so much farther into the hidden realms of truth, but is adapted to provinces where the understanding will essay in vain to penetrate; hence the believer, if he understand his ground, will never descend to any fencing of this sort.'

What Carlyle says of worship-and his "Heroes" is full of it-taken by itself is very beautiful and truly excellent. But taken, as it surely will be, in connection with all other kindred topics, its tendency is to make the mind satisfied with a very refined species of idolatry. We have already, perhaps, said enough upon this subject. He often defines worship to be "wonder"-" wonder infinite," to whatever object rendered. How easy would it be to name devout men according to Carlyle's notions of devotion, whom the Christian world has had the best of reasons for not considering religious!

He quotes scripture phrases with much significance, often happily. Bible language, as is the language of all other books ever written, is familiar to him. 'Winged words' are his vocation, and no man ever had more, or better for effect. Milton's imagery of Paradise is none too strong for him to express the rapturous feelings of the devout soul; nor Dante's imagery of hell to express the agony of remorse. Upon this subject he has most forcibly uttered what every Universalist minister is forever trying to utter; and many a profitable pearl will this class of religious pearl-divers fetch up, together with sea-weed and mud in abundance, from these prolific waters. In a tropical sense, Carlyle believes all the poets and prophets say about heaven and hell. He makes life a most serious concern to mortals; words were rarely ever put together with more appalling force in favor of right, and in opposition to wrong. Here his notes are the clearest, the strongest, and the most imperative! He throws around the lowest, as well as the highest of mortals, an infinitude, and would make him feel the full weight of his responsibility. Would that there was nothing to counteract the impression!

Upon a future state, he is so Unitarianly general in his forms of expression, as to make it difficult to state with much confidence his belief. Here he so transcends as to leave him in Platonic, or German fog, out of sight of those who yet live in "time and space." We judge, however, that when this phantasm of a material body and world' shall vanish, he supposes we shall enter upon a higher state; or then the present' apparent parts' of the Universal All' will be more or less happily united.

Upon miracles nothing but the style is Carlyle's; the thoughts have been often advanced in attempts to answer the arguments in proof of revealed religion.

The account he gives of the "Conversion" of his Professor Teufelsdröckh is in keeping with his general theology, and probably was designed to express his view of the doctrine of Regeneration. It is the common method of philosophizing upon a most momentous Bible doctrine. No wonder that, in speaking as he has upon this, and almost every other subject touching practical piety, he has "spoken to the condition" of so many in New-England-particularly in Massachusetts. The Quaker's complaint can cease for some twenty years.

We say what we do know, when we assert that many young men in our Seminaries of learning have lost their faith in the Bible as a special revelation from God by reading Carlyle. They are captivated by the novelty, the picturesque beauty and sublimity of his thought and diction. His two-edged, quaint, and grotesque expressions soon cease to repel, and actually chain the mind as if spell-bound, before this literary Circe. Pride of intellect, the love of originality in many cases, prepare the mind for the reception of the erroneous, together with so much that is true and good in this singular writer. And then few minds, it is apprehended, are entirely and uniformly beyond the precincts of Doubting Castle; and those who indulge much in sceptical trains of thought must be particularly on their guard, or a parley with Mr. Carlyle will prove fatal.

His writings are, and will continue to be extensively read. He will have admirers, enthusiastic and ridiculous thaumaturgic' imitators. His uncouthness will offend the tastes of some and he will be thrown down with the cry-" It is so unnatural ;"—" All affectation," "A jargon of Germanisms," etc. But he will be read; and he may be read with profit. We doubt whether many minds will long continue to be particularly delighted with his peculiarities. The fever will be high, but not continue at its height for a great length of

time.

His French Revolution stands unrivaled as a series of vivid, glowing pictures of that frightful catastrophe. This is Carlyle's master work, and it can be read with great profit, not only for its history, but for its sound reflections. It is the least objectionable of all his writings, on the score of awak

ening sceptical trains of thought in the mind of the reader. And we believe the bad influence of all his works might be counteracted in a great measure, particularly among the youth in our Colleges and Seminaries, by a little pains on the part of the instructors. That words of caution are needed here, is but too manifest.

ARTICLE V.

ON AN EXPRESSION IN ACTS, 27: 17.

By Theodore D. Woolsey, Prof. of Greek Literature, Yale College, New Haven.

THE following remarks, suggested by a passage in Plato's laws (Lib. 12, p. 945, C.) are laid before the reader nearly in the order in which the subject presented itself to the writer, and with the hope of explaining the precise meaning of ὑποζωννύντες τὸ πλοῖον in Acts, concerning which some doubt has existed.

