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without celebration among the Gentiles, but originally as symbols of something above and beyond them.

TYRE.

THE governor of Tyre has been committing excesses upon Christian woman (before last May, 1841). Their ruin and prophetically denounced judgments do not appear to have improved Tyrian morals. Their purple is become a theme for Pancirollus. The precious shell yields the imperial tint no more, but the sins of Tyre are as scarlet still.

Colonel Anderson, with the British sappers, artillery, &c., on Mount Carmel! How strange it seems to think of an English colonel on the very spot where, nigh 3000 years ago, Elijah confounded and extirpated the 450 priests of Baal, with engines, too, the fire of which had appeared to the idolators of Israel not less miraculous than that which licked up the water in the trenches around the Tishbite's altar! The sappers, though perhaps not over well shod, will not turn Carmelite friars. And Colonel Macniven at Nablous, the ancient Shechem, the Sychar of the Samaritans, where the Saviour conversed with the spouse of five! There is something puzzling to me, well as I know its certainty, in the actual geographical existence of the scenes of the Old Testament events, for I have no such feeling in respect to the New. I am apt to think of the Holy Land as of the paradise of Izem, and I would as

soon seek in Billedulgerid for the Garden of the Hesperides, as for Naboth's vineyard in the pachalic of Syria. This is a mere crotchet of the imagination. My faith is perfectly historical.

EXTRACTS FROM NOTE BOOKS.*

ASSERTION OF LUTHER RESPECTING GOD.

Gott kan nicht Gott seyn er muss zu vorn ein Teuffel_werden. -LUTHER, tom. 5.

I QUOTE at second-hand from Sculteti Ethica; but I suppose the passage is to be found in the German Boanerges, and startling as the expression seems,— The God we worship, with his attributes of holiness, justice, and mercy, in His characters of Judge, Redeemer, Sanctifier, Law-giver, could be conceived only by the antithesis or antagonism of an actual or possible evil principle. Analogically, we might say that were there no fear, there could be no such virtue as valour; if no sensuality, no temperance or chastity, and so forth. As I am not acquainted with the context, I cannot tell what provoked Luther to such an astounding way of expressing a very demonstrable truth; but Martin was one of those who delight in putting their doctrines into the form most likely to puzzle and alarm the common-sense of simple persons,

The following extracts turn, more or less closely, upon the subject of religion, and may be read in connexion with the Notes immediately preceding.

like the worthy Unitarian parson who commenced a sermon on the Divine Omnipresence with "God is in Hell." After all, there is an equivocation in Luther's proposition, inasmuch as it confounds the absolute eternal self-existent and self-sufficing One with Jehovah, the Lord, the revealed and substantiated Personality, the Θέος αὐτοκάθαυτος with Emmanuel, the God with us. More truly might he have said: Were there no Devil, there would be nothing but God; nothing antithetic to, or distinguishable from God. God would be, as He promises to be when Sin is destroyed, All, and All in All.

not.

ON THE VIRGIN MARY.

"But Mary kept all these sayings in her heart."

A VERY serious question is suggested by these words. Was Mary aware of her child's divinity? Probably That her offspring was the Child of Promise, the Hope of Israel, she always believed, and sometimes knew; but that He was the Lord Jehovah, perhaps was only revealed to her after his glorification. There is little, very little about Mary in the Christian Scriptures. That she was always a virgin is, I believe, the orthodox opinion of the Church of England; yet a man might maintain her to have been bona fide the wife of Joseph without rejecting or explaining away a single text. Indeed it requires a very latitudinarian exposition to support the doctrine of her perpetual virginity. Thus, Matthew i., 24, 25:

"Then Joseph, being raised from sleep, did as the angel of the Lord had bidden him, and took unto him his wife, and KNEW HER NOT TILL she had brought forth her first-born son," ews d'ETEKE. Now certainly these words do not necessarily imply that Joseph ever did know her, were there any text implying that he did not; no one could convict the Evangelist of self-contradiction upon the strength of ews ov; and all the parallel passages which Beza adduces contra Helvidianos (who were they?) are quite supererogatory. But still, as there is no sure text, -as Mary is never styled the Virgin in any of the few passages in which she is mentioned in the Gospels or Acts; no one can say that the perpetual virginity of Mary rests upon Bible authority. The same line of argument applies to the passages which speak of our Lord's brethren, who we are to believe were his cousins only. I do believe it; I would rather believe them anything than that they who scoffed at Jesus ever lay in the same womb where he had lain. Nor can I conceive it possible that she whom the Holy Ghost had overshadowed, whose issue was called the Son of God, would be mother to a mere fleshly progeny; or that any man, far less a pious man like Joseph, would dare to approach a woman whom he knew by divine communication to have conceived by the Holy Ghost. If the men of Bethshemesh, who but looked into the typical ark, were smitten, even fifty thousand and. three-score and three men, how could Joseph have ventured to touch that sacred ark in which God really dwelt, and perish not? Perhaps some one

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may object that the old ark, deserted of Divinity, would only have been a gilt cabinet, and that Mary, delivered of Jesus, was only a woman. I anticipate such scoffing objections, only to show how little I fear them, and how easily they are answered. No doubt, the brazen serpent which Moses erected in the wil derness, the emblem of our crucified Saviour, its purpose done, was nothing but so much copper; and Hezekiah is seemingly commended for breaking it to pieces when it became an idol. Balaam's ass, when its miraculous voice was mute, was nothing more than any other ass. But Mary was a woman, capable of and participant of holiness, which wood, or copper, or mere animal life, could not be. In fine, my opinion in this case, as in many others, is the orthodox and catholic opinion, though I defy the most orthodox Oxoniensis to dig it out of the mere words of Scripture. We must bring something to the Bible, as to the study of nature, or we shall carry nothing valuable away; and they who think that I disparage the Bible by this, might as well say that I disparage nature.

Why was I led away into this unquiet path of controversy, when I meant only to certify my inward conviction that miracles, even to those who have beheld or experienced them, can never be more than subjective evidence. Mary who had borne Jesus by a more than miracle, was yet only a believer in Him. She treasured His sayings in her heart as so many confirmations of a prophecy. She had a wishing, hoping, praying, doubting, not an assured belief in

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