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centuries found the churches to a large extent removed from their old and sure footing, and fighting the battle on treacherous ground. We are glad to be able to quote, in support of this view, so high an authority as Hagenbach. Speaking of Lessing, who was one of the chief forerunners. of the Rationalists, he says:

"As the Protestant church, in contradistinction to the Catholic, had asserted that the Bible was the foundation of all religious inquiry, Lessing sought to shew that Christianity was older than the Old or New Testament, which had their rise within the Christian church; he went directly back to the most primitive doctrine framed by the earliest fathers, from the verbal sayings of men and an oral tradition. On this living spiritual power, which linked the early believers to each other, rests, according to Lessing, the framework of the church, while the Bible is but the plan of the church on paper. . . . And this reasoning of Lessing was not without some good foundation, for Protestants had let a belief in the living power of the Spirit withdraw behind their belief in the written word, and always cried off the danger of the latter being attacked, while they let the former sleep. Many pions and thoughtful Protestants, particularly the mystics, had spoken of this, and tried to remedy the evil, but they could not gain a hearing. Lessing went too far in the opposite direction, and fell into an equal extreme. . . . The Protestant church would cease to be if the Scriptures were given up, although it were to be wished that we were not content with the mere dead possession of holy writ, but laid more stress upon the living Spirit, which holy writ not only makes us understand, but accept with the heart."*

We would rather perhaps say that, instead of going to an extreme in the direction of the Protestant principle, Lessing adopted, in its germ at least, that of Rationalism; and the history of theological opinion in Germany since his time has been on a large scale, something like what the phases of faith of the younger Newman have exhibited on a smaller one. And the fact that so many of the leading theologians of that country are not only approaching more nearly the old orthodoxy, but reasserting the great Reformation principle of the Bible, not as a dead letter, but along with the

*We quote this passage from the English translation, published by T. & T. Clark, under the title of "German Rationalism" (pp. 91, 92), which we have not the opportunity of comparing with the original. But we venture to suspect that this passage at least is not quite accurately rendered; though the task of translation seems on the whole to have been faithfully executed; and the valuable work of Hagenbach has been made quite intelligible, as it is very interesting to the English reader. But surely the last clause has been misconstrued by the translator. It should certainly read thus::-"The living Spirit, who makes us not only understand, but accept with the heart, holy writ.'

living Spirit, as the foundation and rule of our faith, is one of the most hopeful signs of the times.

A very similar course of events may be recognised in the religious history of England and Scotland. Here the spiritual impulse of the Reformation was longer of exhausting itself than on the continent, the Reformers were followed by the Puritans and Covenanters; and the principle of the testimony of the Spirit was preserved as a living faith by the work of Owen on the Reason of Faith, and by the Westminster Standards. But there succeeded a period when an appeal to this was derided as fanaticism; and then came the Deists, and the age of apologies, arguments, evidences of religion, along with a general declension and deadness of evangelical godliness. Then came the revival by Methodism without, and the evangelical clergy within the church; when the work of the Spirit was again vindicated and raised to its due place, but more in its practical aspect than its bearings on theology. In this latter relation it has, we venture to think, not yet been fully acknowledged; and thus the door has been left open for the inroads of Romanism on the one hand, and of Rationalism on the other, that distinguish the present day.

All this serves to shew, how close and intimate is the connection between truth and life, between evangelical soundness and spiritual religion. It has ever been found in the history of the church, that a declension of spiritual life has been either accompanied or followed by a departure from Christian truth. Sometimes indeed the two have been found apart, but it has only been for a short season. There have been times, when a strict formal orthodoxy has co-existed with an absence of spiritual life; but it has generally been found that the deadness in practice very soon brought about either a reaction or a corruption that speedily destroyed the theoretical orthodoxy. And on the other hand, if sometimes we see real earnest religion combined with very defective or erroneous views of the truth, may we not hope that the power of the life will gradually bring about a more full and correct knowledge of the truth, according to that word of the Saviour, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God." Nor can we wonder at this close connection, if it be so that God has appointed his Spirit, who is the only and all sufficient source of all true godliness, to be also the teacher and witness of the truth. If this be so, the church cannot lose her hold of the one without, sooner or later, having the other wrested from her grasp. The only real and lasting security for the continuance of sound doctrine in the church, is the continual presence and working

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of the Spirit of truth. The Holy Ghost is the river of living water, the streams whereof make glad the city of God. Popery hardens and crystallises the living stream into an icy mass, making it more definite and tangible indeed, and more bright and brilliant as it glitters in the sun, but withal hard, dead, and motionless, incapable of really imparting life; the Spirit is supposed to testify through the outward organism of the church, and to work only through its ordinances. On the other hand Rationalism, ignoring or denying the work of the Spirit altogether, dries up the stream entirely, and leaves only empty channels that mock the thirst of the beholders. The living water may be something less definite and tangible, not so easy to limit down or pourtray exactly, but it supplies the real want of the city, as neither the frozen glacier nor the empty channel can do. So it is not so easy, in some respects, always to realise the testimony of the Spirit, as to rely either on ecclesiastical authority or enlightened reason; it requires an eye directed to the unseen, and a heart attuned to the melodies of heaven; it is always an easier thing to acquiesce in the idea that the Spirit speaks through the good and godly when we can see and hear, and who form the church, or that the dictates of our own reason are all the voice of the Spirit we are to expect; hence the facility with which either Rationalistic or Romanising principles have insinuated themselves into the church; but in either of these ways we would be substituting something dead and formal for the living Spirit, whom the Saviour has sent as the guide and teacher of his church. This, as we read it, is the great lesson taught us by the history of Rationalism.

