too keen and fine? It is the course such men as the poor Poet Cowper fall into. Luther, to a slight observer, might have seemed a timid, weak man; modesty, affectionate shrinking tenderness the chief distinction of him. It is a noble valour which is roused in a heart like this, once stirred up into defiance; all kindled into a heavenly blaze.

66

In Luther's Table-talk, a posthumous Book of anecdotes and sayings collected by his friends, the most interesting now of all the Books proceeding from him, we have many beautiful unconscious displays of the man, and what sort of nature he had. His behaviour at the death-bed of his little Daughter, so still, so great and loving, is among the most affecting things. He is resigned that his little Margaret should die, yet longs inexpressibly that she might live;-follows, in awestruck thought, the flight of her little soul through those unknown realms. Awestruck; most heartfelt, we can see; and sincere,for after all dogmatic creeds and articles, he feels what nothing it is that we know, or can know: His little Margaret shall be with God, as God wills; for Luther, too, that is all; Islam is all.

"Once, he looks out from his solitary 'Patmos,' the Wartburg, in the middle of the night: The great vault of Immensity, long flights of clouds sailing through it,—dumb, gaunt, huge,-who supports all that? None ever saw the pillars of it; yet it is supported.' God supports it. We must know that God is great, that God is good; and trust, where we cannot see. Returning home from Leipzig once, he is struck by the beauty of the harvest-fields: How it stands, that golden yellow corn, on its fair, taper stem, its golden head bent, all rich and waving there, the meek Earth, at God's kind bidding, has produced it once again; the bread of man!-In the garden at Wittenberg one evening at sunset, a little bird has perched for the night: That little bird, says Luther, above it are the stars and deep Heaven of worlds; yet it has folded its little wings; gone trustfully to rest there as in its home: the Maker of it has given it, too, a home!-Neither are mirthful terms wanting: there is a VOL. I.-26

great free human heart in this man. The common speech of him has a rugged nobleness, idiomatic, expressive, genuine; gleams here and there with beautiful poetic tints. One feels him to be a great brother man. His love of Music, indeed, is not this, as it were, the summary of all these affections in him? Many a wild unutterability he spoke forth from him in the tones of his flute. The Devils fled from his flute, he says. Death-defiance on the one hand, and such love of music on the other: I could call these the two opposite poles of a great soul; between these two all great things had

room.

"Luther's face is to me expressive of him; in Kranach's best portraits I find the true Luther. A rude, plebeian face; with its huge crag-like brows and bones, the emblem of rugged energy; at first, almost a repulsive face. Yet in the eyes especially there is a wild, silent sorrow; an unnameable melancholy, the element of all gentle and fine affections; giving to the rest the true stamp of nobleness. Laughter was in this Luther, as we said; but tears, also, were there. Tears, also, were appointed him; tears and hard toil. The basis of his life was Sadness, Earnestness. In his latter days, after all triumphs and victories, he expresses himself heartily weary of living; he considers that God alone can and will regulate the course things are taking, and that perhaps the Day of Judgment is not far. As for him, he longs for one thing that God would release him from his labour, and let him depart and be at rest. They understand little of the man who cite this in dis-credit of him!-I will call this Luther a true Great Man; great in intellect, in courage, affection and integrity; one of our most loveable and precious men.

Great, not as a hewn obelisk; but as an Alpine mountain,-so simple, honest, spontaneous, not setting up to be great at all; there for quite another purpose than being great! Ah, yes, unsubduable granite, piercing far and wide into the Heavens;-yet in the clefts of it fountains, green beautiful valleys with flowers! A right Spiritual Hero and Prophet; once more, a true Son of Na

ture and Fact, for whom these centuries, and many that are to come yet, will be thankful to Heaven."

In this same admirable discourse, Mr. Carlyle discourses at some length upon John Knox, upon Puritanism, and collateral subjects; but our limits forbid fur

ther quotation. His character of Martin Luther appears to us wonderfully graphic and true. Mr. Carlyle always understands what he is writing about; he never writes without having something to say; and what he says is said with no superfluity of words.

