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Among the memorable facts which may be learnt from the writings of Eustathius, we would mention, that among the Greeks there were at that time institutions for the deaf and dumb. He speaks of deaf and dumb persons as being apprenticed to various trades (p. 79, § 17). Some teach and others learn,' he says, 'not by words, but by actions, which may be called unspoken words or living thoughts,'

IS BIBLICAL CRITICISM UNFAVOURABLE TO PIETY?

By the Rev. HENRY BURGESS.

'We wish some means could be devised for making such researches as profitable, spiritually, as they are interesting to the intellect.'—Journal of Sucred Literature, No. IV. p. 368.

THE professed admirers of Christianity are divided into two classes, of which the characteristics are so distinct, that with the exception of having the same object of contemplation or study, they have but few points of resemblance in common. Let us select a few individuals of each class who shall be types of the genus, and endeavour to analyze their modes of thought and feeling. In the performance of this task we shall endeavour to avoid extremes, and shall draw as little as possible from the stores of imagination and fancy. Our object will be to answer the important question at the head of this article, and to show that the study of the divine oracles to the fullest extent of critical investigation must be in accordance with God's moral government, and consequently pleasing to Him, and favourable to an enlightened piety. If devout feelings and holy conduct are in any case not the result of such pursuits, other causes than biblical studies themselves must account for the failure.

To multitudes of Christian men, the region contained within the bounds of their faith, appears like a land of enchantment, amid the wonders of which they wander day by day, delighted with the sight of the eye and the hearing of the ear, but examining nothing and doubting nothing. As impressions from without they received their religious convictions, passively, as wax gives way to the pressure of the seal; and being thus intellectually cast into a certain mould, their characters undergo but little change. Through the vista of the present, they catch a glimpse of the past eighteen centuries,

centuries, whose events have in their minds the fixedness as well as the reality of a gallery of paintings, various indeed in their antiquity and brilliancy of colouring, but definite in their contour, and immutable in their sequence and historical character. To them, Christ and his Apostles are great men, poor indeed, yet clothed with a dignity like that of pontiffs or high priests. Primitive Christianity has its bishops with sacred robes, and a lofty ceremonial corresponding with that of succeeding ages, though a little less magnificent. Its calendared martyrs from St. Peter and St. Paul to the almost unknown St. Agatha and St. Chad, are all undoubted enlightened confessors, never erroneous in their principles, nor fanatical in their search after a public and cruel death. So far from distance of time being connected with the necessity for a searching criticism, it only 'lends enchantment to the view;' an atmosphere of brightness covers all the remote scenery, and a halo surrounds the head of every saint, more refulgent as the period of his earthly existence recedes from the present. Christianity is of God; not as the wheat among the chaff, or a little leaven hid in three measures of meal, but in its whole circumference of profession. In apostolic times in the dark ages—and now-(heretics and the heterodox of course excepted) a oneness pervades this great community; it has clear marks of divinity which are never interrogated, never doubted.

With what great ease minds of this character throw themselves on the soft cushions of a fides recepta when surveying the present aspects of their holy religion, or performing their customary devotions! To them the sculptured cathedral is more than an object of taste, reflecting the zeal of a by-gone age;-it is divine. The pealing organ and the chorus of sweet voices chanting the Psalms of David or the Nicene Creed, are not things of expediency, man-invented, and unessential; they are linked in the fancy with the choirs of cherubim, and the harpers harping with their harps in the visions of John. Innovation must be rejected because it is new; antiquity must be loved because it is old. The faith of our fathers' is a sentence of more than talismanic power; it holds scepticism at defiance, and preserves him who knows how to use it from the misty and cold regions of mental perplexity. Thus submissive to external influences, persons of this idiosyncrasy drink in the dew of heaven like Gideon's fleece when others remain parched and dry. Ancient creeds, authorized interpretations, current opinions respecting God and the soul and an immortal existence, are to them like the soothing sound of sweet instruments to those who sail on a summer's eve on the clear bosom of a mighty river.

If the past history and present customs of the visible church

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offer no difficulties to the class of Christians we are now describing, it is equally true that the Bible is contemplated with the same easy, complacent, and untroubled spirit. The Book is of God without question, in all its sections, in all its words. Moses, holding in his hands the tables of stone engraven with the finger of God, could not feel more convinced of the divinity of the writing, than these men are of the heaven-born character of the collection bound together as the Old and New Testaments, prefaced with the dedication to King James, and subscribed, in many copies, with a list of the degrees of consanguinity within which a man may not marry. How this collection originated, on what authority its inspiration rests, what injury it has suffered by the teeth of time, that eater of all other things, they do not enquire: there the book is, and seeing with them is believing. What man is there,' said the town-clerk of Ephesus, that knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is a worshipper of the image which fell down from Jupiter? which thing cannot be spoken against.' The very order or the collocation of the books, which is probably accidental, except where a natural sequence is pointed out, has the impress, they say, of the finger of Divine Providence. The Bible begins with the beginning of all things, and ends with Apocalyptic visions of future ages when this world shall have passed away. It even utters a commination against those who would alter in the least its present arrangement: If any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life.' This threat, contained in one isolated portion of Holy Writ, and that the most obscure, is construed by them as referring to the whole canon of Scripture, and woe therefore be to the man who shall temerariously begin to examine the authenticity or to doubt the entire integrity of that which God has so plainly joined together as one! What would such blind admirers do if acquainted with the fact which lies patent on the page of history, that in the primitive ages the Apocalypse was only partially received as an inspired production, and that its place at the end of the Bible in our copies is not so occupied in some of the best manuscripts and versions? The views which are thus taken of the book when closed, and surveyed as a whole, characterize the devout exercises of these happy believers when they open its pages. Each text is a separate pearl which may be taken to adorn the spirit of any man in any age, or a piece of manna as palatable and nourishing now as when it first fell from the skies. A mighty quiver full of arrows against spiritual evils, it matters not which weapon is taken. A text in Chronicles appertaining to Joab or Abishai, contains holy mysteries as well as the precious sayings of Christ in the Gospels. Happy men! if an unwavering

