foot of a flea; and that of his providence, by sneering at the undignified notion of his observing the position of a pin or a hair. To prescribe particular commands on matters of minute detail, was a necessary part of a ceremonial law. If then it was consistent with the high dignity of Jehovah to insinuate a ceremonial law at all, it was also consistent with it to descend into that minuteness of detail on which you exereise your ridicule, and in which you find a foundation for your cavils." p. 46, &c.

Such are some of the satisfactory replies of the Christian Advocate to Sir W. Drummond; and we unfeignedly hope, that the latter gentleman will weigh them as he ought. His assertion that the Jewish Scriptures present a degraded portrait of the Deity, is striking only from its novelty and its hardihood. Does he remember that the Jewish Scriptures alone taught the great truth of the unity of the Godhead; that if this sublime doctrine flashed occasionally in the writings of the philosophers, it never really dawned, and rose to set no more, but upon the horizon of Judea? Does he remember also, that the doctrine of a future state is the exclusive property of the Old Testament; that if philosophy sometimes dreamt of another state of being, the Scriptures alone embodied the idea, and alone erected the hopes and fears of futurity into a principle of action? Does he remember, moreover, that the Jewish Scriptures alone revealed the qualities of grace or mercy in the character of God; alone, therefore, presented the Divine Being as an object of love;-that whilst heathenism displayed merely the dark side of the pillar, Moses displayed that brighter face, the sun of the desert, the guide and comforter of the people of God? Does Sir William finally remember, that the Jewish Scriptures alone revealed that summum bonum, that chief good, about which philosophers disputed, and on which they had almost as many systems as men; that whilst conflicting sages placed it, some in a brutal indulgence of passion, and the rest in an impossible extinction of it; some in unattainable knowledge, and some in universal doubt; the Bible alone proclaimed God to be the supreme good of his people; dethroned the creature, to enthrone the Creator; taught the world that virtue was likeness to God, duty obedience to God, and happiness union to God, now and for ever? Was this any small deserving? Will the man who celebrates, with strains of self-gratulation, in huge quartos of hot-pressed paper, the resurrection of a pipkin from a subterranean city, or the fancied development of the Phoenician radicals of some word which nobody knows, contemplate this discovery without admiration or gratitude? As dogs which hunt for truffles, whether so employed or not, generally keep their noses to the ground, so is it with these minute, underground philosophers: they hunt and scratch for words, till they despise things; and prate about heathen gods, till they forget there. is a real God in the universe.

But we come now to notice, though very briefly, the main body of Sir William's work; that romantick disquisition, in which a grown man gravely contends that what has been called a history of the Jews is, in fact, a history of the reform of the calendar! We think it right to inform our unlearned readers, if such there be, VOL. I. No. I.

that the calendar, or distribution of time into years, months, days, &c. was not the work of a day, or of an individual; that Romulus, imagining the sun to perform his journey in 304 days, appointed the year to be of the same length; that Numa extended it to 355 days; that Julius Cæsar, by the assistance of the astronomer Sosigenes, stretched it to the dimensions of 365 days, adding such intercalary days as appeared to him necessary to fill up the few additional hours which the sun spends upon his annual journey; that in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII. finding either the sun a little out of his place, or the astronomers out in their calculations, proceeded to such rectification of the calendar as satisfies the merchants upon 'change, over the whole of Europe. Now it is the adjustment of the calendar which Sir William determines to be typified by the Jewish Scriptures. Joshua is "the type of the sun in the sign of the Ram;" the "Passover was instituted in memorial of the transit of the equinoctial sun, from the sign of the Bull to that of the Ram or Lamb," &c. &c. &c. To dispute such an hypothe sis would really be an insult to our readers. It is enough to say, that where a writer proposes to divest words of their natural, and give them an allegorical meaning, the onus probandi lies upon him. We have a right to interpret them literally, till an insuperable objection to such interpretation be advanced, and a rational scheme of allegorical interpretation produced. Now we have already given enough of Sir William's reasoning upon this point, to determine its value; but lest our readers should mistake the process, we will state it in a few words. He takes, for example, the name of a city; breaks it into morsels; changes letters, and places of letters, to suit his purpose; traces them up, directly or indirectly, to radicals which have some relation to astronomy; and then jumps at once to the inference, that this supposed name of a city is, in fact, the name of a star. Let us suppose a case. We find the name of Pallas in the ancient writers, and, because they universally say so, rashly believe her to be a goddess worshiped by the heathens. But how false is the conclusion! Is there not a planet called Pallas? This supposed name of a goddess, therefore, is the name of a star, and Pallas had no existence but in the eye of an astronomer. Such, we assure our readers, is the real character of Sir William Drummond's reasoning; though we state it with delicacy, fearing the steps which the next of kin may think proper to take with him. There is, however, something to be added upon this subject.

