One thus to.dictate by signs, word by word, protection to this institution of high bethe most complicated sentences. But nevolence. Sicard was a subtle metaphytoo often it was found that the pupil had sician. His "Course of Instruction for a no idea, or a very imperfect one, of the Deaf-Mute from Birth" has justly been meaning of what he thus wrote. Yet characterized as a philosophical romance, the mere recognition of the language of rather than a practical treatise. In this gestures as deserving of assiduous culti- once celebrated work, he assumes his vation, and capable of indefinitely great deaf-mute pupil to come to his teacher improvement, forms a new and better era not only destitute of words, but totally in the history of the art. destitute of ideas. The teacher appears as the magician whose wand is to create a soul in this walking machine. Together they explore the realms of nature and of art, naming, analyzing, and classifying all objects, animate and inanimate, before the pupil was taught to compose the simplest phrase. And then he was introduced to the adjective and verb by means of curious and laborious metaphysical processes, long since laid aside as at least unnecessary. Yet in some instances Sicard was eminently successful. of his first pupils, Jean Massien, had a world-wide reputation from certain happy responses and definitions, such as this wellknown one, "Gratitude is the memory of the heart." Yet he was never able to write a regular and correct composition of any length. A younger pupil of Sicard, Laurent Clare, still living at a green old age, was regarded in his youth as not only the best pupil, but the best teacher of the school of Paris, and brought to this country the language of signs and the processes of instruction which, improved by the labors of successive generations of vivacious pupils and emulativc teachers in the Parisian school during more than half a century, served as the base of the American system, which, after another half century of diligent cultivation, still retains the best of the distinguishing features of the method of De l'Epée. This impulse to the cultivation of the language of gestures is not the only title of De l'Epée to the gratitude of the deaf and dumb. His most celebrated cotemporaries and rivals, Pereire, Heinicke, and Braidwood, practised their art as a source of gain, and refused to impart it except for a consideration and under the seal of secrecy. De l'Epée, on the contrary, with zealous and large-hearted benevolence, devoted his own fortune to the support of his school, refused offered gifts except for the benefit of the deaf and dumb, imparted his method freely to all comers, published them in works which he printed at his own cost, and in every possible way sought to awaken public attention and enlist sympathy in behalf of those whom he habitually called his children. Though his immediate success as a teacher was not equal to that of his rivals, his zeal and saintly benevolence took hold of the public heart, interested more than one sovereign in his labors, and gave to the cause of deaf-mute instruction an impulse which it would hardly have received from the labors of a hundred such teachers as his predecessors and cotemporaries. From his time education, which had been the privilege of a favored few, began to be recognized as a duty which the community owed to all the deaf and dumb. De l'Epée died in 1789, and his school was soon after taken under the patronage of the French government, and his friend and disciple, the celebrated Sicard, placed at its head. Threatened with massacre with a crowd of other ecclesiastics, Sicard was saved mainly because he was a teacher of the deaf and dumb, and all through the wild scenes of the Revolution, the nation continued to accord support and The greatest improvements in the methods of De l'Epee and Sicard are due to the genius of Bebian, whose light rose when that of Sicard began to wane. By his influence, the method became much more simple and natural, the sign language more clear and impressive. The successors of Sicard and Bebian have been so numerous that we can barely name a few. The baron Degerando, not himself a practical teacher, yet wrote an elaborate and valuable treatise on the principles and history of the art. Edward Morel, Piroux, Leon Vaïsse, Valade Gabel, Puybonnieux, and others, have published copious and valuable works. There have also been deaf-mute authors who have made a sensation. Berthier in prose, and Pelissier in verse, have shown that deaf-mutes can successfully cultivate let ters. We have hardly spoken of any other German writer or teacher except Heinicke; yet the German writers on this subject are to be reckoned by scores, perhaps by hundreds. We have only space to mention Neumann, Jeeger, Moritz Hill, and O. F. Kruse, the last a deaf-mute. In Italy, the most conspicuous author is the Abbé Pendola of Sienna. In Spain ! we may name Ballasteros. Great Britain has produced quite a number of writers who have discussed the principles of the art, or published lessons in language adapted to the use of deaf-mutes. The most eminent since Doctor Watson, is probably Charles Baker of Doncaster. Mr. Anderson of Glasgow, and Mr. Buxton of Liverpool, deserve mention. We hope in a future number to give a sketch of the history and present state of the American schools. VL. Upon the field foul vultures light, With whetted beak, Gorging their maws through all the night, VII. Back, back! pale Ghosts!-the summer grain Waves rippling gold Where, stark and cold, Lie high-piled stacks of putrid slain, THE REVIVAL OF CHRISTOLOGY.