"On Quivet Neck he built himself a house, one-story high, roofed with thatch, and fronting south with such precision as to serve as a sundial, and indicate the hour of noon. The fireplace was made of rough stone; the chimney, of boards plastered inside with clay. Both the fireplace and the chimney-flue were of immense capacity; so that, after a rousing fire had been kindled of a winter's evening, the family would occupy the spaces on each side of it, and look up through the chimney opening, and gaze at the stars. What visions of other days must have come over the old Pilgrim, as he sat there and heard the whistling winds and the roaring on the sea-beach, and saw through the chimney-flue the same planets that twinkled upon him on the Princen Graat of old Amsterdam!"

The "Memorial of the Chauncys," by Mr. William Chauncey Fowler, gives an account of a family famous in New England religious history, and also distinguished in secular pursuits. President Chauncy of Harvard College was the first settler of the name in New England, a man of honorable family, liberal education, and superior ability. His descendants in the male line are not very numerous. The pedigree in Mr. Fowler's book commences with Chauncy. de Chauncy, who came from France with the Conqueror. How far back this is really authentic we have not examined, but the Chauncys were a very ancient house in Hertfordshire, and we doubt whether any other of the founders of Massachusetts could boast so high a lineage as could President Chauncy. A family descended in the female line from the first ancestor, and bearing the name, is still found among the Hertfordshire gentry.

We have far exceeded our intended limits, and must omit further examination of the very numerous publications on genealogy. Our desire has been to give our readers such information as will aid them in historical investigations, and to avoid any opinion as to the wisdom or justice of hereditary rank, or the utility of genealogical studies. We shall only say, that the subject of Peerages and Genealogies is too closely allied to history to be ignored, and that some knowledge of English noble families, and of the origin and nature of the English aristocracy, is essential to any thorough knowledge of English history.

ART. III.—1. Historical Lectures on the Life of our Lord Jesus Christ, being the Hulsean Lectures for the Year 1859. By C. J. ELLICOTT, B. D. Boston: Gould and Lincoln. 1862. pp. 382.

2. The Life of our Lord upon the Earth; considered in its Historical, Chronological, and Geographical Relations. By SAMUEL J. ANDREWS. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863. pp. 624.

"THE life of Jesus on earth was in the highest sense a human one, and it is this fact that gives us the key to the Gospels as real historic records."

"O, let us not forget, in all our investigations, that the history of the life of Christ is a history of redemption, that all the records which the Eternal Spirit of truth has vouchsafed to us bear this indelible impress, and are only properly to be seen and understood from this point of contemplation. It is the history of the Redeemer of our race that the Gospels present to us; the history, not of Jesus of Nazareth, but of the Saviour of the world; the record, not of merely idealized perfections, but of redemptive workings, My Father worketh hitherto, and I work'; and he who would presume to trace out that blessed history, without being influenced by this remembrance in all his thoughts and words, must be prepared to find himself adding one more unhonored name to the melancholy list of those who have presumed to treat of these mysteries, with the eclectic and critical spirit of the so-called biographer, the biographer (O strangely inappropriate and unbecoming word!) of Him in whom dwelt the whole fulness of the Godhead."

These brief citations- the first from Andrews, the second from Ellicott-indicate the widely different stand-points of their respective works, so nearly identical in title. The one, passing by all questions respecting the authorship and the inspiration of the Gospels, assumes that they are genuine historical documents, and statements of facts; and deals with them as such, with a view to portray in their just geographical and chronological relations the external aspects of the earthly life of Christ. The other, assuming not only the credibility of the Gospels as a history, but their plenary inspiration as well, and regarding "the usual tone of mere historical writing" upon the closing scenes of our Lord's ministry as "little short of

profanity," attempts to set forth "the outward connection of those incidents that inspired pens have been moved to record of the life of God's Eternal Son."

But while the stand-point of the one is the external history of the life of the Son of Man, and that of the other is the inspired record of the incarnate Son of God, both authors agree in this, the attempted reproduction of the life of Christ in its historical unity of time, place, manner, and relations. Mr. Andrews, while "recognizing the supernatural elements in the evangelic narratives wherever they exist," and believing as devoutly as does Bishop Ellicott that Jesus was "very God," has written his book with this simple purpose in view : "to arrange the events of the Lord's life, as given us by the Evangelists, so far as possible, in a chronological order, and to state the grounds of this order; and to consider the difficulties as to matters of fact which the several narratives, when compared together, present; or are supposed by modern criticism to present." Bishop Ellicott, while rejecting with pious indignation all naturalistic criticisms as "discreditable and unreasonable attempts to throw doubt on the credibility of the sacred narrative," nevertheless in his notes which alone give value to his book for the scholar-is at much pains to refute such " idle and mischievous doubts," upon critical and historical grounds; and to exhibit the connection of events in the life of Christ, in "a regular continuity of narrative," as if he himself were writing a biography of the man Christ Jesus, from the materials furnished by the four Evangelists.

