INTRODUCTION.

THE Deity gave a vivâ-voce revelation to man before a written one was consigned to him, for this was an indispensable provision accruing from the very nature of the case; and if thereby can be shown a priority of order, it implies no incompatibility between them both, a disparagement of either, or an infringement of one on the office of the other. So, the faculty of speech was a gift with which Adam was endowed by his Maker, and mental ideas were uttered in intelligible sounds by the articulate movement of the mouth, from palatal, guttural, and labial organisation, before letters became the visible representations of them. Anthropomorphism is a figurative term, whereby we attribute to the Supreme Being human organs, actions, and passions, with which the Bible abounds. Such is the passage, "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light;" which is merely another mode of declaring to His creatures the emanation of the divine mind and will. When, however, He is said to have addressed Adam in the garden of Eden,

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it was a proper and real communication, whatever may have been the medium by which it was made.

The confusion of languages, and dispersion of mankind into emigrant colonists, and communities of monarchical government, have been assumed to have arisen from that divine intervention by which a contrariety and diversity were produced in the pronunciation of the same words, in their inflections and terminations, rather than that new ones were immediately, though in process of time, fabricated and composed for the supply of increasing wants. This operative cause may be traced in the Shemitic and Japhetic families, evidently derivable from one primeval stock in their etymologies, provincialisms, and dialectical affinities of their living branches.

Our Lord did not, indeed, see fit authoritatively to multiply copies of the sacred records with the same facility and at the same time when He imparted to His Church the gift of speaking and comprehending foreign tongues, since those records themselves were then incomplete; but the injunction to study them is divinely imperative, and the honourable spirit of the Berean believers in this respect was wisely commended. Man is

not the mere creature of feeling and emotion, but of rationality and perception. It is essential both to convince the intellect and to win the heart. When and where society, after having emerged

from a barbarous and ignorant condition of immaturity, has become more or less artificially cultivated, and the human mind has been expanded, the instruction conveyed in any department of literature by written and printed books, if not always more speedily acquired, is better digested by the understanding, its arguments weighed, its value appreciated, and the result retained by the memory, than by the transiently impressible method and course of oral lectureship, except it might be the acquisition of experimental philosophy.

Fiction, or parable, which is founded on fact, has become in all times a vehicle of thought; and even a sententious proverb has contained within itself the good sense of a nation. It has become the favourite truism of the age in which we live, that knowledge is power, while we are indebted to the natural agents of steam and electricity for the boast of it in the mechanical rapidity with which it spreads. The press is a gigantic instrumentality of moral good, with its train of inflammable evil, whose accompaniments and consequences are incalculable in a great city, and in a free country. It is an absolutism and monopoly which can only be dethroned and eschewed by competition, being both the dictator and judge of its fellow-man, the trumpeter and libeller of fame. Its nutritive food and stimulants are imparted to the public, with the Athenian appetite and thirst for novelty, by the

compositor and the newsmonger, the author and the reviewer, the pedagogue and the pupil. It sometimes also inoculates with the virus of disease, while professing to be the hygeian dispenser of health and animation. It is the insatiable horseleech of Solomon; and a perpetual motion, whose speed is commensurate with time. Its pride is only equalled by the Babylonian monarch, environed in a domain having brazen gates and pensile gardens; or its greatness by the Macedonian commander, who wept because he had not another world to vanquish.

The rolls of inspiration were designated by the Hebrew appellation of Chetib or Mikra, when manuscripts were scanty, precious, and hoarded, and the tongue was the pen of a facile scribe. 'H zawn Aaon is the Greek inscription upon the titlepage of that New Covenant which has been sedulously preserved to us as Gentile property, though of Jewish authorship. It has been an assumption of Roman Catholicism that the Church existed before the Bible; but the right definition of a church is only an earthen vessel which contains pure water, and there is no danger to the stability of the one from the irrigation of the other.

"Heaven's early care prescrib'd for every age,

First in the soul, and after in the page."

Dryden.

It is libellous Jesuitism which has virtually placed the book of divine revelation itself within its own