a-half pages, and a third on Isaiah of thirty-four columns, or about fifty pages. Dr. Davidson, of Manchester, has contributed the article on Chronicles, and another very elaborate one on the Apocalypse. On the New Testament, Dr. Tholuck has supplied seven articles, all worthy of his dis tinguished name.* One on the Gospels generally, one each of the four Gospels, one on the Epistles generally, and one on the Epistle to the Romans. The articles on Acts and the Pauline epistles, (excepting Romans) which are the fruit of extensive reading and written with great care, are from the pen of Dr. Lindsay Alexander. Dr. Wright, the translator of Seiler's Hermeneutics, has furnished four upon the Catholic epistles. The same gentleman also supplied the papers on the Canticles, Obadiah, and Micah. The remaining papers on the Old Testament were furnished by Dr. John Eadie, Mr. Gotch, Dr. Benjamin Davies, Mr. J. E. Ryland, Dr. Baur, of Giessen, Dr. Ewald, of Tübingen, and another writer whose initials only are given. In addition to these are articles on the Samaritan Pentateuch, and Syriac versions, by Dr. Davidson.

The great extent to which biblical introduction, especially that of the New Testament, has been recently treated in our journal, renders it both unnecessary and undesirable that we should quote from any of the articles which have been mentioned. The detail which we have gone into, brief as it is, will be enough to show how erudite and masterly the work must be in the department under review. There is, however, an article on an allied topic which we cannot so hastily pass over. Some of our readers may have a tolerably accurate recollection of a paper on the Nature of Prophecy,' translated from Dr. Hengstenberg's Christologie des A. T. which was inserted in the American Biblical Repository for 1832; and none of them who are acquainted with the Christologie, in the original, will have forgotten the avowal contained in the preface to the third volume, of a change in the author's views on the nature of prophecy, which, however, he did not explain, but left to be ascertained from the discrepancies between the third volume and its predecessors. All this gives a peculiar interest to any thing recently

That on the Epistles is very general, and, not requiring any discussion of equal interest to that on the Protevangelium, see Art. GOSPELS, is necessarily brief. We noticed one statement which we believe not all Dr. ThoJuck's learning could substantiate. Paul's letters 'conclude,' he says, 'with the epistles to the two bishops and a private letter to Philemon.'

+ His words are: many an expression in the first volume, is corrected in the following, often silently. The difference, indeed, extends further than to particulars, and beyond all the lower department of linguistic. It appears throughout in the fundamental view of the nature of prophecy, on which subject the author, who has become more and more familiar with the

written on the subject of prophecy by Dr. Hengstenberg, and, accordingly, we were highly pleased to find an article of fifteen columns from his pen devoted to that subject in the present work. We are compelled, however, to say, that we have failed to discover from this article in what respect his earlier views have been corrected, and that the article is in other respects obscure, and unsatisfactory. Dr. Hengstenberg, when he first explicitly developed his theory of the Nature of Prophecy,' in 1829, laid very great stress upon the notion that the Old Testament prophets were, at the time of inspiration, invariably in an ecstacy. by which they were deprived of their natural consciousness, and saw in vision only. This supernatural extatic vision he considered, from Numbers xii. 5-8, to be the essential and characteristic condition of prophetic inspiration, and declared that he must dwell the longer on it, 'because the true explanation and defence of numerous Messianic passages rested on a correct theory of prophecy.' As already intimated, he announced in December, 1834, an entire change in his fundamental view on the nature of prophecy, yet the following is the substance of his theory as now communicated to the public.

