arrangement, to worldly success and prosperity (for such, in fact, was the essence of the birthright); and I think we must not exact from men of an imperfectly civilised age the same conduct as to mere temporal and bodily abstinence which we have a right to demand from Christians. Jacob is always careful not to commit any violence; he shudders at bloodshed. See his demeanour after the vengeance taken on the Schechemites.* He is the exact compound of the timidity and gentleness of Isaac, and of the underhand craftiness of his mother Rebecca. No man could be a bad man who loved as he loved Rachel. I dare say Laban thought none the worse of Jacob for his plan of making the ewes bring forth ringstraked lambs. May 17. 1830. ORIGIN OF ACTS.-LOVE. If a man's conduct cannot be ascribed to the angelic, nor to the bestial within him, * Gen. xxxiv. what is there left for us to refer it to, but the fiendish? Passion without any appetite is fiendish. The best way to bring a clever young man, who has become sceptical and unsettled, to reason, is to make him feel something in any way. Love, if sincere and unworldly, will, in nine instances out of ten, bring him to a sense and assurance of something real and actual; and that sense alone will make him think to a sound purpose, instead of dreaming that he is thinking. May 18. 1830. LORD ELDON'S DOCTRINE AS TO GRAM MAR SCHOOLS. DEMOCRACY. LORD ELDON's doctrine, that grammar schools, in the sense of the reign of Edward VI. and Queen Elizabeth, must necessarily mean schools for teaching Latin and Greek, is, I think, founded on an insufficient knowledge of the history and literature of the sixteenth century. Ben Jonson uses the 66 term grammar" without any reference to the learned languages. It is intolerable when men, who have no other knowledge, have not even a competent understanding of that world in which they are always living, and to which they refer every thing. Although contemporary events obscure past events in a living man's life, yet as soon as he is dead, and his whole life is a matter of history, one action stands out as conspicuous as another. A democracy, according to the prescript of pure reason, would, in fact, be a church. There would be focal points in it, but no superior. MOSAIC PRO GENUINENESS OF BOOKS OF MOSES. — DIVINITY OF CHRIST. No doubt, Chrysostom, and the other rhetorical fathers, contributed a good deal, by their rash use of figurative language, to advance the superstitious notion of the eucharist *; but the beginning had been much earlier. In Clement, indeed, the mystery is treated as it was treated by Saint John and Saint Paul; but in Hermas we see the seeds of the error, and more clearly in Irenæus; and so it went on till the idea was changed into an idol. The errors of the Sacramentaries, on the * Mr. Coleridge made these remarks upon my quoting Selden's well known saying (Table Talk), “that transubstantiation was nothing but rhetoric turned into logic." one hand, and of the Romanists, on the other, are equally great. The first have volatilised the eucharist into a metaphor; the last have condensed it into an idol. If so, A Jeremy Taylor, in his zeal against transubstantiation, contends that the latter part of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel has no reference to the eucharist. St. John wholly passes over this sacred mystery; for he does not include it in his notice of the last supper. Would not a total silence of this great apostle and evangelist upon this mystery be strange? mystery, I say; for it is a mystery; it is the only mystery in our religious worship. When many of the disciples left our Lord, and apparently on the very ground that this saying was hard, he does not attempt to detain them by any explanation, but simply adds the comment, that his words were spirit. If he had really meant that the eucharist should be a mere commemorative celebration of his death, is it conceivable that he would let these disciples go away |