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faith built on custom, and a freedom from doubt arising from never examining, can constitute bliss!

Is this a correct description of a class, or is it a caricature and an exaggeration? That all the features of the picture are found in any one individual we will not affirm, but we know they may be recognized in the genus. We say nothing respecting the objective truth or falseness of their opinions; we merely affirm that they are subjectively impressed upon them by education and custom, not elaborated and deduced by a process of reasoning. Let us turn to another class placed almost at the antipodes of this extensive one.

Before our Lord entered on his public ministry, he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil, and each wile of the arch-enemy contained a doubt to be solved, or a truth to be confirmed. Thus, in every age, multitudes of his followers have had to conflict with the same foe, not for forty days only, but in some cases for as many years, and probably often through the whole course of a religious life. Childhood and youth have been spent in their case in the way in which those seasons ordinarily pass, amidst habitual levity and occasional and passing religious convictions. At length the attention is fixed, and the maturity of manhood brings with it the solemn necessity of finding out what is the truth. Different countries, says the enquirer, have different religions; the Hindoos reverence the Shastres, the Mohammedans the Koran, and Christians the Bible. That my received source of religious sentiments is more worthy than those of other nations I am taught to believe and am willing to admit, but in a matter of such vital interest I must be solidly convinced. A Brahmin firmly believes in error because he has been brought up in it; may I not be in danger of doing the same? As an immortal and rational being, I must judge for myself.

If our enquirer is a private Christian engaged in the business of life, and having therefore but little time for theological study, he does all that can be demanded of him, and all that is necessary for his peace, when he confides in the judgment of the excellent men who, he has reason to believe, have given due attention to the grounds of the Christian faith, and have written books on its evidences. A rational and well-grounded confidence may thus be obtained with comparative ease, sufficient to prevent the disciple from being on the one hand the blind adherent of a party, and on the other from continuing a child, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine.' Difficulties and doubts respecting doctrines and obscure texts, and matters of personal experience, must be grappled with as they arise, and will yield easily in proportion as they are treated rationally. In this manner

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115 the man of business who is concerned for the well-being of his immortal soul, and submits patiently and conscientiously to discipline, will become a scribe well instructed in the things of the kingdom. He will have learned before he is old, that some of the cherished opinions of his youth were airy nothings, and that in the popular creed there are positions which no learning nor logic can sustain. But the same process which demolishes the unsound will consolidate that which is right and true. Whatever may perish in the fiery furnace of trial, that which is godlike will remain unscathed and become his comfort and delight; and what should a wise man wish for more?

But the Christian whom we would now follow into the wilderness is one who is called to teach others, and who feels he can only perform his high duties conscientiously by being himself thoroughly satisfied of the truth of the substance of his instructions. He begins his work, as an ingenuous and right-minded young man always will, in a spirit of deference to those who have been his guides, and naturally attached to the doctrines and practices of those among whom he has moved. His opinions are thus to him in a great measure traditionary, as he has hitherto had neither time nor disposition to investigate everything on original grounds. But the same qualities of spirit which disposed him to submit to guidance when under tutors and governors, will make him examine more closely for himself when, on his own responsibility, he is called to preach the Gospel. Then the flowery paths of prescription and authority in things sacred must be exchanged for the sterile by-ways of suspicion and doubt and examination. It is well for him that only a part of what is before him becomes visible at once, or he might shrink dismayed from his troublous and prolonged task. Here we cannot but admire the arrangement of divine Providence by which no more is laid upon us than we are able to bear, precept must be upon precept, line upon line, here a little and there a little.'

After having preached for a longer or shorter period, according to circumstances, the student finds it becomes more necessary for him to consult the original documents, that in all cases he may present to his flock, to the best of his power, the true sayings of God and not the traditions of men. He discovers, perhaps, to his great mortification, that a text on which he declaimed with great zeal and eloquence on the previous Sunday, has no existence in the form in which he used it in the original record; that the translators whom he followed mistook its meaning and gave a wrong rendering, which he adopted on the faith of the Authorized Version being a correct one. A single instance of misplaced confidence thus being distinctly recognized, there is no

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