exaltation of their own reason above the authority of Scripture. It was from perceiving, in the Scripture itself, that the orthodox doctrine was inconsistent with its general tenor, and that the phraseology which is supposed to teach it, compared with other scriptural phrases, bore no such meaning, that_they were induced to renounce the opinions which they had once held. Every candid man, whether orthodox or heterodox, will confess, that there are difficulties in the language of Scripture, embrace what interpretation you will; and some will take one side and some the other, as the natural disposition or habit of each mind inclines; but it is an intolerable assumption on the part of the advocates of orthodoxy, that whoever differs from them does so from an indisposition to believe what is clearly taught in Scripture. The first impulse which was given in Germany towards a better interpretation of the New Testament, was by the translation of the works of Benson, Peirce, Hallett, Sykes, and others; men so far from deciding what was or was not fit to be revealed by God or believed by man, that they are remarkable for carefully illustrating Scripture by Scripture, and deducing its meaning from this comparison; and had Semler and others only confined themselves to the path thus pointed out, they never would have been led to that wild extreme of scepticism which some of them have reached. A man may borrow from Hume, or any other philosopher, the principle, that no miraculous event is credible, and then, like Ammon or Wagscheider, deny the miraculous part of the gospel altogether, or, like Paulus, resolve it into natural occurrences; in the first case he abandons biblical criticism altogether; in the other, as the event has shewn, he will bring much more ridicule on himself than injury on the cause of Revelation by the forced interpretations and arbitrary suppositions which he will be compelled to make. The name of rational, when applied to the principles by which the evidence of revelation is investigated and the interpretation by which its doctrines are discovered, and not to a system preconceived and forced upon the language of Scripture, imports nothing blameable; and the use of it as a term of reproach indicates a secret consciousness that the system we hold cannot stand this test. Mr. Rose does not indeed, in words, deny the right of every man to apply his reason to his religious belief; on the contrary, he professes to invite such an application (p. 66); but if any one makes the experiment and differs ever so little from him in the result, then he turns round on him and charges him with an undue confidence in his reason.*

The extravagances of theological speculation which have been exhibited in Germany, let them be rated as high as Mr. Rose pleases, are no more than the natural consequence of the ardour with which the study has been pursued there. What branch of knowledge, which admitted at all of hypothesis, has ever made a rapid progress, and engaged a number of powerful minds in its pursuit, without producing many crude speculations, which excited the ridicule or perhaps the horror of those who did not reflect that " opinion is but knowledge in the making"? Who would hesitate between absolute

* Among the opinions which tend to undermine the authority of Scripture, Mr. R. mentions, p. 128, that of the existence of errors of astronomy, instancing the miracle of Joshua x. 12, 13. Now, if he really believes that the sun stood still at Joshua's command, he must suppose that it was previously in motion. Would he then have the Copernican system taught at Cambridge, as by the Jesuits, only as an hypothesis? Or does he take the passage in some other than a literal sense, and thus exercise that privilege himself which he so vehemently inveighs against others for using? After all, how can the interests of Revelation require that we should maintain the inspiration of the unknown author of the poetical book of Jasher?

barrenness, such as the theological literature of the English church has long exhibited, and the luxuriance which puts forth much that never ripens, and sends up tares mingled with its wheat ? *

To Mr. Rose, however, the very idea of theology being a progressive science appears an absurdity; and very extraordinary is the reasoning by which he would prove, that though it was lawful for the sixteenth century to prefer its own judgment to that of the fifteenth, it is arrogance and presumption for the nineteenth to claim the same advantage over the age of Luther and Cranmer. "The principle on which we separated from the Roman church was not that we had discovered any new views of Scripture, but that we desired to return to the primitive confession, the views held by the apostles and early fathers of the church.”—“ Our church receives only what was received in those ages in which truth must have been known; the others profess that perhaps in no age has truth yet been recognized, and that her genuine form may yet remain to discover."-Pp. 21, 22. And do not the professors of every other variety of Christian belief maintain precisely the same thing as the Church of England? Does not the Church of Scotland appeal to Scripture and the apostolic age to prove the divine right of Presbytery? Do not the Unitarians allege the confession of Tertullian, a confession which no orthodox ingenuity has ever been able to pervert, to prove that the majority of believers in his age rejected the doctrine of the Trinity? What portion of the Thirty-nine Articles is to be found in the Apostolic Fathers, whom we presume Mr. R. to mean by "writers who lived at the outset of the Christian system"? P. 27. The assumption of a conformity with the primitive church begs the whole question in debate; all believe themselves to possess this conformity, and the Church of England has the same right to her belief as they to theirs; but while they, according to Mr. Rose, admit that they may have been in error, she, with singular modesty, has established a creed for all future ages, in which no one should dream of making an improvement. We do not, however, believe, that the venerable founders of the national church were guilty of such arrogance as Mr. Rose attributes to them; we know that many of her members, not inferior in station, in learning, or in worth, to the Bulls, the Waterlands, and the Horsleys, have acknowledged the necessity of a further reformation; and we see with pleasure that even the great organ of orthodoxy, the Quarterly Review, in a passage which calls forth Mr. Rose's indignation, disclaims the absurd pretension that the church has nothing to learn." If we would hope," says a writer in Number LXIV. p. 87, "to restrain that wildness of criticism on theological subjects which is too prevalent in Germany, we must learn to tolerate among ourselves a sober freedom of honest and humble inquiry; our censures at present lose some of