The passage in Plato is to this effect. He is speaking of the difficulty of finding a set of magistrates competent to supervise the other magistrates of the state. "There are many occasions," says he, "when a polity may be dissolved, as there are of dissolving those parts of a ship or of any animal, which having a common nature spread through them all, are in different circumstances called by the various names of cords, izoluara and tendons." As in this passage, Plato classes this thing pertaining to a ship, whatever it may be, with the cords and muscles of the body, and implies that the structure of a ship would be weakened or destroyed, if it were loosed or broken, it seems not improbable that a równa is something in a ship like a cord or cable, by which its frame is tied together. Ast, however, in his edition of Plato's laws, and after him Cousin in his translation (*) under

(*) Ast: tabulata quibus navis latera coutexebantur. Cousin: Rèces de bois qui ceignaient le corps des vaisseaux, et en soutenaient la charpente.

stand the word of boards, by means of which the sides of a ship were woven or connected together. It is singular that the very passages to which Ast refers after giving this explanation, and which Cousin borrows from him, are as well adapted as they can be to show that it is untenable The first is from Athenæus Lib. 5. p. 204, A. He is giving an account of an enormous galley of forty banks of oars belonging to Ptolemy Philopater, and among other particulars says: "it took (hápave, i. e., the space upon it required) twelve broguara: each was of six hundred cubits." It would seem that something like cables going round the whole ship must be here intended. And there is the more reason for thinking so, because the length of the vessel is put down at 280 cubits in the same passage. The double of this length and forty cubits allowed for the curvature of the sides, would make the length of the hypozoma. In the other passage, (from Vitruvius 10. 15, near the end of the work.) the thing seems to be mentioned without the name. 'The architect is

describing a battering-ram, and says, "a capite ad imam calcem tigni contenti fuerunt funes quatuor crassitudine digitorum octo, ita religati, quemadmodum navis a puppi ad` proram continetur ejusque praecincturae funes transversis erant ligati, habentes inter se palmipedalia spatia." That is "four ropes eight fingers' breadth thick, had been stretched from the head to the extreme part of the foot of the beam; so bound to it as a ship is held together (or girded) from stem to stern. The ropes which formed this girdle had been fastened together by other transverse ones, and had spaces of a foot and a hand-breadth between them." Here Vitruvius teaches us apparently, that ships were kept together by ropes passing horizontally so as to enclose the sides. What else could the browua have been?

The only other passage in the early classics, where this word occurs, so far as I am informed, is in Plato's republic, Lib. 10. near the end. The context is embarrassed by certain difficulties which need not delay us now. The immediate passage may be translated thus; "for (he said) that this light is the connecting bond of the heavens, which like the hypozomata of galleys keeps their whole circumference. together." Here Stallbaum explains the term by the general words, "cingula triremium, quibus navis latera quasi continentur;" and then adds, "vocem alii aliter interpretati

sunt." Schleiermacher renders the word in question by "streben" props, or boards, or beams, I suppose, put along obliquely to counteract the strain upon the sides of the ship.

But even here the idea of a continuous rope seems more natural. For the light spoken of was one undivided thing, unlike the separate boards along the sides of a ship, but quite similar to a rope encircling the vessel. If Plato here refers to the milky way, as is not improbable, or if the passage was suggested to him by a dogma of Parmenides concerning something in the likeness of a crown,-(" stephanem appellat continentem ardore lucis orbem, qui cingit coelum." Cic. de nat. Deor. 1, 11,) by which Parmenides also may have intended the milky way,-at all events a girdle encompassing a ship answers well in the comparison.

Passow, however, in his lexicon, with obvious reference to this passage defines wua as "a rowers bench running ὑπόζωμα across to the side of the ship; also called dúveruos, because it forms the connexion between the ship's walls." But this explanation, besides being for other reasons wholly inadmissible, hardly deserves notice, after the passage from Athenaeus given above, except on account of the respectability of the source from which it comes.

The view which we now seem obliged to take, that the hypozoma was a cable going around the sides of vessels, is confirmed by a passage of Apollonius Rhodius 1, 367, seq. When the heroes had chosen Jason to be their captain, and he had made his inaugural address, they stripped off their garments and went to work to get the vessel ready for sea. At the suggestion of Argus the shipwright, "they tightly girded the vessel (xgarews (waav) inside with a well twisted rope, (TRεper EvdoJEV OTλw) stretching it taught on both sides, (τεινάμενοι ἑκάτερθεν in order that the planks might be well secured by the wooden pins, and might resist the opposing force of the running waves." It is obvious that this cable must have run along the sides and not under the vessel, for in the latter case only a single part,-say the middle,of the ship could be strengthened by one cord.

We may presume that Apollonius describes what was usual in vessels, or at least in vessels of war. Hence, when in Polybius (27, 3, 2.) "Hegesilochus advised the Rhodians

owview forty ships";-which is explained by Schweighauser, as answering to "reficere," and by Passow, as