Mr. D'Oyly has very truly informed us, that this scheme of interpretation, so slily slipped by Sir William into the hands of his friends, as a snug discovery of his own, as some rare fruit gathered from the orchards of Herculaneum, or relick from the mausoleums of Pompeii, is by no means original. Let us go into a brief history of this, which is just hinted by Mr. D'Oyly. The scheme of allegorical interpretation revived, after its first birth and death with Origen, we believe with our countryman Collins, who, however, confined it mainly to the prophecies. For a time it took

like low carriages or square-toed shoes, among the wits and belles of the day; and a man could scarcely blow his nose without typifying the rise or ruin of the commonwealth. Every thing was transformed into the history of every thing but what it really was; as if we were to suppose the Newgate Calendar a history of the gods, or a tailor's bili a catalogue of constellations. But the celebrated Chandler, adopting the approved practice in certain hospitals treating disorders of this class, lashed the age into their senses. The like spirit again showed itself among the Hutchinsonians, but died almost a natural death. Pere Hardouin's skepticism about the ancient poets, Lauder's crotchets about Milton, were symptoms of a sister disease. Then came a Mons. Gebelin, contending that "Romulus and Remus were mere allegorical personages, representatives of the sun, and worshiped as such." Having asserted this in the first chapter, he proceeds to say in the second, "nous avons vu dans le chapitre précédent que Romulus étoit le soleil; que tout le prouvoit." And the proof is this-" le nom de sa mére, celui de son pére, son frère, la mort de son frére, son propre nom." There is another morsel of reasoning of this Mons. Gebelin, whom we verily believe to be the type of Sir William, so precious that we cannot refuse it to our readers. "Quirinus, (nom de Romulus,) la traduction literale de Melcarthe, que portoit Hercule chez les Tyriens, est une autre preuve qu'on regardoit Romulus comme le soleil." Still more raving, if possible, than the Count Gebelin, appeared Mons. Volney, with his "Meditation of the Revolutions of Empires." The sum and substance of this notable work is predicated in the following sentence: "We acknowledge, in one word, that all the theological doctrines, on the origin of the world, on the nature of God, on the revelation of his laws, and the appearance of his person, are nothing more than mere recitals of astronomical facts, and figurative and emblematical representations du jeu des constellations."* With this praposition he endeavours to reconcile the systems of Moses, Zoroaster, Confucius, Brama, and Christ; of which last he declares, that "it consists in the allegorical worship of the sun under the cabalistical names of Chrisen, or Yesus, or Jesus." In the tail of this literary comet followed a M. Dupuis, who, in a work, entitled "Origine de tous les Cultes," reiterated most of the positions of Volney, and endeavoured to prop them up by a few more radicals and derivatives. Last of all, in this progression of illuminées, appears Sir William Drummond, who, smit with the same malady, re-asserts most of the absurdities of Volney, borrows most of the proofs of Dupuis, and adds to the follies of his predecessors, that of assuming to himself the discredit of much of this nonsense as his own, which, in fact, belongs to them. Far from washing his hands of his own crimes against orthodoxy and common sense, he appro

We do not translate these last words, from a real inability to give them any mean« ing compatible with common sense.

priates theirs; calls his copy an original; and displays this sort of purloined goosequill plumage, as the proper produce of his own back. After this short sketch, we shall leave these knights-errant to settle the point of honour between them, and to enjoy that cabalistick precedency which no one else will be found to contest with them.

Without detaining our readers any longer upon these "deliramenta doctrinæ," we shall proceed to add a few practical considerations suggested by this work.

