Alleged Polytheism of the Jews. 147 afterwards to his descendants, as the God of their nation. Our author, in short, is offended that the Almighty should be represented throughout the Jewish history as descending to man, instead of raising man at once to himself. Must all the ways of God approve themselves to human judgment ! Mr. Greg and Mr. Newman have both, in common with many German writers, their "Elohistic" and their "Jehovistic" theory. They suppose that, because different terms were used on different occasions by the Old Testament writers to express the name of God, these writers held views of the Supreme Being inconsistent with each other; that the one view embodied, as we have said, the idea of the prophets, the other that of the priests-the latter being a false representation of Him. Now the fact seems to be, that the word Elohim expressed the more abstract and general idea of God, and the word Jehovah represented Him in his connexion with the Jews as a nation, since it was by this name that the Almighty had revealed Himself to them by Moses, and chosen them. "I appeared unto Abraham and Isaac and Jacob by the name of God Almighty, but by my name Jehovah was I not known unto them." And when Moses was commanded to go with a message to the children of Israel, he was to say, that "I am," (Jehovah, He that is,) had sent him. Mr. Greg alludes to the fact of the Jews having been Polytheists, as a contradiction to the supposed purity of their worship. If by Polytheism Mr. Greg means a belief in Beings superior to Man, then were they certainly Polytheists, even those of them who fully believed that "the Lord was the God;" and so are those of us who believe in the existence of evil spirits, as well as the ignorant among us, who put faith in fairies, &c. But by Polytheism is generally understood paying allegiance to such beings, or worshipping them in connexion with, or to the neglect of, the one true God. And it is in this sense, of course, that Paley denies the name of Polytheists to the Israelites in the passage quoted by Mr. Greg, and speaks of them as "adhering to the unity when all other nations slid into Polytheism;" and that Dean Milner uses the expression Monotheism in regard to them, viz., as worshippers of the true God-the Maker of the universe. It was, then, in perfect consistency with the command, "Thou shalt have none other Gods but me," (though this involves a difficulty to Mr. Greg,) that Jacob and others are represented in the sacred narratives as being allowed to "choose whom they would serve." Man's worship, indeed, where the knowledge of the one true God has been brought before his mind at all, seems always to have been left as a matter of choice. His religion is not forced upon him by demonstration. His will is left free to reject or receive the revelation offered to him. This responsibility might suggest an awful subject of thought to those who stand in the former position. We confine our comments on Mr. Greg's treatise meanwhile to that comparatively small part of it which properly relates to the subject of this Article. The criticisms contained in the book itself extend over a much wider field, including the New Testament as well as the Old, the doctrine of Miracles, and the Future Life. Respecting the author's treatment of the last of these subjects, we may however remark, that, if "faith" consist in a confident trust, without any ground, he surely is not wanting in such faith. He rejects the proof, and yet keeps by the doctrine. Nay, he believes it not only "without the countenance," but "in spite of the hostility of logic," (p. 303). He is full of cheering confidence that all existing evils will work out ultimate good. Yet this hope is built on-confessedly nothing rational. The Christian's hope we, at least, consider to be built on some definite reasons. Our author, moreover, is animated by the prospect that all our sufferings may "work together for good," not to ourselves indeed, but to some future generation, or to some other order of Beings; though Ulysses and his companions did not, it seems, feel much satisfaction in the thought that their flesh would furnish a dainty meal to the giant. Enough, we think, has been said in this Article, by way of specimen, to illustrate, to fair and reasonable minds, the sort of objections to the Old Testament, which are now passing current in some quarters of our literature, together with certain of the principles by which they may be judged. We have seen in how great a degree these objections consist of bold and unsupported assertions, or of arguments which the thoughtful and intelligent writers, whose works we have selected for criticism, would deride on any other subject. These writers have indirectly added to the evidence, that the objections of religious scepticism to the records of the Sacred history, like the shadowy forms of twilight, acquire a mysterious power chiefly when viewed from a distance, and lose their terrors when closely examined and proved to be futile. And as for those who, according to the proverb, are "deaf on one ear," who attend to all the objections against the receiving of a certain system, and utterly disregard all the objections against rejecting it—whose mode, in short, of weighing evidences is to calculate carefully the amount of the weights in one scale, and to think not at all of those in the opposite-persons of that habit of mind are not likely to be enlightened by any prolonged discussion. They would look at our arguments, like Lord Nelson at the battle of Copenhagen, with the blind eye. ART. V.-1. Elliott's Poems. London, 1833. 2. Poems of Robert Nicoll. Third Edition. Edinburgh, 1843. 3. Life and Poems of John Bethune. London, 1841. 4. Memoirs of Alexander Bethune. By W. M'COMBIE. Aberdeen, 1845. 5. Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver. By WILLIAM THOM of Inverury. Second Edition. London, 1845. 6. The Purgatory of Suicides. By THOMAS COOPER. London, 1845. 