the worship of Christ by a visible image and sacrifice, Heathenism at length dragged down Christians. Yet, as if awed by this silence of the New Testament, no writer, for many centuries, attempted even to invent a description of Christ's person. Clemens, Barnabas, and Ignatius-called, from their nearness to apostolic times, "The Apostolic Fathers"-say nothing of the bodily presence of our Lord. Either the Church was still too spiritual to desire it, or its leaders were too honest to invent what the first followers of Christ had withheld. So late as the fifth century, Augustine says "that the real features of the Virgin, as of our Lord, were unknown.2

When the Fathers break this silence, it is only, says Milman, to dispute and differ from each other, one party taking literally the words of Isaiah, "Without form and comeliness;" another as confident that the Divinity shone through His Humanity, and endowing Him with a celestial grace and corporeal beauty, bearing about a celestial halo on His head. Still no Church historian of the first four centuries ventures a description of His personal appearance, leaving it to Nicephorus, a mere compiler of history, and that so late as the fourteenth century, to give us a personal portrait, the only one which the learned Calmet, anxious for the credit of his Church, knows of, to justify its many consecrated and miracle-working paintings of our Lord. As Christians departed from the spirit of the New Testament, they grew impatient of this silence, and made answer to themselves, pleased with the Christ of their own imagination, or of the favourite image of their day or their locality. It is said of a distinguished sculptor of our times, Thorswalden, that a friend one day seeing him dejected, and inquiring the cause, was answered, "My genius is decaying!" "What do you mean?" said his friend. "Here," said the sculptor, "is my statue of Christ. It is the first of my works with which I ever felt satisfied. Until now my idea has always been beyond what I could execute. It is no longer so. I shall never have a great idea again." When the churches became satisfied with their portraits and statues of Christ, the genius of Christianity had declined. How unlike the ever-expanding ideal of the inspired writers!

We feel that we have only broken ground in a large field, in which may lie untold treasures. At another time we may renew the search for "the treasure hid in the field." But no one man 1 See Milman's Early Latin Christianity, vol. iii. 516.

2 Aug. De Trinitate, ch. 8.

See Milman's Early Christianity for details respecting this controversy. It is instructive to observe that Justin Martyr and Tertullian, and all the earlier Fathers, take the literal view of Isaiah. Origen, Jerome, Chrysostom, Ambrose, and Augustine, and all the later Fathers, farthest removed from apostolic feelings and traditions, took the view that at length prevailed and was realised in mediæval art.

Value of this Evidence.

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nor age can read out this Silence. It has somewhat to say for the benefit of all men and all ages. As an argument of the Divine in the formation of the New Testament, it is ever calling up before us the idea of amazing circumspection. Not that of man, who sees only a little way on all sides of him, but of Him whose circle is eternity, and whose eye surveys at once the infinitely great and little, who says nothing and does nothing without a full knowledge, not only of the thing said or done in itself, but of all its relations to all time and all being, of all surroundings and all their issues. As an instruction, this finger on the lip has been ill understood at the right time, because men seldom take warning beforehand against evils on which their hearts are strongly set. There is hardly an instance of this silence that may not still prove offensive to some one or other of the many phases of the religious character in our day, to the zealous observer of religious festivals, to the lover of church legends, to the devoted ritualist, the frequenter of holy places, the too ardent admirer of logical systems, the eager stickler for ecclesiastical order, etc., etc.,—all that seek in Scripture that for which man was sufficient in himself, or which it was not to the purpose of a spiritual revelation to impart. To avoid all offence, it would be necessary to hold back not one or two instances of this silence, but one and all, and be wholly silent as to the silence of Scripture. It is told of Raphael, that, intent on teaching a lesson to his critics, he adopted by turns their successive suggestions as to one of his paintings, inserting them in water colours over his own in oil. When they had exhausted their critical spirit, and he had complied with each suggestion in turn, he called them together to see the effect of the whole, when, with one accord, they besought him to restore the original. A full search for, and discovery of, all "this treasure hid in the field of Scripture," would, we fear, be only, in its practical application, a succession of offences. Yet some compensation there would be in the readiness of each party and each individual to understand the finger on the lip designed for his neighbour; and the offended feelings might change into the reverential, on perceiving that Scripture, in its silence, is no respecter of persons or sects, but everywhere shows, in its silence, a wonderful length, breadth, and depth of insight into man and his ways. One thing all may feel from the silence of the New Testament, that God has given to Christians and Churches a larger charter of freedom than in our local and ecclesiastical differences we imagined-a charter meet for that Gospel Church which, like the common sun, air, and water, is designed to exist in all regions, and is adapted to the people of all languages, customs, and climates under heaven, -for the Kosmos.

ART. V.-Secret History of the Austrian Government, and of its Systematic Persecutions of Protestants. By ALFRED MICHIELS. London: Chapman and Hall. 1859. Pp. 421.

M. MIGNET, in one of his historical essays, has traced, step by step, the progress of the French monarchy during the time of the kings of the third race. At the commencement of that era, the monarchy, properly so called, did not extend beyond the duchy of France, and was flanked on every side by duchies and counties equal in extent and in power to that monarchy to which they owed a feudal subjection little more than nominal. One by one these rival powers are either conquered or more peacefully absorbed, and at the close of the middle ages, France, though still with limits considerably short of her present ones, has taken her place as one of the great monarchies of Europe. In existing France, the marks of former territorial division are, indeed, far from wholly lost. The Alsatian still retains his German speech, largely, too, his Lutheran faith, and deems himself as distinct from the Frenchman as the native of Canada does from the American. The Breton still, in dialect, in the names of people and of places, and in character and feeling, keeps up the remembrance of his Celtic descent, and his once independent position. In the local colourings which afford so rich a harvest to the writers of fiction, whether in prose or poetry, no district of France affords a wider scope than Bretagne; and of this, such gifted sons of hers as Châteaubriand, Souvestre, and Brizieux, have taken full advantage.

