is great praise, but we sincerely think that Mr. Craig has earned it.

It seems hardly necessary to enlarge upon the value of the biographical parts of Scripture. An apostolic pen has admonished us to be followers of those holy men of old, " who through faith and patience inherit the promises." But it may be observed, that while the doctrines of Scripture seem to exercise the most salutary influence upon the heart, when presented to us according to their present collocation in the Bible, and not as they are strung together and artificially arranged in theological systems; the biography of Scripture, on the other hand, may often be rendered more impressive, when its detached members are united, and exhibited in their proper conformation. The intermixture of general history with individual biography in our sacred books, while it renders the whole more natural, striking, and instructive, does yet, in some measure, impair the effect that is produced by concentrating the attention on some one distinguished person. We are, therefore, mnch indebted to those religious writers, who have placed before us in an unbroken series those trains of events, which reveal, in all their naked beauty or deformity, the characters of men conspicuous in Biblical story. When it is considered how powerfully the mind is affected, particularly in our tender years, by the sentiments, feelings, and habits of those with whom it is brought into contact; and that a powerful force is exerted in the modification of character, especially on the young, not only by intercourse with the living world, but also by conversing with those who exist only in the pages of the memorialist; it must be admitted to be of the highest importance that children should be familiarized with the histories of those holy persons after whose cast of character we could wish them to be modelled. Perhaps we can, many of us, trace the present constitution of our minds, and the force of a particular taste, indeed the whole complexion of our lives, to some anecdote we heard or read in childhood, or to something, seemingly of little moment, that was done or uttered by persons, to whose ascendancy we instinctively paid homage. The mind has received a bias, by which the whole future condition is irreversibly affected, for good or for evil. Happy they, who, in the period of vernal susceptibility, are assimilated, by what they daily witness or peruse, to patterns of lofty piety and self-denying virtue!

Now, it is obvious that sacred biography possesses immense and peculiar advantages over profane. When the Bible declares the motives by which any one has been actuated, we are

sure that the declaration is not erroneous. And hence we learn, from the highest authority, what are the symptoms and manifestations of particular principles. Moreover, Scripture gives us the judgment of God, in opposition to the judgment of man; and corrects in numerous instances that scale of virtues and vices, which our self-partiality has constructed. An attention to this estimate we conceive to be among the most important uses of Scripture history. The world finds the sum and substance of religion in the second table of the Law; and even that table, if not broken by its hands, is yet shamefully mutilated; but the Bible teaches us, in its account of God's dealings with mankind, that he is jealous of his own honour, as well as attentive to the interests of his creatures. When we see a Sabbath-breaker stoned, and a liar struck dead; the Jewish lawgiver shut out from the promised land for one failure in his characteristic virtue; and good king Hezekiah levelled with the earth by a tremendous denunciation, for allowing his heart to be lifted up; we learn from an infallible teacher, that the code of worldly morality is at best miserably defective, and oftentimes quite at variance with the righteous law of God.

There is another point of view in which the contemplation of primitive sacred biography is peculiarly interesting. It shews us the uniformity of religion. Under several dispensations, religion has still been one and the same thing,-faith in God, and a righteous conversation. In the early ages, when the promise of Messiah was obscure, the faith of the Patriarchs was necessarily proportioned to their limited information: it could not shoot beyond the compass of Revelation. But in the devout ejaculation of Jacob on his death-bed, "I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord," we may discover the same spirit, though accompanied with only indistinct and elementary knowledge, which breathes in that noble appeal of the fully illuminated Apostle; "I have fought a good fight; I have finished my course; I have kept the faith.'

The following extract may here find an appropriate place.

From the whole inquiry into which we have entered, we obtain a very satis factory view of the close of Jacob's life. It is not enlightened with all the knowledge, but it is adorned with all the gracious influence of Gospel truth. His death is marked as strongly with "the sure and certain hope" of immortality, as that of any one of the noble army of Christian martyrs. The faith which he had in the promised redemption, made him a holy and zealous servant of the Lord of hosts, as long as he continued in the valley of humiliation and trial. The measure of grace which he had received, for the controul of his natural corruptions, led him to desire and to look for more. The anticipation of his soul, confirmed by the direct intimations of Divine teaching, led him

out towards a brighter and better home beyond the grave, where sin could not enter, and where sorrow was unknown. And, as the whole of his course had been a pilgrimage towards this promised land, so the hour of death was the period when he looked with ardent desire, with sincerity, and enlightened patience, for the realization of the blessing which he had so many years desired. pp. 298, 299.