1 The nature of Prophecy, &c.—The view commonly taken of the prophets is, that they were mere predictors of future events, but this view is one-sided and too narrow, though, on the other hand, we must beware of expanding too much the acceptation of the term prophet. Not to mention those who, like Hendewerk, in the introduction to his Commentary on the Prophet Isaiah, identify the notion of a prophet with that of an honest and pious man, the conception of those is likewise too wide who place the essential feature of a prophet in his divine inspiration That this does not meet the whole subject, appears from Num. xii. 6, seq., where Moses, who enjoyed divine inspiration in the highest grade, is represented as differing from those called prophets in a stricter sense, and as standing in contrast with them. Divine inspiration is only the general basis of the prophetic office, to which two more.elements must be added:

'Inspiration was imparted to the prophets in a peculiar form. This appears decisively from the passage in Numbers above cited, which states it as characteristic of the prophet, that he obtained divine inspiration in visions and dreams, consequently in a state extraordinary and distinguished from the general one. This mode was different from that in which inspirations were conveyed to Moses and the apostles. The same thing is shown by the names usually given to the prophets, viz., and on seers, and from this, that all prophecies which have come down to us, have a poetical characprophetic writings, has more recently attained to greater clearness. Precisely in reference to this most important alteration, however, will it be easy to the intelligent reader, to supplement the earlier representation from the later ones.' Christologie, vol. iii. Preface.

ter, which points to an infinite affinity between prophecy and poetry, a subject further illustrated by Steinbeck, in his work Der Dichter ein Seher, Leipzig, 1830; though the materials which he gives are not sufficiently digested. The prophetical style differs from that of books properly called poetical, whose sublimity it all but outvies, only in being less restrained by those external forms which distinguish poetical language from prose, and in introducing more frequently than prose does, plays upon words and thoughts. This peculiarity may be explained by the practical tendency of prophetical addresses, which avoid all that is unintelligible, and studiously introduce what is best calculated for the moment to strike the hearers. The same appears from many other circumstances, e.g, the union of music with prophecying; the demeanour of Saul when among the prophets (1 Sam. x. 5); Balaam's description of himself (Num. xxiv. 3) as a man whose eyes were opened, who saw the vision of the Almighty, and heard the words of God; the established phraseology to denote the inspiring impulse, viz., the hand of the Lord was strong upon him' (Ezek iii. 14; compare Isa. viii. 11; 2 Kings, iii 15), etc. All these facts prove that there essentially belonged to prophecy a state of mind worked up a state of being beside one's self-an ecstatic transport, in which ideas were immediately imparted from Heaven. Acute remarks on the subject will be found in the works of No alis (vol. ii. p. 472, seq.), from which we give the following passage: 'It is a most arbitrary prejudice to suppose that to man is denied the power of going out of himself, of being endued with a consciousness beyond the sphere of sense he may at any moment place himself beyond the reach of sense (ein übersinnliches Wesenseyn), else he would be a mere brute, not a rational freeman of the universe. There are indeed degrees in the aptitude for revelations; one is more qualified for them than another, and certain dispositions are peculiarly capable of receiving such revelations ; besides, on account of the pressure of sensible objects on the mind, it is in this state difficult to preserve self-possession. Nevertheless, there are such states of mind in which its powers are strengthened, and, so to speak, armed.' The state of ecstacy, though ranking high above the ordinary sensual existence, is still not the highest, as appears from Numbers xii., and the example of Christ, whom we never find in an ecstatical state. To the prophets, however, it was indispensable, on account of the frailty of themselves and the people. The forcible working upon them by the Spirit of God would not have been required, if their general life had already been altogether holy; for which reason we also find ecstacy to manifest itself the stronger the more the general life was ungodly; as, for instance, in Balaam, when the Spirit of God was upon him (Numbers xxiv. 4, 16), and in Saul, who throws himself on the ground, tearing his clothes from his body. With a prophet whose spiritual attainments were those of an Isaiah, such results are not to be expected. As regards the people, their spiritual obtuseness must be considered as very great, to have rendered necessary such vehement excitations as the addresses of the prophets caused.-Art. Prophecy, vol. ii. pp. 561-2.

