The Press. — London, England, 1858-10-09 00:00:00

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 9, 1858 argument, front analogy, fails precisely in . that ch aracteristic whic h g ives analogy its str en g th, proportrn: o estimate the exact amount of retribution due to individual offence be a di ffi cu lt calculation, but we may feel quite certain nifty h y between punishment in time that, if Lsehremiesnatnlnateltaelrongity, the penalty and pu ni shmen t • • and the trans gression must be commensurable quantities. The con sequence of misconduct on earth may be permanent, without rendering life valueless ; and where it brings irremediable and intolerable misery, it brings also the sure specific for all human ills—death. However flagrant our crime, or severe our punishment, it ends. For years of wrong doing. human vengeance requires only years of suffering. Shall divine justice, though entreated by divine mercy, demand for th e transient life of sin nothing less than an eternity of sorrow ; for finito and natural error, infinite and supernatural torture ? Now, to pass over the ingenious sophistry of the last two sentences—in which it is conveniently forgotten that for a moment's "wrong doing" human vengeance, as well as the laws of nature, often require years of suffering too—is the writer, we would ask, unaware that Butler com mits himself to no opinion whatever about the eternity of future punishment, contenting h •m -self with the observation that the doctrine is not peculiar to Christianity, and is therefore no pe culiar objection against it? This a specimen of the hose and inaccurate style in which the article is written throughout. His attempts at biblical criticism are no better than his attempts at philosophical. Here is an instance : We will mention another instance of the pliancy with which, in the hands of this theological Ulysses, the obliging bow of Scriptural expression consents to bend to the necessities of orthodox interpretation. Mr. Newman, in adverting to the incident of the fig-tree (Mark xi.), observes : "we are perplexingly told that it was not the time fir figs." Now, answers his ready corrector, " all that is necessary seems to be to understand the time of fig-harvest when the figs would have been gathered." And with iliiiiinaulhorized and untenable explanation it is sup poet, that the difficulty is solred and the objector silenced. The original text distinctly declares that the fig-tree had leaves, that it bad nothing but leaves ; and to account for the absence of fruit, plainly says that it was not the season. Die unaided interpreter knows butter than the inspired author ; lie violently wrests his words to sustain his own view, and evidently expects that his interpretation will be received as final. Now what lad of eighteen only, preparing for matriculation, but would laugh outright at this wonderful paragraph ? The reviewer is clearly under the impression that this interpretation of the passage is a discovery of the author he is castigating. Our " ready corrector " is wrong. It is the interpretation now generally given, and we believe most generally accepted. Blomfield, Wilkinson, Schleusner, &c., all give this meaning to the word sni,:o; ; and Wordsworth, Alford, and Stanley, imply their acceptance of it. This is sufficient to show that the explanation is not " unauthorized." That it is " untenable " is a matter of opinion. But to maintain it in the face of the evidence to the contrary is an assumption of scholarship that may be justifiable in the re viewer—for we do not know who he is—but which we certainly cannot tolerate merely on the proofs of his fitness here given. The word xr,,,-6; is clearly so used in Mark xii. 2, Matt. xxi. 34, and Luke xx. 10. And the meaning of the whole 'seems simple enough when we remember that in the fig-tree the fruit shows itself before the leaves. The fact, then, of the tree having leaves would show that it was time for it to have fruit; and the absence of fruit would prove ac cordingly that the tree was barren, unless it had been previously gathered—a supposition against which the Evangelist guards us by adding, that it was not yet the time for gathering figs. The next time this sarcastic gentleman takes his pen in hand we hope he will trust to something stronger than his own memory ; and that he may be enabled to perceive, that though he has no chance of ever becoming a theological Ulysses, he may very possibly sink into the condition of a theological Ajax, and exhaust all his vigour on the phantoms of a disordered brain.