sufficed for the achievement, so fierce and arrogant a knight of the pen would assuredly have added enduring reputation to his worldly success; but though he proved himself an effective soldier in the controversial campaigns of his own day, it was inevitable that the judgment of time should go in his disfavour. The sword and lance of Warburton's mental equipment, however fitted to put an adversary to silence, were powerless to overawe "the incorruptible Areopagus of posterity." Churchman as he was, and in the end prelate, the weapons of his warfare were not spiritual, nor the virtues of his character and temper the distinctive Christian graces. But Warburton was not all churlish priest," "He praised me, sir," said Dr. Johnson, "when praise was of value to me "-and an estimate of the man cannot be

separated from an estimate of his age. It was an age in which men proved their doctrines sound by apostolic blows and knocks, identified opinions with the individuals who professed them, and regarded truth as a kind of entity with a sharply outlined objective existence, a species of personal property, the rights to whose sole possessorship ought properly to be preferred and argued by claimants, after the procedure of a court of law. Two camps divided the thinking England into which Warburton was born. The fruitless struggle between theologian and deist, which threatened to absorb the entire mental life of the eighteenth century, and enlisted, only to squander in barren logomachies, the powers of so many of the best minds, offered a field of exercise thoroughly congenial to his nature, and he entered upon it with zeal indefatigable, and matchless insolence of temper. It must be admitted that Warburton had reasons for his assurance. Among the debaters, his contemporaries, he takes, if not the first place, at least a place in the very first rank. But no writings have so swift a foot on the road to oblivion as books of controversy, and notwithstanding the fact that his works occupy noble room in the catalogues of our great libraries, and that no reader can fail to recognise the immense strength of the personality that lay behind them, they can scarcely be said to belong to literature proper; and only the curious student of the outworn methods of theological debate will care to clear away the dust from bulky volumes, at once so exclusively polemical and so recklessly unscientific. In defence of his opinions, Warburton was an opponent to be reckoned with, and his enthusiasm for them was such as passes easily for a love of truth. But truth is differently

conceived of nowadays, and rather than as a searcher after truth, we must think of him as a doughty disputant, with the qualities moral and intellectual that go to make one. Intolerable in point of fairness or of taste as Warburton's philippics are, his confident alert attitude and eye, the gusto with which he administers a coup de grâce, the inexhaustible fertility of his invention for paradoxes, even the monstrous character of many of his arguments, aid in dissolving our resentment. To pass now and then into the zone of his stormy polemics may be found a change of moral atmosphere not altogether unhealthy for us who breathe the air of weak convictions and superfine controversial courtesies.

It is not needful to criticise Warburton's works in detail, the outline of the Scheme of the Divine Legation will be sufficiently illustrative of his mental habit. This book, though running to four volumes, is really a long-drawn-out controversial pamphlet, whose main reasoning, diversified by numerous subsidiary discussions, rests on a paradox-a device for which, and especially as a point of departure in an argument, Warburton had a cherished fondness. The absence from the Mosaic books of any reference to a future life had, it appears, been pressed by the deists as sufficient proof that the expectation of a life to come formed no part of the Jewish belief, and the theologians were hard put to it in the effort to frame a satisfactory reply. Warburton admits the absence of any such reference, but draws a very unexpected conclusion. His syllogism runs thus: the Jew was taught by Moses to look to no future charged with punishment or reward; but by universal consent the moral law demands these sanctions for its support, and they have been found indispensable by all other lawgivers since the beginnings of society. It follows therefore that, for the Jew, in this present life divine reward and retribution attended virtue and vice -in a word, God was the actual civil governor of the Jewish community. Upon such frail support does the whole structure of this extraordinary book rest; "his syllogism," as De Quincey says, "is so divinely poised, that if you shake the keystone of his great arch, you will become aware of a vibration, a nervous tremor running through the entire dome of the Divine Legation." A strange feeling accompanies the modern reader on his way through the book; the mere count of years that have passed since it was written is no measure of the mental interval that separates us from the author; the whole problem has altered

beyond recognition, the whole horizon of thought is changed. His curious multifarious learning, his subtile lawyer-like method in speculative matters, his almost incredible confidence in the torch of logic to light the way to truth, these are now subjects of antiquarian rather than of living interest.