7. The Book of Scottish Song. By ALEXANDER WHITELAW. Edinburgh, 1848. FOUR faces among the portraits of modern men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features: Shakspeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be "in presence weak, in speech contemptible," hampered by some thorn in the flesh-to interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians, the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies, that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been given, might learn that soul is after all independent of matter, and not its creature and its slave. But, in the generality of cases, physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not, alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect. Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of Robert Burns an honourable station among them. Of Shakspeare's we do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns's be not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most loveable-the most like what we should wish that of a teacher of men to be. Raffaelle-the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the fullface pencil sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford-though without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy, formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. His is a face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goëthe, even in his earliest portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own will. There is a self-conscious power, and purpose, and self-restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which might win worship, and did, but not love, except as the child of enthusiasm or of relationship. But Burns's face, to judge of it by the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was literally mobbed by the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets. The magic of that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may explain many a sad story. The features certainly are not as regular or well-proportioned as they might be; there is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal health in the outline or colour; but the marks of intellectual beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling. The lips, ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the bones shew thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh out upon you with boundless good humour and sweetness, with simple, eager, gentle surprise-a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth upon the wonder of a new-born world-altogether "A station like the herald Mercury, New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill." Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence-a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life-a deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man—an instinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregu lar and unscientific, only not superstitious-turn him loose in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope. And what an age in which to be turned loose!—for loose he must go, to solve the problem of existence for himself. The grand simple old Scottish education which he got from his parents must prove narrow and unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not because it was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly all things necessary for his "salvation"-in every sense, all laws which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it contained so much of them as yet only implicitly; because it was not yet conscious of its own breadth and depth, and power of satisfying the new doubts and cravings of such minds and such times as Burns's. Scotland in the Age of Burns. 151 It may be that Burns was the devoted victim by whose fall it was to be taught that it must awaken and expand and renew its youth in shapes equally sound, but more complex and scientific. But it had not done so then. And when Burns found himself gradually growing beyond his father's teaching in one direction, and tempted beyond it in another and a lower one, what was there in those times to take up his education at the point where it had been left unfinished? He saw around him in plenty animal good-nature and courage, barbaric honesty and hospitality-more, perhaps, than he would see now; for the upward progress into civilized excellencies is sure to be balanced by some loss of savage ones-but all reckless, shallow, above all, drunken. It was a hard-drinking, coarse, materialist age. higher culture, of Scotland especially, was all but exclusively French-not a good kind, while Voltaire and Volney still remained unanswered, and "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" were accepted by all young gentlemen, and a great many young ladies, who could read French, as the best account of the relation of the sexes. The Besides, the philosophy of that day, like its criticism, was altogether mechanical, nay, as it now seems, materialist in its ultimate and logical results. Criticism was outward, and of the form merely. The world was not believed to be already, and in itself, mysterious and supernatural, and the poet was not defined as the man who could see and proclaim that supernatural element. Before it was admired, it was to be raised above nature into the region of "the picturesque," or what not; and the poet was the man who gave it this factitious and superinduced beauty, by a certain "kompsologia" and "meteoroepeia," called "poetic diction," now happily becoming extinct, mainly, we believe, under the influence of Burns, although he himself thought it his duty to bedizen his verses therewith, and though it was destined to flourish for many a year more in the temple of the father of lies, like a jar of paper flowers on a Popish altar. No wonder that in such a time, a genius like Burns should receive not only no guidance, but no finer appreciation. True; he was admired, petted, flattered; for that the man was wonderful, no one could doubt. But we question whether he was understood; whether, if that very flowery and magniloquent style which we now consider his great failing had been away, he would not have been passed over by the many as a writer of vulgar doggrel. True, the old simple ballad-muse of Scotland still dropped a gem from her treasures, here and there, even in the eighteenth century itself-witness Auld Robin Gray. But who suspected that they were gems, of which Scotland, fifty years afterwards, would be prouder and more greedy than of |