The early history of the Old Testament was involved in great obscurity. Down to the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus (B.C. 280) the Scriptures had been in the keeping of the Jews, and down to 200 years before Christ they (the Jews) had no established canon of the Scriptures. The oldest poets and historians of antiquity did not mention the Jewish Bible, neither Homer, Hesiod, Sanchoniathon, or Herodotus.

But we might inquire, who were these people (the Jews) who we are told were the chosen people of God to disseminate his word to all the world? Were they in advance of the surrounding nations in intelligence? He answered, no; for they were the most ignorant, intolerant, credulous, and cruel of the ancient nations, and a darker history than theirs was not to be found. While the Chaldeans, Egyptians, and Romans were progressing in intelligence and learning, the Jews added nothing to the pyramid of human science. He then proceeded to say the four gospels were not named till the time of Irenæus (A.D. 187 or 197), and down to the Councils of Nice or Laodicea there was no authorized canon of the New Testament by which Christians could agree to be judged. Seeing the obscurity which surrounded these books, we must ask ourselves on whose authority we are called upon to endorse the claims of the New Testament to Divine inspiration? Upon the authority of Christian fathers alone, and he defied any person to bring any other evidence except the Christian fathers. He then endeavoured to impugn their veracity, and said they were men who, upon principle, deceived their fellow-creatures. After quoting a number of authorities on the subject-Professor Mosheim, Dr. Con. Middleton, and others-he said Origen, a celebrated Christian father, and a man of unlimited power in the church, selected the present canon of the New Testament. He would now inform them how the Christian fathers settled the New Testament, how that those records were the only genuine records, that they were the true Word of God. Did they receive a special intimation from Heaven on the subject? Did they receive that proof which was beyond all possibility of denial? No; but this vital matter was decided as a Town Council would decide upon a police-force, or the House of Commons upon a tariff; or as the priests recently settled the question of "the immaculate conception"-by a majority. In short, the claims of our infallible Bible were determined by fallible men, and not till the Councils of Nice or Laodicea, which were held in the fourth century. Alluding to the Council of Nice, at which the Emperor Constantine presided, Tindal, in his work on the Rights of the Christian Church, page 195, observed-" And if these accusations and libels which the bishops at the Council of Nice gave in of one another to the emperor were now extant, in all probability we should have had such rolls of scandal, that few would have much reason to boast of the first oecumenical council, where, with such heat, passion, and fury, the bishops fell foul of one another, insomuch that had not the emperor by a trick burnt their church memorials, probably they must have broke up in confusion!" After reading further from Tindal on the same subject, he proceeded-" Have we the New Testament books as they were settled at that time? Have they come down to us intact? Why even Christians themselves dispute as to very important passages and books. Luther doubted the Epistle of St. James, and called it an epistle of straw;' and Calvin doubted the Book of Revelation." He then recapitulated the arguments he had advanced, and concluded by stating that he was induced to devote his time to this question because he believed it lay at the foundation of all slavery, political and religious.

After the lecture, a discussion took place between the lecturer and a young man named Peter Sykes, who adroitly attacked some of the arguments of the lecturer, showing that the Scriptures were adapted to the universal wants of man, and proving that if we were to believe nothing but what we could under

stand, there were many of the laws of Nature we could not understand, and therefore we should not believe in Nature, the infidel's God.

A QUESTION FOR SECULARIST LECTURERS.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE DEFENDER.

DELTA.

SIR,

It once fell in my way to hear Mr. G. J. Holyoake lecture upon one of those stale topics of his, with which he has gone the round of the country: "Roman Catholicism the type of the Orthodox Churches around us." This subject he treated in his usual manner, viz., with a great deal of apparent candour and fairness, but with a great deal of real sophistry and injustice. But the whole exhibition was so feeble, the parallel was so strained, the discrepancy between the type and the antitype was so apparent that none but the most ignorant or the most prejudiced could fail to perceive it; and his own friends must have felt that the attempt of the lecturer to substantiate his position was a failure. At the conclusion of his lecture he told us that he did not charge the orthodox churches with inconsistency for teaching these obnoxious and objecjionable doctrines to which he had been referring, and in which these churches were but the antitypes of Roman Catholicism; for, he said, all these doctrines were found in the Bible, and, as the orthodox churches professed to make that book the standard of their teaching, they were but consistent in teaching these doctrines. How then, he asked, are we to get rid of these obnoxious doctrines? Why only by getting rid of the book which contains them. We must teach them so long as we make the Bible our doctrinal standard. Replace the Bible, then, by reason; trust not a book, but trust your reason. Reason teaches us no such doctrines as those of eternal punishment, persecution, &c. Trust to reason, and not to a book. In this strain the lecturer concluded. Discussion was then invited; and as no one seemed inclined to make any remark, I requested the attention of the lecturer to a question which had risen in my mind while listening to his concluding remarks. I said: Suppose we were to take your advice, and follow it out to its utmost consequences. Suppose we were to reject the Bible as teaching fables or absurdities, and to break up our religious institutions, and, so far as these things are concerned, take reason for our guide, and begin de novo. Now, Sir, what guarantee can you give us that we should not, at some future day, find ourselves in the same predicament again, viz., with a bible of some sort, and with religious institutions of some kind;-perhaps like those we have, perhaps worse, as we see them in some other countries? The propriety of my question will appear when you recollect that, upon your own principles, there is no God-no being superior to man-no divine inspiration; and consequently men have had no guidance to follow except that of their reason and their feelings. No Deity, then, has interfered with them; divine inspiration, as believed by Christians, is a chimera; and yet men are found with bibles, belief in God, and religious institutions. Now, Sir, upon your own premises, all this is the work of man; all this has resulted from the exercise of human reason and the promptings of human feelings, for there has been no supernatural interference. And yet with these results before your eyes,--results which you disapprove and deprecate, you nevertheless exhort us to trust our reason. What guarantee can you give us that it will not lead to the same round again? For, I argue, that men never attempt to supply a want till they feel it. The fact, therefore, that men have invented a Deity, is proof to me that they felt the need of one; the fact that they have

