lute giant above moral pigmies, whose orthodoxy, too, is in som instances as questionable as his own. In two things Colenso ha an undoubted advantage over the most of his opponents-first, in command of temper; and, secondly, in the possession of a theory the Pentateuch, whether valid or not. Not for a moment, not in single sentence, does the "best abused" man of the day lose hi dignity, or discover either odium or animus. What a contrast t the raving philippics, the vile insinuations, the uncharitable conclu sions, the downright falsehoods, which have been uttered agains him in effusions. many of them coming from respectable or eminen names, and which thus, on our cheeks at least, have served t deepen the blush kindled for the sake of our common Christianity In a controversy such as this, it is of vast importance to have a approximately complete theory of the whole case, whence to com down upon particular passages and points. Now this, while th most of his opponents entirely want, disagreeing, too, for the mo part, with each other even as to their fractions of general principl Colenso undoubtedly has. We do not vouch for its accuracy originality; we do not hold it ourselves, even less, as we have sa do we think Colenso the man qualified fully to unfold it, but we se it to be consistent with itself to solve many, though not hitherte the difficulties connected with the subject, and to give to the bish an immense vantage ground in the discussion. Nay, we say more if he can apply his idea of the Pentateuch being a composite wor of various authors and ages successfully to the solution of all th phenomena of these books, philosophers, and Christians too, shoul hesitate ere they summarily reject it.

As it is, the state of the discussion is, we think, the following and we perceive the following shades of opinion to prevail :-Ther is first the class-a very large one, although not perhaps the mos intelligent who maintain that the bishop has been driven out the field, annihilated, or, as the Quarterly Review has it, "torn t fragments -an opinion against which Colenso, feeling himself sti totus teres et rotundus, very naturally protests, as he comes for ward with a third lengthy volume in his hand, and challenges a comers to refute it. Another class-rather small, we imagine. i number, although considerably distinguished by talent, and whic may stand typified by the Rev. Mr. Houghton, of Salop, who on ginally replied to Colenso, but who has recalled his answer-baw declared themselves converts to his general views. A third clas have all along treated the whole controversy altogether with silen or sneering contempt, and this class has been curiously compounded of orthodox and of heterodox thinkers, both united in imagining themselves either exalted on altitudes, or immersed in profundities too high or too deep to permit of their occupying themselves with such a trivial matter. But there is another class still, who, feeling that

ice.

e subject, although not vital, is of great interest-that Colenso has ated some real perplexities-that, in particular, in calling attention the Hebrew numerals, and showing the necessity of their reducn, he has done good service-and that the entire critical question reference to the Hebrew Bible demands a new and thorough instigation, are on the whole thankful for the controversy the Bishop s raised, and look forward with calm fearlessness to its results. While Colenso, by his ready calculations and dashing swiftness movement, has been frightening weak believers, and a class a iter of the day has called "ignorant evangelicals," out of their priety, a mightier spirit and a nobler has been summoned from tomb, and is now again seen walking through the world. This that Benedict Spinoza whose defamed and abused name was e a bugbear to Christian children, and who was often plunged olicly, by professing Christian divines, into the fires of that "Other Hard indeed was the fate of the noble Jew; cast out of synagogue, he was rejected by the Church. He had, shall we ', like another Zaccheus, mounted a wild fig-tree to look at Christ n a new angle, and through a philosophic chiaroscuro; but, 3! no authentic Jesus passed by and said to him, " Come down; lay I must abide in thy house." Men are too often judged by ir mere systems and their immediate effects, and not by the ughts and feelings which led them to build up their systems, by the sublimer and ultimate results to which their systems 1. So far as Spinoza was a victim, he was the victim, not of passion or of sinister motive, but of thought-the irrepressible llectual tendency of his nature, which led him into the very ths of abstraction. It is very vain for inferior men to rebuke h a tendency in minds of Spinoza's rank. It is like saying with nan voice to the ocean, "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no furr;" or with human voice telling the perpetual hills to bow. No bt there is a point where the mightiest must become a little id before the mysteries of the universe, and end in the wonder h which he began; but some have to travel far ere they reach 3 point-the interspace of inquiry is shorter or longer in propor1 to the depth and strength of the inquiring faculties. The tency of the highest philosophical minds has usually been towards cheme of unity, and Spinoza at least was not satisfied till all Dearances subsided in the mighty and awful ONE "whose goings h have been from of old-from the Eternal Obscure." He snowhere, so far as we remember, called himself a Pantheist, he has repeatedly acknowledged the Divine authority of Moses 1 Christ, and of the main principles of the Jewish religion; this doctrine did undoubtedly tend to the absolute unity substance as the great dim substratum of all appearances. has been called a negativist, but this is a mistake; he

