search. The resemblance of the Mosaic tabernacle apparatus to many symbolic objects of the Egyptian system, and still further to many of the archæological objects exhumed by Layard in Assyria, has been an object of much Christian speculation and much infidel cavil. Some have said that Moses appropriated from Egypt; others that Egypt appropriated from Moses. Mr. Smith clearly establishes the true ground, that both were derivations from the

Fig. 1.

common primitive source, of which Gene

sis alone furnishes the only historic origin extant. What a wonderful volume is this old Hebraic record!

The following figures illustrate this point. The first group 1, 2, 3, furnishes images of the goddess Themi, or Truth, on the Egyptian monuments, exhibiting indubitable marks of identity with the Scripture cherubim. The second group 4, 5, presents the Hebrew ark and cherubim beside a similar Egyptian representation. The sacred ark is, in all probability, an emblem handed down from the covenant of the flood.

The tabernacle of David presented the same cherubic mode of access to God, intermediately between the Mosaic apparatus and the Temple of Solomon. Through the prophets Mr. Smith traces the central representations of the incarnation and atonement until the advent of their reality. Thence the development is traced until in the Apocalypse it terminates in the grand consummation of Paradise restored.

Mr. Smith's work presents several dissertations on points of no ordinary interest and importance. Besides his illustrations of the Edenic Cherubic Tabernacle, his development of the particulars and import of the Mosaic ritual is remarkably clear. His dissertation on the tabernacle will attract special attention. His discussions of the Son of God in the Fiery Furnace, and of Paradise, bring together many novel and valuable illustrations. The whole possesses a unity which suggests that all the parts should be compre hended together to feel the proper impression.

Mr. Smith makes no display of his own philological lore, and depends very much on the authority of critics, respected in English theology, but less frequently than formerly quoted at the present time. Of the various possible meanings of a text, he does not hesitate to prefer that which is favorable to his own hypothesis. Yet the most questionable, and as some would say, the most antiquated of his expositions are sustained by so late an authority as the valuable Old Testament Commentaries of Professor Bush. His volume is in some degree indebted to Faber, a writer who, out of his Cabiric and some part of his Apocalyptic studies, is well worthy of reproduction. It is equally free from anything like the older whimsies of the learned but dreamy Jacob Bryant, and from the more dangerous neologies of the latest German importation. We confess an unchanged preference for the sound old English masters in theology.

(2.) The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed, by HUGH MILLER. With Memorials of the Death and Character of the Author." (12mo., pp. 502. Boston: Gould & Lincoln; New-York: Sheldon, Blakeman, & Co., 1857.) The marvelous mason of Cromarty! That he should be led by his own manual craft to investigate the deep and massy masonwork of the almighty Architect who laid the earth's foundations, is not wonderful; but wonderful indeed are the profundity, the originality of those investigations, the new and illustrative applications, and the strain of trumpet-like eloquence with which, from beginning to end, he has given them utterance. What richness of imagination; what felicity of analogy; what purity, accuracy, brilliancy of style!

The "Testimony of the Rocks" has not a very perfect unity of subject; yet is there that general symmetry that redeems it from incongruity. We have first the history, deduced through geological ages of plants and animals. Then comes a confronting, face to face, of the two records, on the page of the rock and the page of the book. So far as geology is concerned, he finds a synchronism, if both records be allowed to describe an epochal and mundane day. Then comes the felicitous theory of the "Mosaic Vision of the Creation;" in which the historical seer is imagined as describing the unseen past, by the

same conceptual power as other prophets describe the future, pictorially exhibited by Divine power to the eye of soul. The Noachian Deluge is then denied, with an extraordinary force of scientific argument, to be universal as to the globe; while the force of the Biblical words is argued to be amply filled out, by supposing the catastrophe universal as to the race. Some grand lessons are then administered to the anti geologists; and the volume concludes with a lecture on the fossil flora of Scotland.

