all his eloquence, putting in a moving plea for the Church to treat it likewise; and when thus two voices from out the heart of two nations of Christendom come so accredited to a third, a lesson on the inspiration of the Scriptures may be timely. The lesson taught by her inability to interpret one single chapter, or, more exactly, that one chapter on some points, is in the fact, that thus Theology, the Queen of all thought, seems in the imagination of the world,

"Crownless, in her voiceless woe

An empty urn within her withered hands."

And yet Theology is asked still to surrender chapter and book of the Bible, at the fancy of anybody or everybody, till nothing will be left to be surrendered. Surely, if any of the more important parts of the whole Record seemed of small moment in this last age, however it may have seemed in the early heathen ages, it was the first chapter of Genesis; yet what a state of things has arisen from the inability to treat of it aright!

And the lesson will be complete when it is seen that the difficulty passes away, not by leaving out the frontispiece of the volume of God; not by evasion, or subterfuges; but by giving to every word its highest, and also its plainest force. This, as has been shown, meets the difficulty.

And let us end these discursive remarks on the state of the controversy, with saying, that if these things be so, it would seem that this volume on "The Six Days of Creation,” which, in the spirit of profoundest reverence for the Scriptures, and resting on their words alone, propounds a solution of the difficulty altogether new, should have met a very different reception from that which it has met with.

We have considered its exposition. It answers Science, if it has not to meet the absolutely fatal objection, that it is a new interpretation. And this brings up the thought before alluded to, that the interpretation has been lost. But how could this be? Could such a thing have taken place?

CHAPTER XII.

ONLY when the interpretation, which discovers in the sacred oracles the thoughts which bring their revelations into harmony with the truths of science, falls back for confirmation upon the re-discovery of some old, universal, authoritative interpretation, like unto itself; only when thus it is carried back to the race, to the ages, finally to the man by whom this revealing word was authenticated, can it be accepted as true. Is there any hope that this may be? Or who is there to read backward the thought of the ages to the uttering of this word on Time and the World, and wise enough, in researches such as these, for us to deem his opinion antecedently and presumptively conclusive?

Here let us consider, at some length, if there can be any hope of any such re-discovery of lost truth. Certainly no such idea could be indulged at all as to most of that which constitutes the volume of Revelation. The idea would unsettle all theological science. The idea of a Church could not coëxist with such a thought. But there is on the face of the matter something which suggests that there may be an exceptional possibility here. The record is one of its own kind, and there is naught like to it in the volume. Nor, as in so many other cases, did the moral exigencies of the Church ever require any careful reproducing, with the utmost precision of re-statement, of all that herein was revealed. Nor did it so connect itself with any other system of truths or thoughts, as to share in its light, and from it to have its own reïllumined, if it became obscured.

All will grant, that in the interpretation of a record running through a period far longer than that of existing civilization,

and made up of elements so diverse, there might be a greater failure to keep the fulness of the interpreting thought in some parts than in others. It would be far more difficult to hold on to the full thought of the second century as to the mysterious apocalyptic vision, than as to the history of John; it would be more difficult to keep unimpaired and complete the idea of the Book of Ecclesiastes, held by still more ancient ages, than of the Book of the Kings; more difficult to hold on to the true idea of some brief psalm, than to the interpretation of the tables of stone. Now, by every consideration, this thought culminates in the Creative Vision. By its age, mysterious and unknown; for its tones may reach to us from across the flood, may come from those days when Enoch walked with God, and certainly have come from those days when the lightnings of Sinai enlightened the world; - by its theme, out of human history, and pertaining even to the time when sun-ordered Days were not; by its great works of God, alone in the solitude of a mindless world, a house for which the tenant was unborn; by the solitariness of its truths, with nothing in the world to attach themselves to; by the brightness of its truths, so bright that the page seemed all luminous, and the eye no more thought

of any

darkness there, than does the common eye of vast tracts without lustre on the face of the blazing orb of day; — by all these considerations, this is the chapter of Revelation, if any such there be, as to which it might be true, that the volume of truth flowing from it might pour on forever a stream mighty, and deep, and satisfying; yet have lost, without its being perceived by the admiring and wondering eye, something of the primeval volume and breadth with which it flowed from its far remote, unvisited fountain.

