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fall upon the ear; the echo out of Seir sounds aloud, "Watchman, what of the night ?" All things of creation, now groaning, and suffering, and shaken, appear to be anxiously awaiting the new order of the coming day.

Blessed, thrice blessed are they who are looking for His appearance. They who long for home will soon reach home. And they who are in earnest upon the subject will be enabled to realize the force of what has been so well expressed by a great Father who has afforded comfort and instruction to the Church for ages:-" O God! Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."

B. S.

STANLEY'S SERMONS IN THE EAST.

Sermons in the East: preached before His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. By Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, D.D., Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the University of Oxford, &c. &.c.

THERE is a proverb, which we will not repeat, respecting the wind from the East. This should not, and we would fain hope will not, apply to sermons. For if ever sermons can be full of thrilling interest, and warm with life, and wear the freshness of reality about them, it must be when they are conceived and preached upon those sacred spots, and amid those exciting associations of place and scene, where all the great events of Scripture history were transacted. These were the advantages which Professor Stanley had when he delivered the sermons that are now placed before us. How far he has profited by them, and succeeded in profiting others, causing (if we may use such an expression) the dry parching wind of the East to blow with all the moist, fertilising freshness of the West, we shall see in the sequel. It is a saying, as true as it is trite, that that is a "bad wind which blows no one any good."

Feelings of more than ordinary curiosity possessed us when we took up this volume of sermons. Preached, as they were, before the future sovereign of Great Britain, and amid the extraordinary scenes to which we have alluded, we have very naturally been led to expect to find them possessing the attributes of peculiar point and power.

It is one of the prevailing complaints of our day, that sermons are too long. In this respect no fault can be found with Dr. Stanley's. Their characteristic is brevity. We have grown to be an impatient generation. Nothing contents us now that is

not dispatched quickly. The perfection of a sermon, in particular, with many, is its shortness. Nothing of this kind, however excellent, or however interesting, can be endured beyond the length of half an hour. The most worldly-minded man in existence, who is tethered down to listen to a sermon, but whose thought is constantly trying to break away to go in pursuit of his gains or his pleasures, need not complain of length here. Ten minutes, at the utmost, would dispatch the longest sermon in the volume, and set the captive free.

We are far from blaming Professor Stanley for this brevity of discourse under the circumstances. Sermons preached on a pilgrimage, in which the tent has to be pitched only for an hour, for all the purposes of washing, dressing, and eating, must necessarily be brief. Considering, too, before whom these sermons were delivered, their shortness may have been a necessity, and expedient, if not wise. Indeed, we are not sure that their brevity is not, in every sense, their chief merit. The first sermon in the volume is upon the text, Abraham went down into Egypt to sojourn there" (Gen. xii. 10); chosen because it was to be delivered in Egypt. Professor Stanley here shows at once that he thoroughly understands the principle of accommodation, as applied to Scripture. Curiously enough, he finds in this fact respecting Abraham a justification for the Christian's going into the world, instead of coming out of the world. Having asked the question, "What religious lessons it (the text) is intended to teach us?" he answers, "It is, in one word, the introduction of the Chosen People to the World-to the world, not in the bad sense in which we often use the word, but in its most general sense, both good and bad." (p. 2.) Then he continues:-" Egypt was to Abrahamto the Jewish people-to the whole course of the Old Testament, what the world, with all its interests, and pursuits, and enjoyments, is to us. It was the parent of civilization, of art, of learning, of royal power, of vast armies.".... "We might think, perhaps, that the Bible would take no account of such a country; that it would have seemed too much belonging to this earth, and the things of this earth. Not so!" No, indeed; Professor Stanley can derive a very different lesson, even from Abraham's forced "sojourn" there under a stern necessity. Hear him again :-"This, then, is one main lesson which the Bible teaches us by the stress laid on Egypt. It tells us that we may lawfully use the world and its enjoyments; that the world is acknowledged by true religion, as well as by our own natural instincts, to be a beautiful, a glorious, and in this respect a good and useful, world." (p. 3.)

Let it be observed, that it is man's world, not God's world, that our author is here speaking of as "beautiful," "glorious," and "good." We fear it will rather amaze some of our far

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behind-the-age readers, to find that world, of which Egypt is throughout the Scriptures made the type, thus described. But if this amazes them, still more will they be amazed to learn, from a professed Christian divine, that this "world" (figured to us by Egypt) "was consecrated" (mark the word, good reader,) "consecrated by the presence of Christ our Saviour," for the very conclusive reason, that he was taken down into Egypt by his parents in the days of his "unconscious infancy"!! How easy it is for a man to prove what he wishes! But if the going down into Egypt proves this, it just occurs to us to ask, what does the text, "Out of Egypt have I called my Son," prove?

It is a very remarkable thing, that Egypt, in Holy Scripture, is taken to represent exactly the opposite to what Professor Stanley makes it represent. It is the type and image and embodiment of darkness and oppression and idolatry, and, in general, of all wickedness. This any one at all familiar with Scripture phraseology will at once remember. Well then may they be astonished to find such a gloss put upon what the Bible brands with the black mark of its own indelible condemnation. But Professor Stanley belongs to a school of divines, as we have shown in former reviews of his works, whose theology is much broader than the Bible-so broad, indeed, that there is nothing which it will not include, except that intolerant thing, TRUTH.