* THERE are what Vico calls "the Returns of History." He applied the phrase to the transition of every State or nation through the periods of youth, maturity, decrepitude, and extinction, which he regarded as the inevitable law of history. This analogy, taken from the sphere of individual life, is doubtless carried too, far by Vico, as if an inexorable fate condemned every nation to certain extinction. But it is still true, notwithstanding the undeniable progress of mankind, that there are at some periods "returns" of certain tendencies and conditions, strikingly akin to those of past epochs. Especially will this be likely to be the case, when great changes and crises are imminent, when the race is preparing for a momentous step in advance. All the social, political, and religious forces will then be at work, and their commingling and strife bring back the old chaos, out of which the new Kosmos is to be engendered. *Christ and Christendom. The Boyle Lectures for the year 1866. By E. H. Plumptre, M.A., Prebendary of St. Paul's; Professor of Divinity, King's College, Loudon. A. Strahan: London, 1867. The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. (Bampton Lectures.) By Henry Par ry Liddon, M.A., Prebendary of Salisbury, etc.: Rivingtons: London, 1867. Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Boston, 1866. Ecce Deus: Essays on the Life and Doctrine of Jesus Christ. Boston, 1867. Such was the state of things in the ancient world, when Christianity was completing its conquests over Paganism in both East and West, heralding the downfall of the old Roman Empire. In the last half of the fourth, and the first of the fifth century, the whole of expiring heathenism rallied its forces in a death-struggle with the advancing and victorious Christianity. Julian and the New Platonists attempted to set forth a system which, they claimed, surpassed Christianity in its completeness, its universality, and its fitness to man's real needs. In this contest the Christian faith then prevailed, chiefly in and through the power of its Christology—by holding forth, full high advanced, its whole system as centering in Christ, and by elaborating the Christology of the system so fully and sharply, that the decrees of Constantinople and Chalcedon have. been adopted into all the subsequent confessions of faith. At this decisive epoch the power and the victory of Christianity were found to centre in its Christology. In other relations and against other foes, we are now passing through a struggle strikingly akin to that of the old faith in those ancient times. We are in the midst of one of the "Returns of History." Modern philosophy, in its two great anti-Christian forms of materialism and pantheism, is striving to do just what ancient paganism attempted in the fifth century, that is, to unfold a system of thought supposed to be absolute and final, which is to supersede the Christian faith, and to be man's guide in life. And the present schemes and attempts are much more bold and subtle and comprehensive than any that have gone before. To defend and maintain itself against such foes, and to obtain the victory over them, the Christian system must be planted on its impregnable foundations, it must call out its resources and reserves, and be illumined in all its parts by its central light. Accordingly we find that now, as in ancient times, the Christology of the system is made prominent, both in the attack and in the defense. The conflict is centering in the person and work of Christ, for here alone can be found the real centre, the very seat of life, of the Christian religion. Here alone all is to be won or all lost. From the very necessity of the case, there has been a revival of Christology. The Christological Revival is the most striking and signal characteristic of the theological discussions and controversies of the present age, as compared with those of the eighteenth century, and the first third of the present century. The whole Christian and even anti-Christian literature of Germany, France, England, and this country, is teeming with volumes and essays bearing upon the person and work of Christ. Other themes have comparatively lost t:eir interest. The sum and substance of the main theological investigations in Germany, for example, may be said to consist--so far as the attack on Christianity is concerned-in two main attempts on the one hand, to show that the historical data do not guarantee to Christ the position, the authority, the nature and the offices, which the Church has uniformly ascribed to him; and on the other hand, to construct a speculative system, designed to supersede the supreme and absolute claims of the Christian religion, as centering in Christ. And this last attempt is chiefly made, (as in the schemes of Hegel and Strauss and Baur) not by denying all truth to Christianity, but by presenting its essential verities in what they consider their more perfect, that is, more speculative or philosophic form; thus paying homage to Christianity, even while attempting its subversion. The same general method of attack and defense is also followed, less consciously, less definitely, in other lands, in England, and our own country. A sure instinct here impels and guides both the friends and the foes of our faith. The problems of thought, of faith, of history, of speculation, are gathered up into the dilemma-Christ or something else. And the very statement implies, that, to all thinking minds, who really know and grasp the living issues, Christ is the grand enigma, if he be not the great key, of human history; that his is the one nature