Egypt, and possess himself of the neighbouring kingdoms, where at present the Turk holdeth an uncertain power." Vol. II. P. 60.

His highness the Duke of Reichstadt has here a long career of renown and rapine laid out for him, of which he is probably at this moment utterly unsuspicious; but the vigour of the commentator should stimulate the conqueror, and Mr. Irving's prophecy (for the merit is all his own) must have the sole honour of the miracle which is to change a feeble and characterless lounger about an Austrian court into the new Alaric or Attila, the new destroyer of the city of the seven hills, and the lazy empires that still sit wrapped in the robes of its luxurious superstition.

"What may be the motives leading to this conquest is not revealed, and it is likely they will be various; but certainly the prophecy beareth chiefly upon the countries round the head of the Mediterranean Sea; and those which lie towards Arabia, and the eastern confine of Palestine being excluded, confirms the notion that it is the scattering of the Turkish empire, and driving back their power beyond the deserts, and reclaiming to his sceptre the Augustan bounds of the empire. And he shall prevail. It shall be given to him to rally once more the nations of the ancient empire under his banner, and to give life once more both to the eastern and to the western side of the eagle, because the time of the offering up of the wicked beast is nigh at hand, and it is, as it were, fattening for the sacrifice. And the instruments of the Lord to offer up the victim shall not be wanting, when the time of the end is fully come. For, while all these eastern nations are at his steps, it is said, 'But tidings out of the east and the north shall trouble him, therefore he shall go forth with great fury to destroy and utterly make away many. And he shall plant the tabernacles of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain, and he shall come to his end, and none shall help him.'"

This rhapsody closes by,

"Moved by what natural impulse we know not, but overruled by all the prophecies which have foredoomed him and all his chivalry to fall upon the mountains of Israel, in the valley of Jehoshaphat, by the rock of Zion; he plants in Jerusalem the tabernacles of his palace, the ensigns of his royal state upon the glorious holy mountain between the seas; and there he comes to his end, by a mighty overthrow in the great battle of God Almighty, to which the nations have been gathering together. There he shall fall and none shall help him." P. 62.

Thus is his highness of Reichstadt's fate reserved for the grand convulsion, and he perishes in the battle of Armageddon, after having led the army of Europe, he being then sovereign of the ten kingdoms (including England of course), to fight with

whatever enemy he may find among the hills of Palestine, where he is to fall, and where he will clearly deserve to fall, should he ever quit the tranquil city of Vienna.

We must now quit these volumes; we have not condescended to enter into a detailed examination of the errors of almost every position which the present commentator has taken. Until he shall give some higher authority than his mere conjecture, it is enough to give him the plain and brief answer, that his conjecture is improbable. The man who will ramble over the chapters of the Apocalypse looking for resemblances to his favourite facts, cannot fail of finding as many as he desires, and as many also to the opposite facts as he desires. An isolated prediction may be tortured to any purpose, and there is not one of Mr. Irving's "towers of strength" that has not been long since made a stronghold for some discovery which he would denounce as heretical and monstrous. But the prophecies of God were not given to be thus capriciously and uselessly dealt with. There is in the Apocalypse as much capability of proof on the soundest and simplest principles of common evidence, as much consistency and corroboration, as in the plainest historic narrative. This Mr. Irving has yet to learn, and until he shall have discovered that he has hitherto thrown away his time, nothing that he can write on the subject will be worth even his time.

Yet we must do him the justice to say, that he is answerable for no more than the adoption of this theory, and that he honestly confesses its being the wisdom of Mr. Frere, rather tardily forced upon himself; we could tell him that Mr. Frere's work is as little original as his own.

There is in the course of these volumes a good deal of that unhappy and cloying labour of language, that mixture of the images of this world and the next, that unctuous appeal and virulent attack, that thorough tabernacle style, which was called eloquence in Mr. Irving's crowded days. Those days are past, we hope, for the honour of English common sense, and not less for the genuine interests of the preacher himself, never to return. In the studies of his sacred calling he will find more suitable and higher occupation; and in this sense we are glad to find him toiling through prophecy. But we must protest against his covering under the sacredness of his subject opinions that would be scarcely tolerated in a party pamphleteer.

"Oh Britain; if now thou go apostate from thy God, who hath made thee the Israelitish tribes of this latter Exodus, upon thy head shall come direful destruction from the Lord."

So far for the denunciation, now for the offender.

"But alas, how art thou changed! how hast thou committed whoredom with every evil spirit, and vexed the spirit of thy God, who chose thee for his own. In thy public councils the spirit of godliness, which heretofore animated the defenders of thy liberty, hath wholly changed for the spirit of indifference and infidelity, which disguiseth itself under the specious names of toleration and liberality."

"And the rest of the people are become a political people, politics their religion, newspapers their sermons, and demagogues their Messiahs. Which revolution hath not been brought about without much artifice of Satan and his agents, neither is it maintained without gross deceptions of hell.

"And for reform in the administration of affairs. I have from my `youth held, and spoken against, and written against, and in my place, as is known to the nobles and prime ministers of this land, testified against the system of patronage for selfish ends which they too much follow, both in church and state." P. 383.

