ends of the earth as a missionary; yet be utterly dead and without any fruits unto God. So you may bind painted fruits to dry sticks, but grapes can only grow from the union of a living branch to a living vine. "The fruits of the Spirit are manifest, which are these love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance."

II. The means of this fruitfulness. The Word of God and prayer. "If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you." Mark how entirely the work of spiritual renovation is of God. Grapes of thorns and figs of thistles would be far less an impossibility, than a single right thought, or feeling, or desire, without God's supernatural grace. with the fruits of righteousness, which are by Jesus Christ, unto the praise and glory of God."

III. The certainty of the attainment.

66 Being filled

It is absolutely pledged. "Ye shall ask what ye will" — of divine grace, that is, that ye may bring forth fruits unto God. Here is the prayer of faith and its answer. "This is the confidence that we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will he heareth us." And that nothing can be in more perfect accordance with his will than prayer for personal holiness is certain, for "Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples." Highest and most commanding of all motives to the Christian! The glory of the eternal Father! To give another moon to the starry firmament, or set a new and brighter sun in the heavens, would be a little thing in comparison. Just as soon as the church takes hold with her might on this doctrine of Christ, "the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun as the light of seven days."

ARTICLE IX.

LITERARY NOTICES.

The Divine Human in the Scriptures. By TAYLER LEWIS, Union College. pp. 407. 12mo. New York: Carters.

1860.

NOT confining our attention to the newest issues of the press, we would like to recall our readers to this not only valuable but uncommon work. Its design is to secure a thorough re-study of the Bible

as the only sufficient antidote of the scepticism, both lettered and unlettered, of the times. To this end it offers a thoughtful and most Christian discussion of a variety of closely related topics. We give a very brief outline of the argument.

Striking the key-note of his theme in the much deeper than verbal analogy "The Written Word; The Incarnate Word". the author begins by showing how these terms "the Word of Truth; the Word of Life" are used in the Scriptures, bringing out the meaning of the title "Son of Man" as expressing the pure humanity of Jesus. No man was ever so human. Thence, the humanity of the Written Word is deduced: the divine in the human.

The language of the Bible was divinely chosen. It has therefore a divine significance. Modern interpretation makes too little of the oneness and spirituality of the inspired books. If the fathers found more in them than the text always justifies, we are drifting under a critical and rationalistic guidance, to the other extreme. The Living Word breathes everywhere through the Written Word.

Verbal Inspiration is the specially designed product of emotions supernaturally inbreathed, becoming outward in thoughts, and these again having their ultimate outward forms in words and figures, as truly designed and inspired as the thoughts and emotions in which both the ideas and images had their birth. This theory of theopneustia begins with the most interior spirituality of the subject of it, and ends with the language as the last outward result. Old truths are reset in more arresting forms. Moral conceptions demand not only clearness of expression but intenseness. The colder ethical formulæ give place in the Bible to a penetrating human tenderness or personality. The Infinite can reveal Himself in language. The denial of this ends in pantheism, and precludes the whole doctrine of the Supernatural. It admits only the one total movement of the universe. Men instinctively abhor this blank naturalism. Miracles are refused as contrary to the credence of the senses, not of the reason. The real wonder is that God does not speak oftener to us.

Farther; the denial of the "anthropopathetic," and hence the supernatural, forbids any divine knowledge of the Finite: He cannot know our knowledge, on that theory. But he does. He thinks our thoughts, feels our feelings, cognizes our consciousness, as well as his own eternal exercises of mind and heart. The true Scripture pantheism does not imperil the personality of God. God's knowledge of our sin, while himself sinless, is a mystery, as Christ's taking our guilt, while guiltless.

If Revelation is human, it must be most human. Nature is a gen

The Bible is an individual epis-
Its language, whether direct or

eral epistle addressed to our reason. tle addressed to each human soul. typical, is admirably fitted to its purpose. It is not obsolete, for it is the unchangeable speech of human sympathy, of holy love. We have not outgrown it. It is the best medium for the utterance of devotion -the nearest to the Ineffable. A philosophical dress would have marred the Scriptures, though the materials of it were at hand. The Old Testament language produced a higher order of thought than that of any eastern or western philosophy. Neither have our modern progressives, literary, political, religious, developed any such moral purity and spirituality as to need a new theological language.

It is an enduring Word; living forever in a living people, written on the heart of the universal church. It is not, like other "holy books," adapted only to one phase of humanity; but it is a universal scripture, the most national, yet the most cosmical of writings. Its world-life makes it the most translatable of books. Its marvellousness never becomes, grotesque. The natural rises into the supernatural. The Old Testament, but especially the life of Christ, vindicates the moral grandeur of its divine interventions. The natural elements of the Scriptures admitted, the supernatural follow by a logical necessity. No narratives are so human, so inherently credible as these.

