on the rock. No wonder he should venerate the Bible, as the Word of the Highest must be prized by such a man. He determined to hold by that, as through life and to death he firmly did. "This then is his deliverance from darkness; his final triumph over darkness, what we call his conversion; for himself the most important of epochs. That he should now grow daily in peace and clearness. natural result." (Hero-worship, 210.) And of Cromwell he writes, is a most "It is very interesting, very natural (?) this 'conversion,' as they well name it; this awakening of a great true soul from the worldly slough, to see into the awful truth of things; to see that Time and its shows all rested on Eternity, and this poor earth of ours was the threshold either of Heaven or Hell. He has renounced the world and its wage; its prizes are not the things which can enrich him.” (Ibid. 343.) But more explicit announcements, touching the individual belief of Christianity, we find not here; and he who has carefully read the author's books, before this one on Hero-Worship made its appearance, sees in this last that even such explicitness is new. The truth is that, while, as we said above, this volume is a summary of its author's creed, contained more diffusely elsewhere, there are gleams in it of light from a quarter whence, from all that one could previously gather, light had not yet arisen on him. We find, too, the theory of consciousness a little modified, and repentance' spoken of not as, formerly, lean and unhealthy, but as the 'most divine act for man.' (p. 75.) They are but gleams, however, and transitory, soon lost amid the thick darkness. Are they the silver lining' of the cloud? With the Reformer and the earnest Puritan king he almost, unawares, bends before that truth which made them kings and priests unto God. That conversion of theirs he cannot get over. Here, at all events, he sees matters are not taken for granted. It is all an earnest, nowise unconscious transition, and the result is peace and clearness.' With such admissions however, and with all the magnificent and eloquent utterances in which he speaks of creation, and its thousandvoiced hymn to God, with all his noble sincerity and depth of insight, which recoil from the false and the unreal as from death, though the open secret' be really to him no longer a hidden one, and though he writes of truth, and duty, and death, and heaven, and hell, as we have seen, in thoughts which breathe and words which burn; one thing is lacking; his place is side by side with Wordsworth, not with Coleridge. Coleridge is to us the noblest product of the German philosophy, and-not speaking of that preaching of the cross by which God hath chosen to confound the wisdom of this world, and the Spirit's bringing home of which will be the world's ultimate redemption, as it is that of the individual 6 • Miscell. iii. 252 believer now our hope of the age and philosophy rests in the voice which still speaketh from his grave, more than in Thomas Carlyle. The latter, in perusing the gospel, has not told us that he found the atonement. Coleridge very solemnly did; and in saying this, all is said. The one bowed the heights of his majestic intellect at the foot of the cross, and, with Luther, found joy and peace in believing; the other reveals a sadder experience in these words which tone through the heart like a wail of hopeless distress'there were but three alternatives before this man-Robert Burns -clear poetical activity, madness, death.' There was a fourth - but Thomas Carlyle has not yet mentioned it. While, however, we must answer the question put above in the negative, we need not join in all the outcry against this man. At the same time, one could gather from every tenth page of the book on our table, notions so crude and wrong-headed, as would make a surface reader pitch the six lectures into the lumber-room-such as his laboured eulogy of the false prophet of Arabia, whom yet he tells us he cannot call a wholly true prophet-his seeming to class Mahomet's soliloquies in his cave, with those days of deep water, and nights of groans, and sweat, and tears, and prayer, which prostrated the strength of the Augustine monk, and wore him to leanness and sickness, until he found, in believing on Jesus, that peace which passeth understanding-his very questionable estimate of idolatry so consonant to absurdity, so thoroughly opposed to the terrible denouncements of the true prophets of God against the sin of it, and not against the sincerity or insincerity of it—with others which we cannot here specify;-notions which spring up very naturally in that atmosphere of super-tolerant belief which is breathed by men who are credulous of all but the testimony of Christ,-notions and false charities which we seriously condemn, and cannot tolerate. The true test of charity, toleration, or catholicity of spirit, is not what a man does not absolutely shut out, but what he first of all holds by. You can tolerate this, but what is it you really love and cling to? The man that believes all, and includes all, is one who at best believes nothing; for whatever stands, by necessity, withstands at the same time;-a truth which in great measure explains all pseudo-liberality, and which, taken in conjunction with the standard we set up of truth and duty, affords perhaps the whole explanation. Take social duty as your measure, and there is much which you can bear with. Take into serious thought that God is a 'jealous God,' who will not be mocked,' that the creature, by the very definition of such, and by the necessity of antithesis, owes to him immediately, and before all, such homage and reverence as your devoutest hero-worship does not even adumbrate, and your tolerance is infinitely improved, though it may be numerically lessened. We perceive in Carlyle's tolerance, simply the fruit of his unacquaintance with the positive truths of revelation, and of his apparent insensibility to sin committed primarily, and only against the personal God. Pantheist then is he? So it has been said, but the sooner it is unsaid, the better will it be for the credit of him who makes the hasty averment. The truth is, that he is no ist at all. We can speak of him but in negations, so far as it is incumbent on us to speak of him as a religious teacher; and hence it is, that one rises from his pages always a sadder though wiser man. With the solitary exception of that sentence, where he speaks of the peace which Luther attained, there is in all his writings besides no spot where the eye rests calmly. All is unrest, fightings without, and fears within. The men he worships as heroes of the right heroic mould, with the exception of the rounded and artistic Goethe, whom he looks on with nothing short of idolatry, and Shakspere, who wrote for him, as if under the potent and perennial influence of opium, are men of incessant warfare, who do battle