the full, all that in that case would have been declared, while they exhibit and seal to him something more glorious than even the blessing, viz., the loving-kindness of the Lord. In this case, instead of having the stream pointed out to us, we are taken at once to the fountain; instead of being led to infer what the fountain is from what the stream is predicted to be, we are made to infer the stream from the fountain, saying, "If such be the fountain, what must be the stream? if Jehovah has declared himself to be the God of Shem, what is there that he may not expect at his hands?"* The next verse has generally been considered the blessing of Japheth. That it contains within it a blessing to Japheth I do not doubt," God shall enlarge Japheth;" but it seems to be rather a continuation of Shem's. This will appear more clearly as we proceed. According to the way in which the verse is usually understood, there are two distinct predictions: first, God shall enlarge Japheth; secondly, Japheth shall dwell in the tents of Shem. The former of these has been very visibly accomplished. In no common way, and far beyond either of his two brothers, nay, almost beyond both of them together, has God enlarged Japheth. "In the original colonisation of the world, he occupied all Europe, a full moiety of Asia, and the whole of America." It may be somewhat difficult in the present day thoroughly to disentangle the different tribes and nations, but even to our own times has this remarkable enlargement of Japheth been perpetuated. But the second part of the prediction is by no means so obvious, if understood as it usually is, The history of the world at no time shews us Japheth dwelling in the tents of Shem to any great extent. In the early ages we see Ham, not Japheth, dwelling in the tents of Shem, as when the nations of Canaan occupied the Promised Land. There have been occasional instances of Japheth's occupying the tents of Shem, but very partially. He has occupied the tents of Ham as truly; nay, and both Ham and Shem have occupied his. What, for instance, is the most noted of all the tribes of * "Shem signifies name or renown; and his, indeed, was great in a temporal and spiritual sense. His chief renown was that he was destined to be the lineal ancestor of the blessed seed of the woman."-Hales, Analysis of Chronology. Augustine remarks, "Sem, de cujus semine in carne natus est Christus, interpretatus NOMINATUS. Quid autem nominatius Christo cujus nomen ubique jam fragrat, ita ut in Cantico Canticorum, etiam ipsa præcinente prophetia, unguento comparetur effuso."- City of God, b. xvi. c. 2. + Faber's Eight Dissertations, vol. i. p. 171. The name Japheth signifies enlargement, and the promise seems to refer to the enlargement both of race and of territory. Shem (I mean Israel) doing at this moment? They are occupying the tents of Japheth. If the above, then, be the true meaning of the passage, this second part of the prediction is strangely indistinct. History has not verified it. It cannot be said to be a great historical or ethnographical fact, that Japheth has dwelt in the tents of Shem.* 66 But there is another view of the passage which accords more strictly with history, and suits the words of the original equally well. In our version we have, "He shall dwell in the tents of Shem." Now, there is no he" in the original, so that we ought to read the passage straight on, as if there were no such word to break the sense and alter the person spoken of. We read the clauses thus:-" God shall enlarge Japheth, and (or but) shall dwell in the tents of Shem." Thus readit is God, not Japheth, that is to dwell in the tents of Shem. That God has thus dwelt in the tents of Shem, no reader of the Old Testament, no one who remembers the history of Israel, will think of disputing. He declared beforehand that he meant to do so. He did so in the most explicit and solemn way in which it is possible for us to conceive of his doing so. He did so not for a brief period, but for ages and generations. He pitched his tent in the midst of their tents. He erected his temple in the midst of their land. And though at present he has forsaken his dwelling, so that Israel is left without their former guest, yet he has assured them that he means to return and take up his abode with them, in greater glory and with more abiding permanence than before. For ages God took up his dwelling in the tents of Shem, and that in a way shared by neither of the other two brothers; in a way regarding which there could be no possible mistake-a way which history without question recognises and records. His appearance to Abraham as the "God of glory," was his intimation of this.f His continuation of his favour towards Isaac, and Jacob, and Joseph, was a still farther indication of this. His sending his pillar-cloud to rest above them as they went forth out of Egypt, and as they marched through the wilderness, was something yet more unmistakable. And the whole history of Israel, from first to last, is just a history of Jehovah dwelling in the tents of Shem; so that we may say, * Scripture points out a fact the very opposite, when it says (Ps. lxxviii. 55), "He cast out the heathen before them, and made the tribes of Israel to dwell in their tents." † If Melchizedec were Shem, as the Jews say, the prophecy is yet more remarkably verified. See the mention of this tradition by Jerome on Isaiah xli., Works, vol. iv. p. 137. even in reference to that past history, though it is but a figure of good things to come, Behold the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and God himself shall be with them to be their God.