ble that it is from this name that there has been formed that of Subbat, and that it indicates that species of furor or enthusiasm with which those who celebrate the mysteries of Bacchus are inspired. What confirms this conjecture as to the worship which they render to Bacchus Sabbasien is, that on the day of the feast they urge each other to drink to intoxication, and if any by grave motives are prevented from becoming inebriated, they are at least compelled to drink their wine pure. To these proofs can be added others of still greater force. For instance, those derived from the costume of the high priest; who, on days of solemnity, wears a mitre on his head, and is clothed in a tunic, made from the skin of the stag, trimmed with gold, with a training robe hanging from his shoulders; his feet clad with laced buskins. Below and around the bottom of the robe are attached little bells, which cause as he walks, the same sounds that we hear in the nocturnal mysteries of Bacchus, and from which reason they are called the nurses of this god. Still another proof, is the thyrses and the tambourines, which are seen engraved on the walls of their temple. All this can have relation to no other god than Bacchus. The Jews do not employ honey in their sacrifices, because, mixed with wine it spoils it. Before the art of cultivating the vine was understood, honey was made use of, both as a drink and in the libations to the Gods. Even now, the Barbarians who are unacquainted with the use of wine, make a drink composed of honey, the insipidity of which they correct with bitter and vinous roots.

The Greeks themselves render sacrifices to Sobriety, in which they offer honey; because its qualities are antagonistic to those of wine. Another, and very strong proof of the worship they render to Bacchus, is that the greatest and most ignominious punishment that they can inflict, is to deprive the criminals from the use of wine during a certain time prescribed by the judge. Those who are thus punished"

[The rest of the book is lost.]

ART. V.-The Reign of Law. By the DUKE OF ARGYLE. Fifth edition. Alexander Shahan. London: 1867.

WE regard this as a work of decided interest and value. The noble author holds no mean place among the philosophical thinkers of the day; a position fairly won by the acuteness of his reasoning powers, and the clearness and ability with which his views are enforced. Acting in the spirit of the motto on his escutcheon, "vix ea nostra voco,” and determined to win an honorable fame which should be all his own, he early entered, as an author, those lists in which fortune, rank, and illustrious ancestry avail nothing, but success must depend on personal merit alone. There is a manliness in such a course which naturally enlists the sympathies and good wishes of the public, and secures their congratulations on his well-earned reputation.

The volume presents some of the mature and revised opinions of its author, the greater part of which had already appeared as contributions to the Edinburgh Review and other British periodicals of high character. The subject, as the title imports, is the Reign of Law; not, however, of human law, but of that which controls the course of nature and the operations of the mind of man. Over all this region he thinks its empire is absolute, binding the universe, as far as we know it, in the relation of cause and effect, as in a chain of necessity which is never broken even by the power of the Deity himself. This hypothesis has always been a favorite with those scientific men who disclaim the authority of faith to impose checks on the speculations of reason, but has generally been regarded with suspicion and dislike by orthodox Christians, as scarcely compatible with those intimate personal relations which religion teaches have been established between man and his Maker. Yet the author is not a sceptic, but a believer in revelation, and one object of his work is to wrest from the practical atheist the advantage he claims in that uniformity of natural operations, which appears to exclude all immediate divine intervention.

He distinguishes law (pp. 64'-5), with sufficient precision, into five different senses: as applied, 1, "simply to an observed order of facts;" 2, "to that order as involving the action of some force or forces of which nothing more may be known;" 3, "to individual forces, the measure of whose operation has been more or less defined or ascertained;" 4, "to those combinations of force which have reference to the fulfilment of purpose, or the discharge of function;" 5, "to abstract conceptions of the mind-not corresponding with any actual phe. nomena, but deduced therefrom as axioms of thought necessary to our understanding of them. Law in this sense is a reduction of the phenomena, not merely to an order of facts, but to an order of thought." These different significations all "circle round the three great questions which science asks of nature, the What, the How, and the Why." In inanimate nature the first three, we suppose, are the phases of law most clearly discernible; but the world of organisms, though embracing all, is more peculiarly distinguished by the regulative power of the fourth and fifth, which appear to constitute what are known as teleology and the more recent doctrine of morphology. In considering these last, the author introduces many curious and interesting illustrations of contrivances directed to specific ends, whether of utility, ornament, or order, and opposes with much earnestness and force the systems of Darwin and others, who endeavor to explain away all proofs of design by such hypotheses as development, or natural selection, or some not very intelligible idea of morphology acting as a living, power in nature. But throughout all, he persistently maintains the universal reign of law, more especially, perhaps, as respects those primary properties of matter which, as far as we know, are indestructible by natural causes-law in this sense, certainly, and probably in others, according to him, being never suspended or altered, but all the infinitely diversified effects witnessed in creation being produced by natural forces conspiring, through adjustment, to purposed ends. The chapter on "Contrivance a Necessity" is to us one of much interest. In it his illustrations are all taken from the flight of birds, with the structural adaptations to that function, and represent in a very striking manner how mechanical laws are made