There are some golden passages in the Testimony. There is indeed many a passage of intense eloquence that stimulates and forces us to spring from our study-chair. But more than this, there are passages at which you sit in pure transparent tranquillity, as you see that the world of mind is moving a thought forward; the hand on the great dial-plate has advanced, a clear hair-breadth! Let us note some points:

1. On the canvas of the everlasting rock is impressed, as on the pages of a botanist's herbarium, the complete pictorial history of the vegetable and animal creation, through all past ages, of perhaps some fifty million years. And in the beautiful coincidence between the human classifications of science and the Divine classifications of the Creator, Hugh Miller develops a proof of the resemblance between the infinite and the finite mind; of the creation of man in the intellectual image of God, and the personality of the Divine Being.

2. As geology can trace, with clear distinctness, the commencement and termination of each race, she is able to negate the hypothesis, either that one race runs into or blends with another, or that the higher orders and the highest order, man, are developed by imperceptible graduations from a lower order. Races do indeed rise in successive classifications above each other; but at due intervals between each class; and with diverse qualities, which distance them as independent orders and even separate creations.

Each race, and man's especially of all, starts up in the proper completeness of its being; allowing no other fair solution of its commencement than an immediate planning creative power-miracle! The accounting for man's existSence by an infinite series of minute causations is thus exploded.

3. Hume argued that as creation was a singular and sole fact, without its like or analogy, so God was unable, so far as we can see, to produce any other than this same form of creation; and variation from it by miracle is inadmissible. Miller argues that creation is not singular; but many times repeated, with ascending variations. At each step, a Hume might have argued that no other ascent was possible, only to be contradicted at the next step. The very fact that Omnipotence has repeated its acts, in ever-varying forms, proves by analogy, that it is still able to proceed in ever-varying forms of omnipotent action.

4. It is a wonderful fact, developed by geology, combined with comparative anatomy, that all the forms of animal existence find the perfected completion of their type in man. Their whole system through ages converges individually and collectively, like a vast pyramid, in him as its apex. Termination in man is the tendency in which they all advance. Hence man is the being of which all the past animal system was a prophecy. Herein we have a striking instance of the determinate purpose and foreknowledge of God.

5. Of the unity of the human race, that is, of its origin from a single center, Hugh Miller recognizes an existent doubt on our side of the Atlantic. He has his solution of the varieties In the Caucasian center, the race still exists in its type of primitive physical perfection. Whenever it departs from that locality, and loses its self-cultivation, a rapid degeneration ensues, tending to destruction. Especially before the face of a superior race does a depreciated tribe, in spite of missionary efforts, persistently melt away. Under the influence of high training, physical, intellectual, and moral, a race preserves its highest type. Hugh Miller holds that no finer specimen of manhood can be found than in the present English aristocracy.

The Testimony is a volume full of suggestive seeds; and we venture a few divergent thoughts:

The great object of God in creation would seem to be, manifestation; as he said to Pharaoh, "for this same purpose have I raised thee up, to make my power KNOWN." In reading, in our earlier days, the works of Edwards, especially that on Universal Salvation, we were often flung into dubious revery on his assumptions that God performed great transactions to show forth his attributes to the universe. The atonement is a demonstration of his hatred of sin yet mercy for the sinner; and hell itself, with its endless misery, is intended for a display of God's justice to the universe. What proof, said we, that the universe knows, or ever will know, anything about it? Is it, indeed, a fact, that when the scales of mortality fall from our eyes, we forthwith emerge to a full clairvoyance of all the mysteries of the universal republic, and the laws by which it is ruled? But the stupendous pages of geology, laid leaf after leaf, through ages, in the volume of creation, when read by the eye of science, reveal the wonderful fact that Omnipotence has been for long ages manifesting itself in the most affluent evolutions, with no eye but its own to appreciate its almost boundless display. Unless invisible critics were surveying these performances, with all our powers of admiration, the Deity has here been, so far as other minds than his own are concerned, but, as it were, wasting an immensity of miracula speciosa. So far, we say, as other than his own mind is concerned; but may it not be somehow that his own mind has its own immediate pleasure in this wreaking itself upon an infinite variety of creation? papi biaya azi saith the Hebrew bard; "The sitter in the heaven shall laugh at them." And if Jehovah hath this ireful laugh at his foolish foes, may he not have a laughter of a gentler sort? "Flowers are God's smiles," says somebody, worthy to have been held in our memory for the beautiful thought. But further than this laughter, and even these smiles, may we not say that-Deus seipsum delectat-God amuseth himself?