The reverend pamphleteer's hand is now, like Esau's, against every man, and after having belaboured the nonconformists (whom he denounces as in the darkness of political zealotry,) the newspapers and the ministry; he turns the parricidal pen upon the men of Scotland, and thus smites hip and thigh that thriving and conventicle-loving people.

"And O ye people of my native land, who heretofore were the pride of all the earth! into what a dead sleep you have fallen, and to what poisonous work of the mind you give birth. You are entertained with one who ransacks the hallowed tombs of your martyrs, and makes himself merry with their remains, murdering them over again for a piece of money!

"You are edified with a junto, who, through the term of twenty years, have from your capital given law to taste and policy (!) laughing at every thing sacred and grave."

"Your schools of learning have become strongholds of infidelity, which frantic with the liberty ye gave it, beards your reverend bodies to their teeth and utters blasphemies hardly fit for the courts of hell! Oh my people! Oh the children of my people! who shall restore your lost honour? who shall revive the work of God in the midst of you ? Ye were a people. Ye were a nation of families, and every head of a family as a king and priest in his house, which was a house of God and a gate of heaven. Your peasantry were as the sons of kings (!) in their gravity and wisdom." P. 387.

After this flagellation of the author of "The Tales of my Landlord," for which we leave him to the vengeance of Sir Walter Scott; and absurd panegyric upon those "sons of

kings," who comprise the northern tillers of the soil; he returns to attack" the indifference to sound doctrine among our statesmen," and, after all this, turns round with an undisturbed face, and says that he has " too high a respect both for the dignity. of his subject and of his office, to mingle those interpretations and applications of the holy prophecy with any questions of party politics or of ephemeral debate.

In the midst of the disavowal comes an abuse of the Church of Ireland, in which he felicitously contrives to involve the church and state of England, calling the Irish idolatrous subjects, to whom we have "for two centuries sent wolves in sheep's clothing, shepherds to shear the sheep and starve them for the aggrandizement of their own avarice, and bring dishonour upon the name of God in the sight of the idolaters." P. 390.

This anti-politician then, after having cast his eyes round the outlying corruptions of the empire, reverts with double pathos to the novel topic of " parliament.'

"But it is in vain, it cannot be hindered; I see that it cannot be hindered. That House of our Representatives, which was the palladium of our liberty and religion, hath already been stormed, and the rest will follow or the Constitution will split. This marvellous thing hath come to pass, that the legions of infidelity and the legions of Babylon should have mustered under one banner. Satan finding that the tribes of the sealed ones could not otherwise be mastered, hath for once hung out an UNION flag!"

In this tawdry and tasteless style the book struggles on to the end, satisfying us by painful, but most direct evidence, that Mr. Irving is as little designated for a politician as for a prophet, and that the eloquence which collected the multitude round the sectarian pulpit, was any thing but the eloquence of Greece or Rome.

Of the great prophecy which he has ventured to discuss, we will not doubt that he thinks with reverence, but he ought to have felt that this absolute compulsion of the vulgar topics of the day into contact with his mighty theme was an offence. If the veil, which has hung upon the sacred face of this sublime Personification of the providence of God, is, at the end of so many centuries, to be removed by a mortal hand, it is not to be removed by a hand brandishing a party pamphlet, nor will the secrets withheld from the crowd of the holy and wise that have bowed round it from age to age, waiting for its wisdom, be given to the utterance of a declaimer's lips.

Yet we would not repel Mr. Irving, nor any man, from the

study of this magnificent prophecy. It contains the treasures of divine knowledge, and contains them in such richness and abundance that, like the silver mountains of the west, they burst through their covering, and strike the rudest eye with sudden splendour. But the mine has not yet been laid open, and no man must feel himself entitled to say, that it shall have been opened by himself, but on the evidence of something more authentic than his own belief of his success. The prophecy was given, as all prophecies, for the honour of God and the enlightening of man. To say that it is incapable of clear and convincing interpretation, is to say, what we cannot under any shape admit, that the design of God has been frustrated. But, as its purpose was to produce conviction, it must be laid down as a first principle with the interpreter, that general conviction is the only test. The individual or his party may be satisfied, but this is nothing, without the satisfaction of that various multitude, whose verdict is beyond partiality or passion, and for whose wisdom, encouragement, and advance in the faith, all revelation was given.

An Answer to the Rev. JOHN DAVISON's "Inquiry into the Origin and Intent of Primitive Sacrifice," &c. By the Rev. JOHN EDWARD NASSAU MOLESWORTH, M. A. London. 1826. Rivingtons. 78. A Statement of the Argument respecting Abel's Sacrifice and Faith, with reference to the Objections of MR. DAVISON and MR. BENSON, to a divine Institution. By the Rev. W, VANSITTART, M. A. London. 1826, Rivingtons. 2s. 6d,

THE speculations of Mr. Davison in his " Inquiry," and of Mr. Benson in his "Hulsean Lectures," on the origin and intent of primitive sacrifice, have revived a controversy which, in former ages, had been often and keenly contested. A subject so interesting from its manifest connection with the grand and fundamental doctrines of the Gospel, could not fail to stimulate the inqui ries of theologians, while the few rays of light scattered through the code of divine revelation were calculated to produce a diversity in their opinions. The learned and admirable work, however, of Dr. Magee, the present Archbishop of