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The cubic contents of the great coffer have been elsewhere shown to be equal to one Hebrew laver, or one English chaldron. Now for the measure of weight. A cubic measure being formed, with sides of a ten-millionth of the earth's axis of rotation, a tenth part of this space is to be filled with matter of the specific density of the earth. This mass will form the weight standard. The coffer measure puts the mean density at 5.70.

7. Decimal measures are everywhere indicated, and show the coffer to be intentionally what it is, thinks our professor. Four vertical grooves divide the entrance wall of the king's chamber into five parts. The coffer, whose capacity is also that ascribed to the Ark of the Covenant, is founded on a fifty-inch measure, the one ten-millionth of the earth's axis of rotation. It stands in a room carefully divided by five equal courses of stone; a thing not to be done in that hard material without extreme care. By the position of the floor on the lower course, the room becomes a measure of the same capacity as Solomon's molten sea, fifty times that of the coffer, fifty and five are the ruling numbers. Then again the king's chamber holds an unexpected relation to the whole pyramid. The fiftieth course of stone in the pyramid is identical with the floor of that chamber. On it stands the coffer of fifty inches standard, in its tank of fifty times itself, with walls of five courses; and, if that coffer's contents of water be divided by fifty times fifty, we get the pyramid pound, scientifically checked all the world over as five cubic inches of the earth's mean density! We agree with our professor, that, if this is all accurate and all accidental, it is very bewildering.

He goes on to show that the ventilators were constructed so as to create a mean temperature of what he calls one-fifth. Now, whereas the king's chamber has a relation to a measure of fives and fifties, so the queen's chamber has a similar

relation to a standard of twenty-five; and the subterranean chamber was equally a chamber of angular measure. By calculations concerning the latter, which our readers would not care to follow, our professor gets a compass with divisions of fives, which he thinks the sailors would be grateful for! In the seven-sided crystalline form of the queen's chamber, his peculiar notions lead him to find an index of the sabbatical week; and he somewhere quotes our much-maligned Bunsen in his own support. If figures were ever "off on a strike," we think they would have refused to contribute to such a result!

The third volume contains an interesting but contemptuous account of the labors of Mahmoud Bey, alluded to in our article on Bunsen. It seems to trouble our astronomer a good deal, that he cannot criticise the excellence of Mahmoud's mathematical work.

In his speculative advances, Smith makes a queer choice of authorities; and, whenever he brings up a peculiarly obscure name, he shows his real respect for Bunsen, by reporting what good thing the baron credited to it! If a third of the time spent on the building of this pyramid was spent, as Herodotus says, in subterranean work, then our professor is sure that we shall yet see the inside of an undiscovered chamber, in which will be works of the magnificent diorite, whose splinters strike through the embankment. No man knows where this diorite came from; no one has ever reported it in situ.

Professor Smith treats us, in closing, to Haliburton's "Essay on the Pleiades." All nations, he thinks, once had a year of pleiads, before the rise of the great heathen civilizations, and in which is the explanation of the old festival of Hallowe'en. This year began with the autumnal equinox, "the mothernight of the year." But, for all this, he must needs borrow of Bunsen the very star-maps and charts Professor Heiss prepared for him! One thing he has decided, - that the Dog-star shall not rule the pyramid. Those who know what good work is, however, will always value Professor Smith's second volume, and turn from his third to Bunsen's noble five, with ever-fresh delight.

ART. V. THE FOURTH GOSPEL AND ITS AUTHOR.

An Attempt to ascertain the Character of the Fourth Gospel, especially in relation to the First Three. By JOHN JAMES TAYLER, B.A., Member of the Historico-Theological Society of Leipsic, and Principal of Manchester New College, London. Williams & Nordgate, 14, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London; 1867.

AN able and friendly writer in the "London Spectator' (April 20, 1867) closes his examination of this work, after repeatedly expressing his high esteem for the author's accurate knowledge and perfect fairness, with these words: "Mr. Tayler's learned, lucid, and candid book has tended to confirm, instead of to shake, our conviction of the authenticity of the fourth Gospel."

Such also has been the case with ourselves. Mr. Tayler calls his book, "An Attempt to ascertain the Character of the Fourth Gospel." But it is not so much an examination, as an argument. We can already see, in the first chapter, the result to which the writer has come. The book is a fair and honest attempt to disprove the apostolic authorship and authority of the Gospel.

