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organism must be studied by watching its development from the simplicity of the germ to the final complexity of the finished structure," says our author (p. 6), and this pregnant sentence might be taken as the motto of his whole theory of "revelation." But in becoming an organism' rather than a "mechanism," the "revelation" which Dr. Robertson Smith expounds with such profound insight and sympathy remains in his eyes something essentially distinct from the process by which religious and moral truth became and becomes known, in some measure elsewhere than in Palestine. In what this distinction consists, however, we are not told. In an admirably lucid passage in the first lecture (p. 12) we read, "All true knowledge of God is verified by personal experience, but it is not exclusively derived from such experience. There is a positive element in all religion, an element which we have learned from those who went before us. If what is so learned is true we must ultimately come back to a point in history when it was new truth, acquired as all new truth is by some particular man or circle of men, who, as they did not learn it from their predecessors, must have got it by personal revelation from God Himself." But on page 14, our author continues, with almost incredible naïveté, "It is not necessary to encumber the argument by comparing the way in which individual Divine communications were given to Israel with the way in which the highest thinkers of other nations came to grasp something of spiritual truth." Until Dr. Robertson Smith "encumbers his argument" by answering the question, why when an Israelite acquired a new religious truth he "must have got it by personal revelation from God Himself," whereas a high-class thinker of another nation may have acquired a new religious truth by some other means, into which it is unnecessary to inquire, and until he further encumbers his argument by precisely indicating how and why-in this case, and in this alone-the acquiring faculty is something other and more than a higher degree of the verifying faculty, it appears to us that his "argument " is simply no argument at all.

It must, however, be added at once that his doctrine of revelation does not prevent our author from pointing out in great detail, and with keen spiritual discernment, the living connection between the personal temperament, experiences, and surroundings of each prophet, and the special aspects of Divine truth which he more especially apprehended. Those who adopt a truly "organic" view of the growth of religion and the acquisition of religious truth will find a guide in Dr. Robertson Smith whose theory they may dispute, but on whose observations and directions they will hardly ever be able to point out that that theory has exercised an undue-or, indeed, any perceptible-influence.

In one case, however, we cannot help thinking that Professor Robertson Smith's uncertainty of fundamental position has told upon his treatment of the subject matter. In Isaiah's time, he says, the preservation of the Judæan community was a religious necessity. Isaiah saw this, and, therefore, confidently foretold the failure of the Assyrian attempt on Jerusalem. In Jeremiah's time, on the other hand, the captivity was

in its turn a religious necessity, and Jeremiah accordingly confidently foretold the success of the Babylonian attempt on Jerusalem. Now we are never quite clear as to whether and in what sense our author holds that there really is a direct causal connection between the religious requirements and the military results of any special situation; but this is not our present point. The fact is that Micah, a contemporary of Isaiah, nevertheless agreed with Jeremiah. Dr. Robertson Smith makes an attempt to disarm this remarkable difference between the two prophets, Micah and Isaiah, on a point which he has explained to be essential, by maintaining that Micah did not really mean to predict a total suspension of the national life of Israel, and that to Isaiah the fal of Jerusalem would have involved this; but here his argument appear to us strained and unconvincing. On the contrary, when he shows how this difference of view was connected with the personal surroundings an the social positions of the two prophets he carries us completely with him.

In the treatment of the "Messianic" passages in Isaiah our author is at his best, and the fine analysis of the essential difference between Isaiah's hopes of a nation collectively "righteous" under existing forms of life and the New Testament conception of individual "re-birth" makes us look forward with keenest interest to his treatment, in a future volume, of Jeremiah's "new covenant."

PHILIP H. Wicksteed.

A

A SHORT PROTESTANT COMMENTARY.*

SHORT Protestant Commentary on the Books of the New Testament answers well to its name. It is short-indeed, only too hort to be always entirely satisfactory-and it is Protestant, not vangelical, in the sense of being unbiassed by theological assumptions f any kind. The Preface to the first edition, by Professor von Holzendorff, is itself a protest against the tendency which for a long time prevailed to "take the Bible as a single divine utterance, delivered, as it were, in one unbroken discourse," while the admirable Introduction, by Professor Paul Wilhelm Schmidt, after tracing the origin of the different New Testament writings, and pointing out the circumstances under which they were composed, goes on to affirm that "the literal historical method of interpretation is the only one that has any proper place in the Protestant Church." It is on these lines, then, that the entire work is written. The reader will not expect to find in it elaborate attempts to reconcile the two contradictory legends of the childhood of Jesus, r to establish the authenticity of both the genealogies; nor will he be A Short Protestant Commentary on the Books of the New Testament, with General and Special Introductions. Edited by Prof. P. W. SCHMIDT and Prof. FRANZ VON HOLZENDORFF. Translated from the Third Edition of the German by Francis Henry Jones, B.A. Vol. I. London: Williams and Norgate. 1882.

surprised to find the temptation compared to the choice of Hercules, or to be informed that the census in Luke, unhistorical at that particular time, has been introduced simply for the sake of bringing Mary from Nazareth to Bethlehem, or that the mention of Lysanias as tetrarch of Abilene, seeing that, according to Josephus, he was a King of Iturea who died as early as 36 B.C., is an error of the evangelist. But he will find, compressed into a small compass, nearly everything that is essential for the elucidation of the text, while the introduction prefixed to each book, or (as in the case of the Synoptic gospels) set of books, will enable him to understand the writer's point of view and the object which he proposed to accomplish. Such a work as this, written in a calm, critical, and perfectly reverent tone, and intended to encourage a rational study of the Bible, as remote from idolatrous worship of the letter on the one hand, as from contemptuous rejection on the other, is a desideratum in this country. The work has reached a third edition in Germany, and it will be a good sign if Mr. Jones's well-executed translation attains a like success in this country. R. B. D.

A DEFENCE OF THE REVISED GREEK TEXT OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.*

THIS

HIS is a temperate and conclusive reply to the charges brought against the New Testament Company by the Quarterly Reviewer, especially in his first article-"The New Greek Text.' The Two Revisers sufficiently refute the allegations of wilful eccentricity in the choice of readings, on the one hand, and of a blind following of Westcott and Hort, on the other. But the pamphlet is more than a defence of modern critical procedure against the attacks of a scholar who estimates a MS. as corrupt in direct proportion to its divergence from the Received Text, and suspects that the preservation of our oldest codices has been due to their having been, immediately on their first appearance, condemned and withdrawn from use, as hopelessly depraved. It is the best and clearest exposition we have seen, at once scholarly and popular, of the Revisers' work, in so far as it was concerned with textual details; and we heartily commend it to a widening circle of intelligent readers, now turning, we believe, with a new interest from the Version to the Text of the New Testament. J. E. O.

“MR.

MR. FROUDE'S LIFE OF THOMAS CARLYLE. †

R. CARLYLE expressed a desire in his will that of him no biography should be written. I find the same reluctance in his Journal. No one, he said, was likely to understand a history, the secret

The Revisers and the Greek Text of the New Testament. By Two Members of the New Testament Company. London: Macmillan and Co. 1882. + Thomas Carlyle: A History of the First Forty Years of his Life (17951835). By JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, M.A. In two volumes. With

Portraits and Etchings. London: Longmans. 1882.

of which was unknown to his closest friends." These words of his biographer might seem a curious introduction to nine hundred pages of a history of the first forty years of Carlyle's life, reminding us, as they do, of his saying, "How happy it comparatively is for a man of any earnestness of life to have no Biography written of him; but to return silently with his small, sorely-foiled bit of work, to the Supreme Silences, who alone can judge it or him, and not to trouble the reviewers, and greater or lesser public, with attempting to judge it. The roll of 'fame,' as they call it, posthumous or other, does not inspire one with much ecstasy in these points of view." With regard to his own life, however, Carlyle was forced to recognise that there were would-be biographers waiting to tell his story, with more or less of inevitable guess-work or misunderstanding; and "since a 'Life' of him there would certainly be, he wished it to be as authentic as possible." "If he was to be known at all, he chose to be known as he was, with his angularities, his sharp speeches, his special peculiarities-meritorious or unmeritorious—precisely as they had actually been." Accordingly Carlyle made over to Mr. Froude a mass of personal mémoires pour servir, including letters, journals, and memoranda, and the ever-memorable Reminiscences, to be used as he might think good.

