spirit, was shifted into a notion of purchase from God through the price of his bodily pangs."-Essays and Reviews, p. 87.

Bishop Colenso carried the doctrines of the Essayists and Reviewers to their extreme issues: "If we compare," he says, "one passage with another, we shall find them to contain a series of manifest contradictions and inconsistencies, which leave us, it would seem, no alternative but to conclude that main portions of the story of the Exodus, though based probably upon some real historical foundation, yet are certainly not to be regarded as historically true; that, as a whole, it could never in its present form have been written by Moses, or by any one who had actually taken part in the scenes which it professes to describe." He says, "It is not to be supposed that Jesus in His human nature was acquainted, more than any educated Jew of the age, with all the mysteries of all modern science; nor, with St Luke's expression before us, can it be seriously maintained that, as an infant, or young child, He possessed a knowledge surpassing that of most of the pious and learned adults of the Hebrew nation upon the subject of the authorship and nature of the different parts of the Pentateuch." Now, let us see what this language implies. He says that Jesus increased in wisdom as He grew in stature; this is unquestionably true. But the question before us is not what Jesus knew as an infant, or whether He was more enlightened as a child than Hebrew adults, but what He was when

He stood forth in the midst of the world, the great Teacher, the only Priest, the supreme King of His Church. If He knew no more at thirty years of age, when He assumed the great functions of the infallible and universal Teacher, than the Hebrew adults, His contemporaries, what have we left us to rely upon? What He taught as the resurrection of the dead, if the bishop be right, may be a myth; what He taught as pardon of sins through His precious blood, may be a mistake; when He taught the immortality of the soul and the hopes of glory, He may have taught delusions.

It is unnecessary to multiply the croakings of this "unclean spirit like a frog." They have been heard from professedly Protestant pulpits and in professedly Christian colleges and schools, and advocated ably in pamphlets, sermons, and books. Bishops, priests, deacons, and professors, and teachers have joined in the impure, unholy, and unmusical chorus. Jewish Rabbis, as if earnests of their conversion to the gospel of Jesus, have rebuked Christian bishops and preachers. "Had the bishop," observes Dr Adler, chief Rabbi in London, "studied the Bible with greater attention, we should not have been favoured with the outburst of his virtuous indignation, and the Zulu Kaffir would have been taught the true meaning of Exodus xxi. 20-22. Bishop Colenso would have discovered that the commandment does not refer to murder with malice prepense, but to accidental manslaughter; and that still, if

the slave died under his master's hand, it is to be avenged' (for this is the true translation, not 'he shall be punished'). And this expression he would have explained by the ancient commentators to mean, execution by the sword.

"But, in fact, there is scarcely one difficulty, one imagined contradiction or impossibility, raised and gloated over by him, which has not already been touched upon and satisfactorily explained by one of the Jewish expositors. Thus the prohibition in Deut. xxiii. 12 is explained by them to refer only to the outside of the camp of Levites, and the whole difficulty vanishes. His Lordship may, indeed, claim originality for startling discoveries, such as he makes, e.g. about the Passover. Who but a smatterer in Hebrew would thus pervert the plain language of the text as to make it appear that a Commandment to be observed on the 10th would have been issued on the 14th of that month? But I must not encroach any further upon your valuable space.

"In conclusion, let me ask Bishop Colenso one question. He forbids us from indulging the imagination, that God could only reveal Himself to us by means of an infallible book. Will he have us believe that God could reveal Himself through a book which contains such absurdities as he has discovered in it?"

The croakings of this frog-like spirit have provoked imitations in Scotland, where a sound theology has so long prevailed. They have encouraged reckless young' men in their enmity to true religion, and furnished

incitements to their unhappy moral career; and in no slight degree made way for the croakings of the two sister spirits or frogs from the mouth of "the beast" and the mouth of "the false prophet."

ROMANISM.

Attention has been often and earnestly called to the steadily-increasing progress of Romanism in this country, a progress not wholly measured by mere statistics of priests and chapels. There is a progress far more disastrous than this. It is infecting public sentiment, corrupting the judgments of public men, and securing for its doctrines, its alleged disabilities, its convents and monastic charities, a sympathy at once unhealthy and ominous.

The ancient attitude of scriptural protest yields to a sentiment not of toleration, which is right, but of compassionate favour, of growing patronage, of public acknowledgment, and official favour. The votes of its representatives are morally and politically, though not financially, launched in the market. They are like all a Romanist has at the service of the Church -a service required by the priesthood, and freely and earnestly yielded by the laity. Political parties become dealers for a rise or a fall; too nearly equal they bid for these disposable elements of power; the price is paid in promises and pledges, and Rome reports the victories she wins, or rather buys, and laughs at the victims she can so easily and successfully count. Thus "the unclean spirit from the

mouth of the beast" spreads its poison, and prepares for the issues.

The great Western apostasy, since her rise in 532, has steadily and further and further departed from the faith, onward to the present hour, adding new errors and repenting not of old ones, glorifying creatures with an idolatrous worship; increasingly intolerant as she decays in influence and strength; proscribing, as in a recent bull, liberty of conscience, liberty of worship, and the liberty of the press. She is the model apostate, the doomed of God, the refuge of every stray error and delusion and superstition, the retreat in which the roué finds sympathetic shelter, and the Ritualist scope for his ceremonies which he felt were stunted elsewhere, and toward which gravitate, by a centripetal attraction, all corrupt and unholy things. This system has sunk so deep in apostasy that she can sink no deeper. Her next and very near descent will be into the deep, and judgments utterly and irrecoverably destructive. Her cup of judgment trembles in the hand of the avenging angel. She is "come into remembrance;" she already tastes the wormwood and the gall; her "judgments will come in one day." "Come out of her, my people, that ye partake not of her sins and receive not of her plagues."

Toward this inveterate and doomed apostasy are tending all homogeneous systems and principles. These, like miasma in the air, have in recent times attained in England a force and increase without