ART. VII.-The Lives of some of the more Celebrated Jewish Rabbis.

Hi. Relandi Analecta Rabbinica. 1723. Trajecti ad Rhenum. Sephardim, or, the History of the Jews in Spain and Portugal. By JAMES FINN. 1841. London.

AMONG the various influences that have produced the pre

sent state of Biblical knowledge throughout Christendom, we are not to overlook the element that has been contributed by the Jewish Rabbis, from the twelfth century downward to the period of the Reformation. Forming a language of their own, simple and yet comprehensive, severely philo

sophical and exact, built upon the basis of the scriptural Hebrew, yet borrowing its nomenclature from the languages of every country of their captivity and exile, from the ruins of Babylon to the wharfs of Amsterdam, the Rabbis, like their ancient forefathers, have made themselves possessors of the treasures of the gentiles, in taking and fabricating into a dialect, conformable to the genius of their own venerable tongue, terms of life, and learning, and science, and art, from the Arabic, and the Chaldee, and the Syriac, and the Greek, and the Latin, and the Italian, and the German, and the Dutch, and the Spanish, and the Portuguese; and have embodied in those mystic symbols, like so many emblems of victory over entile nations, the results of their labours in the criticism and interpretation of those sacred records, which, in many respects, they must be allowed best to understand, as being originally written in their native tongue, of which they were made the earliest depositaries, and in relation to which we may still say, they are the librarians of the world. There is a strong and wide-spread prejudice against the literature and intelligence of the Jews; and, even among Christian men, it has been too generally supposed, that abstracting from the inspired productions of the Hebrew Scriptures, wisdom has entirely perished from the sons of Abraham. The conclusion, like other prejudices, has its origin in ignorance. Because they have heard of the fables of the Talmud, how that the hostler of Rabbi Judah, the Holy, was more rich than the king of the Persians, or how every member of the great Sanhedrim was skilled in seventy languages, or how Rabbi John Ben Narbai despatched three hundred calves and three hundred flagons of wine to dinner, or how three hundred asses were scarcely able to carry the keys of the treasure-houses of Korahi, or how David, by the flight of a single arrow, killed eight hundred men at once, or how two thousand soldiers, in the army of Coziba, were endued with such adroitness, that whilst they rode past, by a simple twitch of their right hand they could each pluck up by the roots a cedar of Lebanon,-such persons, tickled with such curious marvels, and being at once strangers to the genius of the East, abounding in fiction and allegory, and incapable of relishing the sly humour of the expatriated rabbi, who was often glad to seize the breathingtime of persecution, in framing an astonishing story, or indulging a bright day dream, or building a castle in the air, have hastily and erroneously concluded, that all the learning and acquirements of the modern Hebrews are nothing but a collection of falsehood and infatuation. A judgment as fallacious and unfounded, in regard to Hebrew

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literature, as if from the Adventures of Jack the Giant-Killer, or the Travels of Baron Munchausen, or the Exploits of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, a stranger to the comprehensive literature of our country, should rashly and dogmatically conclude that the literature of England was utterly unacquainted with the living germs and matured lucubrations of a rich and intellectual philosophy. The fact is, there is no department of philosophy in which the modern Jews have not excelled; they have enriched their language by a transfusion into their peculiar dialect of the finest works of Greece, and Persia, and Arabia; Aristotle, and Plato, and Euclid, and Hippocrates, and Galen, and Avicenna, and Averroes, and Sacrobosco, are found clothed with the dignity of a Hebrew dress; and original treatises in grammar, and logic, and metaphysics, and criticism, and arithmetic, and algebra, and geometry, and astronomy, and the most subtle and learned questions in hermeneutics and theology start up in the old language of the rabbi, with an accuracy and a skill, with a severity and a precision, that may with the utmost ease compare with the works of the acutest schoolmen, or the most accomplished mathematician in any country or in any age. There can be no question, that from the time of the dispersion of the Hebrews from the College of the Gaonim, in Babylon, and their consequent settlement in Cordova, in 1039, down to their expulsion from Spain, in 1492, when, according to Mariana, 800,000 were banished, the Jews were the most learned, scientific, and enterprising men in Europe. They filled the chief offices in the court of Spain; they adorned the academies of Cordova, and Seville, and Granada; they were the chief assistants of Alonzo the Tenth, surnamed the Wise, in making his sidereal observations, and compiling his astronomical tables, and publishing his Book of Circles; in that Chaldean science, they were the instructors of the Moors, and the forerunners of that brilliant course of discovery, which, under Henry Duke of Viseo, and Vasca de Gama, revealed the headlands of Africa, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and opened up a maritime road to the commerce and riches of India: they carried the astronomy of Chaldea, and the dialectics of Greece, and the chemistry of Spain, into the universities of France and of England; they taught in the universities of Paris and of Oxford; and students from different parts of the world came flocking to the plains of Andalusia. The works that the Jews have published in Venice, in Thessalonica, and in Constantinople, and throughout the towns and cities of Ger

* Finn's Sephardim, p. 229.