"Nothing, if we except the dreams of Hutchinson, has come out in England, in the last 100 years, in the shape of original investigation. Compilation has there long been the order of the day, and names, respectable and valuable indeed in their time, are now appealed to as the only safeguards against innovation, or as instructors in the way of truth."-Professor Lee, preface to H. Martyn's Tracts, quoted in N. Am. Review, No. LII. p. 109. The able author of the article justifies the use of German theological works, by the extreme defectiveness of this branch of English literature. Mr. Rose, however, speaks of "the richness of our sacred literature," p. 13, and thinks it the great glory of the English church that our scholars have been all in holy orders, p. 145. These compliments may pass where they were delivered; ῥᾴδιον ̓Αθηναίους ἐν ̓Αθηναίοις ἐπαινεῖν· Others might inquire, why, from the time of Bentley downwards, our learned divines have done so much for the Attic drama and so little for the New Testament ?

their weight, as proceeding from a national school, too little accustomed to question old opinions to be able fairly to judge when they are questioned without reason." We could almost believe that this sentence had been written by one who had listened to Mr. Rose's invective from the university pulpit.

Perhaps some who would treat with contempt the pretension of restraining individual faith by articles of religion, may acknowledge that a certain uniformity of doctrine in the public teaching of Christianity is desirable, and join with our author in condemning the laxity of the Lutheran church, which allows its ministers not only to think, but to write and preach, what they please, and thus ceases to answer the purpose of an established church at all. This is by much the strongest part of his case; it is powerful as an argumentum ad hominem from the member of one establishment to the member of another; but very little concerns those who belong to neither, and think that the creed of every association of worshipers should be determined by those who compose it only. If there is no medium between this laxity and the jealous rigour with which the Church of England prohibits every innovation, (and we confess we see none,) if the very idea of an established church include that of a creed strictly defined and vigilantly guarded, we are furnished with a very strong argument against such institutions under any modification. For what result can their absence produce worse than that the clergy should believe one thing and preach another, or, through fear of this, abstain from all religious inquiry; or else, calling themselves the ministers of Christianity, deliver doctrines which involve a complete denial of its divine authority? We believe this to have been of much less frequent occurrence in Germany than Mr. Rose represents; yet it is certainly not without example. But how could such a state of things have existed, even in a single instance, except in the case of the minister of an establishment, whom the people are bound to hear, or remain altogether without religious instruction? Perhaps our readers are not aware that in Germany, though a man may preach almost any thing he pleases from the pulpits of the churches recognized by law, no one can establish any new mode of worship, or form any new church, without special permission from the government, a permission which in the principal states would assuredly be denied him, the ruling powers dreading above all things the increase of religious sects. The clergy of the Lutheran and Reformed churches have therefore a virtual monopoly of religious instruction, and the people, who would elsewhere have left the antisupernaturalist, for a teacher more congenial to their religious feelings, have sunk into great indifference as to the doctrines which their preachers may inculcate. The want of sympathy in belief, between the teacher of religion and his flock, is destructive of all the benefits which this relation is calculated to produce; yet we see no other method by which this can be prevented than that states should cease to consider it as their duty to provide a creed for the people, or a clergy to teach it, and leave individuals to their own free choice of both.

We rejoice as sincerely as Mr. Rose can do that the doctrines of the antisupernaturalists are abandoned by many who had embraced them; we rejoice especially, for the honour of Christian truth, that this change has been accomplished without that interference of the higher powers which he would invoke; an interference which, by throwing doubts on the sincerity of the change, would have destroyed its whole virtue as a testimony to the evidences of Revelation. If any one, however, supposes that this will be followed by a return to the dogmas of the sixteenth century, his wishes must

exercise an extraordinary influence over his judgment. The Protestant Church of Germany possesses no splendid revenues to tempt men to the profession of doctrines which they disbelieve, and such a retrogradation of opinion, without any external influence, would be a phenomenon without precedent in the history of the human mind.

ART. III. Recensio Synoptica Annotationis Sacra, being a Critical Digest and Synoptical Arrangement of the most important Annotations on the New Testament, EXEGETICAL, PHILOLOGICAL and DOCTRINAL, carefully collected and condensed from the best Commentators, both Ancient and Modern, &c., &c. By the Rev. S. T. Bloomfield, M. A., of Sidney College, Cambridge, Vicar of Bisbrooke in Rutland, and Curate of Tilton and Tugby in Leicestershire. Part I. 3 Vols. London. C. and J. Rivington. 1826.