—Phe re maining papers in this number are clever and in teresting, especially the last, which is picturesque and graphic, though marred by some fashionable prejudices on the trite subject of the Stuarts. What the Newman article is to the West minster Review, that is an article on the English Poor to th e London Review ; e. g.: — Throughout the countless villages of England, the all but universal rule is that no land is to be bought by any poor man. To us nothing seems more fundamentally necessary in a free country, or more evidently clear, than that the la w oug h t to give to every borough the absolu te light, as it would d o t o a railway company, of purchasing from any and every proprietor whatever land may be needed for the convenient accommodation of its resident Population in the way of house and garden room, and for the health and recreation of its inhabitants in the way of squares or parka. As little can we doubt that, in some way, there should be secured for every village or town ship the means of providing every inhabitant with a comfortable horue,whether he choose to rent it or to purchase it as his own. That the owners of property should have the power to limit the cottage accommodation, according to their will, or that they should, by the nature of their tenure, be prevented from selling ground on which poor men may make themselves a home, is what we are fully persuaded the English people will not much longer bear. Where there is a will, there is a way ; and whatever diffi culties there may be in finding out a method of adjust. ment, the thing must certainly be accomplished. The Poor Law organization, in connection with a system of land tribunals, would probably afford the basis on which a scheme of parochial or township management and autho rity, as to such points as these, might be constructed. And the long-demanded registry of titles will make transfer of property easy and cheap, and its tenure sure. In this paragraph the facts are untrue and the reasoning ridiculous. In the first place, if a man is poor, how can he buy land ? But as soon as he has got the money he can generally invest it in that manner if he chooses. Land is really extremely accessible, and may be purchased in any quantities, large or small, either from indivi dual owners or from land societies. But what if it were not ? Are we to be told that when a la bourer has amassed a little money, he is to go up to the squire, purse in hand, and demand a slice of his estate ? Yet this is literally what the above proposition amounts to ; and nothing but a general confiscation of land throughout the kingdom—a result tolerably remote at present—could accom plish our reviewer's object. We turn with pleasure from this nonsense to the other articles in the Review, which possess great merit. We should notice especially one upon English Dictionaries, a review of Merivale's " Roman Empire," and "The Russians on the RiverAmoor." They display respectively considerable sense, scholarship, and observation, and will, we think, be generally acknowledged as valuable contributions to our knowledge on the three subjects. The National Review comes before us this quarter with a very tempting table of contents, of which the flavour does not belie the appear ance. The review of Mr. Carlyle's "Frederick the Great " is an article well worth perusal ; but, as we have in another part of THE PRESS given an elaborate review of the work, we refrain from going further into the question here.—" The Relations of France and England " is, we are told, from the pen of a distinguished French writer, and is therefore deserving of attention. It appears a sound and sensible paper as far as it goes, but leaves out of view more than one im portant continency.—The essay on Woman is a calm and judicial kind of article, affecting to hold the balance between the two extreme opinions on the subject. It is ably reasoned and elegantly written, and contains one or two pas sages which merit great attention from the public. The following remark is striking—but five or six pages, instead of as many lines, would scarcely have exhausted the question raised : Mr. Buckle, with his narrow theory of civilization, rests the matter too purely on considerations of intellectual conformation; yet it can scarcely be denied that the in fluence of women is less at the present day than it was before the advent of what may be called the scientific age, that our material civilization is the result of effort and mental activity of a more specially masculine kind. An observation that is repeated in another shape at page 347 : We have many more avenues to knowledge open to us than our fathers had ; but the floating mass of thought and general activity of mind in modern society is certainly less proportionately to the ground which our research has covered than it was in the reign of George 111. Both men and women of that day obtained much more intel lectual exercise out of far more limited materials than we now possess. The ladies of that day had narrower educa tions, and were more engrossed in household details, than those.of our own ; lan. they had more activity of mind in pro portion to their acquirements, and freer intellectual inter course with men. We dare say nothing of our wives; but we cannot help thinking our mothers were more agreeable, more social, and enjoyed a more lively and genuine interchange of thought with the young fellows of their day, than our daughters do. Charming clever women, thank Heaven, still exist; but there was some thing very delightful about our grandmothers. Witness gentle Anne Elliot, and sensible spirited Elizab:th Bennett. One thing we may notice; there seems to have been a better balance than we now see between the mind and the feelings. We are glad to see this tribute to the character of the eighteenth century, which has recently been called such very bad names by Mr. Carlyle. We have little doubt that the opinion here ex pressed is correct. What may be the cause of 987 this decline of female influence among us is a more complicated question to determine. 