept back the studies of the twenty thousand professed theologians of England, so that their average opinions and convictions regarding the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament are what the average opinions of Christendom were two hundred years ago. It shows that inquiry or criticism, or any study which deserves the name of study, on the Scriptures of the Old Testament, has been kept in abeyance among the professed theologians of England, apparently on the impression that "the less a man knows, the better," about such things. One of the Bench of Bishops announces to his clergy that he is not a Hebrew scholar, in a tone which really amounts to thanking God for his ignorance.*

Indeed, one is reminded of "Power" in the

*The Bishop of Exeter, "on account of his great age, had not read it, but concluded that great had been the mischief that had turned the very bottom of the heart of the Church."

story-book, who did thank God for his ignorance; and the old retort is suggested, that, in that view, these clergy have a great deal to thank God for.

This revelation as to the state of study in England seems to us the important point in the "Colenso Controversy." We have not seen that, among the half-hundred books and halfthousand pamphlets which it has called out, any new views as to the Pentateuch or the Book of Joshua have been elicited, which we need present at any length to our readers, or with any great care discuss. What is new in Bishop Colenso's own suggestions of detail is perhaps curious, but it seems to us certainly trivial. The greater part of his suggestions are not new, as he himself says. They are household words to every intelligent Christian in America, in France, or in Germany. We believe we might add, they are the familiar speculations of all the enlightened men not bound by the strictest ties of the Church in Spain, in Italy, and in Russia. England is the only country in Christendom where, at this moment, the promulgation of these views could be welcomed with such a howl of indignation and surprise. Here in America, our own school of theologians, of course, claim no more verbal inspiration for the first six books in the Bible than for any other six. We claim no verbal inspiration for any. But it is not of our own school that we speak. The Bibliotheca Sacra, the organ of the Orthodox Congregationalists at Andover, after leading the reader through a bog of fatuity or misplaced erudition, comes out on the intimation that we may postpone, as if it were quite unimportant, the question whether the Pentateuch is or is not an immaculate history, whether errors, trivial or serious, have been detected in it. The writer proceeds to urge that any such "errors," which he virtually admits, bear only on the personal knowledge of the writer, not on his "substantial accuracy." These Andover gentlemen are used to believing in "substance of doctrine." Professor Mahan, of the General Theological Seminary in New York, more frankly throws up his whole brief at the end of his argument. He says, very truly, that

* Bibliotheca Sacra, 1863, p. 424.

†The New Presbyterian Quarterly agrees in our view of Dr. Mahan. "He gives up, as it seems to us, the whole field, and goes over to the adversary's side:"