1856.] Literary Intelligence. 319 and Lightfoot. The few instances of Rabbinical stories in this history make us ask for more. We trust that a free use and an extensive circulation of these volumes among Christian readers will realize the wish so eloquently expressed in the closing words of the Preface: "We therefore fully expect that good men of every creed and every lineage will bid us' God speed'; that wise men will approve of our design; and that both will strengthen our hands in our honest endeavor to break down that icy barrier which Pride and Ignorance have raised, which Bigotry and Prejudice have so long upheld, between those who are children of one Father, creatures of one God." The Physiology of the Senses; or How and What we See, 66 pp. 214. New THIS little book is well fitted to aid one who should wish to make a careful estimate of the knowledge that comes to us through the senses, and to resolve into an exact order the confusions that result from our ignorance and inattention. The writer is evidently a nice observer, clear in his conceptions and statements, and happy in his illustrations. He must, we think, have been subjected in early life to the discipline proposed by Dr. Johnson, when he counselled, "If a child says he looked out of this window when he looked out of that, whip him," and the result is quite a valuable treatise and help towards accurate perception and description. INTELLIGENCE. LITERARY INTELLIGENCE. MESSRS. Little, Brown, & Co.'s series of the British Poets advances with the publication, in three volumes, of "The Poetical Works of John Skelton." The editor has adopted for his chief guide the edition of the Rev. Alexander Dyce, but has found occasion for the exercise of all his skill in this, which is one of the most difficult of the tasks in volved in the series. The biography of the poet is obscure, his language has the difficulties of antiquity and of a transition period, and the early imprints of his works were faulty. We may therefore feel that Professor Childs has had no easy office in annotating these volumes. All that care, good judgment, and fine taste can do, he has done for us. The duodecimo edition of Irving's admirable biography of Washington presents now its first volume from the press of Putnam & Co. of New York. The octavo edition issued to subscribers has had a great circulation, but the smaller size will insure the larger circle of readers. The author, having originally designed to complete his work in three volumes, has found, to the regret of nobody but himself, that he shall need a fourth. Why not run up to a sixth, and give us episodes of his own rich wisdom and fancy? Messrs. Ivison and Phinney of New York have published "A Selection from the Sermons of Rev. John Humphrey, edited by his Father, Rev. Heman Humphrey, D. D. With Introductory Memoirs by Rev. William I. Budington." 8vo. pp. xcix. and 320. A strong personal regard for the pure-minded and amiable subject of the memoir and author of the sermons in this volume has engaged us in the perusal of its pages. His short life devotedly given to his beloved profession accomplished the highest end of any life, in the deep impression which it made upon the hearts of his friends. His blessing was that of those who die young, after having proved that their existence is a blessing to others. His sermons, which are above the average of pulpit discourses, are earnest utterances of a pious heart and a well-trained mind, but rarely affected by the traditional theology in which Orthodoxy tries in vain to train its young generations. Messrs. G. P. Putnam & Co. have published a "Memoir of the Life of Harriet Preble, containing Portions of her Correspondence, Journal, and other Writings, Literary and Religious. By Professor R. H. Lee, LL.D." 12mo. pp. 409. There are good thoughts nobly expressed in a volume of Miscellaneous Discourses and Papers, by C. Van Santvoord, published by M. W. Dodd, New York. 16mo. pp. 456. "Hints concerning Church Music, the Liturgy, and Kindred Subjects, prepared by James M. Hewins," is the title of a volume published by Ide and Dutton, Boston. (16mo, pp. 180.) The hints are many of them timely and wise, and deserve to be regarded. John P. Jewett & Co. have published "The Last of the Epistles; a Commentary upon The Epistle of St. Jude. Designed for the General Reader as well as for the Exegetical Student. By Rev. Frederic Gardiner, Lewiston, Me." 12mo. pp. 275. "Chron Sheldon, Blakeman, & Co. of New York have published a ological History of the United States, arranged with Plates, on Bem's Principle, by Elizabeth P. Peabody." 12mo. pp. 312. THE CHRISTIAN EXAMINER AND RELIGIOUS MISCELLANY. NOVEMBER, 1856. ART. I.-ANALOGY OF NATURE AND THE BIBLE.