reproaching Christ for his angry language to the Pharisees, but who, when Channing took up the book, and read it aloud, said -"Oh! if that, indeed, were the tone in which he spoke !" If that were the tone! Could not Jesus have eloquized his own words better than the good and noble-minded American? Must not the Ithuriel rebuke have been pointed by the Ithuriel tones as well as by the Ithuriel countenance ?

"So spake the cherub, and his grave rebuke,
Severe in youthful beauty, added grace

Invincible."

Safer, after all, to reproach than to encounter such fires of righteous resistless anger, "running along the ground." "Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way."

Peter's distinction, both as a writer and man, is not so much fancy or intellect, as it is feeling. Running riot in his early history, fluctuating in his middle life, it is in his Epistles a calm and steady flame, burning heavenward. Rejecting, as probably a fiction, the story that he desired to be crucified with head downward, lest he should have too much honor in assuming the attitude of his denied and dying Lord, we may see in it a mythic emblem of his ultimate lowliness of spirit, as well as of the inversion of character which he underwent. It may represent, too, those sacrifices within sacrifices so common in that martyr age, in which men sought for fearful varieties of death-gloried in provoking their adversaries to invent new torments-made, at the least, no compromise with the last enemy, nor wished one of his beams of terror shorn-so certain were they on the one hand, that their sufferings could never approach the measure of their master's, and, on the other, that the reward was fear, and unspeakably transcendent. Crucified with inverted head, or impaled on iron stakes, or breast-deep in flames, it mattered not, since Paradise smiled, and Jesus beckoned, almost visibly beside them. Let us pardon even the madness of that primitive rage for martyrdom, when we think of

the primitive patience of hope and security of faith from which it sprung.

It is impossible to contemplate Peter's works out of the checkered light of his character. It is different with James, whose character is only to be read in his Epistle, for all traditionary notices of his history and habits seem uncertain. We know little of him, except that he was not the James who stood with Jesus on the Mount; that he was known as James the Less; and that many identify him with James, the Lord's brother, of whom Paul speaks. At the Council of Jerusalem, he acted, in some measure, as moderator; and his letter, as well as his speech, shows him to have possessed qualities admirably adapting him for this office-wisdom, calmness, common sense, avoidance of extremes, a balanced intellect, and a determined will.

The Epistle of James is the first and best homily extant. It is not what many would now call a "Gospel sermon" (but neither is the Sermon on the Mount). It has little doctrinal statement, and no consecutive argument; it is a list of moral duties, inspirited by the earnestness with which they are urged, and beautified by the graphic and striking imagery in which the style is clothed. James is one of the most sententious, pointed, and terse of the New Testament authors. He reads like a modern. The edges of his sentences sparkle. His words are as "goads, and as nails." He reminds us more of Ecclesiastes, than of any other Scripture book. Paul's short sentences never occur till the close of his Epistles, and remind us then of hurried pantings of the heart. They are like the postscripts of lovers. James's entire epistle is composed of brief, glancing sentences, discovering the extreme liveliness and piercing directness of his intellect. Every word tells. How sharp and effective are such expressions as-" When lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death. Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone. Show me thy faith without thy works, and I will show thee my faith by my works. Thou believest that there is one

God; thou doest well; the devils also believe, and tremble. Is any among you afflicted?-Let him him sing psalms."

pray. Is

any merry?-Let In one of those sentences ("the devils believe, and tremble"), as well as in his quaint and powerful picture of the tongue, we find that very rare and somewhat fearful gift of irony winding and darkening into invective. What cool scorn and warm horror meet in the words, "believe, and tremble !" How formidable does the "little member" he describes become, when it is tipped with the "fire of hell!" And in what slow successive thunderous words does he describe the "wisdom which is not from above," as "earthly, sensual, devilish!" And upon the selfish rich he pours out a very torrent of burning gold, as if from the Lord of Sabaoth himself, into whose ears the cries of the reapers have entered.

In fine, although we pronounce James rather an orator than a poet, yet there do occur some touches of genuine poetic beauty, of which, in pursuing his swift rhetorical way, he is himself hardly conscious. "Let the rich," he says, "rejoice in that he is made low, because as the flower of the grass, he shall pass away." For a moment, he follows its brief history: "The sun is no sooner risen with a burning heat, but it withereth the grass, and the flower thereof falleth, and the grace of the fashion of it perisheth: so also shall the rich man fade away in his ways" -"fade away," and yet "rejoice," inasmuch as, like the flower, whose bloom, savor, and pith have floated up to swell the broad-blown lily of day, his adversity withers in the prosperity of God. "What, again, is life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." Such flowers, indeed, are transplanted from the prophetic forests. There, under the proud cedars, they were overshadowed, and almost lost; here, they bloom alone, and are the more lovely, that they seem to grow amid the fragments of the tables, which Moses, in his ire, strewed along the sides of Sinai-divine rubbish, left, as has not unfrequently been, in other senses, the case, by human wrath, but potent in its very powder,

A little common sense often goes a great way in a mystified and hollow world. How much mist does one sunbeam disperse ! James's few sentences-the law in powder-thrown out with decision, pointed by keen satire, and touched with terrific anger, have prevailed to destroy and disperse a thousand Antinomian delusions, and to redeem the perfect "law of liberty" from manifold charges of licentiousness. Even grant we, that, among the unhallowed multitude who have sought to reduce the standard of morals, Luther, like another Aaron, may have mingled, even he must down before the "Man with a word and a blow," the man Moses, impersonated by James, crying out as his face's indignant crimson flashes through the glory which the Divine presence had left upon it, and his eye outbeams his face and outruns his hurrying feet, and his arms make a heave-offering of the fire-written tables-" Wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead ?"

Earnestness is a quality as old as the heart of man. Nor is the proclamation of it, as an essential and all-important element, merely of yesterday. It was preached-nay, cursed-into Israel's ears by Deborah, when she spake so bitterly of poor, trimming, tarrying, neutral Meroz, "which came not forth to the help of the Lord." It was asked, in thunder, from Carmel, by Elijah, as he said "How long halt ye between two opinions?" It was proclaimed, through a calm louder than the thunder, by the Great Teacher himself, as he told the docile, well-behaved, money-loving weakling, in the Gospel, and in him, millions-"Go, sell all that thou hast, and take up thy cross, and follow me." And here, when faith in the Cross itself was retiring to rest in the upper rooms of speculative acquiescence, or traditionary acceptance, comes James, stoutly, resisting the retreat. His great demand is "life, action, fruit." Roughly, as one awakens those who are sleeping amid flames, does he shake the slumberers, and alarm the supine. But let those who have been taught by more modern prophets the value of earnestness remember, that James always admits the authority of that faith whence he would expect virtue to spring.

"Faith is dead, being alone;" in other words, it is not the Christian faith at all. That is necessarily a living, fruit-bearing principle. And, strong as his hand is to tear away the subterfuges of the hypocrite, and bold as his spirit is to denounce every shade of inconsistency-every "sham" of that day, and although his tone against oppression and oppressors crashes up into that of the old prophets, and his fourth and fifth chapters be in the very mood of Malachi-yet the whole tenor of his doctrine, and spirit, and language, substantiates his first and only title "James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ."