corps of young scholars, from institutions chiefly in New England, have advanced much further than their fathers, and are following on in the direction of what is vaguely called Transcendentalism. They join us in smiling at the stolid earnestness with which some of their seniors are just beginning to catch a notion of Kant and Fichte; but the instructive fact is, that those most advanced in the recent theology of New England, are only one stage beyond their forerunners, in a career of which we see the later and perhaps inevitable stages in Germany. For those who are wise, it is a providential blessing that the curve of which we have but a few actual elements at home has been completed abroad. Already we are becoming familiar with expressions about the Athanasian Creed, the teleiological argument in Natural Theology, Final Causes, Miracles, Plenary Inspiration, Subjective Atonement, the Nature of Sin, and Eternal Punishment, which a few years ago would have branded a man as a Unitarian if not a Deist. Now, we hold it to be useful to our rising theologians, who have this battle to fight, that they should see how it has been fought on the Continent of Europe. This, and not the matter of the doctrines taught in German schools, is the fruit to be obtained by the study of this subject; and for this study, we scarcely know a more valuable book, or one more level to the capacity of ordinary, unsophisticated men of sense, than the one which we here lay down.

ART. IV.-The Spirit of the Old Testament.

It is commonly maintained that the Old Testament, in comparison with the New, and even when regarded in respect to its own intrinsic merits, is deficient in tenderness, in inward as distinguished from outward moral power, and, in a word, in what is commonly denoted by the term spirituality. Such an idea is not exclusively peculiar to the rationalizing or the neological interpreter. It may be often traced in the sermons of preachers who are styled evangelical, and in the writings of commentators who are supposed to hold the plenary inspiration of all parts of the acknowledged Word of God. Even by divines reputed orthodox, is it sometimes held, that in this Older Scripture there are actually wanting some of the fundamental truths of salvation. It is maintained that there is to be found therein no trace, or but the faintest trace of views, without which the lowest form of any thing like spiritual religion would seem to be an impossibility, without which the

devotions and devotional writings of God's chosen people must be regarded as falling, in this respect, below the known standard of heathen and classical pietism.

Many, too, within the reputed pale of evangelical Christendom, appear to be taking a step even in advance of these opinions, so perilous to all solid and healthy faith in Scriptural inspiration. The sentiment is growing more and more in our churches, (and it would seem to be one of the most noticeable signs of the times), that the Old Testament is rapidly becoming, if it has not already become, obsolete in respect to us and our age, that for the present Christian Church it possesses chiefly an antiquarian value,-that its teachings are, in great measure, if not wholly, superseded by the higher and purer instructions of the new dispensation,-nay more, that they are actually at war, and, in some very important respects too, with what is called the genius and spirit of the gospel.

How all this is to be reconciled with any corsistent belief that the Old Testament writings are verily included in what Paul denominates γραφὴ θεόπνευστος, Scripture given by the inspiration, or inbreathing of God,-it would indeed be hard to determine. It would be equally, if not more difficult, to maintain its consistency with the solemn reverence our divine Saviour ever manifested for the books of the Jewish canon,—his constant appeals to the certainty of their predictions,—his implicit faith in Holy Scripture, ἐν ταῖς γραφαῖς τᾶις ἁγίαις, as something "which could not be broken," and which contained the evidence or credentials of his own divine mission,-his deep sense of the spiritual richness of that ancient law, the least jot or tittle of which was to survive the dissolution of the heavens and the earth,—his apparently sincere and unsuspecting trust in the accuracy of their historical and supernatural narrations, whenever referred to in illustration of his own didactic warnings,—his continual accommodation of their devotional parts to his own spiritual wants, and this, too, not merely in public, by way of condescension, as it might be said, to the national prejudices, but in all the honesty and truthfulness of his most private exercises, whether of conflict or of triumph,—his liturgical use of the psalms, even of passages standing sometimes in immediate connection with others for which our more rational commentators, in their higher spirituality, would deem it necessary to apologise, on the ground of their belonging to an obsolete and less spiritual worship,—his righteous zeal for the purity of the ancient law, and for the maintenance of its primitive simplicity and integrity, in opposition to the perverse traditions of the Jews,—and, to sum up all, the high honour he delighted to confer upon the Old Testament by ever citing it in proof of his own doctrines, as the lex scripta that formed

the immutable ground of his own instructions, as the firm support of his own faith in the dark hour of conflict and temptation, as the medium of his soul's utterance in the agonies of the garden and the cross;-to reconcile this, we say, with the anti-evangelical theories of the Old Testament, would require a higher degree of hermeneutical skill than is needed for the solution of the worst difficulties of these strange yet sublime records of God's earliest revelations; especially when we bear in mind that these books, which the Saviour so devoutly studied, were substantially the same (as every scholar knows) with the now-acknowledged Jewish canon, and that HE who ever manifested such deep and deferential reverence for the authority of the lex scripta, was himself the Supernatural and Infinite Reason, the Eternal Wisdom, that "True Light that lighteth every man who cometh into the world."

