is an ecclesiastical one and not a political one, it is heresy and not sedition, and I will not consent to do deadly execution for such a theoretical transgression; or, as Governor Winthrop said, when he was tired of such detestable work, "I will do no more of it." Alas, no Romish magistrate could have done so with assured impunity, but under such circumstances as those, when the Puritan magistrate made the adventure-on a death-bed. Had he attempted such a thing in health, and in his sober senses, the Church would at once have vindicated her insulted honor-would have excommunicated him, and he would have had to die the very death of whose horrors he refused to be the executioner!

Such insatiate persecution, how indirect soever, always meets its recompense. Rome cannot wipe her skirts clean, when its imputation is fastened on her. She could not live out, or live down, that imputation, if she had Popes who lasted as long as Methusaleh; or could not die, like the Wandering Jew. Her dark and red-stained cruelty has made its imprint on history's lowermost foundations, and she must turn time backward, and unwrite the clearest records; or she must bear still, and bear on, the stigma of the Apocalypse, "the woman drunken with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus" (Rev. xvii. 6).

Now, as he recalls such issues for persecutors, the astute and politic Edinburgh Reviewer-evidently quite at home amid the lessons of history-maintains, that Prince Bismarck must not scar his hands with the imprint of violence, in any shape. The reaction and the loss, as he argues, will be as sure to him, in the long run, as to the Romanist, and his imitator, the Puritan.

Well, then, what shall he do? Something must be done. That is incontestable; even if the Falk Laws (so called from their framer and introducer) have to be retreated from. This the Reviewer admits; for he frankly declares, it is "idle talk to maintain that these Papal decrees simply regard the affairs of the Church. They are the results of a deliberatively aggressive policy of the Roman Court against the modern State, which is perfectly entitled-nay, obliged to take its precautions against a power, speaking of faith and conscience, but meaning dominion." (The italics are ours.) No doubt, then, "precautions" must be taken; but what shape shall prudence and forecast give them? Here the Reviewer is silent, or lost in generalities. Why not, then, let them take the shape of that instrument which Rome uses instinctively and lavishly,-excommunication; only, let it be excommunication in its civil form, and with its civil inconveniences? Why not let the State say to a

persevering dissentient from its authority, Have your way, and we will have ours as well? You refuse obedience; we refuse cognizance and protection. Your person, and liberty, and property, are no longer under the guardianship of the Government, which you dishonor. What would a Roman Bishop do if the State were thus to treat him, while yet she would not lay upon him the weight of her tiniest finger? He could not own a square foot of ground, or a brick in a church edifice. He could not transfer any property in his hands; could not make a will, collect a debt, or give security for a borrowed dollar. He could not show his head, or name, before any civil tribunal in the land. He would be an outlaw; and, if slain, no one could be indicted for his murder. He would be in greater distress than the victim of his own ecclesiastical alienation; and he might be held so, until having pitied his own victim, he might ask the law to pity his own self.1

We should like, exceedingly, to see such an experiment attempted. Disfranchisement is, sometimes, the best possible requital for cool, resolute, civil disobedience. It would, as the late Fennimore Cooper contended-no mean lawyer, or statesman, even if he did write romances-it would have been a far better instrument than guns and bayonets, in what was called the Helderberg War. And it would cost nothing, which was one of the grand arguments with Mr. Cooper, for its application in the Helderberg Rebellion. We have not the slightest doubt that it would have brought the Helderbergers to submission, sooner than sheriffs and an armed soldiery; while the State of New York would have saved dollars by the thousand.

To let a man alone is, sometimes, the sorest and dreariest predicament to which you can consign him. The sentence of the Judgment Day is,-" Depart from Me." Its prelibation is pictured by the Prophet Hosea, "Ephraim is joined to idols: let him alone!" (Hos. iv. 17.) Before so heaven-high an example, let the State withdraw judicially from the Romish prelates, who contemptuously disobey her. Let the ægis of her protection no longer surround and guarantee their civil rights and immunities; and then, let us see what will ensue.

'Something in this direction was attempted, in Tuscany, by Leopold, its Grand Duke, brother of Joseph II., and a friend of the celebrated ecclesiastical reformer, Scipio De Ricci, Bishop of Pistoia and Prato. His government insisted on a civil exequatur, for Romish documents, etc. Rome squirmed, protested Luther-like, dodged, and tried all sorts of shifts and evasions. Leopold held on; and Rome, fearing a worse issue, submitted with as much civility as could be mustered.

THE INSPIRATION OF HOLY SCRIPTURE: its Nature and Proof. Eight Discourses preached before the University of Dublin, by WILLIAM LEE, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College.

