even to Scandinavia, furnished no competent opponent to her dictatorial will. While her love of "unifying power" might have produced that civil consolidation which Popery aims at, and to which she would add-as if Heaven's catholic vicegerent-ecclesiastical consolidation also! Papal Rome caught this idea of "unifying power" from its pagan forerunner, and has endeavored to appropriate and develop it, as well as other pagan models. But Providence defeated universal unification at Babel; and seems never to have found humanity good enough and trustworthy enough for a reversal of its decisions. It has reduced potential unities to smaller compass, as it has human life, lest the perversity of men employ them as scourges rather than benedictions. And it has allowed these unities to be competitors, that they may be checks to too much assumption, and to intolerance. Had the policy of ancient Rome, which was the pattern of a policy for modern Rome-had it been as successful as it was eager, Rome might have been the world's incubus and taskmaster. She needed sturdy and dogged opposition, and she found it in Asia. In this Asiatic resistance and defiance, Parthia stood foremost. And she acted her part with a sagacity and a success which, considering her origin, no political prophet would ever have assigned to her. There was a tutelary genius (as philosophers might have called it), which presided over her destiny. There was One—as we believe— whose are the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever, who made her the unconscious instrument of His will. She favored Christianity, as Rome was not disposed to do. Christianity first found governmental security-let us never forget it-on Parthian soil! Christianity found a home in the East, when in the West direful war had been made, not upon its disciples only, but upon its records of inspiration! This war was so exterminating, that when the great edict of Milan, in a. D. 311, gave Christianity tolerance, its sacred books had vanished into the darkest recesses, or from the sight of men. Their scarcity was so great, that one of the early duties of Constantine, as a Christian emperor and patron, was to provide copies of the Scriptures to be distributed, and employed by scriveners for the necessities of the faithful. Humanly speaking, if the policy and the cruelty of ancient Rome had accomplished the hateful triumphs which it sought for, the world might have become a moral desolation. Christianity might have been crushed, and everything else that was anti-Roman, if Parthia had not been "a rock of offence," against which ruthless and lawless warriors dashed as harshly, but as vainly, as wild waves against granite-built shores. Questionless, she fulfilled her necessary and not unsalutary mission; for, as our Canon testifies, she "obtained recognition from the Græco-Roman writers-albeit a grudging and covert recognition as the second Power in the world, the admitted rival of Rome, the only real counterpoise upon the earth to the Power which ruled from the Euphrates to the Atlantic Ocean" (p. 174). And now, for a last word, we have only to say, in the language of a thoughtful modern observer, "Read history in a reverent and believing temper. It is-it is a solemn thing, this track of a world's destiny in the sands of time." LITERATURE AND DOGMA. An Essay toward a better apprehension of the Bible. By Matthew Arnold, D.C.L., formerly Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Oriel College. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1873. COPIOUS OPIOUS as the discussion of modern religious scepticism has become, there seems to have been no careful attempt to ascertain what in it is actually cause and what is effect. Are the doubts that prevail due to certain specific discoveries that have been made in different departments of knowledge, putting discredit upon the records and institutions of the Christian faith, or are they the result of an occult yet diffused spirit of unbelief, having a remoter and more subtle origin, mysterious in its growth, complex in its operation, moral as well as intellectual in its nature, predisposing the mind to reject the authority of Revelation because all authority is irksome, and so setting men out in efforts to find points and create instruments of attack? According as this question should be settled in the one way or the other, there would arise a corresponding difference in the estimate put upon the sceptical manifestation. In the one case, the men of faith would be required to lay out all their strength on the special assailants as they arrive in succession, meeting fact with fact, argument with argument, learning with learning. The tactics and the fight would be purely intellectual. Apologetics would be a trial of logical, scientific, scholarly strength or fence. The battleground would be comparatively clear. Beaten in a fair encounter, each particular enemy would be finally disposed