And when we see the volume of the book of the vast submundane history unfolded, what find we but a pictorial series of Divine sportiveness? a secret play spell of the Creator, all for his own secluded entertainment. What funny little contrivances does Hugh Miller detect in the making and jointing the bones and shells of the primitive testacea. What beautiful little architectures, where strength, lightness, and elegance are skillfully calculated, are displayed in the chambers of the primitive animalculæ. And then such brilliant hues, so softly blended, so brilliantly flared, so wittily spotted, so tastefully selected.

And these were poured forth with a conscious boundlessness, and a vast yet regulated variety, for no apparent purpose, than to please himself, for millions of years, by the unrivaled Lord of Life. Doth God love the cunning fix, the quaint device, the creative joke, as well as we? Is beauty, as it tints the lily, trills in melody, or unfolds in form, a beauty and a "joy forever" to our God? We know that the eagle is an embodiment of grandeur; and the humming bird is a beautiful jeu d'esprit. The lion is an epic; and the ape a comedy. And for a perfect burlesque, there was-for he is now extinct-the poor dodo. Upon that melancholy bird, the Creator heaped everything to make him an ungainly stupid clown, who was perfectly blameless for being the butt of the company, until he sorrowfully slinks from its notice, by dropping out of existence. It would seem cruel to pile a certain sort of merciless ridicule upon a thing so innocently half-witted. And yet the Creator has given to every being its compensation. With the universal bribe of conscious life, does he hire all animated beings to suffer the ills of their position in the scale, for the sake of conscious life itself. And do you doubt that they all make the bargain with full consent? See how anxiously they preserve and defend the life he gives, with all the means in their power. Attack their life, and they will, if they can, poison you, or assassinate you, or pound you, according as they have fangs, or horns, or hoofs. Or, if they have no weapons, they will run with the best tug of their legs; or finally die in deep pathos, as if they would complain, not for having obtained, but for losing the boon of existence. Of man, guilty man alone, can it ever be said, "Better that he had never been born."

If these remarks are true, then God performs an infinity of exploitations, that might hold a universe in wonder, awe, or amusement, with no eye in the universe to witness it but his own. Displays of justice most terrible, of tenderness most sweet, of wisdom most boundless, of taste most exquisite, of quaintness most witty, all may be tied together in the infinite KNOT. "It takes all sorts to make a world," says the proverb; and it may be true that on the entire scale, variety is the all-comprehending law, on which To Iluv, the great whole, is planned.

If this be so, we need no gazing universe to see that God may deal with man with a mercy just as tender, a justice just as exact, as if a universe were rapt in study upon it. "For the manifestation of his own glory," and "for his own good pleasure," are phrases of genuine, though not despotic import. And amid the varieties of possibility, without revelation, it would be in vain for man to conjecture his Theodicic future.

Will unredeemed man, in his multiplied millions, as annihilationism teaches, flare out of the scene of being, a blasted bud, an abortive start, a burst bubble, an everlasting failure? Or is development the key, as restorationism teaches; and is all intelligent immortal existence rolling on the waves of billowy centuries, a mighty Amazon, of which damnation is but a backward eddy in the course, from whose curves the wave will, in rolling æons, return to the onward current, toward the sea of perfect life? Or is hell, indeed, the manifestation of the infinite sternness of the Divine consciousness, highest in its character, absolute in its form, the serious and forever solemn in the variety, the never