And this thought may connect itself with the idea of the vicissitudes through which the Church has passed since this Record was made known to her. We are not about to open such a line of thought as this, that in its transmission from Enoch to Moses, something of the fulness of its exact mean

ing may

have been lost; nor that the keys which unlocked its

complications, and opened the storehouses of its thought, if committed to a line of wise men, may have been lost amid the wars and calamities of distracted Israel. For, with all its peculiarities, we do not think that this Scripture ever was of any private interpretation. We think the broad truths, which we claim are visible in it, were visible to the Eastern mind to which it was given; and that if they have become obscured in the Western mind, the cause will probably refer itself to the differences between the thought of the Orient and the Occident on so many subjects, and especially on Time and the World.

Starting from the age of Moses, as a period when the full and true meaning of this ancient Record must have been known,— as a period, too, in which its ideas of Time and the World conformed to the ideas of the Church, as produced by itself through an influence beginning farther back; or as a period in which it first conformed the thoughts of the Church unto itself, it is seen there were great changes afterward in the history of the Church, and breaks tending to interrupt the continuity of her transmission of thought. There was the great change when the Hebraic State itself was uprooted from where it had grown to a stately nation, and transplanted from the heights of Jerusalem to the plains of the Euphrates. It returns with its old language lost. Here was a break which might well have broken the thread of the interpretation. it did not break it. There was an accord in the thought of the Chaldean and the Hebrew mind. They were of the same stock. The Chaldean mind was as directly in the track of the transmission of inspired primeval ideas as the Hebrew. And there is no reason to doubt, none to deny, that some ideas, once common to both, but perhaps waning among the latter during their wars and commotions, may have received new vitality in the exile. They received as well as imparted, gained as well as lost. But as to Hebraic ideas of Time and the World, there was no change. The Time-thought and the World-ideas of the Orient, point to one common origin, and that origin this very Record; and at that time there was no break or change.

But

But that which it seemed at first view might then have happened, did happen at a subsequent era, when events took on a larger proportion, when there was a far greater change, when there was a wider separation in space, a longer interposing duration between different states of the same ever-existing Church.

It pleased God that the Church, which from the beginning had dwelt with the sons of Shem, should take up its abode with the sons of Japhet; that it should pass over from Asia to Europe; and all its thoughts, which were born in the East, should learn to breathe the new and difficult air of the West. Not wholly forsaking the East, it was there to pass into decadence, to be given into the hands of the false prophet; while in the West it was to be the central power of a new civilization, which was to be dominant over the globe.

The preparation made for the passing of its whole volume of Truth, with all its Records, and the ideas which must pass with them as their interpretation, was on a vast scale. By this one idea might be unfolded a volume of ancient history. Events assume the unity of a grand drama when God, solitary and alone in councils into which no human mind could then pierce, began to order the course of human events for this purpose. For this purpose was the genius of Homer and the sword of Alexander. With the march of armies, and great world battles, the founding of Alexandria, and drunken revelry in Assyrian halls, fully opens the Helenizing of the East. We might trace it from stage to stage, but here need only hint at facts that call up vividly how far it went on. On the mountain of Moriah stood once the statue of Olympian Jove. The war of the Maccabees alone saved the nationality of the Hebrew mind from a Hellenistic mania, which spared not the priests who ministered at the altar. The language of Greece became a spoken language through Syria, Palestine, Egypt; and familiar to the people of Jerusalem as their own.1

1 See Diodati's De Christo Græce Loquente, published at Naples, A. D. 1767. This very scarce book was reprinted in London in 1843.