The Sun.
London, England, 1866-10-25 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

The Quarterly Review. No. 240. John Murray.
The current October number of the Quarterly is
hardly so attractive as usual. A remark having re-
ference mainly, however, to the mere themes selected
by the reviewers. For the treatment of the eight
papers making up the contents of the number is in
almost every instance excellent—two amongst them,
indeed, are especially, we would even • say, excep-
tionally remarkable, and this, at once, it should be
added, in their respective themes and in their relative
treatment. As to the less alluring articles, however,
first of all. It will be obvious, as a matter of course,
that but few of the general public can be supposed
to care much for, " Dr. Badham and the Dutch
School of Criticism"—and comparatively few for a
resume of the " Ancient Literature of France"—
even though that ancient literature leads off heroic-
ally with the Song of Roland and the Poetic His-
tory of the Beatified Emperor Charlemagne !
" Homes without Hands"—suggestive upon the in-
stant of the honey-making bee and of the dam-build-
ing beaver—has a charm of its own, for the notion
of which (in the suggestive title of the paper that is)
the reviewer, who treats upon the subject,
is indebted to the Rev. J. G. Wood, the
popular Naturalist. " Fergusson's History of
Architecture" %has been selected by another
contributor as the theme of an interesting and
instructive treatise upon that, in one sense,
first of the sciences—a professional criticism ren-
dered all the more interesting to the general
reader from the interspersing among the ex-
planatory letterpress of a variety of illustrative
woodcuts. " Operations of Modern War" is an
article that lays Marshal Marmont, General
Smith, Colonel Macdougall, Colonel Huxley, Capt.
Chesney, and others under contribution for their
opinions and experiences—carrying our thoughts off
as we read, at eccentric tangents, now to the Ame-
rican Merrimacs, now to the Prussian Needle-guns,
hither and thither, at every turn of the leaf, to some
more terrible instrument of destruction than those
preceding it, arms suggested may be by a Whitworth
or an Armstrong, a Colt or a Snider, until the lines,
and paragraphs, and pages of typography here con-
veying the writer's ideas to us through the medium
of the Quarterly, one might almost at last imagine
to be as suggestive of the deadly harmonies and
deadlier discords of war as the Springfield Arsenal
was in its day to the poet Longfellow—
The bursting shell, the gateway wrenched asunder,
The rattling musketry, the clashing blade,
And ever and anon in tones of thunder,
The diapason of the cannonade.
" Central Asia" is the title of a politico-geogra-
phico-ethnological article—hung upon pegs as wide
apart as (among others) the Invalide Russe and the
Travels of Marco Polo ! Having enumerated which
half-dozen papers in the present number of the
Quarterly—we have now only to take into passing
consideration the two remaining criticisms not yet
specified, though already referred to as of excep-
tionally remarkable excellence. One of these, the
more elaborate of the two--and no wonder, con-
sidering its " high argument," that it should be
thus more highly elaborated—is theological, ethical,
biblical, in its character. The other is political—the
political article or manifesto, in fact, of the
Quarterly. First of all, however, as to the earlier
of these two notable contributions—a paper simply
but (in this age of Strausses, and Renans, and
Colensos) significantly entitled " Life of 0 UR LORD."
Turn by turn, the unbelieving, so-called philosophers
are subjected to scrutiny, calmly and quite dis-
passionately by the reviewer. Strauss and Tholuck,
and Ullmann, and Lange, and Riggenbach, and De
Pressense—Olshausen, and Bleek, and Hilgenfeld,
and Volkmar, and Boltzmann, and others, on and
on, down even to now-a-days, to these days of
Renan and of Colenso. The survey thus taken ex-
tends over more than thirty years, more than the thirty
years last passed—the lifetime of a whole genera-
tion ! Of the drift of the argument which is there-
upon incidentally set forth by the Quarterly Re-
viewer, as deducible from the contention among
themselves, of these quasi-sages, these soi-disant-
analysts and as such these would-be dissipators of
the dream of Christianity, we need here do no more
than adduce two or three passages, by way of illus-
trative or elucidatory quotation. For 'example—
thus observes the writer, in reference to the ques-
tioned but irrefrag able—
AUTHORITY OF THE RECORDS OF THE EVANGELISTS.
Three great theologians, towards the close of the second
century, at Lyons, Carthage, and Alexandria, Tremens,
Tertullian, and Clement, boar witness to the fact that at that
time our Gospels were universally received as canonical.
