The Press. — London, England, 1855-06-02 00:00:00

a preponderating influence might more safely be intrusted to them than to " the people " set up by Mr. Howitt as their natural opponents. His obvious prejudice on this point renders more than a word of caution unnecessary. The concluding chapters on the wonderful advance made by the colony even during the term of the author's residence in it, and on its vast and varied resources and brilliant prospects, are among the best in the book. Commercial failures are anticipated from excessive specu lation, but a country so richly endowed by nature as Victoria, and affording at present unlimited scope for the industry and enter prise of the Anglo• Saxon race, must surely advance with prodigious though it may be un equal strides, and be destined to play a great part in the future history of the world. Rational Godlint's. By Rowland Williams, B.D London : Bell and Daldy. Tza history of Christianity, like that of the world in general, is one of alternate peace and warfare—now agitated by the stormy contest of truth and falsehood, now relapsing into calm, marked only by the daily noiseless struggle of vice and virtue. To that cessation of hostilities which has hitherto taken place after every important movement in the Church the great Anglican agitation, its work being done, has in turn begun to yield. New reli gious literature contains, every day, less and less about the Church, and more and more about the principles of conduct; seeks more and more to meet mankind, as it were, upon their own ground, to point out to them as a friend the weakness of their position ; and, discarding the tone of authority, to say, like Him who had the best right to use it, " Come, let us reason together." That the volume before us belongs to this school of divinity our readers will probably have surmised from its title. Our author, how ever, does not seek to disguise his opinions on the subject of the Church. In the first sermon of the volume, preached at Cambridge on the 29th of May, speaking of the Reformation and the Rebellion, he says : The Church of England, by whose deliberate judgment I would endeavour to abide, has so fully adopted the first, that to persons gifted with a certain confusion of thought she appears to be its offspring. And again, in the same sermon, he speaks of Her as— The one vine with many branches, but, according to her true idea, though ever imperfectly realised on earth, having bat one branch in each nation. By persons " gifted with a certain confusion " of thought " the latter truth is one, we think, still more fatally misunderstood than even the character of the Reformation. But it is on the obligations to a virtuous life, of which every Christian man who exerts his reason must be sensible, that the Professor has employed his calm and well-balanced intel lect to the greatest advantage. Here he is a worthy disciple of the great author of the " Analogy "—the perpetual remembrance that the natural life is but a type of the spiritual ; that we can no more rebel with impunity against the laws of the one than of the other; that as our age is stamped with the impress of our boyhood, so may our future life be by the impress of the present; that trials and disappointments are but the discipline of the soul, as labour and privation are of the body ; that holiness is the result of habit, as opposed to the doctrine of " experiences " ; and that we cannot expect God, any more than man, to help those who will not help themselves. Such are the truths enforced throughout this volume with the earnest eloquence of convic tion; truths which appeal, not to any highly wrought feelings, not to an excited imagina tion, not to the fervour of fanaticism, but to the calm, sober, common sense of a practical and thoughtful people. To give such examples of the method in which this view of the Christian life is expounded as would suit our limited space would be to do Mr. Williams the greatest injustice ; and we may shortly, therefore, refer our readers to Sermons i., ix , and xxi., as those which dwell more espe cially ou the application of philosophy to religious practice. THE PRESS. Possibly, however, the most interesting, though not. in our opinion the most valuable, portions of the work before us will be con sidered those in which the preacher enters on the discussion of scripture history, scripture characters, and scripture authority iu general. The boldness of his views on these questions will to many be startling, and to some painful ; but there is one point on which we desire to express our cordial agreement with him, and that is, the need of a liberal charity in our judgment of those actors in the great conflict between good and evil who are brought before us in the Old Testament. Those who were on the side of God were not always wholly good, nor were their opponents, on the other hand, entirely evil. The Gentile nations were not without some testimony to the presence of the Holy Spirit among them, nor yet was the Jewish Church cognisant of the entire counsel of God. We should remember that priests, prophets, azid kings, whether of Jehovah or Baal, are alike men, and just as full of deep human interest as if no supernatural light had been thrown around their conduct ; that the servants of the Lord very frequently worked in ignorance of their high mission ; and that then, as now, human passions and human crimes were the instruments of the Divine purpose. Deborah, the avenger of Israel, was no less the Syrian fanatic; the betrayal of Esau by his brother and Uriah by his king are but common examples of Oriental perfidy; we may loathe the vow of the Gileadite, and mourn with the mother of Sisera Surely it is not without a sickening of the heart that any right-minded person can hear some atrocious deed elaborately defended, or even propounded as an act of faith, because it happens to be recorded in the scriptures of the Old Testament. Nor, again, are we warranted in supposing that actions otherwise wrong were rendered right by any special command of the Most High, unless some trace of such command appear to be distinctly re corded. Rather, indeed, we should be careful to preserve the fine edge of our conscience unturned and its percep tions keen lt is well know!. that the nations between the Tigris and the Mediterranean have never ab stained in their warfare from either treachery or bloodshed. Suppose, then, we read in the Book of Judges that Syrian shepherds, twelve centuries before Christ, were gentle, and upright lovers of truth, it would have been a reasonable question, where the originals existed from whom so fair a picture was drawn.