'We cannot ourselves attribute it, in more than a very slight degree, to the "advent of the scientific age." Let us grant that science is at present the " typical" masculine study. It draws a line of separation between the sexes only a little less deep than metaphysics or classics, which stood in the place of it eighty years ago. We are not sure, indeed, that it does even thus much. As the reviewer has mentioned Mrs. Somerville, we may add that we have never heard any female metaphysician or scholar spoken of in the same terms in which competent judges speak of this lady's scientific attainments. The cause, we think, must be sought for elsewhere. We fear we may be indicating the existence of a some what unpalatable truth when we suggest that the fact in question may possibly be connected with this other patent fact, that the upper classes eighty years ago were not so much afraid of " what people would say " as they are now. Moore has noticed the constraint and frigidity which the French Revolution entailed upon our social intercourse. When .society became more mixed, conversation became more guarded and cautious ; while at the same time the enthralling importance of public affairs for a period of near thirty years cannot have failed to affect its tone in a manner unfavourable to the exercise of female influence. In each case the women were the sufferers. Whatever necessitated less frank ness on the man's part would necessitate it doubly on the woman's. And when the ordinary topics of conversation were falling empires and convulsed nations, the opportunities of female attractiveness were inevitably curtailed. It is from this epoch we should be inclined to date the decline of that " female influence " which the reviewer regrets ' • and it is to political more than, or quite as much , literary agencies that we should attribute it. According to the conventional theory of angels, the following illustration must be allowed to be a very happy one:— If we glance through the various divisions of the animal kingdom, we shall find that the most perfect forms of each division are not those through which it passes into the class next above it. It is not the horse or the foxhound which treads on the heels of man, but the baboon ; it is not the rose or the oak which stands on the verge of vege• tilde and animal life, but the fern or the seaweed. Some thing is lost of the typical completeness of each class as it approaches the verge of that above it. The same is true of man ; it is not necessarily the most healthy and highly developed specimen which is nearest a nigher order of beinge ; and in the distinction of sexes, if man be the wore perfect creature, woman is nearer to the angels. Woman is higher than man in her nature; she is less noble in the degree of seltenntrol and independent responsibility imposed upon her. To man, with instincts less pure, intuitions less Jeep, sensibilities less fine, and a heart less faithful and unselfish, has peen given a weighter charge—to be more entirely tinder his own control, to be more completely master of himself. Of the review of Mr. Sanford's " Studies and Illustrations of the Great Rebellion" we need say but little, as the same work has so recently been reviewed in our own columns, and we find nothing from which we dissent in this essay which we have not already answered. We would point out in passing that the reviewer makes the same , observation as we did on the subject of foreign Parliaments : NATIONAL REVIEW, OCT. 1. And if he looked abroad, he would see much to induce him to think that the time was come for the decline of parliaments and the rise of monarchies. Arragon and the Castiles a hundred years before had enjoyed and abused immunities larger and more systematic than any hitherto inscribed in the statute hook of England. Yet these im munities had yielded to the arts or the arms of Charles V. and Philip II.; and in the seventeenth century, the most Catholic king employed his cortes to register his acts and to apportion the tales, but consulted with them on no material question of Wlir or peace. The parliaments of France were still remote from the degradation which in the nest century awaited them ; but they were already on the decline ; and if the king, the nobles, and the church were tolerably harmonious with one another, the voice of the popnlar representation was either not uplifted or unheeded. PRESS, SEPT. 23. Everywhere on the Continent the progress of events had been towards the consolidation and concentration of the Royal Power. In France and Spain the last murmurs of Parliamentary institutions were deed or dying; and their extinction had seemed almost contemporaneous with the restoration of order in those countries. What was to prevent Charles I. from supposing that some analogous process was gradually taking place in England ? We differ, that is, from the National in the in ference to be drawn from this circumstance; and we argue that Charles might fairly have supposed that m attempting to construct his Parliaments U