The well-known " Muratorian Fragment," which belongs
to the same time, bears the same testimony. These would
not do much towards determining a question which be-
longs to an earlier time, unless their evidence were in some
measure retrospective. But it is retrospective. For
example, Tremens indulges in fanciful analogies about the
number four : there must be four Gospels, neither more nor
less, because the Gospel is to go throughout the world, and
there are four quarters of the world ; the Gospel is the
breath of life, and there are four winds of heaven ; the
cherubim, on whom the creating Word is enthroned, have
four faces. All this is bad reasoning to establish the num-
ber four, but it affords a pretty good argument that the
Church had by this time become accustomed to that num-
ber of Gospels. Tremens also reminds one Florinus that
when he was yot aboy he sat at the feet of Polycarp, and that
with the vivid memory which one has for the events of
childhood he could recall the very look, and gait, and
manner of Polycarp, who gave accounts of his frequent
intercourse with St. John and with others who had seen
the Lord ; and Traumas says further that Polycarp's ac-
count of the doctrine and miracles of the Lord were all
" consonant with the Scriptures." Ho also tolls us else-
where that the followers of Valentinus made a free use of
St. John's Gospel. Now all this, written about the year
185; does much more than prove that Tremens knew the
four Gospels. When we are asked to believe, by one of
the latest writers, Volkmar, that the Gospel of St. John
was written about the year 155, we must assume that when
Tremens was now a man, and when the three other Gos-
pels (even on Volkmar's estimate) had been in use for full
50 years, a new Gospel, attributed to one of most eminent
name, appeared and obtained its position suddenly and with-
out challenge, with miracles recorded in no other Gospel,
with new and momentous discourses of the Lord. Perhaps
it is conceivable that this should have taken place ; but
even if we had no testimony save that of Irenueus, it is in
the highest 'degree unlikely. But Tremens is only one of
many. Two attempts at Harmonies of the four Gospels
had been made about the same time. Justin, who wrote at
latest in A.D. 147, quotes three Gospels, and criticism is hard
pressed to explain away allusions to the fourth. Tischen-
dorf makes good use of the argument from heretical writ-
ers; Hippolytus tells us that Valentinus relied on a pas-
sage in St. John (x. 8); and the like is said of Basilides ;
if so, this Gospel was Well known in the first half of the
second century. The Montanists probably borrowed from
John their, view of the Paraclete. It is clear from two
passages of Tertullian that Marcion began by believing
the four Gospels, as known to us, and that after-
wards, thinking them tinctured with Judaism, he
undertook to amend or alter the Gospel for himself : the
date of this amended Gospel, founded on St. Luke, is about
138. Celsus knew the four Gospels, writing about the
year 160. All this testimony, :and much more that Tis-
chendorf and others have adduced, tends to carry us back-
ward to the early part of the second century. Before a
distinct and general recognition of the Gospels could take
place—before they could have been winnowed out clear
from all the apocryphal literature that at first hung about
them—some time must have elapsed. It is scarcely con-
ceivable, moreover, that a new Gospel should take its place
as an authority to be quoted in a controversy without some
discussion on the question of genuineness arising. This
difficulty will always cleave to any theory save the obvious
one of adhering to external testimony.
Speaking of the " confusion worse confounded "
that has prevailed all along among the followers of
Strauss, the Reviewer puts the subjoined question,
upon which, it will be seen, he himself comments
immediately afterwards very wittily :
But whit kind of evidence is that which in the hands of
Griesbach, Do Wette, Baur, and Kosdin, gives us the
order of Matthew, Luke, and Mark, and in the hands of
Wilke and Volkmar exactly reverses this order, and places
Mark at the beginning, with Luko making use of his Gos-
pel, and Matthew beholden to both ? The time is come
for admitting that all the ingenuity that has been spent on
the subject has sufficed to bring out into strong light
many great and deeply interesting questions which
belong to the inspired records of our faith, but
has not produced any approach to a solution of
them. Some future mythical philosopher pondering
this page of literary history, may doubt that such
difference could have occurred; he may argue that it is a
myth in which. the "consciousness" of the 19th century
has reproduced the story of the Tower of Babel ; a "re-
forming criticism" was built up high above all past dogma
and doubt, but amidst a welter of confused and contradic-
tory speech, such as never could. have been historically
possible for rational men, the work was abandoned.
Summing up, at the close of his own impartial argu-
ment, however, the results of this stupendous and
momentous controversy, the Reviewer remarks,