Using these authors mainly for illustration and confirmation upon minor details, we propose to invert their method with regard to the life of Christ, and to inquire what evidences of the reality of that life are to be found in the historical and geographical allusions of the Evangelists, and in the archæology of Palestine as illustrated by traditions and remains, and by hereditary and immutable customs.

A list of geographical names, or a genealogical register such as opens the Gospel of Matthew and the First Book of the Chronicles, has no attractions for the plain reader of the Bible. But these very minutiæ of names, places, and dates, in a book of such antiquity, form a local and historical foundation for

its facts, help us to verify its statements, and serve to certify its authenticity; and thus the religion of the Bible is definitely and permanently attached to the soil and the history of our world.

It has been common of late to criticise the Bible upon the score of accuracy in its details; to admit in the main the truth of its principles and the beauty of its moral sentiments, but to impeach its statements of fact, whether scientific or historical, and thus to impair confidence in the book as an authority. Bishop Colenso, while professing to believe that the Pentateuch "imparts to us revelations of the Divine will and character," yet maintains upon arithmetical grounds that "the so-called Mosaic narrative cannot be regarded as historically true.” Similar criticism has been applied to the life of Christ. But the minute references of the Bible to places, names, and the events of contemporaneous history, serve to fasten its narratives in space and in time; and thus are a means of establishing its truth as a history, and the reality of the persons and the events of which it speaks. Hence the study of Biblical geography and history bears a just relation to the supernatural events and the moral truths of the Bible; for while this book in its miracles and doctrines is the most supernatural work in human language, it is at the same time the most matter-of-fact book of all antiquity, and the most capable of being tested, illustrated, and confirmed by geography, history, and monuments.

To show this, we have only to suppose that, instead of the Bible as it is, we had the general statement, that, at a time far back in the history of the world, there had appeared to men a remarkable Being, with a halo about his head, who said and did many wondrous things; that he had once made a sea stand still in the midst of a storm; that he had created bread for a hungry multitude in the desert; that he had gone up to the top of a mountain, and had there been transfigured into a divinity; and that he had finally ascended from a mountain into the clouds; and yet in all this story there was no hint of the place or the time of these occurrences, what sea, what mountain, what desert, what country, among what people, in what age; we should have a feeling of the unreality of the whole story, however we might prize its moral lessons. It

would be shifted from the region of history to that of poetry. How differently would the truths of the Bible impress us, did they come in the garb of Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained! Those two poems work up into the form of an epic the great events and sequences of the fall and the redemption of man; they aim to reproduce the supernatural features of the Bible; they embody its precepts, prophecies, and doctrines; in a word, they are Biblical throughout. But though composed in a narrative form, and teaching the very facts of the Bible, they are so imaginative in their cast, that, if they constituted our Bible, we should be puzzled to know how much of reality, and especially of Divine authority, to attach to them. Though Milton's poems abound in geographical and historical allusions, which localize the scenes of their principal events, yet their fictitious incidents and imaginary conversations, and the drapery of fancy in which they are clothed, give an air of unreality even to scenes borrowed from Biblical narratives. But if we go further, and suppose all local and historical groundwork to be removed from the Bible, its personages, its events, its teachings, would float before us in the dream-light of poetic fiction. We might accept it as teaching truth, or as founded upon truth, but we should not feel it to be the real, personal, living book it is. As to the effect of reality upon the mind, it would be more like Homer's Odyssey than like Milton's Paradise Lost. The Odyssey abounds in beautiful and noble sentiments, and ends in the triumph of fidelity and virtue. It gives play to supernatural and divine agency in human affairs. It pictures the human race as it stood midway "between Paradise and the vices of later heathenism." Many of its scenes are so far reproductions of real life, that it serves as a text-book of the manners and customs of its age. Even its legends may have had some original basis of fact. Yet, when we come to questions of time and place, we find that "the geographical particulars of the wanderings are dislocated and distorted. Distances are misstated, or cease to be stated at all. The names of countries are massed together in such a way as to show that the poet had no idea of a particular mode of juxtaposition for them. Topographical or local features, of a character such as to identify a description with some partic