does indeed what he deems some needful negative work as a preli minary, but his great aim, after getting rid of the "beggarly elements," is to fasten on great unchangeable principles. Moses said, God is fire; Jesus said, God is love; Spinoza said, God is law. But supposing he identified God with law, that law to him never ceased to seem Divine, although he was disposed to substitute for the words "the Lawgiver" those of the "Lawgiving God." Spino felt that law, like light and all other forms of matter, was per petually pouring out from a present Deity as from a fountain, and thought that it was in this sense that God was the "living God Whether true or not, the idea is certainly sublime, and has seemed so to the poet, who, assuming it for the nonce as correct, has i dited the following verses :—

Sublime Spinoza, glorious Sadducee,
Actæon-like, who Nature naked saw,*

Yet fled not at the vision-met the hounds
Springing immortal at his mortal head,
And soothed them by his magic power to sleep.
The awful veil of Isis his to lift

And die not, but with earnest, patient eye
To meet the mystery that was within-
Secure because he knew that eye contained
In miniature the wonder he beheld,

And God-like gazed at and reflected God.

The modern Moses, who, through clouds and storm,
The awe of Heaven, Earth's howl, the laugh of Hell,
Went up alone the rugged mount of truth,

And found a Law of stone upon the top

Divinely cold, stern, kind, unchangeable,

And brought it down to men who, mad in mirth,
Loud in idolatry, and fierce in hate,

Mocked him, and cried, "No veil upon thy face;
"Where is the glory of thy great compeer?

66

Atheist, begone! back to thy clouds away,
"And leave us to our games and gold again."
But he no tables broke, no frown returned,
But smiled a sad serene and solemn smile,
Like that of sun smiling amid a storm,
Proclaiming peace in him-pardon to them.

Moses revived? or rather shall we say
Last of the high priests entering the shrine;
Thy brow unmitred and thy breast ungemmed,
No bells upon thy feet, and in thy hand
No censer burning with immortal fire,
But clothed in linen white and clean, a pen
Of ready writer gleaming in thy grasp,

* Alluding to Shelley's "Adonais," where he

says

of himself

"He gazed on Nature's naked loveliness
Actæon-like, and then he fled astray

Followed by raging hounds, their father and their prey."

A parchment roll held in thine other hand,
Thy motion soft and slow, thine eye a beam
Of purest, clearest radiance-Spirit light!
The veil removes, rolls back, and Thou art left
Alone; with what? with Nothing-Darkness, Death?
No! for amidst the empty, yawning gloom

Where erst the Shekinah of glory shone,

There slowly shape themselves these words of Fire;
"I AM, Thou art, and We are One, not twain;
"Time is Eternity, and God is Man,

"And Life and Death, and Law and All are One.
'The Soul of beasts and men, and worms and stars,
"Dwelleth in Thee, and Me, and all that are;
"Life, Law, and Mind, are the great Trinal God."
Calmly the High Priest copies out the words,
And with a quiet sigh he leaves the shrine.