But if in France the traveller or the student is reminded of the provincialities that have melted into the present centralized empire, it is only in a peaceful form that these surviving influences of the past are presented. It is different in the rival empire of Austria. It is, and on a larger scale than France, a conglomeration of once separated states. But while in France, the provinces, if ever convulsed by civil war, have been so from general religious or political causes, in the case of Austria it has been from local grievances and injuries, despotically inflicted and gallantly resented, that danger to the integrity of the empire has arisen. In our own day, we have seen in the Hungarian provinces the spirit of insurrection so powerful and so sustained, as to necessitate for its suppression the armed intervention of the Czar. The difference we have thus adverted to, has made France a power of more continuously transcendent influence in Europe than Austria, though the latter be greater in extent, and not inferior in population.

The work of M. Michiels is not a general history of Austria.

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It does not seek to supersede the work of Coxe, still, heavy though it be, the standard authority in this country on that subject. It is not even a complete narrative of the period which it embraces, from the accession of the Styrian branch of the Hapsburg family in 1619. It does not present to us the full history of the government, or the complete delineation of the people. While professedly dealing only with the Transalpine dominions of Austria, to some of these, such as the Tyrol, there is no allusion whatever made. It is a narrative, skilfully and on the whole accurately given, of the proceedings of the Austrian court since the accession of Ferdinand II., against civil liberty and the Protestant faith. The author makes no professions of impartiality. He writes with the natural bitterness of a political exile. He might have taken for his motto the expressions of Joseph de Maistre in one of his recently published letters, "I keep all my hatred for Austria. That house is a great enemy of the human race. I detest it cordially." A calmer style would, however, have been more in keeping with the proper dignity of history, and would have commended the volume to more general acceptance. It is not strength, but weakness of style; not taste, but tastelessness of expression, to accumulate in the compass of half a page such phrases as-"Ferdinand II., the Tiberius of Christianity, the crowned inquisitor, the implacable devotee." M. Michiels, in his preface, censures the style of Baron Hormayer as capricious, wild, and tortuous." Truth compels us to say that we have seldom met with a book so annoying by the affectation and strangeness of its style as that of M. Michiels. Thus we have "bestiality" used in the sense of brutality. We read of a "country being inflicted with a curse," "disgusted of fighting," "the gloom of the scholastica," "expose the maxims of the society" (meaning expound), "provinces swamped by soldiers." The weapon which, in historical writing as well as in ordinary conversation, is usually called a sword, is with M. Michiels a "glaive." His figures are numerous, and often might be better spared. Thus we read-"stolid as the countenance of a statue," as if any statue worth the looking at were not the very opposite of "stolid" in expression. M. Michiels is fond of calling the Jesuits "the Spanish order;" but, not to speak of minor fraternities, were not the Dominicans quite as Spanish in their origin as the followers of Loyola? Worse by far than any merely literary faults are his contrast of "the terrible God of Moses," with the God of the Gospel, and his sneer at "the improper interlude of Boaz and Ruth." One passage of the book, it is stated (p. 266), has been omitted, as "too realistic for English readers." We regret that the eminent publishers did not strike out such irreverent phraseology as we have quoted, and subject

the whole volume to the revision, so far as the style is concerned, of some thoroughly competent person. But with all its faults, the work of M. Michiels is eminently interesting. If it is more fragmentary than it need have been; if repetitions not unfrequently occur; if episodes, such as the account of the personal habits of Wallenstein and Kaunitz, are somewhat too prolonged; if that proportion, which is so principal an element in all good histories, and is so very important when, as in the present instance, the events of centuries are given in a single volume, is by no means carefully preserved,-the work of an exile is not to be subjected to the same rigorous criticism as the production of a literary man enjoying all the ease and advantages of fatherland. For the general reader the book is intended, and it is adapted to be at once informing and interesting to that class.

Ranke has dwelt upon the Romanist reaction after the Reformation, as powerfully influencing the literature and art of Italy in the latter part of the sixteenth century. But its influence is still more evident in the literature of Spain. The representatives of that nation at the Council of Trent were so perseveringly in favour of episcopal residence, and other mere disciplinary reforms, or rather returns to earlier usage, that the Curialist party were accustomed to say they were more troublesome than the heretics. But nowhere was there less disposition to depart from Romanist doctrine. A few enlightened persons embraced more or less fully reformed views, and became victims of the Inquisition. The nation remained not only Popish, but intensely so. An auto-da-fe was as great an enjoyment to the mob as a bull-fight. The golden period of Spanish literature commences in the middle of the sixteenth century. Not only do we find in the theological literature of that period, especially the mystical section of it, how thoroughly a revised Romanism was the expression of popular sentiment, as is manifest in the works of Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada, Juan de Avila, Juan de la Cruz, and St Theresa; but the whole of Spanish literature, in its gravest and in its lightest sections, during the century of its chief distinction, from Cervantes to Calderon, from Mendoza to De Solis, is thoroughly pervaded by the evidence of a triumphant, and not merely governmental or sacerdotal, but national Romanism. Of distinctive Catholicism there is far more in Cervantes than there is of distinctive Protestantism in Shakspere. The latest pages of the last work of the greatest of Spanish authors, written only a week or two before his death, wind up the story with a pilgrimage of faith to Rome. Even in that peculiar production of Spanish humour, the Picaresco novel, we find the national religion powerfully prominent. There, as in other sections of Spanish literature,