and character and influence as yet not mastered; that his is the One Name, towering above all others, attracting as does no other, attracting as by a subtle and resistless force both friend and foe; that somehow human destiny centres in him, that somehow human history is inwrought with his very nature and work; that wisdom and folly, life and death, eternal life, and eternal death, the solution of the deepest issues of the present and of the highest problems of the future, are somehow vitally connected with the question, who and what is Christ? And this must be the case, if he is what the Church believes him to be; and it could not be the case if he is not what the Church believes him to be. Or else, the world has been given up to such blindness and idolatry as surpass all that the sternest advocates of human depravity have ever ascribed to it-for they have supposed that, through grace, something of real faith and true worship has been known among men; but if the Christian faith be given up as unreal and delusive, then all that men have ever believed, all systems of religion, have been a phantasm and a mockery. If the history of Christ can be resolved into a series of myths, and his person into a nebulous abstraction, and his work into a general, unconscious law, and faith in him into a subjective yearning, and life in him into a figure of speech, then is the whole religious history of the race, even in its highest forms, the most vain and stupendous of fictions, and we are all but dreamers on the verge of an unknown and unfathomable abyss. Christian Realism alone, that which finds the reality of Christianity in the facts that centre in the person and work of Christ, and not in the mere dogmas and theories about these facts, this alone can save us from the nescience and the nihilism, which must else be man's last word upon the vital question of his destiny. "Christianity," said Schelling, "is in its inmost nature historic;" that is, it is fact and not theory. Hence the significance of all these recent discussions in this Christological Revival. It is a "return" to a clear vision of the central object of the Christian system. The life of Christ in Judea, eighteen hundred years ago, the death of Christ on Calvary, his resurrection, ascension, and kingly sway, are now as real and living subjects and questions as are those about men now living, and present policies and feuds, and even as those which concern man's material progress and the advance of the physical sciences. On naturalistic grounds this is most marvelous; but the marvel is a fact. The name of Christ, the person of Christ, the work of Christ, his life of sanctity and love when he abode here so long ago in the flesh; his death of suffering and love when he was nailed to the bitter cross for an advantage-these are still the themes, (account for it as we may) preached more widely, debated more intensely, loved more fervently, believed in with a deeper and more living faith than any other themes of the day and the hour. Every day, from the rising to the setting sun, arises the incense of sacrificial praise and prayer to Him whom the nations still hail as the Incarnate God; and the whole earth in its daily round is circled and girdled with this sublime worship, which, as the nations still believe, alone unites and reconciles our fallen human race with the Father of all. This living sense of the personal presence and agency of Christ was never, perhaps, more consciously felt, nor more widely diffused, than it is now; and this despite the strong counter tendencies, and the new development of rival claims and interests, which so signally mark this epoch in the history of our race. This state of things arouses, of course, anew all the Christological questionsthat is, all the questions that pertain to the person and work of Christ, his relation both to God and man, his place in the universe and in the history of our earth. The fate of Christianity as a distinctive system, and its claim to absolute authority and supremacy, are felt to be involved and at stake. And hence the person and work of Christ are subjected to a new examination, in view at once of the whole history of the past, and all the theories and speculations of the present. What Bacon calls "the curious questions and the strang anatomies of the nature and person of Christ," were not more rife and stirring in the fifth, than they are in this nineteenth century of the Christian era. The fate of the world may again turn, as Gibbon said it then did, upon an iota; i. e., upon the question whether Christ had the same (homoousia) or only a similar (homoiousia) nature with God the Father. In view of these subtle disputations, it was once asserted that it was an ingenious matter to be a Christian" (res ingeniosa fuit esse Christianum); and now, not without clear and sharp distinctions, can we come to a solution of the questions that meet us on the right hand and on the left, at home and abroad. "Many other things," are the words of Augustine in his tract on the Trinity, “are to be thought of in the incarnation of Christ, besides the absolution of sin;" and once again the whole problem of the absolution of sin, and also the whole mystery of godliness, and also the universal relations of the Godman, are brought forth and examined anew, almost as if they were new; debated as earnestly as is the last discovery in physics or the newest theory of speculation; for men have not yet learned to fathom the full import of the sayings, that Christ "is the fulness of him that filleth all in all;" that "it pleased the Father that in Him should |