tecture and sacred art are on the models which Vladimir or Alexander Nevsky may have witnessed. With all this antiquity of type, there is a strange air of novelty about the empire. The bitter winters disintegrate brick and mortar pitilessly; the frequent fires in towns consume wood. Every thing seems as new as in an American clearing; and, in fact, the Russians are as great colonists as the Anglo-Saxons, only that they migrate within the limits of their empire, not beyond it. But no one could mistake the Russian church, with its gaudy cupolas of blue and gold, for any thing but the fresh form of an immemorial faith. Our own Gothic cathedrals are scarcely more instinct with the life that is beyond time. The kremlins or fortresses, from their massive construction, are commonly older in actual date than the churches; and the white conical towers, enclosing the lowest and highest parts of the town, with palace and cathedral, are indescribably picturesque. It is a curious tribute to the permanence of type in Russian edifices, that no visitor to Moscow ever thinks of it as a new city, though most of it of course dates from within sixty years. One great advantage of Moscow over its rivals in the empire lies in the fact, that it has been laid out irregularly. After the fire, which burned away the stain of French occupation, every one was allowed to build pretty much as he liked: palaces and gardens were clustered in unsymmetrical lines without interference from imperial edicts. Then the architects of the two greatest buildingsthe Cathedral of St. Basil and St. George's Palace-have been men of the highest capacity in their respective ways. Add to this the unrivalled natural position; and it will be understood that the whole effect is rather that of an Arabian Night's story than of an ordinary second capital. Nijni Novgorod is scarcely less remarkable. The old town, with its kremlin and cathedral, on a cliff that overhangs the junction of two imperial riversthe Volga and the Oka; on the other side, an illimitable plain fringed with many thousand booths, interspersed with mosques and pagodas; and the river between gay with decorated junks, which alone contain the population of a city; Cossack, Armenian, and Chinaman here confronting the bagman from Manchester or Lyons,-never surely had commerce a more fantastic metropolis. This generation will probably look upon its last. There is talk already of telegraph lines in Siberia; road and rail have made Moscow as accessible as Nijni Novgorod; and the days of fairs are numbered.

There is still one class of traveller whose interests we have not considered, the man who wishes simply to lie fallow, and rejects all idea of self-improvement. To such a one we recommend Norway. It has lain idly looking on at the world round

it since its heroic age some eight centuries ago, and has no manufactures, no art, no history, and almost no literature. The common mode of travelling in carriole, a sort of low chair upon two wheels, with a place behind for luggage, saves the tourist from some of the common and most annoying incidents of a journey, the hurry to catch a train, the waiting-room, and the temporary loss of impedimenta. To be quite independent, however, and enjoy the country leisurely, he had better travel with his own horse: the loss, if any, on this will be slight in a country where fifteen or twenty pounds is a large sum for the best. The great conveniences of Norwegian travelling are, that the light lasts far into the night, that mists are unknown, and that, as a general rule, the best views may be seen without climbing. The waterfalls are perhaps superior to the Swiss; the fiords are longer and with more reaches than the lakes; and the frequent changes of scenery along the roadside are indescribable. But the country is not one for a delicate man, nor for any but a very adventurous lady to travel in. Oat-cakes and milk are in many parts the only food that can be counted on; and the doctor may have to be summoned from many miles' distance. On the other hand, clean sheets are the rule. It is needless to describe cottage interiors for any one who has seen Tidemann's pictures. It must be well borne in mind that such rooms as he paints are the only ones that await the traveller, except in the three or four towns where there are hotels.

What we have said is addressed, not to the learned in travelling, but to those who are beginning it, or who have never had time and occasion to master its first principles. Of the traveller, as of the poet, it may be said that he is born, not made. There is an irresistible impulse in certain races and families to go out into the unknown world about them; and few instincts bring a richer reward with them, or are more durable. Yet we hold a sort of Hegelian doctrine, that the feeling for home is nowhere stronger than in the wanderer. Probably no nation has better proved its credentials in this respect than the Scotch, and in none is there heartier local patriotism or a stronger family pride. The men who really renounce England for the Continent and sink contentedly into the second-rate circles of a provincial German town, are not travellers, or to be so accounted, because they have given up one form of cockneydom for another. They are also the last men who ever understand the society into which they have thrown themselves. They catch, perhaps, its tricks of manner or vice; but the same want of individuality that hindered them from taking their proper place at home unfits them to learn the more difficult lesson-what the highest aspirations of a

strange people are. It is only the artist in travel, "always roaming with a hungry heart to follow knowledge like a sinking star," who is also "a part of all he meets." To those who understand this instinctively it will not seem strange if we have dwelt even to weariness on the uses to which a journey in the most hackneyed parts of Europe may be turned.

ART. VI.-EWALD ON THE JOHANNINE WRITINGS. Die Johanneischen Schriften übersetzt und erklärt. Von Heinrich Ewald. Göttingen, 1862.

Geschichte des Volkes Israel. Von H. Ewald. Siebenter Band. Göttingen, 1859.

Zehntes Jahrbuch der Biblischen Wissenschaft. 1859-1860.

[The following Article is intended to furnish a digest of Ewald's views, and does not aim at giving an estimate of the questions connected with St. John's Gospel generally.]