WHEN our minds have been depressed by a consideration of the boundless variety of sentiments existing in the religious world, all professing to be founded on the same authority, and derived from the same volume; when, well persuaded of the fallibility of others, and conscious of our own, we have felt for the moment at a loss for any firm ground on which to rest our feet, and have been to tempted abandon the search for scriptural truth as altogether uncertain and hopeless; we have found our ardour in the pursuit of biblical knowledge, and our confidence in our sincere and serious conviction restored by the reflection, that if men have differed widely as to the results of their inquiries into the sense of Scripture, it is chiefly because they have also differed as to the principles on which these inquiries have been conducted, and that if they could agree as to any common principles of interpretation, a rapid tendency towards a general agreement in religious opinions must be the unavoidable consequence. But, however they may be resisted by prejudice, or despised by ignorance and enthusiasm, nothing, we apprehend, can be more certain than the just principles of scriptural interpretation. They are the same which are applicable to any other ancient book, and they have been so fully developed, and so skilfully applied in connexion with Greek and Roman literature, that no scholar can be ignorant of their nature and use. The Scripture interpreter has the same object in view with the interpreter of any other book-to ascertain and make known the sense of his author-and he must employ the same means. His opinion of the importance, or his respect for the authority of the work which is the object of his labours, may excite his diligence, or impress on him the necessity of guarding with peculiar caution against prejudices, or rash and fanciful judgments; but it can never authorize him to dispense with the ordinary rules of interpretation, because the importance and authority, whatever they may be, must in all cases belong, not to the mere words, but to the real sense of the author, and this can be no otherwise found out than by a careful examination of the words and phrases he has employed, as to their real power and grammatical construction, with a due consideration of those circumstances of the age, the writer himself, and those whom he immediately addressed, which might modify the force of his language or throw light on its obscurities. Now, it is evident, that the words of any writer can have but one genuine sense, which, if sufficient monuments remain of his language and his age, it must be possible to ascertain with tolerable certainty. There may be real difficulty, and this may, by various causes, have been considerably increased; as by the

great authority attached to a work, leading every one to seek in it a confir→ mation of his own opinions; or its having been received as an authority in dark and ignorant times, when it could not be rightly understood and false explanations were put upon it, which are afterwards long supported by prejudice; or its being commonly consulted as an authority, and that in an inaccurate translation, by numbers who have never been taught to understand, much less are qualified to apply the true principles of interpretation : but all these causes are temporary. To patient study and impartial criticism the difficulty must yield, and all classes of society are becoming daily better prepared, by the diffusion of knowledge and mental cultivation, to receive and rightly to estimate any increased light which may be afforded them.

There is nothing, then, extravagant or visionary in the hope, that the true sense of the Bible, or at least of all important parts of it, may in time be so established as to be generally received, and that the blessed religion it teaches may thus be restored to its primitive purity: but this glorious result is to be anticipated chiefly from the general application by all parties of strict and reasonable principles of interpretation, such as are allowed to be proper for all other ancient books, to the sacred volume. Every instance of the concurrence in such principles of individuals professing opposite opinions, is a sure pledge of their approach to a common sentiment, however this approach may be retarded by prejudices incident to human frailty. The discussion between them is now only concerning the application to particular cases of certain acknowledged rules, in which application one of them at least must be wrong, and their remarks can hardly fail to lead towards a conclusive decision; whilst so long as their principles of interpretation are altogether different, their confident quotation of texts against each other is worse than a waste of time-it is a means of awakening only bad passions.

From these remarks it will sufficiently appear how high is our estimate of the value of philological and exegetical annnotations on Scripture, and how well we are disposed to appreciate the exertions in this department of all sober and judicious commentators, to whatever doctrinal system they may be personally attached. Excepting only the sacred text, with the concordances and lexicons necessary for our own examination of its words, the works of scholiasts and commentators form the most essential part of a theological library, and should be the daily and nightly study of all those who undertake to expound to others the doctrines and precepts of the gospel.

In the book of which we propose now to give some account to our readers, Mr. Bloomfield endeavours to save the labour of the theological student, and to render many large and expensive works less immediately necessary by "a critical digest and synoptical arrangement of the most important annotations on the New Testament, exegetical, philological and doctrinal, collected and condensed from the best commentators, ancient and modern ;" besides which he has added his own collections during a long course of study.

"It was proposed," he tells us," that, within a moderate compass and in a convenient form, he should endeavour to bring together the disjecta membra exegeseos, the most important materials for the right interpretation of Scripture, hitherto dispersed amidst numerous bulky and expensive volumes, carefully digesting, condensing, simplifying and moulding those heterogeneous materials, including his own original notes, into one connected and consistent body of erudite and accurate annotation, and at the same time, intermixing with the whole a series of critical remarks, which might serve to guide the judgment of the student or junior minister amidst the contrarieties of jarring interpretations; and, finally, in order to more effectually adapt the work to