In the first place, we cannot avoid pointing out, from the case before us, especially to our younger readers, the extravagancies into which those are hurried who depart from the plain good old way of religion marked out by God himself, and trod by the wise and devout of every age. Sir William Drummond is, though not a first-rate scholar, a man of a glowing imagination, of extensive reading, and of singular ingenuity in bringing his knowledge to bear upon any point in question. Perhaps few writers of a metaphysical cast have presented such illuminated manuscripts to the publick. All his entries upon the world of letters are in the shape of ovations; and he drags at the wheel of his car the spoils of many books, and languages, and people. But, having once determined to forsake the beaten path, and to "drive the chariot of the sun," behold the consequences of his temerity. We have no hesitation in saying, that a greater mass of profound nonsense has seldom or never, in one volume, burdened the presses of our country. Whence, then, is this, but that the Great Author of the Bible is resolved it shall not be traduced with impunity? It is, that as God, (however Sir William has condemned the passage,)" hardened the heart" of the refractory monarch of Egypt, he blinds the eyes of those monarchs in literature who oppose their wisdom to his own. It is, that he suffers those who "profess to be" eminently "wise," "to become" eminently "foolish." It is because God abandons the proud to the obliquities of their mind, and punishes their resistance to His word, by permitting them to talk their own nonsense. If any of our young friends should ever for a moment be tempted to forsake the cloud of witnesses by whom they are surrounded, and to soar upon wings of wax into the regions of original interpretation, let him see inscribed upon a pillar, at the gate of that region, the name of the Right Hon. Sir William Drummond; inscribed, like the names on the stones in the Alps, to warn the traveller by the fate of those who perished upon the same spot. John Zisca's skin was made into a drum, and continued to terrify his old enemies: and Sir William Drummond, we doubt not, will continue, (if his name survive himself,) to alarm the rash of all ages, and will light up a perpetual beacon on the fatal rock of scriptural innovation.

But Sir William must allow us next to say a word to himself. He arrogates to himself the rank of a philosopher. Now, does he remember any philosopher, really entitled to be " so called," who thought that a state could subsist without religion? Does he not know that Socrates deemed it necessary to uphold the popular su

perstition, though he had no faith in it? That Solon, and Lycurgus, and Numa, all felt it essential, even by fraud, to invest their laws with the sanctity of religion? That Livy attributed the triumphs of Rome to her reverence for an oath? That Machiavel, in his interpretation of Livy, confirms this judgment by his own? That numerous individuals, distinguished at once for moral virtue and profound learning, have rejoiced to cast their spoils at the foot of the Cross-to build up, out of the materials of their chosen science, an altar to Jehovah, and to exclaim, in the glowing language of the volume so dishonoured by Sir William," righteousness exalteth a nation; yea, happy is the people who have the Lord for their God?" And, knowing all this, does this bold apostate from philosophy, as well as faith, never ask himself what he is doing? Does he never fear, lest the hand should wither that he thus stretches out against the altar of his country? Does he never tremble at the idea of a whole world, should they believe in him, staking their souls, their eternal existence, upon the dictum of an almost solitary teacher? Would he allow us to address him, we should say -Sir William, you are too well acquainted with the errours of others, not to have ground for suspicion that you yourself may be wrong: and if you should be wrong, what flood-gates of misery are you endeavouring to open upon your country? How are you, in that case, also calling down the denunciations of the Almighty on your own head? How are you kindling a spark which may involve a universe, and that through all eternity in its dreadful blaze? But do you say, "What I believe I must speak?" Then what becomes of your honesty? You are a privy-counsellor; a man who, besides being pledged on oath, to support the religion of your country; to carry no counsel to the throne which will not establish the constitution in church and state, in the form delivered to us by our ancestors; must have solemnly attested his sincerity, by partaking of the symbols of the body and blood of Christ. Now, cast your eyes, where we should be glad to know no one else would cast them, upon the pages of your book. See in it an open and scurrilous attack upon the faith of your country; an invasion of all our religious hopes and joys; a prostitution of the sacred vessels of our temple to the purposes of your indecent merriment. Is this the conduct we should expect even from a man of truth? You think the world can do without religion. Is such conduct as this any proof of it? Is such honour a fair barter for religious integrity? and such a casuist a good substitute for a Christian? There are two men, who, even in your own department of science, demand your homage, Sir William Jones and Jacob Bryant. The testimony of the one to the Bible has been already produced, and you must be acquainted with that of the other. You know that his ancient thology was one vast monument to the truth of religion; that he ever approached the Scriptures like a man coming into the presence of God; and that the writer of his epitaph deemed it the discriminating feature of his writings, that they were" Exquisite quædam et reconditæ, quas non minore studio quam acumine, ad

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