of, and the defender of the faith would be at liberty to turn his attention to the next comer. If, however, it should prove that these multiplied objections are only so many related offshoots from a common parent stock, a growth involving elements of the will, the affections, the tastes, in a whole generation or period, one of the shapes of that time-spirit (zeit geist) of which Mr. Matthew Arnold, after Goethe, has so much to say, affecting civil society no less than the Church, bearing upon political government, education, and manners as well as religious beliefs and worship, and infusing a temper of insubordination into them all,—then, manifestly, the difficulty encountered would assume another aspect. The work of defence, if not less simple and less easy, would have less of the distinct, sharp outlines of a dialectical engagement. Changes must be wrought in the very springs of men's private life. Influences must be brought to act on dispositions and inclinations, on the hidden choices and tendencies of the soul, on the fine essence of character. The young must be reached, more than the mature. Reverence, humility, selfsubjection and devotion, seldom suddenly produced, will have to take the place of conceit, ambition, self-assertion, unrestrained curiosity. A check must be put upon the propensity to level dignities for the sake of diminishing duties, and to abolish deference and grace in a clamor for personal rights, before any serene and fruitful age of faith will come again. Either way, however, much of the same sort of patient and not very inviting labor must needs be done. When the authority of Revelation and the Divine constitution of the Church are disputed, and when they are disputed, as they often are, by men not indifferent to moral truth or regardless of human welfare, the eternal verities must be reaffirmed, the new and plausible sophistry must be exposed, the true and the false must be separated, and that weakness of error, which forever lurks underneath the most brilliant and imposing show of strength, must be uncovered. It has been repeatedly illustrated, and notably by Mr. Farrar and Dr. Burton in their Bampton Lectures, how forms of both heresy and infidelity-neither word being used here in a sense that charity could condemn-which wear a look of originality, really carry an ancient pedigree under a modern dress. From Porphyry and Celsus the progress of unbelieving literature has been rather in the way of expanding its dimensions and reclothing its primitive forms, than in any process of invention. So, in the work that is now to come under examination, the last utterance of educated doubt, it is not difficult to detect a commixture of the serious yet airy Epicureanism of Lucretius "Lucretius, nobler than his mood, Who dropped his plummet down the broad -with the stoic morality of Aurelius. Its author, a disciple of the Renaissance, is, like Schelling, more indebted, after all, to Neo-Platonism than to the Revival of Letters; for it may be said of him, as accurately as of Plotinus, that his deity "which seems personal, is actually only the personification of an abstraction, a mere instance of mental realism." His treatment of some portions of the Old Testament, as the prophet Daniel, for example, is almost identical with that of Porphyry, from whom it very likely descended to Dr. Arnold of Rugby, and from him, with some better heirlooms, to the less manly son. This identity of type, however, is very far from implying a stationary condition, or a monotonous activity. The germ being the same, the flora is wonderfully diversified. Indubitable here is the principle of "development." The old apologists, good for what they undertook, are wellnigh good for nothing for the days of Baur and Strauss, Comte and Renan, Huxley and Gregg, Herbert Spencer, Mill, Emerson, and Matthew Arnold. Not only do the antique fabrics of disbelief come out, in the hands of these recent men of genius and study, "as good as new," but through their several lines, whether of investigation or decoration, the denying interest becomes more formidable in resources and more seductive in its fascination. All that a brave and honest contestant even for the royal treasure of man's immortal hopes can expect, is that the war be fair and the terms honorable; and though his antagonist offer only the pagan prayer of Ajax for light, he will pray to the Lord of all good gifts for love as well. To all Christians who contend in this spirit, whatever their solicitude may be for individual doubters, the coming of a fresh phase of scepticism in the hands of an able advocate will be attended with this comforting reflection : Provided this new onset, led by an acknowledged master, fails, then one more danger threatening the cause is disarmed, and then the impartial spirit of history must score one victory more for the Faith once for all delivered. In his recent work, "Literature and Dogma," Mr. Arnold leads |