In the second sermon of this volume, also preached in Egypt, our accommodating divine advances a step further in his liberality, and actually finds the groundwork of the religion which is from God in the worship and religion of Egypt. Their materialized idolatry shows us, he says, "the power of religion." "This it was which gave form and direction to the great works which we see;" alluding to the temple of Karnak at Thebes, in which this sermon was preached, and to the other vast temples and tombs, covered with animal emblems of the objects of their worship, which were then all around them. In these he sees "the religious feeling of intense thankfulness for the gifts they enjoyed." (p. 10.) He even finds a lesson of reproof for us in their costly sacrifices, offered to an unknown God; and says, "We may well ask ourselves, as we look around on these rude but gigantic steps towards a better knowledge of God, whether, with that better knowledge of Him, we serve Him with anything like the same devotion and success as those first forefathers of the faith and worship," (we have italicised these remarkable words to draw attention to them,)" which we have been permitted to enjoy." (p. 10.)

The view which St. Paul took of the condition of the heathen without Divine revelation, we need hardly observe, was very different from that taken by Dr. Stanley. He finds the true God

worshipped with almost equal acceptance in every country, and in every age. St. Paul speaks of the heathen generally as "without God in the world." His spirit was "moved" when he saw the Athenians" wholly given to idolatry." Dr. Stanley's spirit seems not to have been at all moved in the same manner; for the obvious reason, that he has not viewed the moral condition of the heathen nations in the same light. But we need not go to a divinely enlightened apostle for a reproof of this false and fatal liberality of sentiment, which makes no marked distinction between the worship of the one true God, and the worship of things "made like unto corruptible man, and fourfooted beasts and creeping things." Naaman the Syrian could say, after he had been cleansed of his leprosy, "Now know I that there is no God in all the earth, but in Israel." (2 Kings v. 15.)

Dr. Stanley admits, of course, that we have advanced far beyond the ancient Egyptians in many respects. He grants that the "chosen people"-the Jews-were elevated, by the law given to them through Moses, to more spiritual conceptions of God, and of the worship to be rendered to Him, than they possessed while they lived in the darkness of Egypt. But the difference, as he represents it, is so narrow, the distinction is so much more in form than in fact, that we are rather at a loss to discover why, in Scripture, the one system is so peremptorily condemned, and the other so exclusively sanctioned. According to him, what the Second Commandment prohibited in the words, "Thou shalt not make to thyself any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth," was that "they were not to make to themselves graven images of the hawk and the ibis, that fly through the heavens, or the crocodile and fish that swim in the Nile, or the serpent that creeps in the caves of the earth, or the lion, the jackal, and the wolf that prowl on the rocky hills." (p. 12.) And yet we are told immediately after, "these were the forms under which, at that time of the world, the human mind loved to represent the Divine nature. Perhaps these were the best figures that could be used in those early ages; and we may still learn something from seeing how, out of those earthly shapes, they drew lessons of that which is heavenly and divine." This looks to us very much like "casting a longing lingering look behind," to that rich, sensuous worship, the departure of which the poor benighted Keats so plaintively deplored, and for the sweeping away of which the godless Shelley so bitterly accused Christianity.

It is a fact, of which we ourselves have long felt convinced, that the very worst enemies to Christianity, after all, are they who betray it with a kiss. Such inconsiderate and sweeping

censurers as Shelley can do little to shake men's faith, compared with those who profess to admire, and yet stab-to uphold, and yet undermine. If the Christian faith ever could be subverted, and reduced to a nullity, it would be by those who confound it with heathenism in its essential elements, and teach Pope's celebrated principle, that it matters not whether men worship God under the name of "Jehovah, Jove, or Lord," provided the worship be intended for the One Great Supreme. Christianity, if we are to believe them, is only one degree better than Polytheism, in that it lays more stress on the moral virtues than on material offerings. The merit, however, of the advance, when it is real, according to Professor Stanley, lies more in us than in the Revelation we have received from Heaven; for he tells us, "In proportion as we value and revere truth, and justice, and purity, and lovingkindness, in that proportion we are worthy of the new religion of the new world to which, by God's grace, we belong." (p. 13.)

Honest-minded theologians of the Church of England will very naturally think, when they come upon such a passage as this, of the doctrine of the Thirty-nine Articles. They will ask, How can we "value and revere truth, and justice, and purity, and lovingkindness," without the grace of God by Christ preventing us (Art. X.); and if it must be the grace of God that is to enable us to do this, how can we, by doing this first, render ourselves worthy of the grace of God? or, as Dr. Stanley strangely expresses it, "of the new religion of the new world to which, by the grace of God, we belong?" Here is a strange confusion for a bishop's examining chaplain! We are to do that without the grace of God, for the doing of which we absolutely need the grace of God! Or, if we can do this without the grace of God; then, to speak of this as making us "worthy of the new religion of the new world to which by the grace of God we belong," is to make grace to be no grace. Thus, whichever way we put it, Dr. Stanley runs into a manifest contradiction; while, at the same time, he introduces the exploded Romish doctrine of the "grace of congruity." (Art. XIII.)

We can readily imagine that the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion must be most obnoxious to a man of Dr. Stanley's prepossessions, and that he would rejoice to get freed from them altogether. Their sharply defined Calvinistic doctrines (as some would style them) must ill accord with principles that agree far more readily with the sentiments of the Socinian than with those of our Scripture-taught Reformers. But it is the breaking of law that shows the necessity for law. If men can leap over the traces with such unruly disregard, while they are placed under certain restrictions, what would they not do if all bonds of duty were done away?

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