Here, so far as we can see, Dr. Hengstenberg retains all that was peculiar in his earlier view on the subject. It is true he does not draw out the consequences of his theory so explicitly as in his original chapter, but the omission implies no change in reference to those consequences. If the prophets received the communications of Jehovah in visions only, and therefore by images or pictures, it would still follow that they saw things as if present, and without any exact discrimination of time, and that this would account for the intermingling of different subjects in the same oracle without any note, or evincing that they were so intermingled. It would explain, as Dr. Hengstenberg had before shown, the want of precision in the use of the tenses which is obvious in prophetic oracles, and the fact noticed so particularly in 1 Pet. i. 11, that the prophets, except in the instances where they were informed by special Divine revelation, were ignorant of the time when their predictions would be fulfilled. It is obvious, therefore, that though Dr. Hengstenberg has not dwelt on these consequences in the article before us, it is not in them that we are to look for any change of view if he adheres to his exclusive theory of ecstatic vision; and this being the case, we must own that we are still in the dark as to the change which has passed over his mind on the subject, and should have been pleased to have received, what we think was always due to his readers, more explicit information.

In our judgment, Dr. Hengstenberg's leading error lay, and still seems to lie, in overlooking the variety which certainly existed in the forms of prophetic inspiration. In his original chapter, he says, after unfolding his theory of ecstatic vision, 'this peculiar character of prophecy has not been entirely undetected by most expositors. Still they have for the most part assigned it to those prophetic passages only in which it reveals itself with special evidence, such as Isaiah, chap. vi., Ezekiel, chap. i., the first part of Zechariah, and the second of Daniel, which, therefore, have exclusively been designated Visions. But the distinction between these prophecies and others is an insecure one. The arguments which have been produced apply equally to all prophecies; and even in the latter, when the details are rightly conceived, indications of vision disclose themselves in ample quantity.' Now, had Dr. Hengstenberg merely declared that a careful examination of their details would prove that a much larger number of prophecies than had been usually regarded as visions,perhaps a large majority of them,- had been communicated in the form of pictorial vision, we should have seen no reason to dispute his assertion. It probably is so. But we cannot admit that inspiration by vision is the exclusive or essential characteristic of Old Testament prophecy, or that whenever such a vision was disclosed to any prophet, he

was in a supernatural ecstasy, divested of intelligent consciousness, till he had imparted the burden of it in words to those for whom it was intended. That the latter was not the fact would appear to name no other instances-from the communication which Micaiah held with Ahab, when he delivered his oracle respecting him, in 1 Kings xxii.; and from the history of Jonah. The former, though it may be inferred from Numbers xii. 5—8, (which, however, we should interpret as declaring a general, rather than an absolutely universal rule), is not only inconsistent with the characteristics of prophetical inspiration under the New Testament, which may be presumed to have been similar, but also with the contents of some of the Old Testament oracles. There is, at least, a great number of Old Testament prophesies, the subject matter of which cannot be represented in a visionary form, and in which, therefore, vision could have no place, unless we suppose that in every instance of prophetic inspiration the prophet saw Jehovah, and heard him, in vision, utter the words which he is required to speak in his name to the people. But this seems too large an inference from the passage in Numbers xii., even if we had not the analogical light of New Testament inspiration, suggesting the contrary. We are told, 2 Peter, i. 21, that holy men of God had spoken as they were moved by the Holy Ghost, which seems to imply a power working in them, similar to that which moved the writers of the New Testament, who ordinarily had no inspiring vision.

But what, our readers will in all probability have asked before this, is the meaning of the passage which Dr. Hengstenberg has quoted from Novalis ? Does he mean that any man may at any moment 'go out of himself,' or 'place himself beyond the reach of sense'? We certainly know of one way in which any man may do the latter, which is, by writing or talking nonsense. And we know not which is greater nonsense,-what Novalis there asserts, or the application made of a thing which, he says, any man may at any moment do' to the supernaturally inspired condition of the prophets.

Dr. Hengstenberg's article on prophesy, however, notwithstanding these exceptions, and some others which it would be easy to make to it,* contains many valuable remarks. What he has written on the prophets' manner of life, though not new, is good. Equally good is what he has written respecting their

As, e. g., where he states, that before a man could be a prophet, he must be converted,' with which compare Matt. vii. 22; and adds, in confirmation, for a single momentary inspiration the mere beginning of spiritual life sufficed, as instanced in Balaam and Saul,' with which compare 2 Pet. ii. 15, 16, and Jude 11.