And the opinions to which we have alluded are gaining ground. They are presenting themselves in their most extreme and startling forms. Among many heretofore reputed evangelical, they have had their origin in zeal for a false philosophy of reform, with which the unyielding spirit of the Old Testament would seem to come in direct collision. Their rationalizing casuistry, and shallow utilitarianism, and abstract philanthropy, cannot brook its stern method of resolving all morality into a strict observance of the duties arising from the acknowledged relations of human life, and of deducing all its sanctions from the acknowledged sovereignty of God. There seems too little reason, too little regard to the "fitness of things," too little recognition of the universe as something back of Deity, too little of that philosophy of the "greatest happiness of the greatest number of sentient beings," in a law whose only sanction is ever the same solemn Ani-Jehovah,-I am the Lord. Hence such opinions are held by very many who are unconscious of the danger attending them, and of the inevitable consequences which must be the result. The signs of the times indicate a still wider diffusion; and unless checked by timely expositions of their fallacy, they must end in a fruitful harvest of scepticism in respect to the inspiration of all Scripture, both new and old.

To return, however, to some of our first points, or to that which is seemingly the least faith-destroying of these neological dogmas-There are many, we may say, who stop short of the view taken by Warburton, Whateley, and the great mass of modern rationalists. They recognise in the Old Testament an implied belief, to say the least, in a future life, and would even regard certain passages as express declarations to that effect, or at all events, as admitting no fair interpretation in any other way. Still, even among such is it very gene

rally maintained, as something uncontrovertible, that the hopes and fears of the Jew, even of the pious Jew, were directed mainly to temporal objects, and that outward rites and ceremonies formed a far greater part, and a more acknowledged part of their religion, than the cultivation of any spiritual affections having reference to the eternal and the invisible. The Old Testament, it is often said, looked mainly to the outward, the ceremonial, the formal, the carnal, while it insists. but faintly upon the inward, the unseen, and the spiritual. The latter were not wholly lost sight of, but they were almost entirely reserved for the later and higher revelation. The gospel first laid the main stress on inward rectitude of motive; it first declared the blessedness of him who had not only "clean hands," but "a pure heart." There is doubtless some truth in this, but at the same time more that is fallacious. There is such a thing as destroying the very ground and sanction of our Saviour's instructions, in the attempt to magnify the New Testament by unduly depreciating the older revelation. There is in the latter more spirituality of view and feeling than meets the eye of the careless reader. It requires, however, the spiritual perception and the spiritual mind. It obtrudes not itself upon the outward Sadducee, whilst in the experience of the true Israelite is it often felt, that there is no part of God's Word, the reading of which is more precious, or which has more power over the purest and most inward affections of the soul.

It is indeed true, that ceremonial observances occupy a most prominent, and sometimes an almost exclusive space in the law and national records of the Jews. Hence it is that we lose sight of those frequent declarations which were intended, on this very account, to guard against the danger of a merely formal, and to urge the necessity of spiritual religion. In the mysterious plan of God's revelation, the outward would seem to come first, and yet the inward ever accompanies it, ever presents itself to one who seeks for it, ever appears expressly or impliedly in the outward language, instead of being left merely to the inferences of the natural conscience. To one, therefore, who has hastily adopted the idea of the exclusively formal character of the Old Testament teachings, it is sometimes a matter of astonishment when he finds, on careful examination, how very many passages there are of a directly opposite nature, passages exhibiting the necessity of the internal and the spiritual, with even more of melting and glowing earnestness of language, than is ever found in the more sober and preceptive instructions of the gospel itself.

The psalms, the prophets, the law, and even the historical, portions abound in them. "I have cleansed my heart in inno

cency, therefore will I encompass thine altar, O Lord. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, thou will not despise. Create within me a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within me. Thou desirest truth in the inward parts." (Ps. li.) In the Hebrew it is ning in praecordiis,-the same as renes, the reins, or ppéves, the seat of those deeper thoughts and affections which the Greek terminology would seem to place in the most central regions of vitality. So also in Job xxxviii. 36, "Who hath put wisdom in the inward parts," where the same Hebrew word is used in parallelism with ", the picturing or conceptive department of the soul, where the thoughts may be said to receive an objective distinctness, the source of the most interior emotion of the most spontaneous intuitions, or as they are elsewhere styled (Gen. vi. 5) having "the very imaginations of the thoughts of the heart," those first beginnings of emotional mental activity which give moral character to all that subsequently proceeds from them. Again,— "In the hidden parts" (DD, Ps. li. 8, in the most secret or interior chamber) "O make me to know wisdom,"-in that region of the spirit which is concealed from direct consciousness, which is below the very thoughts themselves, where the thoughts have their birth, or in other words spring* up from that state of the affections which is most closely allied to the very essence of the soul-" O there, even there, make me to know wisdom."

In accordance with the same idea is that fervent prayer for inward grace that soon follows-"O, take not thy Holy Spirit from me; O give back to me the joy of thy salvation." And then the light in the intellect which comes from the purification of the conscience-" Then will I teach transgressors thy ways; then shall sinners be converted unto thee."

Beside such express declarations as these, how much do we find of implied meaning that is utterly inconsistent with the idea of a mere formal or outward religion,-how many expres sions, for example, containing indeed no explicit mention of a future state, yet full of that emotion which has no meaning except in connection with the idea of a higher life for the human soul, and from which all glow, and warmth, and elevation, and strength, and beauty depart the moment it is severed in the mind from all such connection, and regarded as proceeding from the low level of the materialist, or as having refer

* From some such idea of the soul seems to have come that beautiful Hebrew metaphor, by ascendere super cor, representing thoughts as rising or welling up in the soul, as from some deep fountain of being far below them, and in which resides the true moral character of the spirit. See Jeremiah iii. 16; vii. 31; xxxii. 35, &c. Compare also the Hebræism in Luke xxiv. 38, Δία τί διαλογισμοὶ ἀναβαίνουσιν ἐν ταῖς nagdíass iμãv;—“ Why do thoughts arise in your souls.”