to the death. He has not, like Spenser, a well of Truth,' where the red-cross knight is refreshed and strengthened, and goes forth as the eagle from the wave, to deadly and victorious onslaught with the dragon. Having not, as it would seem, himself drunk of the brook in the way, he concludes that where there is not conflict in the heart of hearts, there necessarily is insincerity and falsehood. Mahomet, Dante with the myrtle leaf glittering amid the cypress wherewith he bound his visionary brow,' Cromwell, Johnson, Burns, even a sensual Mirabeau, or the butcher Danton-such are the men who saw into the truth of things; such, alas, be thy gods, O Israel? Prometheus bound, Ixion on his wheel, Tantalus steeped to the lips, yet no drop of water to slake his thirst, a blind Samson that would fain pull down the pillars that support Philistian simulacra, Hercules with poisoned shirt of destiny; of such fabled and real ones are we reminded by the words of this great restless mortal. He appears to know Christianity but as a sanctuary of sorrow.' Fight,-ah yes! fight we must life long, and no sitting down, as Jeremy Taylor says, to a game of dice on the drum-head; but amid the din of the sternest battle-day there is a peace within, with which, as Luther found, not Satan himself can intermeddle; and Christianity, Mr Carlyle, is not sad tidings,—it is glad tidings, it is great joy to all mankind. 6 The gospel and the Reformation bring man and God face to face, and proclaim Christ as THE truth, and the way, and the life. Hume taught that there was no Christ, no truth, no way, no life. Kant ism and traditionism shuddering in the cold eclipse, recede from the cheerless and icy wastes of unbelief, but land us only in twilight, and the two playing fast and loose with the conscience, which in the way of earnest experiment is to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good; and with the understanding, which has a wide range for its exercise in Christianity historically considered, inculcate a faith without a reason for the hope that is in us-irrational belief, because not grounded on evidence. Burke's saying that the age of chivalry was gone, has now to be supplanted by another one,-the age of indifference is gone. This biform belief speaks to us not in cold unimpassioned accents, but is heart-deep and intensely earnest. The universal No has been succeeded by a Yes as universal-but from its universality, individually accepted, it is restless, feverish, unsatisfying; for flung loose from the solid rock of the truth, with no fixed star to guide me amid the billows, and hearing but the uncertain sound of traditional echo floating on the waters, or impelled by the changeful aims of a blind burning purpose within me, I may toil and ply my strongest effort, but despair seems my only solace. The skies are painted with unnumbered sparks, ART. II.-The Revelation of St John, Literal and Future, being an Exposition of that Book, to which are added Remarks in Refutation of the Ideas that the Pope is the Man of Sin, and that Popery is the Apostacy predicted by St Paul. Ry the Rev. R. GOVETT, Jun., A.M., Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, and Curate of St Stephens, Norwich. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co. Almost all commentators on the Apocalypse have admitted the truth of the principle, that the visions contained in it must be arranged before they can be interpreted, and yet very few have attempted to carry this principle into practice. It is this unaccountable neglect of a doctrine universally acknowledged, that has led to the endless diversity of interpretations which seems to render certainty hopeless, and has cast discredit upon the investigation of a subject, to the study of which God has attached a special blessing. Some analogy, perhaps, is discovered between a passing event, and the page of prophecy; the stores of memory, and the powers of imagination are tasked to render it more striking; every other portion of the vision is distorted into conformity with this leading idea, and a scheme of interpretation is fashioned, which, however imposing, is fundamentally erroneous. Such a masterpiece, however, of divine skill is the Apocalypse, that it is impossible there should be an untrue interpretation which does not carry with it the means of its own detection. The separate pieces of which it is composed will betray, by their yawning joints, the force which has been used in the attempt to bring them together. As an illustration of what we mean, we may refer to a paragraph in a lately published sermon by Dr. Candlish, where the talented author tells us that the seventh seal is opened; that the sixth trumpet, or second woe-trumpet, has sounded, and that the third cometh quickly; that the sixth vial is now being poured out; that there are besides two intermediate or parenthetical visions in the Revelation which now manifestly await their fulfilment, the prophesying of the two witnesses, and the persecution of the woman, representing the Church in the wilderness, by the dragon and the two beasts, to which successively he gives his power.'* We confess we are at a loss to imagine upon what possible scheme of arrangement the visions of the Apocalypse, alluded to above, can be made to appear synchronous. There may be such a scheme, but until it is placed before us, we cannot take for granted that the exposition is correct. For if the principle on which the several visions are brought together fails, then must the interpretation given to some at least of the number be erroneous. There is a double check by which we must test all interpretations of the Revelation; the first, the observance of the connecting links which bind the visions together; the second, the correspondence of the events with the prophecies, of which they are supposed to be the fulfilment. When the former of these is disregarded, the exposition must be at least unsatisfactory, if it should not be proved erroneous. There are in the Apocalypse three great series of visions,—the seals, the trumpets, and the vials. Let us endeavour to ascertain from the prophecy itself, the order in which these, its three divisions, are to be placed. But first it will be necessary to ascertain distinctly what belongs to each series of visions. In regard to the seals, we agree with our author, and some other modern interpreters, in supposing the book to which they are attached to be the book of the forfeited inheritence of man.' "The question which next arises, is, what was the sealed book? To this Burgh replies, that it was probably the book of the forfeited inheritance of man. This will account for the whole scene. As, under the law, when a man had sold or otherwise disposed of his inheritance, he might redeem it himself, or any one of his kiusmen for him-so when this book is presented to our • The Principle of Free Inquiry, &c., p. 14. |