anything Heine could reach; and because his hand is not paralysed by the fatal defect indicated so truly and suggestively by Professor Arnold. "To his [Heine's] intellectual deliverance, there was an addition of something else wanting, and that something else was something immense; the old fashioned, laborious, eternally needed moral deliverance." "He is [therefore] not an adequate interpreter of the modern world." In default of this no man can be. And, given the needful susceptibility, culture, and intellectual power, a man will be an “adequate interpreter of the modern world," according to the completeness of his moral and spiritual "deliverance."

And, if this is needful in order to the literary man being qualified for being an interpreter of the social and moral phenomena-of the prophetic longings, the tendencies, the exigencies of the time-much more to his being a guide, a moulder of the chaotic thought and sentiment, which are struggling for life; which, are, as it were, appealing to the purged eye and the plastic hand. As society never before embraced such elements of complication and danger, so there was never before such an urgent demand on Literature-never before a function of such delicacy and importance imposed on literary men. Would we could say that the responsibility is prevalently realised. Would we could say that it is so adequately by even any one of our accepted and popular writers. That temptation (or necessity shall we say?) to be "popular," is infecting with a fatal taint the productions of many more than one or two writers who are capable of better things than the public appetite cares to digest, or publishers to encourage. The money-changers have established themselves in the temple, and literature is in peril of becoming more degraded by the million purchasers than it was in other days by the one patron. Indeed, as has just been most pertinently said(Reader, Aug. 22, 1863)—“ What are those who pass as our most superior writers and thinkers, but, in many cases, mere vendors of what may be called carefully-connected thoughtlets?" Why, at this time of day, is it so? Partly because, as Professor Arnold says, Englishmen pooh-pooh "ideas," but partly also because there is not enough of what we must call spiritual discernment and moral earnestness in our literary men, to enable them, first to lay hold of the needful and struggling truth, and then to give it honest, unalloyed expression, be the message popular" or the opposite. The current taste may not encourage that kind of literature which is the great intellectual and moral need of the time. It is not, therefore, any the less, on the contrary, it is the more the duty of those who are gifted with anything of the "vision and the faculty divine," to furnish it notwithstanding. If Moses and Joshua are unfaithful to their trust, how ever shall the people be led on to the Promised Land!

XXIX. THE BIBLE AND ITS ASSAILANTS.

It would contribute greatly to the Bible obtaining its appropriate and uncontested recognition, if those who deem themselves specially charged with the duty of vindicating its claims, would substitute for the idea of Perfection that of Adaptation. Revelation had from the first a practical object; and, of all books, the Bible is the most practical. But such being the case, it has, of course, ever aimed at what was practicable. The divine intention-luminous on it from its first page to its last-is to make men what they ought to be; but in order to this it deals with men as they are. First of all, they are, (as they must be) addressed as men. They are addressed in human language, and in the speech of the people and the time. It follows that such a Revelation must submit, not merely to the conditions of human thought, but to the limits imposed by the language used, that being, indeed, the exponent of the thought of the people. The capacity of thought is a development, both in the individual ard the race; and in the earlier ages of the world men seem to have been as incapable of pursuing abstract thought—even of admitting abstract ideas—as children are in the early years of life. Accordingly, in the early Scriptures, we find everything presented, so to speak, in the concrete. Men moved in, and were conversant with, the world of sense, and the sensible world was made the medium of all early divine instruction. God manifested Himself in bodily form, and He is represented as if acting by means of bodily organs, both in creating and governing the world. This one fact-so simple,

indisputable, we may even say, so inevitable-duly realised, would solve a host of difficulties, and clear away at once vast masses of inconsiderate objection. Realising this, we discern that the Bible does not describe the mode in which God created the world; the object is to give the most indubitable impression of the fact. The double object is ever kept in view to make God known as Creator, and as Sovereign or Moral Governor of the world. He is El Shaddai-the Maker of all things; He is Jehovah-self-existent and independent, therefore indisputably and absolutely supreme. And thus does revelation provide, at its very fountainhead, against what have been through all ages the two typical phases of religious error-Pantheism, or the tendency to merge the Divine personality and independence in a Spirit of the Universe, and Polytheism, or the tendency to distribute Divine attributes and honours

among a host of superior beings. So that, in a feature of the Mosaic writings which has proved the pons asinorum of so many critics, and the rock on which the faith of so many spiritual sciolists has made shipwreck, we may recognise a clear and special mark of Divine inspiration.

When we think that God was thus made known in His essential character, as the One Self-existent, Independent Being; and in His character as the Creator and Governor of the world, in the language of a simple and semi-barbarous people-a people so incapable of abstract thought, that their language could not express the essential nature of God as a Spirit, otherwise than by a metaphor;—we surely need have no hesitation as to the fact, that God Himself, and none other, was their teacher_ that God did indeed appear unto Abraham, and speak to Moses as a man speaketh to his friend."

