vellous power possessed by Mr Ellinwood, of uniting the abstraction of mind and fervour of spirit required in the devout worshipper of God, with the mental and manual labour which he has to put forth as a reporter of prayers."

The Testimony of the Catacombs, and of other Monuments of Christian Art, from the Second to the Eighteenth Century, concerning Questions of Doctrine now disputed in the Church. By the Rev. WHARTON B. MARRIOT, B.D. and F.S.A., sometime Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, &c., &c. London: Hatchards. 1870.

This is a most seasonable work, and destined, we should think, to produce a wide and beneficial impression. Part I. deals with the Cultus of the Virgin Mary, and proves, beyond all reasonable doubt or denial, that the worship of Mary had no existence in the earlier ages of the Christian church. Part II. takes up the monuments bearing on the claims of supremacy in the See of Rome. Part III. refers to monuments regarding baptism and the eucharist These are elucidated by plates and woodcuts of the monuments that remain extant. We can conceive nothing more fitted to produce conviction than the exhibition of these works of art, conveying as they do to the eye what no historical records could do, a vivid and unmistakeable argument in proof of the gradual corruptions of the Church of Rome. The book is beautifully got up, containing a great variety of illustrations; the text is equally well composed; and altogether it may be regarded as one of the most effective contributions to our anti-ritualistic literature.

The Ministry of the Word. Sermons by Walter MacGilvray, D.D., Gilcomston Free Church, Aberdeen. London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co. 1870.

These Sermons are brief, varied, pleasant, and edifying. They correspond well with their title: they are truly the ministration of the Word. In their mode of treatment they are generally textual; that is to say, the text, instead of merely indicating a topic of discourse, into which the preacher may import some favourite ideas of his own, occupies a central position, from which, in its connection, the ideas flow, or upon which they naturally hang, as fruit upon a tree, bearing its peculiar flavour. The great advantage of this method is, that the message comes to us with power as well as freshness. We have less of the preacher and more of the word preached; less of human idiosyncrecy, which is apt to issue in monotony, and more of that "tree of life in the midst of the garden, which bears twelve manner of fruits." The style of the volume is simple, clear, and scholarly. And we feel sure that, in its perusal, the reader will find no cause to complain of the tedium or the dryness too often associated with the name of sermons.

The following works still lie on our table for future notice :-" John; or, the Apocalypse of the New Testament," by Philip S. Desprez, B.D.; A Critical English New Testament;""Men of Faith," by Luke II. Wiseman, M.A.; "Bloomfield: a Tale," by Elizabeth Warren; "Zeller's Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics," translated by Raichel; "The Lost Sheep Found, and other Sermons to Children," by the Rev. Gordon Calthrop, M.A.; "Life Problems, answered in Christ," by Leigh Mann, &c. In the poetic line, we have "The Alexandra "-Poems by the late William Leighton; "Rizpah and Early Poems," by Gilbert Beresford, &c.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN

EVANGELICAL REVIEW.

OCTOBER 1870.

ART. I.-The Two Testaments in their Relation to each

THE

Other.

HE exact relation which subsists between the two collections of ancient records which unite to form Holy Scripture, is a subject on which few seem to have any definite and well-grounded judgment, although it is very well known that this topic lies very near the root of many questions constantly coming up for solution in the present age. For want of a wellconsidered and accurate decision of this preliminary inquiry, evidence derived from the Old Testament is often practically evaded, and often fails in its effect. Every one familiar with theological investigations has had occasion to observe this at such times as he has sought to convince the understanding of his readers by appealing to the testimony of the Jewish Scriptures. Old Testament citations have usually importance attached to them when they come in to confirm principles, which, for other sufficient reasons, we have seen it right to adopt; but when their testimony is clearly on the opposite side to that which we have already adopted, we somehow contrive to remember that these ancient records are superseded by the New Testament, and that the state of things there described, however well it may have been adapted to the circumstances of the people of God in their minority, is now, in the manhood of the church, a little out of date, and is scarcely up to the requirements of a higher and more spiritual dispensation. Practically, this means that it is not divine revelation, but our own sense of what is right and proper to believe and to do

VOL. XIX.-NO. LXXIV.

A

which is to form our religious sentiment, and to regulate our moral action. At the very least it means, that evidence from one part of Scripture does not stand exactly on the same level with evidence from another-a position clearly antagonistic to that great principle which most of us have been taught from childhood to cherish with undoubting faith-that the entire Word of God is the rule of faith and life. This inconsistency of judgment arises, we think, from the want of definite knowledge as to the exact relation in which the two Testaments stand to each other, and, when carried to its natural issues, expresses itself in contradictory statements of opinion, and in painful uncertainty of action.

In laying down some principles on this subject, and in pointing out some of their applications, we do not profess that we have reached the ultimate and foundation truth of the matter. Our design is rather to call attention to its importance, to stimulate thought, to suggest somewhat to those who are more familiar with such investigations, in order that, by repeated efforts, some clear, well-defined, and indisputable principle may be reached, which may supply a firm basis for subsequent inquiries. When truth itself is too high to be grasped, it is a healthful exercise to stand on tip-toe and touch it if we can.