THE study of unfulfilled prophecy, which had fallen into some neglect, has recently been pursued with great learning, ability, and ardour, both in England and in this country. While the puerilities of persons like William Miller have invited to such speculations the contempt of scholars, the profound and impressive discussions of thinking men have reinvested them with their appropriate dignity and importance. We have not room in this number of our Review, to present an outline of the argument of Mr. Elliott, but our readers will be gratified with the following contrast which he draws near the conclusion of his third volume, between the great German critic and St. John, as the last is explained in Hora Apocalyptica.

"Here it is that the moral of the Apocalyptic prophecy, its philosophy of the history of Christendom, if I may so call it, becomes unspeakably valuable. We have elsewhere had the philosophy of the same history traced by human pen; and lessons at the same time drawn from it in the way of instruction and direction for the future-more especially I may refer to the work of the late celebrated Frederick Von Schlegel on the subject; a writer of no common eloquence or common reputation. But if we compare the two outlines of historic philosophy together, the human and the divine, what a contrast will appear! And how true the one; how superficial and delusive

the other!-In his general abstract notions, indeed, of the philosophy of history and its objects, Schlegel has much that is admirable. He lays it down that, as the highest object of philosophy is the restoration of God's image in man, so the great object of the philosophy of history must be to trace historically the progress of this restoration;-that it is his object and intention, through that all-ruling Providence which regulates the whole course of human destiny, ultimately to accomplish it;-that Christianity, God's own heaven-sent religion, is the regenerating principle, whence whatever may already have been accomplished has proceeded, and whence alone man's final and perfect regeneration is to arise;—that the hindrances and obstructions in the way of its accomplishment have arisen from the fearfully powerful, though most mysterious, influence in the world of the spirit of evil, alike God's enemy and man's, and man's endowment with free will, to choose, as he may please, the guidance of the one spirit or the other;

further, that it belongs to the province of the philosophy of history to mark God's wrathful judgments on the world, when thus led astray from Him; and to mark also the interpositions and proceedings of Divine Providence,-especially as illustrated from time to time in the rise and conduct of any remarkable particular nations or individuals, with a view to the fulfilment of its designs, whether of judg ment or of mercy.-Such, I say, is Schlegel's generally just idea of the philosophy of history; and the reader has but to recall what has gone before in this commentary, or to glance at the illustra

tive chart prefixed to it, in order to be convinced how eminently, on such an idea of it, there attaches a high degree of the philosophic character to the historic prefigurations of the Apocalypse. It is in the application of the principle that the marked contrast appears between these and Schlegel's sketches: nor, I think, can I better place the moral lessons of this holy book in full relief and distinctness before the reader, than by setting forth its philosophy somewhat fully, in direct contrast with the other.

"The German philosopher then, agreeably with his religious creed, directs himself by the Romish standard in his judgment of things that concern religion and the church. After the first four centuries, notable for the diffusion and final triumph of Christianity over paganism in the Roman empire, he traces the church visible and established (already then, with respect to its acknowledged head, a Romish church) through the four long centuries which followed, of a chaotic intermediate state between ancient and modern history, as still Christ's true church, the upholder and preserver of the Christian religion, as well as civilizer of the barbarous invading Germanic nations; then the next three centuries, after that the tempests had subsided, and the wild waters of barbarian inundation begun to flow off, from Charlemagne to Gregory VII. and the first half of the twelfth century inclusive, -a period constituting the earlier half of the middle age,-as the happiest era and golden age of Christendom; when 'the influence of religion on public life was paramount,' when, in the project of a universal empire to embrace all civilized nations, the foundation-stone of the noble fabric of modern Christendom was laid, and all the elements of a truly Christian government and policy were offered to mankind, when the principles which animated society were the best and noblest and soundest,' when the church like the all-embracing vault of heaven,' with its pure faith sheltered and shed kindly influence on all, and the Papal power, founded on and adapted for unity, after having grown up towards the end of this era to unprecedented greatness, used this great power only so as to preserve Chris