The Bible must be either a veritable history; an entire forgery; or a traditional compilation. The second is impossible. Literary forgeries come of a different order of things. If the Bible were a forgery, the whole contemporary state of the race must have also been forged to fit into its couplings. So is the third hypothesis untenable. Internal obstacles discard it. Tradition is hazy, legendary, distorted; as the Greek myths. Jewish Scripture is numerical, chronological, precise, from Noah's Almanac to Haggai's diary.' It is statistical, genealogical, geographical, documentary replete with careful censustables, and significant, memorial names, revealing the national character, particularly in its religious tendencies. The filling-up proves the authentic nature of the records. The same is true of the New Testament records. The natural in the history of Christ proves a divine interest immeasurable in its intensity. There must be not only a witnessing God, but witnessing all this as a method of the manifestation of the Infinite truth and grace, condemning and vanquishing human sin.

This new life in the world was perpetuated into the apostolic period. It came from the grave of Christ. A chasm in church history, scantily filled by the apostolical writings, separates the ages of canonical inspiration from later times. The new life was more than

the knowledge of Christian truth. Besides the doctrine, it was the risen life, of the Crucified. The disciples were the "Christ-bearers -"the man in Christ." Saint Paul was the type of the class. Not a dogmatist, he was the most practical of moralists. He thought more of graces than of gifts, of charity than of the wonder-working power.

The Bible is thus shown to be a World-Book, inspired, by the inbreathing of the Lord, with the truest humanity and the fullest divinity; replete with power; none of it superannuated; the book of the race; giving us universal truths in its statements of the fall, redemption, incarnation, and human brotherhood. Our modern rationalists, in discarding its revelation, are making no progress in holiness, the only right advance of humanity; their criticism of the sacred text is essentially unsafe, and worthless, as all must be which "has not the unction of a hearty faith."

We have made this full synopsis of the volume before us, partly in our own, and partly in the author's terms, not even hinting at a hundred of its excellent suggestions, nor adopting its every particular shade and idea, in the hope of attracting some unsettled inquirer to its pages. We have personal knowledge that it is commanding the deep respect of meditative minds, some of them very far from an acceptance of all the truth which it unfolds. It does not travel a beaten track. It is as fresh in its thoughts as it is thorough in its reasonings.

The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments. Translated and arranged, with Notes. By LEICESTER AMBROSE SAWYER. Vol. 1. The New Testament. Vol. 2. The Later Prophets. Vol. 3. The Hebrew Poets. 12mo. pp. 423, 384, 348. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1862.

A NEW translation of the Scriptures is fast becoming no rarity. Of late this field has been quite tempting, and many are in it. As an indication of the age it is a good one, whatever the private purposes of the translators. We cannot however obscure the fact that the most of them are serving some denominational or theological interest that the received translation does not favor. Hence most of the new translators are at the same time annotators, chronologists, and reconstructionists of the canon. Undoubtedly the text of the common version may be improved, as well as some of its renderings and English phrases. So all these efforts at new translations will furnish welcome aid in the study of the scholar and to the popular expounder of the

Bible. But all the improvements on the common version, proved or claimed, do not yet amount to enough to warrant the church in disturbing her practical and godly faith in the Bible as it is. To revise and accommodate our Scriptures to the changes in the English language is, we think, just the thing we should not do. Since the days of Elizabeth and James the English has been growing less pure, as a language for popular use, and we rejoice in the "authorized" version as the most powerful of forces to keep our language near to its best estate. Its very lack of adaptation for nice discrimination in those earlier days was a high recommendation. A language like the present English, polished and sharp and set for minute distinctions in metaphysics, theology, and philosophy, would be at a wide variance from the genius of the Hebrew and Greek of the original Scriptures.

A translation in our day is in danger of becoming an emendation, because of the nice philosophical distinctions that now possess, as a spirit, our language, yet find no responsive spirit in those ancient ones. And this danger increases where but one sect, or an individual, undertakes the translation.

Mr. Sawyer brings to his favorite work a fair knowledge of the sacred languages and their cognate tongues, and has greatly improved some of the renderings. We do not admire his English. It lacks that felicitous conjoining of precision and grace in turning a thought. It has not the unconscious, unlabored beauty of the version that he would improve. There is also an unprofitable disregard of expressions and phrases. Ages have hallowed them, and sacred associations have added, in our feelings, to their divinity. Nothing but the sternest necessity, imposed by greater fidelity to the original, should do violence to sentences of holy writ that the world of English-speaking Christians have been using for two centuries and a half: "Neither do men light a candle and put it under a modius"; "I tell you truly, you shall not go out thence till you have paid the last quadrans"; "When they arrived at the place called Cranium, there they crucified him"; "And Jeva of gods planted a park in Eden of the East, and set there the man whom he had formed"; "And Enoch walked with the gods and was not, for God took him"; "And God said to Noah, Make you a chest of pine trees, make chambers in the chest." We have no sympathy with such changes. They bring us no nearer to the original, unless it be Cranium, and who wishes to substitute that word for Calvary, the dearest in sacred geography? How is modius better than bushel, or quadrans than farthing, or chest of pine-trees than ark of gopher wood?

In some instances Mr. Sawyer has made our version more grammat