to subserve the power by the most exact, beautiful, and (if we may use the expression) ingenious contrivances for the purpose. Two following chapters, called "Apparent Exceptions," and "Creation by Law," illustrate, in different phases, the same general argument of design working under conditions imposed by law, and show the author's power of dealing with those somewhat transcendental ideas which have in recent times become imbedded in the philosophy of natural history. The last two chapters consider law in the realms of mind and of politics, where its reign is recognized as not less absolute than it is in matter, and where, also, order, purpose, and adaptation to specific ends are equally principles of controlling authority. The author had designed to add a chapter on "Law in Christian Theology," as necessary to complete his plan, but for the present has "shrunk from entering on questions so profound, of such critical import, and so inseparably connected with religious controversy."-Preface. The work, which throughout has the impress of an able, cultivated, and manly mind, is perspicuous, animated, and unaffected in its style, exhibits much vigorous thought, and contains a variety of scientific information which is made more interesting by its connection with the philosophical argument.

With a thesis so wide and so varied as the work presents we do not propose to deal, but we would offer some remarks on the relation which its views, as to the immutability of natural laws, seem to bear to the fundamental truths of religion.

The nineteenth century appears to present, in sharper antithesis than most of its predecessors, two antagonistic mental tendencies great superstitious credulity in one class, with a determined scepticism as to every form of the supernatural in another. The first is seen in the prevalence of Mormonism, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and other wild systems of belief, to which multitudes of minds, generally ill-trained, and little used to the scrutiny of evidence, yield implicit faith. The second is often found with intellects of a higher order, being, indeed, a frequent characteristic of reasoning and philosophic minds. Within the church both are exhibited, sitting side by side, or following each other in rapid succession. In Oxford, thirty years ago, a powerful ecclesiastical party sought to re

introduce into the English Church many of the superstitious observances of Popery. Twenty years later disguised infidelity prevailed there to such an extent that a deistical lecturer could boast, with apparent justice, that the work called "Essays and Reviews," written by an association of Oxford clergymen, propounded the views of Paine and Voltaire with just that mixture of cloudiness we might expect from men who remembered they were in orders, and therefore not quite free to utter all they thought. More recently, by another revolution, the credulous element is again ascendant in that city, and the tractarianism of a past generation is eclipsed by the ritualism. of the present.

Yet, if we compare the two-credulity and scepticism-in the extent of their prevalence and the class of minds affected by them respectively, we cannot well doubt that the latter is much the more decidedly a distinguishing trait of the age. Probably at no former time were reasoning men less disposed to submit to the authority of received opinions; probably never before were the foundations of religious faith searched by a criticism so cold and so unshrinking. Not only have philosophers denied the being of a God, the truth of the moral sense, the necessary inherent distinction of right and wrong, and the objective reality of time and space, but what is still stranger, they have even doubted their own personal existence in the very act of self-conscious deliberation upon the point. These are men who have pursued too far the phantoms that haunt the dim bewildering regions of ontology. There are others, again, who have never questioned their own personal identity, or the reality of the external world, but who look upon the universe as a machine that works out its ends by its inherent forces; and, therefore, like the old Epicureans, they exclude all divine agency as superfluous if not mischievous, and deliver up man, hopeless, helpless, prayerless, to the blind fatality of natural causes, except as his own powers may avail to influence his destiny. Nor is this scientific scepticism content with denying the Deity all share in the supervision and control of his works; for one object toward which it zealously presses is to efface all those proofs of design from which his existence even as a Creator can be deduced. Such is the tend