* [A Dudleian Lecture, delivered in the College Chapel, Cambridge, May 14, 1856. By REV. A. P. PEABODY, D. D.] WERE the principal books of the New, and, I might add, of the Old Testament, records of ordinary events, with but that slight tinge of the marvellous which adheres to all ancient history, I doubt whether their genuineness and the authenticity of their contents would be called into serious question, except by the class of critics who deny that Homer ever lived, and would assign to the Iliad more authors than it numbers Books. The simple argument of Paley in his "Evidences of Christianity" is unanswerable. It met, and more than refuted, the historical infidelity of his age. It, and with it very many masterly treatises of the last century, have become obsolete and comparatively useless, not because they are not true, but because they drove infidelity from its old historical ground to considerations of antecedent probability or possibility. I say this, with Strauss, the * The text to this Lecture on its delivery was Genesis i. 1: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." John i. 1, 14: "In the beginning was the Word..... And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. VOL. LX. —4TH S. VOL. XXVI. NO. III. 28 Tübingen school, and critics of their stamp, in my mind; for their historical theories concerning the symbolical books of Christianity are not founded on any known laws of literary composition or known facts in the history of books, but are simply attempts to account for the existence and contents of these books in accordance with the assumed impossibility of revelation and miracle. It is, then, at this latter point that Christianity needs defence at the present moment. The region of the possible and the probable is the Armageddon, the final battle-ground, where the forces of infidelity must be routed or must bear away the honors of victory. If revelation and miracle are intrinsically probable, the Christian revelation and miracles have more than enough of solid historical testimony to substantiate them.. If revelation and miracle are in a high degree improbable, this historical testimony, strong as it is, may find its entire counterpoise in rebutting a priori arguments. If revelation and miracle are impossible, then this historical testimony, though it seem impregnable, loses all validity; while hypotheses, else absurd, become tenable. In this region to which the conflict is narrowed, analogy is our chief argument, the analogy of the known facts of nature to the alleged facts of revelation. Analogy demonstrates nothing; for it argues from a fact in one series or department to a parallel fact in another somewhat similar, yet not coincident, series or department, and, unless assured from other sources, we can never know that it is not with the fact in question that resemblance ceases and difference begins. Yet, under the administration of a self-consistent and immutable God, analogy always proves a possibility; and in proportion to the closeness of the parallelism between the series of facts or the departments of truth 'compared, its conclusions range from bare possibility to the confines of certainty. I propose in this discourse, through the aid of analogy, to meet some of the intrinsic improbabilities urged against Christianity and its records. 1. According to the Christian theory, the history of the spiritual creation has been marked by successive forming epochs, at each of which new spiritual agencies 1856.] Creative Epochs. 323 have come into action, new trains of spiritual causes have been put in operation, new modes of spiritual life have been brought into being. Of this sort were the Abrahamic and the Mosaic, no less than the Christian era. Now, if we admit the development-theory of the material universe, this hypothesis as to the spiritual creation is utterly untenable. If, without any creative acts or epochs, a mass of nebulous matter, which filled the entire area comprehended within the orbit of the outermost planet, in cooling, threw off successive rings that globed themselves into worlds; if animal life in its lowest forms was the product of fermenting chaos in the infancy of those worlds; if on our own planet the Acarus Crossii furnished the parent stock for all animated nature; if man must abandon the genealogy closing with those sublime words, "which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God," and must trace his ancestry, not upward, but downward, through the ape, the tadpole, the polype, to the microscopic animalcule, then is man's spiritual history equally a spontaneous development, and the germ of Judaism, the seed of the kingdom of Christ, floated in nebulous vapor, weltered in unformed chaos, was wrapt in the thin cuticle of the first animalcule whose aspiring nisus raised him to a higher grade of being. But the Lucretius redivivus, the modern apostle of this theory, found it necessary in his second treatise to appeal from the inhospitality of the scientific world to the larger receptivity of popular ignorance. Science denies that species run into one another, or develop themselves from one another, and has settled down in the belief of successive epochs in the material creation, - epochs when new causes were intruded, and new forms of life were ushered upon the stage of being. The tilted strata of the mountain-sides are chapters of cosmogony, each with its plainly written beginning. The cryptogamous plants preceded animal life. The saurian reptiles floundered on the reeking surface of our planet before there was foot of quadruped, or solid ground on which it could be planted. Gigantic forms, that have left only their fossil relics, had their era before man became a living soul. Is it, then, probable that spiritual life alone had but one epoch of creation, - that it came at once upon the |