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written bibles and set up religious institutions is proof that they have felt the need of bibles and of religious institutions. Now, Sir, can you guarantee that men shall not feel these wants in future, and hence shall not attempt to supply them? Can you give us a reason for thinking that the human mind will undergo any change in these respects, and not act in time to come as, upon your principles, it must have acted in time past? Because, unless you can, I think your advice is as absurd as if you were to advise us to destroy some production of nature, say wheat, and yet could not guarantee that such a change should take place in either our constitution or our circumstances as should render wheat unnecessary to us; and we should be as simple if we were to take your advice in this case as in that." This question was put to Mr. H., in different words, three several times that night; and as many times did he evade it; and as he left it at last without any answer, and as I have been unable to obtain any since from any other source, perhaps he, or some of his friends, may think it over at their leisure, and tell me how they relieve themselves of the difficulty it involves. They think Christians ought to give them every information they can upon doubtful points. I hope they will act upon the same principle, as there are many doubtful points in secularism upon which I should like information, and I propose this as one.

THE GENUINENESS OF THE GOSPELS.

AUFSEHER.

We proceed then to the proof thut the gospels have not been exposed to any peculiar causes of corruption, but remain essentially the same as they were originally composed. This appears, in the first place, from the agreement among our present manuscript copies of the gospels, or parts of the gospels, in what ever form these copies appear. There have been examined, in a greater or less degree, about six hundred and seventy manuscripts of the whole or portions of the Greek texts of the gospels. These were written in different countries and at different periods, probably from the fifth century downwards. They have been found in places widely remote from each other, in Asia, in Africa, and from one extremity of Europe to the other. Besides these manuscripts of the Greek text there are many manuscripts of ancient versions of the gospels in different languages of each of the three great divisions of the world just mentioned. There are likewise many manuscripts of the works of the Christian fathers abounding in quotations from the gospels, and especially manuscripts of ancient commentaries on the gospels, such as those of Origen, who lived in the third century, and Chrysostom, who lived in the fourth, in which we find their text quoted as the different portions of it are successively the subject of remark. Now, all these different copies of the gospels, or parts of the gospels, so numerious, so various in their character, so unconnected, offering themselves to notice in parts of the world so remote from each other, concur in giving us essentially the same text. Divide them into four classes, corresponding to the four gospels, and it is evident that those of each class are to be referred to one common source; that they are all copies more or less remote, of the same original; that they all had one common text for their arche type. They vary, indeed, more or less from each other; but their variations have arisen from the common accident of transcription, or, as regards the versions, partly from errors of translation; or in respect to the quotations by the fathers, partly from the circumstance that, in ancient as in modern times, the language of the scripture was often cited loosely from memory, and without regard to verbal accuracy, in cases where no particular verbal accuracy was required. The agreement among the extant copies of any one of the gospels, or

portions of it, is essential; the disagreements are accidental and trifling, originating causes which, from the nature of things, we know must have been in operation The same work everywhere appears, and by comparing together different copies we are able to ascertain the original text to a greater degree of exactness, or, in other words, where various, readings occur, to determine what were probably the words of the author. The Greek manuscripts, then, of any one of the gospels, the version of it by the fathers, are all professedly copies of that gospel or parts ofit, and these copies corresponding with each other, it follows that they were derived more or less remotely from one archetype. Their agreemont admits of no explanation, except that of being conformed to a common examplar.-Norton.

THE SPIRITUAL SENSE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

A reply by anticipation to some of Mon's Statements in p. 283.