tianity from being lost in a multitude of sects-in all which he thinks to mark the presence and operation of God's animating Spirit, as well as kindly providence. On the other hand he traces the cotemporary operation of the evil spirit, (the Spirit of time,' as he calls it, from after the era of the overthrow of the pagan empire that it had previously ruled in and animated)-I say, he traces the evil spirit's operation through the same period in the beguiling sectarian spirit and religious schisms of Christendom; including not alone the Arian schism, and the Mahomedan schism (for he places Mahomedanism in the same category,*) but also in the iconoclastic proceedings of certain of the Greek emperors,-proceedings which he lauds Gregory the Second for resisting.—and the consequent schism between the eastern and western churches.-In his sketch of the latter half of the middle age, reaching from the twelfth century to the Reformation, he admits the general religious deterioration of western Christendom; particularizing the essentially false scholastic philosophy then in vogue, and the internal feuds and contests between church and state traces the kindly operation of the divine. Spirit, (the Paraclete promised to the church by its divine Founder') whereby Christianity was preserved, in the rise and institution of the ecclesiastical mendicant orders, as men of the most perfect evangelical humility, poverty and selfdenial at the same time reprobating the doctrines of the then popular opposers of the church,-as the Waldenses, Albigenses, and also Wickliffe and Huss after them, as fraught with the germs of heresy. So arrived at the Reformation, he

and

"The rigid prohibition of the religious use of images was proper in those cases only where

the use of them was not confined to a mere devotional respect, but was likely to degenerate into a real adoration and idolatry, and where a strict separation from pagan nations and their rites was a matter of primary importance. But now that the Mahomedan proscription of all holy emblems and images of devotion arose from a decidedly antichristian spirit, this Byzantine fury against all images and symbols of piety can be regarded only as a mad contagion of the moral disease of the age."-Lect. xii. p. 106.

speaks of it as manifested to be a human, not divine reformation; by its claim of full freedom of faith, its rejection of the traditions of the past, its destruction of the dignity of the priesthood, and endangering of the very foundations of religion, through a denial of the holy sacramental mysteries, its adoption finally of a faith of mere negation, (so he designates it,) and severing of its Protestant constituents from the sacred centre of faith and religion, i. e. from Rome.*

"Such is Schlegel's philosophic view of the history of Christendom down to the Reformation after which he notices the religious indifferentism of spirit, and false illuminism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, - ascribing them very much to the influence of the Protestant principle,f-until the tremendous political outbreak of this infidel illuminism in the French Revolution. Then, after a notice of the Revolution and its twentyfive years' war of irreligion,'-'a convulsive crisis of the world which has created a mighty chasm, and thrown up a wall of separation between the present age and the eighteenth century,'-he speaks of the late progressing revival of

"Had it been," he says, p. 228, "a divine reformation, it would at no time, and under no

condition, have severed itself from the sacred

centre and venerable basis of Christian tradition; in order, reckless of all legitimate decisions, preceding as well as actual, to perpetuate discord, and seek in negation itself a new and peculiar basis for the edifice of schismatic opinion."

He speaks with high approval, p. 222, of the institution of the Jesuits; as a religious order, wholly dependent on the church, and from their opposition to Protestantism, as the great want of the age.

"Those negative and destructive principles, those maxims of liberalism and irreligion, which were almost exclusively prevalent in European literature during the eighteenth century, in a word, Protestantism, in the comprehensive signification of that term.”—Lect. xviii. p. 285. So, too, p. 295; though he there allows that the English Protestantism of philosophy is to be distinguished from the French Revolutionary atheism; for that "though by its opposition to all spiritual ideas it is of a negative character, yet most of its partisans contrive to make some sort of capitulation

with divine faith, and to preserve a kind of belief in moral feeling."

Catholicism as a revival of religion, more especially in the countries of France and Germany;—and finally expresses his hope of a true and complete regeneration of the age, at no great distance of time, (though not till after a temporary triumph of some antichristian spirit of evil,) as the fit conclusion to the philosophy of history:-its essence to consist in a thorough Christianization alike of the state and of science;-its form to be somewhat like the perfection of the noble but imperfect Christian empire of Charlemagne ;-its introduction to be not without the display of fearful divine judgments, nor indeed without Christ's own coming and intervention:-and, with this divine reformation, and its accompanying complete victory of truth, that human reformation, which till now hath existed, to sink to the ground, and disappear from the world.'