"In the papers thus in my possession," Mr. Froude says, "Carlyle's history-external and spiritual-lay out before me as a map. By recasting the entire material, by selecting chosen passages out of his own and his wife's letters, by exhibiting the fair and the beautiful side of the story only, it would have been easy, without suppressing a single material point, to draw a picture of a fauitless character. When the Devil's advocate has said his worst against Carlyle, he leaves a figure still of unblemished integrity, purity, loftiness of purpose, and inflexible resolution to do right, as of a man living consciously under his Maker's eye, and with his thoughts fixed on the account which he would have to render of his talents."

And this fairly describes the portrait which is drawn in the two volumes before us, especially if we allow the personal memorials which the biographer gives us, in the form chiefly of letters and extracts from Mr. Carlyle's journal, to tell their own story, and if we do not always accept the inferences and generalisations which Mr. Froude himself has drawn from them. We certainly think that in some way his anxiety to "extenuate nothing," to soften none of the shadows, has induced him unconsciously to exaggerate some of the faults which he discovers, and to make the harsher features of Carlyle's rugged natura more repellent than they really were. Especially in his comments on the relations between Carlyle and his wife, the story of which forms a prominent feature in Mr. Froude's pages, he seems to us determined to minimise the brighter aspects of the case. He has a theory that if two people of genius marry they must be content to do without happiness; and he presents the story of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle's married life as an illustration of this theory. And if he only means that they were not happy, "in the roseate sense of

happiness," there is nothing more to be said. But one would be inclined to imagine, if the grounds for modifying this conclusion had not been supplied in his own pages, that the six years spent in the solitudes of Craigenputtock were years of almost unmitigated loneliness of spirit, and of wearying toil and household drudgery, for the bright, refined, and delicately-nurtured woman, who, after years of agitation and anxious doubt, had bravely ventured to cast in her lot with that of the grim genius, whom she began by admiring and reverencing, and whom she ended by loving truly and well. We feel very strongly, however, that Mr. Froude has not altogether succeeded in getting at the inmost truth of the situation. He lays hold of all the indications of the trials and hardships which had to be endured in the long and often disheartening struggle against actual poverty, with the determination to maintain a proud independence while waiting and working towards better days; and he makes too little of the frequent glimpses of the brighter side of it all, given especially in some of Mrs. Carlyle's own letters. In one of them, for instance, written after four years of her banishment, she gives an amusing picture of the sufferings of the "fine lady who should find herself set down at Craigenputtock, for the first time in her life left alone with her own thoughts-no 'fancy bazaar' in the same kingdom with her; no place of amusement within a day's journey; the very church, her last imaginable resource, seven miles off." And then she says: "For my part I am very content. I have everything here my heart desires that I could have anywhere else, except society, and even that deprivation is not to be considered wholly an evil. . . . My husband is as good company as reasonable mortal could 'desire. Every fair morning we ride on horseback for an hour before breakfast." Then follows a description of her household occupations, which certainly does not countenance Mr. Froude's dismal picture of her "being obliged to slave like the wife of her husband's friend Wightmann the hedger, and cook, and wash, and scour, and mend shoes and clothes for many a weary year." These rides together (Carlyle on Larry "the Irish horse of genius," and his wife on her pony, Harry), which are several times mentioned, Mr. Froude reduces to “an occasional ride;" and in the same way-with no foundation, apparently, except Miss Jewsbury's story, pubblished in the Reminiscences, of a winter's adventure, when the servant had been prevented from coming home, and Mrs. Carlyle amused herself with scrubbing the kitchen floor, after fetching a chair for her husband to sit and watch her while he smoked his pipe-we are told that "It might happen that she had to black the grates, or even scour the floors, while Carlyle looked on encouragingly with his pipe."

....

That Mrs. Carlyle had in many respects a hard and trying time of it, a life burdened by anxieties and saddened by ill-health, and one which her husband might have made lighter for her, is plain enough; and his biographer is right in not extenuating his want of consideration, and his failure to reconcile his devotion to his great idea, with a more minute and tender care for the woman who so nobly upheld him in his long