There is in the Old Testament a spiritual sense. We mean by this, nothing cabalistical, or fanciful, or mystical, but that deep and holy wisdom, which, although not obtruded upon the profane or superficial reader, is yet presented without any forced interpretation to the spiritual-minded Christian, whether learned or unlearned. The Sadducee may have read it with all honesty, and yet he found no proof of a soul, or of a separate spiritual state. Christ, however, discovered it at once, in one of the most common and oft-repeated texts, which, doubtless, the blind Sadducee had read hundreds of times, without seeing any thing remarkable in the language or the thought. The Saviour, perhaps merely gave the interpretation that prevailed among all the pious Israelites of his day, and which was well known to Simeon, to Anna, to Eleazar, and to many others who were looking for the kingdom of heaven. To such a spiritually-minded one, the declaration, "I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob," ever presented that blessed state, or place, into which "the fathers," had entered, as into their resting-place in the divine pavilion, "the secret place" "beneath the shadow of his wings," in which they abode in peace, where he was yet "their God"-" the God, not of the dead, but of the living," and where they, although long since dead to earth and earthly things, did yet most truly and personally "live unto HIM." The Sadducee saw in this familiar, yet, in itself, strange language of the promise, only a "form of words," a mere usus loquendi, to use the favourite hermeneutical phrase with which critics of the Whately school explain all difficulties. It was an ancient form of words a mere metaphor, with little or no meaning. Their striking peculiarity long familiar usage had served to veil from his earthly mind. So also the solemn declaration, "Lord, THOU art our dwelling-place in all generations,"-to the Sadducee, as to the modern rationalist, sounded only of temporal deliverance, and temporal salvation. To one who was 66 a Jew inwardly," it was the clear revelation of the far higher truth-that the belief in the eternity of a spiritual God is inseparably connected with the thought of the eternal safety and blessedness of all those whose God he styles himself, and respecting whom he repeats the declaration ages after they had departed from the earth. Thus each derived his own meaning from the passage, and each may be said to have derived a true meaning perhaps, in some sense of the term; for the scriptures may be regarded as containing a higher and lower significance, or a greater or less amount of significance, according to the capacities of each soul for its reception. But the satisfied Sadducee felt perfectly content with earth. He confessed not "that he was a pilgrim and sojourner" upon it. He was not "seeking a better country, a city which had foundations ;" and, therefore, to him the door of the inner sanctuary

of the word was never opened. He read the ancient book of his fathers, and found therein neither angel nor spirit, nor spiritual life, nor world to come, nor, in short, any thing to explain the mysterious care and providence exercised towards beings of so little value when regarded as having no connection with the invisible and eternal state.-Foreign Review.

NORTH AMERICA, NEW ENGLANDERS.

Their love of science and learning is amply evinced by the fact, that they have established parochial schools at such near distances as to give every child in this country, except in very recent settlements, an ample opportunity of acquiring a knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Grammar schools also they have established in all their towns, containing one hundred families. In 1638, they founded a college at Cambridge, and since that period their descendants have founded seven others. In addition to this, they have established a great number of Academies, where students receive an English education of a higher cast than that which can be obtained at the parochial schools. These things, it is presumed, cannot be said of any country of the same wealth and population.

The morality of these people may be fairly estimated from the following facts. There have been fewer capital crimes committed in New England since its settle ment, than in any other country on the globe, (Scotland perhaps excepted,) in proportion to the number of its inhabitants. One half, or two-thirds of the inhabitants sleep, at the present time, without locking or barring their doors. Not more than five duels have been fought here since the landing of the Plymouth colony, near two hundred years since. During the last fourteen years I have travelled not far from twelve thousand miles, chiefly in New England and New York, and have never seen two men fighting.--Dwight's travels in America.

SELECTED APHORISMS.

Of course none of us is a Paul, but we may be perfectly like him in will, however meaner, and weaker in faculties. The iris in the dew-drop is just as true and perfect an iris, as the bow that measures the heavens, and betokens the safety of a world from deluge.—J Sterling.

The good man rewards injury with tenderness, as the sandal wood, while it is falling, imparts to the edge of the axe its aromatic flavour.-Hindoo Epigram.

Learn from the earliest days to insure your principles against the perils of ridicule; you can no more exercise your reason if you live in the constant dread of laughter, than you can enjoy your life if you are in the constant terror of death. Rev. S. Smith.

Let justice be universally done and he spirit of mercy will have little of do, but to look upon mankind with the smile of congratulation.-Fawcett.

The soul of man, approving of the true and the right, whether it will or no, werever these are discerned, points with unerring certainty to that which is the source of this its moral power, viz., the rectitude of the divine character as the poised steel, turning ever to the mysterious north, indicates the existence of that unknown power, which from afar controls all its vibrations, whose influence it ever feels, and at whose presence it trembles.-Rev. J. Havèn.-Bibliotheca Sacra