FEW readers can study the Johannine writings of the New Testament with merely ordinary feelings of curiosity and interest. To the devout and thoughtful, the Gospel of St. John has ever been the revelation of the highest spiritual truth given to man, and the setting forth of the divine character with a glory which is found nowhere else in human letters. Readers of this class know that their own apprehension of the book depends upon the love and the light which are in them, upon the hold which the unseen realities, the subject-matter of the book, have upon them. And the critical student, who engages in the study out of the resolve to let no writing of the ancient world escape his inquiry, whose aim it is to discover the authorship, design, and history of every book which has told powerfully upon the course of human thought, and who will not be deterred from this task because any such writings are clothed with a sacred character, or because many will consider the inquiry over bold, if not profane,-he, we dare say it, does not long study the Gospel of St. John as he would another work. He meets in it with thoughts, words, and deeds which the critical faculty is inadequate to explain. He finds the mere historical insight fail him. He learns that this Gospel speaks less to his intellect than to his affections; that he must find its meaning and explanation in the experiences of his daily working life with and among men, as well as by the aid of the understanding. And he acknowledges at last that, to know the Gospel as he would wish to know

another book, he must be in relation with the mind of the writer. We think that both the critical and the devout reader, likeminded and sincere in their aim, arrive at the same conclusion.

With the Gospel we class the three Epistles, which bear indisputable marks of the same handwriting. Indeed, the longest of the three, which may be entitled the Epistle of St. John, is but the expanding and applying to immediate wants of the church the discourses narrated in the last chapters of the Gospel, and stands or falls with the Gospel as the work of the apostle.

The remaining book of the series awakens its own interest, though of a different kind. The dramatic form of the Apocalypse, "the majestic image of a high and stately tragedy, shutting up and intermingling her solemn scenes and acts with a reverential chorus of hallelujas and harping symphonies;" the passionate glow of devotion which pervades it; the vivid character of its symbolism, at once so real and so strange, making us feel that the book is treating of actual things under a form and dress altogether foreign to present modes of thought; and again, the fact of its being the one prophetic book of the New Testament, and that the old Hebrew spirit appears in it anew, clothed in still more fiery language,-combine powerfully to attract students to the study of it. Rarely does the study prove satisfactory. On the very threshold the want of some guide is felt, and not a few offer themselves. No other book has been more frequently commented upon,* to the bewilderment rather than to the help of the student. The largest class of expositors with all the confidence of dogmatism hammer out of the book their own theories of the divine government of the world since Christ came till now, which bear the odium theologicum upon their front, and are too plainly the issue of that mother of monstrous fables and fancies. The student who is told to believe the Apocalypse a catalogue of unfulfilled predictions which contain the history of Christendom written out in enigma, and who finds that the different theories of interpretation, even when based on the same principles, are mutually destructive, gives up the study as hopeless. The book becomes to him the name for what is past finding out. The neglect into which the book has fallen, and the low esteem in which the study of it is held, even as a weakness, lie heavily at the door of the expositors. We would not seem unmindful that the book retains its place among writings which are the spiritual food of men. We know how children and untaught peasants pore over it with delight and wonder.

* "Si quâ in re libera esse debet sententia, certè in vaticiniis, præsertim cum jam Protestantium libri prodierint fermè centum (in his octoginta in Angliâ solâ, ut mihi Anglici legati dixere) super illis rebus, inter se plurimum discordes." Grot. Epist. 895, quoted by Hallam, Literature of Europe, 5th edition, vol. ii. p. 455, n.

But the simple faith that the book bespeaks the ultimate triumph of the cause of God and his saints over the oppression and injustice of the world, that he hears the prayer of the poor destitute, and will yet cause right to be done, renders it a living book and prized possession to many a wayfarer. The fortitude and patience with which its pages have inspired the afflicted and distressed, the betrayed and persecuted, the confessor hiding to pray in the catacomb, or fleeing to the caves and dens of the earth for shelter, from the first age of Christianity till now, more than justify its place in the canon. The book has a special meaning for special times, and is then most felt to be true when most needed. While we recognise these facts, we cannot withhold the inquiry what the book means, whether the symbolism which is its most distinguishing feature may not have been most intelligible to its first readers deeply read in Old-Testament prophecy; and whether the time of its composition, once clearly established, will not clear away many difficulties, by showing how earnestly the events which were happening and just about to happen, the strong fears and cries of Christendom, called for a revelation of the kind. The historian, the scholar, the critic, who should furnish this key, would open a storehouse of truth hitherto well nigh closed. It is equally in their province to make the study of the Gospel more fruitful. We have expressed our conviction of the one essential condition, without which no appliances of learning will avail. Deeply as we feel the need of that, -the fear of God in our hearts and good-will towards men in our lives, we shall eagerly seek for every gleam of light that knowledge can shed upon the least letter of the text. This Gospel differs in one respect from the earlier Gospels. It has a more evident reference to the time and circumstances when it was written, to the thoughts and beliefs which stirred the first Christian communities. The historian who should reproduce this environment of the apostle, who should set us in the midst of one Christian congregation and acquaint us with the minds of its elders and members, would make the form, yes, and the spirit of the Gospel more easily understood, and he would deserve well of the student. We want to stand near the men who were the first to read this book, to know how they understood the language which came to them fresh from the lips of the beloved disciple; how it became, as far as any even the most sacred book is capable of this, their guide and counsellor. Who is sufficient for such a task? On the brief roll of those who can without presumption undertake it, we place among the foremost Heinrich Ewald. It is unnecessary to mention the great works which have earned him the high place he holds among biblical scholars. Those of us who know nothing of foreign theological literature,