After thus briefly adverting to a few of the benefits to be reaped from the study of sacred biography, we shall not have performed our duty, unless we also touch upon the faults most easily besetting writers who attempt to elucidate and improve this department of sacred literature. We are not meaning to meddle with those profane and diminutive wits, who evince an insensibility to the noble candour and touching simplicity of the narratives in the inspired volume, as little creditable to their heads as to their hearts, and who can find nothing but subjects for puny criticism and flippant malevolence in representations which have extorted the admiration of the greatest minds. With these unhappy witlings we decline all controversy-Procul, Oprocul, este profani! But pious men are apt to be seduced, by their piety itself, to draw conclusions in favour of one party and adverse to another, which the facts of the case will hardly justify. Their saint is almost faultless, while their sinner is without a single redeeming quality. When exhibiting the character of some holy man, they seem to forget the individual, and to be depicting holiness in the abstract and the worthy whom they present to us, like the Cyrus of Xenophon, is half an ideal creation of their own, designed for a pattern of religious practice, and for the oracle of sound divinity. On the other hand, the black are blackened, and the leaven of Satan is detected in whatever they say or do. We deprecate all such exaggeration: and though our charity cannot carry us so far as some commentators have gone, who discover hopeful symptoms in Judas Iscariot, yet we scruple to load any man with the name of reprobate, and to number those with the lost whose perdition is not certified in Scripture. From this fault Mr. Craig is not entirely exempt. His good sense and integrity have indeed withheld him from any considerable indulgence of it; but we think a disposition is apparent to make the contrast between Esau and Jacob as glaring as possible, by magnifying the vices of the one and extenuating those of the other, and that he is far more eagle-sighted to the excellencies of the latter than of the former. Indeed, it is our author's avowed sentiment, that the two brothers "were exemplifications of the opposite principles of nature and grace." Had he not been unconsciously operated upon by this partiality, he would not, we are persuaded, have again and again charged Esau with being

a fornicator, on the authority of a verse in the twelfth chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews which breathes no such allegation. The Apostle is enjoining on the Hebrew Christians great diligence and circumspection, "lest (he observes) any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness, springing up, trouble you, and thereby many be defiled; lest there be any fornicator; or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his birthright." It is manifest, from the concluding clause, that what Esau is here charged with is profaneness, and not licentiousness. Mr. Craig, we are confident, had no suspicion that he was misinterpreting the passage. Yet, possibly, his readiness to believe any imputation on the character of a man who has been most injuriously classed with Pharaoh and Judas, may have led him to admit at once an exposition of the text, into which, had his prepossessions been different, he would have looked more narrowly.

Esau, no doubt, at the period when he sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, was an irreligious man. An inspired penman has branded his forehead with the epithet "profane;" and the man who could postpone the high and spiritual privileges attached to his primogeniture to any human considerations, even though they had been more imperious than the one to which Esau yielded, must have merited the ignominious title. But we are not to conclude, from his being thus deservedly stigmatized; nor from the assertion of Scripture that he was hated of God,-an expression which means no more than that he was thrown out of the line in which Messiah was to descend: :-we are not to conclude from this technical phraseology, that Esau was the most flagitious of mankind, and lived and died accursed. Indeed, Mr. Craig himself refuses to concur with those stern judges, who have consigned the elder brother of Jacob to the deepest pit of perdition. Still we are of opinion that fair measure has been denied him; and that some excellent points in his conduct have been overlooked or disparaged. If Jacob, who had shewn himself a crafty, scheming man, conduct himself afterwards according to truth and rectitude, we are called upon to admire this evidence of a renewed heart; and to appreciate his subsequent conscientiousness the more, inasmuch as it evinced a victory over his besetting sin. Be it so: we only desire that Esau be measured by a similar standard. He had betrayed an ungodly unconcern about his rank in the covenant made with his grandfather and father. In a moment of desperation from hunger, he had been trepanned into surrendering a jewel, which nothing, as he intimates at the time, would have induced him to sacrifice but the prospect of inevitably losing it by death.

son.

But how deeply he felt his fault, and with what agonies of penitence he sought to retrieve it, is forcibly depicted by the sacred writers, in the pathetic narrative of his behaviour upon learning the consummation of his brother's perfidy. Again: Esau is a man of violent passions, and threatens, in the heat of his resentment at the unbrotherly conduct of Jacob, that he would make away with him: yet, even in this moment of headlong rage, he is checked by filial tenderness, and resolves to defer his vengeance till after the death of Isaac, that he may not inflict upon a parent whom he dearly loves the pang of losing a His behaviour, also, on meeting his brother after their long separation, behaviour which Mr. Craig places in disadvantageous contrast with Jacob's,-may, we think, without any rhetorical management, be much more favourably represented. The anger of Esau at the vast and immeasurable wrong he had sustained, has subsided; and when apprised that the companion of his childhood is returning with his family, he instantly goes out to welcome him at the head of an armed troop, intended, apparently, for an escort to the helpless company. There is no foundation for the common surmise, that Esau went forth with the intention of executing his early threats, but was hindered by a supernatural influence. We may surely ascribe to a temper unusually generous and affectionate, if not to higher principles, the forgiving embrace with which he welcomes home the exile, and forgets the crafty supplanter in the restored brother. "Lo, this my brother was dead, and is alive again: he was lost, and is found."-Other instances might be adduced of Esau's amended character; such as his endeavour to soothe the grief his irreligious marriage had occasioned his parents, by taking another wife from the family of Abraham. But we are not going to canonize Esau. It is not our purpose to maintain that he ever became a new creature. We could wish, indeed, that there were any satisfactory proofs of his having undergone so blessed a change. Still, let it not be affirmed that he did not. Such auspicious indications as have just been alluded to ought not to be forgotten. As to Jacob, no legitimate doubt can be entertained of his real piety. Nevertheless, we cannot record him as an eminent pattern of holiness. The history of his life is not that of steady, uniform, consistent godliness. From the gross misconduct of most of his children, an opinion may reasonably be formed unfavourable to his domestic discipline and in none of his transactions is it easy to recognise so signal and decisive a proof of self-conquest, and of a mind subdued to religious influence, as was exhibited by Esau, when he fell on his brother's neck and wept.