IN

N a former article we considered the nature of Inspiration, as expounded by our author. We are now to examine the proof which he adduces. But, first, let us present something explanatory of the personal condition of the prophets when under the influence of the Spirit of Inspiration, and the sense we are to give to their prophecies.

The prophetic suggestion came immediately from God, and in no degree or sense from the powers or intelligence of the Prophet. The revelations imparted to them are divided into two classes,— those received when the senses were suspended, and those received when the prophet was awake, and in the exercise of all his faculties. The first class divides itself into revelations by dreams, and revelations by ecstatic visions. In ecstasy, the senses are partly suspended, ciii.-1

either by the sublime character of the revelation, or by the energy of the Divine influence, or by both conjointly; the imaginative faculty and the Spiritual intuition alone remaining active, and being highly excited. Visions are the result of ecstasy. In dreams and ecstasy imagination is aroused, and the forms and symbols created by this faculty are presented to the spiritual vision of the prophet, as objects of thought. This is the origin of symbolic actions and symbolic visions; in the former, the prophet being an actor; in the latter, a spectator. The Divine communications or ideas the prophets translated into symbolic language. Under the guidance of the Divine Spirit, the imagination framed these symbols; being productive, where the symbols represented ideas beyond the range of human experience -and reproductive where the ideas were within that range, or related in a measure to this world of sense. The meaning of their prophecies the prophets did not always understand; nor can a sceptical argument be drawn therefrom, seeing it results from the nature and design of prophecy, that it was not always necessary, or intended, that the prophets should understand their predictions. The Spiritual sense of the prophets received a communication or vision from God, and their understanding contemplated the vision in order to comprehend it. They "searched" their own prophecies, as the Scriptures inform us (I. Peter, i. 10, 11).

While the prophets were in ecstasy (and their personal condition while in this state is not to be confounded with the impulse of the Holy Spirit), their senses were closed against impressions from the external world; but they retained an intelligent and perfect consciousness of their condition, and of what transpired therein; in this respect differing from the heathen seers. Yet they never gave utterance to their Divine communications, while in the ecstatic state; and in many cases a revelation was not committed to writing, till some years after it had been publicly announced. This consciousness of the human agent, and the elevation of his faculties in order to receive the Divine communication, are the tests of true prophecy.

A word to show the sense we are to attach to the prophecies. It is an error to suppose that each prophetic description relates to one and the same time, as well as object. The law of prophecy is, that a prophet always, or at least commonly, connects his prediction with some event happening at the time the prediction is made. Truth is very often in the middle between two opposite errors; and here she leads us to a point half way from Origen's excessively allegorical mode of interpretation, on the one side, and Thedore of Mopsuestia's excessively literal and bald mode on the other. In affirming

the double sense of prophecy, we hold that Scripture has no other meaning besides the simple meaning of its own words, but under this meaning, it has the same meaning, only lying somewhat more deeply. This is the perspective character of prophecy, according to which the prophet is represented as standing on an eminence, whence nearer objects are seen more clearly, and those farther off less so, surrounded with the haze of distance Or, to supply another illustration from Scripture itself: What the servant of Elijah once saw as no bigger than a man's hand, became by-and-by a pall that covered the whole sky.

Another word to point out the nature of the Spirit of Inspiration possessed by the Apostles and writers of the New Testament Scriptures. We learn that Spiritual gifts, received singly, were designed either to sustain and adorn the Gospel before the world, or to support the individual against the trials of his day. For edification of others, a combination of at least some of these gifts was necessary; either a combination in the same individual, or when a gift possessed by one completed those possessed by another-as where the gift of tongues was necessary to be supplemented by the gift of interpretation of tongues. But all these gifts centred in the Apostles and their assistants. Upon them the Spirit descended with an energy so mighty, and in so many forefending aspects, that all possibility of error was removed. These New Testament writers are the Divine interpreters of the former Scriptures. "In the plenitude of their Inspiration, they go beyond the stand-point of consciousness of the Old Testament authors, and reveal the full and hidden meaning of their words."

We now come to the proof for the Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, as its nature was presented in a former article; and in offering it, we, at the outset, discard without ceremony the well-known Roman doctrine, that we are to believe in their inspiration solely upon the authority of the Roman part of the Church Catholic. Nor can we entertain that other proof, sometimes proposed, the witness of the Spirit-the Spirit's bearing witness by and with the Word in our hearts. That this should be a primary or independent ground of our belief in Inspiration, is impossible, since it begs the question. And to a sceptic such a proof offered is perfectly meaningless; for his ready and conclusive objection would be, that he himself has no such witness, and that a proof of this sort is equally strong upon a Mohammedan as upon a Christian lip. Yet this witness of the Spirit is not to be cast aside, as having no bear