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But when thus regarded, we can see how necessarily all such manifestations and revelations must be inadequate. We never, indeed, regard the manifestations God made of Himself-e. g., to Abraham at Mamre, or to Moses at Horeb, as other than symbolic of His real nature-as accommodations to the power of apprehension in His servants, and why should we impose severer conditions on the account of His work as Creator of the world, which He gave to them, or incited them to record? We have no more right to demand, in the opening portion of Genesis, an exact description of the process of creation, than to assume that God ought to have revealed Himself to the early fathers of the race, solely and alone in the essential spirituality of His nature. To that height, indeed, God meant to raise the conceptions of men, as the crowning portions of the Scripture Revelation leave us no room to doubt -but not at a jerk-not by miracle; not by re-creating man, but through a long, painful, chequered process of training, culture, and providential discipline. The proper exercise of man's intellectual faculties was not to be anticipated or superseded, but neither must violence be done to His moral constitution; for to do either would have been te defeat the object of Revelation altogether. God interposed to cure the moral malady which had affected man's nature, not to change his nature or constitution in any respect. The Bible, therefore, always deals with him as he is-addresses him in his own language-appeals to him through his natural sympathies-speaks to him, in short, in a way he can understand and feel. Thus may we see that the medium of Divine Revelation is, and must necessarily be, largely human, and adapted to the receptive capacity, and the susceptibilities of those addressed. But there is a progress, a training towards the higher and more adequate spiritual apprehension. At first, God appears to man in a human form, and speaks to him in audible words. Then He manifests Himself to him

in dreams and visions of the night. Then He makes the mind of the prophet the medium of His Word. Then when "the fulness of the time had come," the Word becomes incarnate, and the moral nature of God attains its most expansive and comprehensive manifestation in a living man. Finally, after a brief sojourn among us, Christ withdraws from the world, having introduced the dispensation of the Spirit. Under that dispensation, all manifestation of God to the senses ceases. Human thought has now so far liberated itself from sensuous forms and conditions, as to be capable of apprehending spiritual being. God proclaims Himself a Spirit, and demands that true worship should correspond to this latest and highest manifestation of His character. The days of tutelage under sense the days of bondage to type and symbolare past, and the spiritual must correspond to the intellectual emancipation of man. The symbolic and sensuous element must take a subordinate place in his worship, as he has now become capable of subordinating it in the motive forces of his individual and social activity.

And in this relation it is most note-worthy that the grand characteristic of this last dispensation is freedom-" Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." Through a long process of discipline, thought, training, and culture, the human intellect has become liberated from the bondage of sense; but this mental freedom will become nugatory without a corresponding spiritual emancipation. The security and guarantee of the former can be found only in the latter. It is "he whom the Son makes free who is free indeed." His disciples and followers are liberated from sensuous and selfish considerations as the ruling motives of action. Intellectual freedom (including social) is to be sustained, as it is conditioned, by spiritual freedom. That freedom is not a state of lawlessness, but of correspondence of the inner as well as the outer life to the law. It is man re-placed in his proper relation to God and to his fellowmen, and it approximates perfection in proportion as his life-inner and outer becomes adjusted to the requirements of those relations.

To effect this is the clear purpose of the Scripture revelation from beginning to end. It is the purpose of all the manifestations there recorded, as made of Himself by God to man—of all His dealings with mankind-of all the educative and disciplinary treatment to which nations and races have been subjected.

And, as matter of historic fact, what system, force, or agency has been prevailingly, progressively, and abidingly available for this, save the truth which is embodied in the Scriptures? Where is social and intellectual freedom enjoyed ?—where does mind show its greatest triumphs, in culture, in refinement, in productive power ?-where has man attained the greatest mastery over Nature, acquired the deepest knowledge of her laws, and drawn from her forces the largest measure of service ?

who, in a word, are the peoples that are in the van of human progress the dominant nations, to which all other Powers and peoples are every day, and everywhere, succumbing? They are the nations in which Christianity is received, where its principles have, in a measure, blended with the intellectual and national life-where its facts have been believed, its doctrines taught, and its worship observed, through long and con

tinuous ages.

And it is not due to any defect or inadequacy on its part, but to the imperfect recognition and embodiment of its principles, that these nations are still afflicted with perilous and disastrous evils. Christianity embraces a cure for them all, and needs only to be honestly, fully, and practically adopted in order to the cure being effected. The proof of its divine origin (we may admit without disparagement to it) is not yet complete, but there is nothing wanting save its universal acceptance and adequate realization. There would no longer be room for doubt about the "doctrine" of the Bible, if men would only set themselves "to do the will of God" as therein revealed.

XXX.-THE NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL.

THAT which has become in our day the great stumbling-block to the acceptance of the Bible is that which gives to the Bible its distinctive value and glory-the Supernatural element. Direct DIVINE REVELATION and DIVINE MANIFESTATION-to, and in, humanity-that is the vital and quickening power in Scripture. GOD there addresses man; that is the secret of the "spirit and life" which inhere in the Scriptures as nowhere else. You may explain away the physical miracles recorded in the Scriptures, but there is a higher witness which cannot be set aside or silenced; that witness is found in the living truth which they embody.

But whence this modern and ever-growing hostility to the Supernatural? The subject is worthy of a little investigation-is, indeed, one of the most momentous questions that can be raised.

The root and germ of all scepticism as to the supernatural, is found in Hume's argument against miracles, that they are contrary to experience. But, if we can recognise within our experience a power strictly analogous (not differing in kind but in measure) to the power of working miracles, then Hume's argument is cut up by the roots, and all the sceptical developments that have had their outcome from it, fall along with it. This is what we believe can be done, by an analytic and inductive process which we now propose to indicate.