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other is so glad to find Him at all, and is so occupied with the love and tenderness of the Christ whom he worships, that he can feel satisfaction and sympathy with the humblest and most ignorant of his worshipers.

The one is for a moment moved to a relenting mood as he beholds a Christian, though a superstitious worshiper, but it is but for a moment only, for he relaxes into his wonted disgust at what he considers the necessary unsatisfactoriness of all verbal and formal worship.

The other is so entranced with the Christ of his worship, and so oppressed with the thought of his own unworthiness and need, that he finds occasion for tolerance and even for love and sympathy, in the humblest assembly that honors the Christ whom he trusts.

We hold that the conception of such a Christ, with attributes so exalted and claims so transcendant, who can condescend to assemblies so mean and worship so uncouth, is of itself an argument that goes far to establish its superhuman origin; and also that the power of faith in Him, to solve the problems and to adjust the conflicts evolved by human culture and science, confirms the argument. If this argument is valid, the moral force and poetic majesty of Christ's person can never fail in any age to fill and glorify

"The soul's east window of divine surprise."

ARTICLE VII.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

"THE PRIMEVAL WORLD OF HEBREW TRADITION."*-This book, by Rev. F. H. Hedge, D. D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and Senior Professor in the Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., is put forth by the publishers as a "representative religious volume." It contains twelve discourses, professedly relating to the primeval world. The first is entitled "The World a Divine Creation." In this we learn that the world never was created. Notwithstanding some dozen pages are occupied in showing a progressive geological formation of the earth, covering unknown ages, the whole discussion incontinently swamps itself as follows: "God, in creating, did not bring into being a new substance foreign to himself. pendent existence.

in God, and in us."

The material creation has no inde-
The material creation exists only

We would inquire of Dr. Hedge, in the name of Science, how long a period it is necessary to allow for the above mentioned

creation ?

Then comes "( Man in the Image of God;" and here our author flounders in difficulties. "There was a first man. The question arises, whether one first man for the whole human family, or one for each continent, or for each of the various races, Caucasian, African, Malay, and others, into which the naturalists divide mankind. Whether the human family originated from a single pair, or has flowed together from different centers in different lands.". But the nub of the difficulty is the great Simian, question, Was man originally an ape? Our author hates to believe it, but then there are very learned men who do believe it, and it is even more difficult to doubt their learning, than to doubt the apeish origin of man, and so a classification of the human races is resorted to under the principle of "divide and conquer." Some may have come from apes, and some not, though that does not prevent all being a band of broth

* “The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition." By FREDERICK HENRY HEDGE. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1870.

ers.

The apes are coming up. The more advanced may have received souls. The historic races are some of them on the decline. The author is sometimes tempted to think the transformation may have been the other way-a change of type from human to simian. Such, for example, as jeer "at the great and serious truths of humanity" (like the above, perhaps), are evidently going down. "If anything can make an ape of a man," says our author, "it is that."

The period of Apeish gestation being over, we come to "Man in Paradise." The garden of Eden is doubtless an allegory, nevertheless, it has been properly located by Bunsen at the head waters of the Euphrates. At this spot, on the earth's surface, began the history of man, or, according to our author, possibly took place the transformation of an ape. Various questions in the political economy of a future Eden are here discussed, as to whether such robbery as property will exist, and kindred matters.

We then arrive at the brute creation. Here our author is free from theologic or scientific troubles and trammels. He has a theory of his own. Orthodox Spain, where there are bull-fights, is to him the representative idea of the relation of Christianity to brutes. This is in painful contrast with the spectacle of Hindu hospitals for the cure of sick animals, "in the interest of mercy entirely," says our author, "not for the sake of the owners, but of the animals." He might have mentioned, also, that this peculiar form of philanthropy has the added merit of family feeling. A lame cat, for instance, may be at the very moment a man's grandfather or a dyspeptic donkey his brother. Something should be allowed to filial tenderness. The author closes this chapter with a celebrated hymn to nature, by St. Francis of Assisi, which he says needs only a recognition of the brute creation to make it the best expression of Christian piety in relation to the visible world. We agree with the author, that David is not to be mentioned in this connection. Here is the hymn:

"Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and especially our brother the Sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light; fair is he and shining with a very great splendor. O Lord, he signifies to us Thee!

"Praised be my Lord for our sister the Moon; and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in the heavens.

"Praised be my Lord for our brother the Wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou upholdest in life all creatures.