—Pages 93-4. This fidelity Mr. Williams considers (vide p. 47) to be a very strong argument in favour of the authenticity of scripture history, so different to the " usual genius of Oriental " narrative, which delights rather in pompous " and inflated exaggeration." There is much force in the argument thus educed, which is nevertheless open to an objection, though perhaps not of any great weight. Whenever, it may be said, we can be certain, as in the Old Testament, of the direct personal inter vention of the Deity in the affairs of men— whenever it is not a matter of opinion Khich is the cause of God, and which of his enemies— then we are at liberty to judge of human actions by a different standard, and to discard that code of laws from which, under no other conceivable circumstances, is it safe to depart. If we know—if we do not merely believe, but know—that a particular person is the agent of the Almighty, we do not require the produc tion of a " special command for every act of his career; we have faith in his character of a divine messenger; he becomes invested in our eyes with a portion of the divine attri butes ; and we are not unwilling to admit that vengeance is his. One more extract on this subject will com plete the representation of Mr. Williams's theory : We may read Moses, not for his physical geography, but for his Ten Commandments and his history. We may read the Book of Joshua, not for its astronomy, but for a tremendous example of the law by which God sweeps cor rupt nations from the earth. We may find in Kings and Chronicles, not imaginary and faultless men, but sultjects of Divine Providenze, instances of divine teaching, and all that blending of interest with instruction which the history of a devout people, told with reference to the Judge of the whole earth, is ever calculated to afford Nor let the natural metaphor, by which men call a sacred record " The Word of God," ever blind us to the fact that no text has been found, from Genesis to Revelations, in which this holy name is made a synonym for the entire volume of Scripture.—Pages To these passages, taken by themselves, we can give, as before stated, our willing assent ; yet we are sorry they should be connected SATURDAY, with others less satisfactory—passages which awaken a suspicion that our author is not so far removed as we could wish from that class of high-church writers who are just now court ing popularity by toying with liberalism—who put their heads between its jaws to raise a cheer from the mob, and comfort themselves with the pleasant fiction that the beast is too generous to bite. Mr. Williams's views of the bearing of mo dern science upon scriptural statements, though characterised by a similar tendency, are less open to objection than those in which he ad vocates the cause of progress. We are not to con found inspiration with omniscience; we are to consider the Bible as consisting of essential and non-essential matter; the former being the relation between man and his Maker, the latter the incidental topics of geography and science. No discoveries, therefore, of error in the latter need shake our confidence in the former ; and it is strangely unreasonable for men to argue that they cannot believe God ought to be worshipped in spirit and in truth nn:ess they are also convinced that Cyrenius was President of Syria, or that the Cretans were always liars. The interests of religion will therefore, he thinks, be best answered by dealing boldly and openly with this question. We have nothing to fear from the acceptance of modern discoveries—from rejecting them, much. We cannot protect by an outer fence the house which is founded upon sand ; nor have we any power to roll back the floods of knowledge which threaten its de struction. This doctrine, however, though substantially that adopted by some of our best divines, is one that requires to be ex pounded with the utmost delicacy. To loosen the hold which the simple Bible narrative has upon the hearts of the people is a dangerous task. They cling to its literal interpretation with the fund fidelity which early association inspires ; nor do they see any improbability that He who turned the Nile into blood, and buried the heathen in a " darkness that could " be felt," should also have divided the waves of the Red Sea, or given life to Jonas when engulphed by the monster of the deep. And, after all, what are we to say ? Still we are met by the old, but not because old less vital, ob jection—where are these theories to end? If the preacher rejects the supernatural in one case the congregation will do so in another; and it will then be too late to blame them. Where are we to draw the line? Face to face with the gorgeous spectacle of modern civilisa tion stands the stern old Bible theory of guilt, and sorrow, and corruption. The two can never be reconciled. We may strain every nerve to bring into unison man's views of pro gress and God's view of sin : to array the miracles in the garb of philosophy, and to coax the wary sceptic over to our side by ig noring the primeval curse, and listening to the voice that whispers " ye shall not surely die ; yet will our labour be fruitless. The truce be tween the two great antagonistic powers must ever be unreal. We can make no compromise between matter and spirit, between the tem poral and the eternal. As long as we bear this truth in mind we may perhaps, without danger, admit that some steps are necessary to meet the increasing discrepancy between the letter of Scripture and the revelations of hu man science; and we have no doubt that in addressing an uneducated congregation Mr. Williams would have expressed himself much more cautiously ... than was necessary either at Lampeter or in King's College Chapel. To those tempted to carry their innovations too far we recommend the twentieth sermon of this volume, on the subject of " Gospel Freedom." We could have wished to add a few remarks on Mr. Williams's opinion on the Jewish scepticism, the relation of the Church to the Bible, and also on the question of reason and faith, so ably treated by Mr. Rogers. As none of these, however, arc so peculiar to himself, or so lengthily discussed, as the matters to which we have confined ourselves, we regret less the necessity of their omission—an omis sion, however, we strongly advise our readers to repair for themselves by a perusal of the series.