Mr. Tayler first describes the evident difference between the three Synoptic Gospels and the fourth, as regards the scene of Christ's labors, the form of his teachings, the events mentioned, and the resulting view of the character of Christ himself. He thinks that John's Gospel is not so much another as a different Gospel from those of the Synoptics. Considering it impossible that the fourth Gospel and the Apocalypse should have been written by the same author, he decides in favor of the authenticity of the latter. The notices of the Apostle John in Scripture and ecclesiastical tradition, show, in Mr. Tayler's opinion, that John belonged to the Jewish section of the Christian Church; to which, plainly, the author of the fourth Gospel does not belong. The external testimonies

to the apostolic authorship of the Gospel do not begin to be satisfactory, till toward the end of the second century. The doctrine of the Logos, he thinks, could not have blended itself so intimately into Christianity at a very early period, as is seen in this book. In the apologists of the second century, indeed, he finds this Logos doctrine fully accepted; but in the writings of Paul, instead of the "Logos," we have the

Spirit." But Mr. Tayler's chief reason for rejecting the Gospel as apostolic is from its position in regard to the time of the Last Supper. The three Synoptics place it on the fourteenth of Nisan, on the day of the Passover; but John puts it on the day before, and fixes the crucifixion on the Passover. That the fourth Gospel is wrong here, Mr. Tayler thinks evident; and that therefore it could not be written by John, who was incapable of such a mistake, and whose authority was appealed to in Ephesus in favor of the other date. For such reasons as these, Mr. Tayler believes himself compelled to deny the apostolic authorship of the fourth Gospel. Who was really the writer, he is unable to say; but some one, he is convinced, who was living and writing before the middle of the second century, certainly before the death of Papias He differs from

in A.D. 163, and probably after A.D. 135.

Dr. Baur, who considers it of Alexandrine origin, since he regards the uniform tradition of the Church in favor of Ephesus conclusive as to the place of its composition.

The fourth Gospel, therefore, according to Mr. Tayler, “belongs to the primitive age of Christianity, and cannot be brought lower than the first half of the second century." Nevertheless, he does not consider it as the work of imposture: partly because it does not speak of John as its author till the last chapter, which he holds to be a later addition; and also because the book is really filled with the current of spiritual life which came from Jesus. Mr. Tayler's work ends with an attempt to show, that Baron Bunsen was wrong in saying that, if John's Gospel is not authentic, there can be no historical Christ, and no Christian Church. On the other hand, Mr. Tayler asserts that Christianity is not damaged by the results of this criticism, and that we lose nothing in discovering that

VOL. LXXXIV. -NEW SERIES, VOL. V. NO. I.

7

the fourth Gospel was not the work of an apostle, but of an unknown writer at Ephesus, in the second century.

However this may be, the question is surely important, and weighted with very grave consequences. We will therefore examine, as far as our limits allow, the state of this question.

I.

And first we ask, Which ought to have the most weight in deciding the question of authorship, the united and unvarying belief of the Church, less than two hundred years after the birth of Christ; or the arguments of criticism, however ingenious, at the present time?

To test this, let us suppose a critic, in the year A.D. 3500, to be examining the question of the authorship of the "Paradise Lost." He finds, we will suppose, few references to it before the year 1867; but at that time it was universally attributed to John Milton, an eminent English writer of the seventeenth century. Such had continued to be the general belief, during all the subsequent centuries. But this critic, on examination, sees much reason for doubting this conclusion. "I find," he says, "other works, in prose, attributed to this same writer, — works of a violent and bitterly controversial character, and wholly different in spirit from the poem. In these, he is a Son of Thunder, ready to call down fire from heaven on the heads of his opponents: in this, he is patient under neglect and sorrow. The difference of style also is very great. The prose writings have long, involved, difficult sentences: the verse is luminous, simple, and clear. person, for example, unbiassed by prejudice, can read the 'Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence against Smectymnuüs,' and believe the author of this bitter, obscure, and prosaic essay, and that of the 'Paradise Lost,' to be the same person. Take, for example, the following passage, which is a fair specimen of the whole:

No

"The peremptory analysis, that you call it, I believe will be so hardy as once more to unpin your spruce, fastidious oratory, to rumple her

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