"Praised be my Lord for our sister Water, who is very serviceable unto us and precious and clean.

"Praised be my Lord for our brother Fire, through whom thou givest us light in the darkness, and he is bright and pleasant, and very mighty and strong. , "Praised be my Lord for our mother the Earth, the which dost sustain and keep us and bringest forth divers fruits, and flowers of many colors, and grass."

Our author adds, in the following supplementary stanza, the final touch of perfection needed to render this Assisinine hymn the best expression of Christian piety extant:

"Praised be my Lord for our brothers and sisters the living creatures which thou hast made, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and the fishes that inhabit the Sea. They, too, are thy children, they praise thy handiwork, and thou blessest them with thy love !"

We must hasten over "Paradise Lost," which is, in fact, no loss, and come to the Cainite genealogy, which is peculiar. We quote:

"Seth is the name of a God, and Enos, his son, means man. genealogy in Genesis v. begins properly with Cainan (Cain). with Adam, and Seth the Creator."

Accordingly the
Enos being one

This is quite a learned note. We did suppose that the old Babylonian God, Set, here dragged up to duty in the fifth chapter of Genesis, properly belonged to some period after the flood. How he gets into the Hebrew records of this date is not mentioned-probably through the arrow-headed, in some way unknown. Cainan becomes Cain by the same process that Middleton is derived from Moses, viz. cutting off the -oses and adding on the -iddleton. So cutting off an from Cain-an, the terminus ad quem, we have Cain, the terminus a quo, from whom we are all descended through this revised genealogy.

As for Methuselah, his 969 years were too many for him. He either died of apoplexy from the accumulation of years and ideas— or if he lived so long, he was drowned in the flood; but in any event, whether he lived at all, or not, or was only a period, he and the period are both dead now, which is satisfactory, and the moral is, that we must all die sooner or later, which is conclusive.

"The Failure of Primeval Society" our author regards as simply "the crude abortions of immature nature in its first essays." "The Deluge" has undoubtedly some foundation in fact, although the biblical account of it is puerile.

As for "the Dispersion," that, too, has some color of truth, inasmuch as Ethnology traces back the historic races to the alleged locality.

We have, then, "Jehovah and Abraham, a Hebrew Idyl,"

from the text, "And the Lord appeared unto Abraham in the plain of Mamre," with the story of the promise to Sarah, and the conversation concerning Sodom, upon which our author remarks"The whole narrative, dinner and conversation included, is exceptional, a visible, palpable appearance of God to man is rare in Hebrew tradition, *** but here is a God who is not only seen and heard, but touched, who not only walks and talks, but eats." This is more than the author can endure. Notwithstanding man is divine and God is human (page 41) the fact of eating destroys the illusion. Such vulgar occupation becomes neither a Jehovah, nor a Christ, after his resurrection.

"The Heritage of the Inner Life" is the poetic title of the final chapter which concerns the meditative character of the patriarch Isaac. It seems the patriarch did not know his letters. He went out in the evening to meditate-" writing had not been invented. If the patriarch experienced intuitions, or formed conclusions, there was no opportunity of recording them, and so they are lost to posterity." We would suggest to Dr. Hedge, that Isaac's grand ancestors beyond the river were possibly familiar with the record of certain events which occurred some four hundred years before Abraham came into the land of Canaan, and which were inscribed upon memorial cylinders in Hamitic arrow headed characters, preserved in the Temple of the Moon, in this same Ur, or Hur of Lower Chaldea, from whence Abraham emigrated. Furthermore, that Abraham sojourned some years in Egypt, and that the Egyptian Book of the Dead antedates, or is at least as old as the time of his visit there. It is also a new idea to us, that the Phenician or Semitic alphabet is younger than either the Assyrian or Egyptian-so that if the patriarch Abraham neglected either his own or his son's education, we think him quite culpable.

But this is not the point of the chapter. It is the tendency to inwardness of the Hebrews, as derived from father Isaac, which strikes the mind of the author. Their outwardness they get from father Jacob. This inwardness flowered outward from time to time in their history, "from Joshua to John the Baptist-in Jesusin John of the Apocalypse-in Maimonides, and in Spinoza "—and our Christianity "is a birth from the interior spiritual life so characteristic of the Hebrew race," from Confucius to Tam O'Shanter.

We have endeavored to skin the cream of these chapters. If our readers desire the milk of the word, let them read the book.

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