We begin by noticing the vast chasm which separates the two main portions of Revelation. There is a chasm in regard to time; there is a chasm in regard to language; there is a chasm in the social and political surroundings of the events described. Not only so, but the moral sentiments, the modes of worship, the forms of religious life, are so different, that a man who passes from the polar regions to the tropics scarcely feels a greater change of temperature, than is felt in a religious sense by one who passes from the types and shadows of the Pentateuch to the clear realities of the Gospels, from the keen, incisive denunciations of the prophets, to the genial warmth of apostles and evangelists. The moral atmosphere is entirely changed. The local has made way for the universal; limitation has given place to expansion, constraint to freedom, death to life, condemnation to glory.

So painfully was the contrast felt, even in the early unscien tific ages of Christianity, that some acute thinkers could, with difficulty, bring themselves to believe that two systems so apparently different as those presented in the law and the gospel, could have originally emanated from the one infinitely wise and unchangeable Being. Some Gnostics of the second century went to the extreme of supposing that the Old Testament was not the production of the Supreme Deity, but rather of the Demiurge, whose works Jesus was commissioned to counteract and destroy. If this were so, it would certainly

account for the apparent harshness of the Jewish legislation, for the cumbrous and seemingly unspiritual ceremonial, and for the deflections from rectitude which, on various occasions, are allowed to pass without rebuke in the Old Testament. It is questionable, however, whether the hypothesis would be attended with many other advantages, while it is certain that it would call into existence at least ten difficulties, any one of which would be more huge and terrible than any of those that it had put out of the way. The Gnostic heresy is long since dead. Christians everywhere are now agreed in the belief that the Book of Revelation, like the Book of Nature, has no second author. A work whose constituent parts are the production of at least forty different men, writing in different places, and separated some of them from the others by centuries, must, of necessity, present great diversities in thought and style; but amid all these diversities, one grand plan and purpose is manifest throughout. So much is this felt on closer inspection to be the case, that the old Gnostic notion is universally exploded. Intelligent persons may still be found who do not profess to believe that any portion of Scripture is divine, but no man now thinks of accounting for the moral distance between the two Testaments, by alleging that one of them is from God and the other from the devil.

It must not be forgotten, however, that while both are in their origin divine, the New Testament is the more recent in production; that the works which it contains are the latest written expression of the divine mind; and that they present the full development of a religious system which the Old Testament exhibits in germ only. This is the one grain of truth that underlies the common prejudice which exalts the gospels and the epistles at the expense of the law and the prophets, and which unduly disparages the latter without overestimating the former. Every one who mixes in religious society of almost any grade, has at some period encountered the growing impression that the Jewish Scriptures are now obsolete that at least they have lost in a great degree the binding force which they once possessed, that precepts embodied in them, and in them only, cannot legitimately command unqualified obedience from Christians, that in fact no religious duty can be proved to be a present duty, except it be proved from the New Testament.

"Does not the word testament mean a will?" said a shrewd but unlettered peasant to his minister. "Yes, it sometimes has that meaning," was the answer. "But if a man make a new will, does not this of necessity revoke any other will which was in existence before it?" "Among men such is, undoubtedly, the case," said the minister. "That being so,"

rejoined the peasant, "does not the fact that God has given us the New Testament, deprive the Old Testament of its validity as a rule of conduct, and can it now be of any other use to Christians than like an old will to shew the intention of the testator at the time it was made?" To an error put so plausibly, it is no doubt difficult to give an answer equally clear and equally plausible. An uneducated man can scarcely be induced to perceive how deceptive and unsafe it is to found any important principle upon a mere analogy between our acts and the acts of that great Being, whose thoughts and whose ways are so different from man's. The fallacy of the argument lies in supposing that He, "with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning," changes as a man changes, who, by every new record of the disposition of his effects, absolutely invalidates every other record by which it was preceded. God does not alter his plan, though he may modify his law to suit the altered circumstances of humanity. The New Testament is not a distinct and independent revelation-it is rather the completion of a revelation which was in process of communication for ages-it is the finishing of an edifice, in whose erection priests and prophets were engaged for centuries, but which required to have the top-stone laid upon it by evangelists and apostles in order to make it perfect. To carry out the peasant's figure, it is not so much a new will, revoking everything that had gone before it, as a codicil to a will, altering some old arrangement now no longer needed, and providing for some new circumstances, which, in the case before us, Omniscience doubtless foresaw from the beginning, but which were not in actual existence when the document was at first prepared.

In the conversation now quoted, the peasant was merely giving utterance to an opinion which it would be a mistake to suppose peculiar to peasants or artisans. The probability is, that it was derived from others superior in intelligence to himself, whose treatment of the Old Testament Scriptures may have, undesignedly perhaps, communicated to his mind the impression which he embodied in words. Perhaps in the public services of the church he may have heard the lesson of inspired wisdom read constantly from the gospels and epistles, but from the law and the prophets rarely. Out of every ten discourses pronounced from the pulpit, nine may have been based on passages found in the New Testament only. The very songs the sanctuary, indited by inspiration, embedded in the Scripture, surrounded by so many holy associations, and in which millions of the saints now asleep have expressed towards God the deepest and purest feelings of the heart, may have fallen into disuse, and may too frequently have had substituted for