* ART. IL-PROPHETIC POETRY. In none of the early hymns of the Church now extant do we find any allusion to the Second Coming of the Lord. The oldest Christian hymn, that of Clement of Alexandria, to the praise of Christ, contains no reference to the great day of promise;† and the other two brief Greek hymns of the same age, the Morning and Evening Hymns, are of the same cha racter. The Latin poem entitled Genesis, usually given at the end of Cyprian's works, and ascribed by some either to that Father or to Tertullian, makes no mention of the Church's hope. In Ambrose's hymns there is the same silence. In the ninetyfour Greek hymns, or fragments of hymns, which Daniel has collected in the third volume of his hymnological Thesaurus, we can trace no reference to the Advent, nor even to the resurrection. The same may be said of the hymns of the Nazianzene Gregory, who wrote about the end of the fourth century for, while they occupy about three hundred folio pages in his published works, the only allusion to the Lord's coming that we find is in the Exhortation to Virgins, at the close of which he calls on Christ's virgin-band to watch for the Bridegroom, that they may behold his beauty, and be made partakers of the glories above.‡ The hymn of Prudentius on the funeral rites of the dead contains in it a fuller utterance of resurrection-hope than any other poem of these early ages. It is a noble piece, though it makes no mention of the coming of Him who is to accomplish that resurrection of which he speaks so well. Apollinaris was a Millennarian, and he wrote hymns; but * See such passages as the following, in illustration :-The past-Ex. xxv. 8; xxix. 45, 46; Deut. xxxiii. 12; 1 Kings vi. 13; Ps. lxviii. 16-18; lxxvi. 2; cxxxii. 14. The future-Ezek. xxxvii. 26; xliii. 7; Zech. ii. 10, and viii. 3. + This old Greek hymn the reader will find in Daniel's Thes. Hymnol., vol. iii. pp. 3, 4. It belongs to the end of the second or beginning of the third century. It is well to notice that Gregory's tragedy," Christ Suffering," in which there are fine things no doubt, seems more fitted to exalt the Virgin than the Virgin's Son. It is sad to observe how early the Fathers became infected with Mariolatry. * as to the nature or quality of these we know nothing. They have not been preserved. In all likelihood he made his verse the vehicle of the truths he held. His name is handed down to us simply as that of a heretic. But as we have no works, nor even fragments, of his preserved, save in the pages of his opponents, we need not be too hasty in believing his heterodoxy, especially seeing he was a Millennarian, and also because it is admitted by his adversaries that his errors arose from an ardent zeal in behalf of the supreme Godhead of Christ, and a fear lest the speculations of the age should tend to lower or dilute that doctrine. Men are at length beginning to open their eyes to the fact, that Church history, up to the time of the Reformation, has been wholly one-sided. The "Fathers smothered all truth that was not convenient for them to hear uttered, and lied away the reputation of the good and true, without mercy or remorse. Always excepting Augustine, we may say, that in reading the Fathers, we are reading either the words of a Diotrephes, loving to have pre-eminence, and "prating" against all opposers with "malicious words;" or those of a Pusey, bent at all hazards on defending "mother Church," and putting down, per fas aut nefas, every whisper of dissent and utterance of honest spirituality which, taught of God, not of man, struggled to express itself in words not quite canonical, or in ways which would have cast a slight upon the ecclesiastical dictators of the age.† Century after century passes on, and we find nothing of Chiliasm either in poetry or prose. The only pieces approaching to this subject are the following. The first which we quote is hardly known, yet it is worth preserving. Daniel, from whom we take it, says nothing of its authorship.‡ * Apollinaris lived and wrote in the fourth century. The fullest account of him, or at least of his poetry, is in the Preface to Duport's Greek Metrical Version of the Psalms. See also Mosheim and Neander. In Athanasius we find frequent attacks upon Apollinaris, more or less severe. The following, of Basil, however, in one of his letters to the Western Bishops, is one of the sharpest we have read. "We warn you concerning Apollinaris, a man who has, in no small degree, grieved the Churches. By his facility of writing on every subject, he has filled the world with his productions, in contempt of the preacher who cautions us against many books (Eccles. xii. 12). What he writes on theology is not founded on Scripture, but on human reasonings." Then we have Basil's distorted description of his millennarianism:-" He has written fabulously (uvoiκws), or rather judaically, concerning the resurrection. In these writings he says that we are again to return to the observance of the law, to circumcision, to the keeping of the Sabbath, to abstinence from meats, to sacrifices, to temple-worship in Jerusalem, so that we shall become Jews again instead of Christians."-Ep. 74, Works, vol ii. p. 876. Thes. Hymnol., vol. ii. p. 380. “Hora novissima, tempora pessima sunt,-VIGILEMUS. We have also a long hymn "On the Day of Judgment,” in which, as indeed in all others of this period, we find nothing but a very vague utterance of solemn feeling respecting judgment, in which there is more of the unpardoned sinner's terror than of the saint's assured hope of glory. Here are a few stanzas: "Appropinquat enim dies, "Dies illa, dies vitæ, "Ecce Rex desideratus Et a justis expectatus, Ad salvandum præparatus." There is, besides, the striking hymn, in the same solemn tone, 66 Apparebit repentina dies magna Domini, Fur obscura velut nocte improvisos occupans. Clangor tubæ per quaternas terræ plagas concinens "Tunc fideles ad coelestem sustollentur patriam In an old Latin rhyme, containing exhortations "De Vitâ Monastica," we have these lines on the evils of the last days: "Mundus finem jam minatur Quod prædixit Veritas; Charitas jam refrigescit, * This is one of the nearest approaches to the reigning with Christ, which is our hope. It is, however, vague enough. + Daniel's Thes. Hymnol., vol. i. pp. 194, 195. |