"How different the philosophy of the same history of Christendom, as traced out to St. John in the prefigurative visions of Patmos !-a difference based in fact on a totally different view of what Christ's true religion consists in, and what is Christ's true church! After a brief symbolization of the chief coming eras and vicissitudes of the Roman pagan persecuting empire, until its total overthrow before the power of Christianity, there was forthwith very strikingly intimated to him in the sealing vision that a general apostasy would then have begun, and be progressing, among the professing Christian body in Roman Christendom,—an apostasy which the comment of subsequent history has shown to have arisen in chief part through that same over-estimate and unscriptural view of the church sacraments and church ministry with which Schlegel would connect the essence of religion;-and that this apostasy would be the cause of a series of fearful

avenging judgments, soon to follow. At the same time there was also manifested God's gracious purpose, while giving scope to apostate man's evil, yet to preserve to Himself a faithful church and witnesses in the world. And the formation, character and secret history were

also shown him of those that would constitute this the Lord's real church; how

they would be no visible corporate body, but strictly the xupiazη exx2noia, Christ's κυριακη εκκλησία, own outgathering and election of grace, individually chosen, enlightened, quickened and sealed by Him with the Holy Spirit of adoption: a body notable as God's servants' for holy obedience; and though few in number, compared with the apostate professors of Christianity, yet in God's eye numerally perfect and complete.-Thenceforth these two lines and successions were traced distinctly and separately in their respective histories, through all the series of events and revolutions following, even to the consummation; and the invisible authors of their different polities and actions, -whether the evil spirit or the good, made manifest. On the one hand there was depicted the body of false professors of Christianity, the constituency of the apostatizing empire and church,-having a religion not Christian but antichristian, formed on traditions of men, (traditions that figure so high in Schlegel's estimate,) not God's word, and giving worship to departed saints and martyrs as mediators, not to Christ,-in its eastern division as therefore soon mangled and afterwards exterminated by the divine avenging judgments of the scorpion-locusts and Euphratean horsemen,-in other words, of the Saracens and the Turks: in its western division as rising up again from the primary desolating judgments of Gothic invasion, in the new form of an ecclesiastical empire, (the same that Schlegel eulogizes as Christ's true church,) seated on the seven hills of ancient Rome: its secret contriver being the very Dragon, or Satanic spirit, that had ruled openly before in the pagan empire; its character proud, persecuting, blasphemous and self-exalting against God, even beyond its pagan precursor; its constituency and priesthood, throughout Schlegel's boasted middle ages, characterized by idolatries (oh impotent attempt to defend Rome's image-worship by the German philosopher!*) and forni

* See the quotation in Schlegel about the iconoclastic Greek emperors in preceding page, 395.

Mr. Sibthorp, it is said by Mr. Faber, went over to the Church of Rome, under the belief 26*

cations, murders, thefts, sorceries;' in fine as continuing unchanged, unchangeable in apostasy, notwithstanding the repeated checks of woes and judgments from heaven, even until the end; and therefore then at length, in its impenitency, to be utterly abandoned to judgment, (this being an essential prelimi nary to the world's regeneration,) and, like another Sodom, made an example of the vengeance of everlasting fire.-On the other hand the Apocalyptic prophecy represented Christ's true church, the election of grace, consisting of such as should hold to Christ as their head, and keep the word of God and testimony of Jesus, as almost at once entering on the great, the long tribulation; yet, though in number few and fewer, and reduced to a state spiritually destitute and desolate, like that of the wilderness, so as to constitute a church invisible rather than visible, as still secretly preserved by their Lord the revelation of God's doctrines of grace, acted out in the light-bearing visions of the sealing and the palm-bearers, just before the burst of the emblematic tempests, a doctrine directly antagonistic to that of the incipient apostasy, and which Augustine's history well illustrated,-being the result of God's direct primary intervention, with a view to their spiritual preservation and life. It represented the witnesses for Christ's cause, from out of this little body, and protesters against the reigning apostasy, (verified historically afterwards in the history of those whom Schlegel would make heretics, the Waldenses, and Wickliffe, and Huss, and their followers,) as made war on by the Roman ecclesiastical empire, soon after the full establishment of its power, like as by a beast from the abyss of hell, and at length conquered and apparently exterminated; but then presently after, as all suddenly revived. and exalted in presence of their enemies, with a revelation from heaven accompanying (the result of God's great second

that it did not require idolatrous worship of the Virgin Mary; and that he has left it, and rejoined the English church, on finding that it was in very truth required of him. But did it need that he should enter the Romish church for evidence on this point?