The Sanhedrim are met in conclave stern,
Severe in look, long-bearded, serpent-eyed,
Sitting in darkness; for the gloomy room
Has but one taper shining in the midst,
Black, waxen, wan,-it is Spinoza's soul!
And under it there stands a pail of blood,
And over it there towers an aged priest,
White-haired, white-bearded, girt for sacrifice.
He lifts the candle in his quivering hands,
And cries, "Eternal curses on the soul
"This taper doth denote! may it be plunged
"In fires unquenchable, as I this plunge

"In human blood !-Down, down, thou Sadducee,
"Into Gehenna's flames for evermore!"
Slowly the candle droppeth in the blood,

And growls of savage joy pronounce " Amen!"

See yonder man in haste leaving the spot,
With stealthy step and circumspective look.
He finds the Immortal sitting in his room,
Lost in the richest reverie of truth,
Rapt far above the sun in lofty thought.
He tells him of the deed of darkness done:
Spinoza smiles, as though Jove's statue smiled
From its lone Capitolian altitude

Down on the clamours of the crowd below,

And says,

"Fear not, my friend; for Wisdom's child

"He shall be justified, and these-forgot.

"The Spirit they have plunged in night and blood
"Shall rise, and shine a star on God's own brow."

e charge of Atheism has been often brought, generally by the est, against many of the greatest of men,-against Socrates, even Cudworth-against Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, as well as st Spinoza; and in every one of these cases has been false. tis Atheism? It is the belief in a mindless, heartless, disored, and blind on-rushing Materialism, called improperly the erse; whereas the philosophic Idealism, as the creed of all

these thinkers should be called, is founded upon the perception o the divine order in which all things move, the divine idea which al things reveal, the supremacy of thought and law to the mere out ward shows and phenomena of things. In fact, the error that is i their system lies in its tendency to the other extreme, not to Athe ism, but to All-theism; and instead of eliminating God from th creation, they seek to saturate it all with a divine element, repeatin to some degree the process described by Coleridge in his ode o Mont Blanc:

O, dread and silent Mount! I gazed upon thee

Till thou, still present to the bodily sense,

Didst vanish from my thought, entranced in prayer ;
I worshipped the Invisible alone!

And so to the eye of these great spiritual seers the visible disa pears and the invisible takes its place, or rather matter becom a transparent veil, revealing the face of God. It is as when t persons-the one non-scientific, the other a botanist-walk throu a garden. The one sees a number of brilliant objects bathed summer sunshine, and glittering with a thousand varied colour the other, behind all this, beholds the laws of the plants, their rel tions to each other, their metamorphoses,-all the history, in shor and philosophy, as well as poetry, of the garden. Spinoza, 805 from being an Atheist, was said to be "drunk with God;" and all remember Schleiermacher's bold burst, "Sacrifice with me alo of hair to the manes of the pure and misunderstood Spinoza. 1 sublime spirit of the universe filled his soul, the Infinite was beginning and end, the Universal his sole and eternal love. Livi in saintly innocence and in deep humility, he viewed his being the glass of everlasting nature, and knew that he too reflected son thing that was not unworthy to be loved. Full of religion, full the Holy Spirit, he appears to us as dwelling apart from the wo raised above the vulgar, and master in his art, but without discip and without a school."

Spinoza's mind was of a calm, clear, colossal character, only flowerless in its products, but apparently of a nature which flowers are as incredible as miracles. Yet what maste depth and grim severity of logic! He is too dogmatic, howe and is altogether more a seer than a poet. Plato was a seer, poet, and so was Bacon. Spinoza rather resembles Aristotle strength and clearness, though not in compression. Some speaks of dry-light: Spinoza's is double-dried-the sun of Sah How different this great Sadducee of the Sadducees, as from point of view we may call him, from the inspired magnates of race,-Isaiah, David, Ezekiel, John! He seems the very invers of the dreaming Daniel. Not only do miracles and prophe resolve themselves with him into natural events, but the beau