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

THE PRESS, OCTOBER 9, 1858

argument, front analogy, fails precisely in
.that characteristic
which gives analogy its strength, proportrn: o estimate
the exact amount of retribution due to individual offence
be a difficult calculation, but we may feel quite certain
nifty h y between punishment in time
that, if
Lsehremiesnatnlnateltaelrongity, the penalty
and punishment • •
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 the 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 the 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 law ought to give to every borough the absolute
light, as it would do to 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

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