Since Warburton belongs more properly to the history of intellectual method than to the history of literature, there is little for the critic to say of his style. He aimed at effectiveness, and attained not an effectiveness due to any unity, but of a fragmentary kind, as of well-placed blows. The mass of his work is amorphous. It is not surprising that he did not care to pay court to the graces of expression. Purple patches or poetic imagery would have been sadly incongruous in books that are best described as pillories for the author's adversaries. But if it lack beauty, his style possesses many of the elements of strength-directness, precision, and that high quality, freedom from all affectations and conceits.

Before the eye that contemplates the intellectual past Warburton looms out a lofty but receding figure, for he was in no sense a man of ideas, of thought that outlives or serves to keep alive in the world's memory the social or intellectual conditions that gave it birth, such thought as makes Berkeley and Burke, or their peers of an elder day, stationary and inviolate influences that win upon us like those of living friends. He may stand for us as a perfect representative of that class of writers whose work, without root in any soil of permanent human interest, makes no claim upon the gratitude of following generations. Warburton served himself better than his party, and his party better than mankind.

W. MACNEILE DIXON.

LANGUAGE HELPED BY ACTION

LANGUAGE, as appears from the nature of the thing, from the records of history, and from the remains of the most ancient languages yet remaining, was at first extremely rude, narrow, and equivocal: so that men would be perpetually at a loss, on any new conception, or uncommon accident, to explain themselves intelligibly to one another; the art of enlarging language by a scientific analogy being a late invention, this would necessarily set them upon supplying the deficiencies of speech by apt and significant signs. Accordingly, in the first ages of the world, mutual converse was upheld by a mixed discourse of words and actions; hence came the Eastern phrase of the voice of the sign; and use and custom, as in most other affairs of life, improving what had arisen out of necessity, into ornament, this practice subsisted long after the necessity was over; especially amongst eastern people, whose natural temperament inclined them to a mode of conversation, which so well exercised their vivacity by motion, and so much gratified it, by a perpetual representation of material images. Of this we have innumerable instances in Holy Scripture as where the false prophet pushed with horns of iron, to denote the entire overthrow of the Syrians; where Jeremiah, by God's direction, hides the linen girdle in a hole of the rock near Euphrates; where he breaks a potter's vessel in sight of the people, puts on bonds and yokes, and casts a book into Euphrates; where Ezekiel, by the same appointment, delineates the siege of Jerusalem on a tile; weighs the hair of his beard in balances; carries out his household stuff; and joins together the two sticks for Judah and Israel. By these actions the prophets instructed the people in the will of God, and conversed with them in signs; but where God teaches the prophet, and in compliance to the custom of that time, condescends to the same mode of instruction, then the significative action is generally changed into

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a vision, either natural or extraordinary: as where the prophet Jeremiah is bid to regard the rod of the almond-tree and the seething pot; the work on the potter's wheel and the baskets of good and bad figs; and the prophet Ezekiel, the ideal scene of the resurrection of the dry bones. The significative action, I say, was in this case generally changed into a vision; but not always. For as, sometimes, where the instruction was for the people, the significative action was, perhaps, in vision: so, sometimes again, though the information was only for the prophet, God would set him upon a real expressive action, whose obvious meaning conveyed the intelligence proposed or sought. Of this, we shall give, at the expense of infidelity, a very illustrious instance. The excellent Maimonides, not attending to this primitive mode of information, is much scandalized at several of these actions, unbecoming, as he supposed, the dignity of the prophetic office; and is therefore for resolving them in general into supernatural visions, impressed on the imagination of the prophet; and this, because some few of them may, perhaps, admit of such an interpretation. In which he is followed by Christian writers, much to the discredit, as I conceive, of Revelation and to the triumph of libertinism and infidelity; the actions of the prophets being delivered as realities; and these writers representing them as mean, absurd, and fanatical, and exposing the prophet to contempt. But what is it they gain by this expedient? The charge of absurdity and fanaticism will follow the prophet in his visions, when they have removed it from his waking actions; for if these actions were absurd and fanatical in the real representation, they must needs be so in the imaginary; the same turn of mind operating both asleep and awake. The judicious reader therefore cannot but observe that the reasonable and true defence of the prophetic writings is what is here offered: where we show, that information by action was, at this time, and place, a very familiar mode of conversation. This once seen, all charge of absurdity, and suspicion of fanaticism, vanish of themselves: the absurdity of an action consists in its being extravagant and insignificative; but use and a fixed application made these in question both sober and pertinent: the fanaticism of an action consists in a fondness for unusual actions and foreign modes of speech; but those in question were idiomatic and familiar. To illustrate this last observation by a domestic example: when the sacred writers talk of being born after the spirit, of being fed