old Anglican foundations of research and fair statement, we must revise some of the decisions provisionally given upon imperfect evidence: or, if we shrink from doing so, we must abdicate our ancient claim to build upon the truth; and our retreat will be either to Rome, as some of our lost ones have consistently seen, or to some form, equally evil, of darkness voluntary. The attitude of too many English scholars before the last monster out of the deep is that of the degenerate senators before Tiberius. They stand, balancing terror against mutual shame. Even with those in our universities who no longer repeat fully the required shibboleths, the explicitness of truth is rare. He who assents most, committing himself least to baseness, is reckoned wisest.

Bunsen's enduring glory is, neither to have paltered with his conscience nor shrunk from the difficulties of the problem, but to have brought a vast erudition, in the light of a Christian conscience, to unroll tangled records; tracing frankly the Spirit of God elsewhere, but honoring chiefly the traditions of His Hebrew sanctuary. No living author's works could furnish so pregnant a text for a discourse on biblical criticism. Passing over some specialties of Lutheranism, we may meet in the field of research which is common to scholars; while, even here, the sympathy which justifies respectful exposition need not imply entire agreement.

In the great work upon Egypt,* the later volumes of which are now appearing in English, we do not find that picture of home-life which meets us in the pages of our countryman, Sir G. Wilkinson. The

*Egypt's Place in Universal History, by Christian C. J. Bunsen, &c. London. 1848, vol. i.; 1854, vol. ii.

interest for robust scholars is not less, in the fruitful comparison of the oldest traditions of our race, and in the giant shapes of ancient empires, which flit like dim shadows, evoked by a master's hand. But for those who seek chiefly results, there is something wearisome in the elaborate discussion of authorities; and, it must be confessed, the German refinement of method has all the effect of confusion. To give details here is impossible (though the more any one scrutinizes them, the more substantial he will find them); and this sketch must combine suggestions, which the author has scattered strangely apart, and sometimes repeated without perfect consistency. He dwells largely upon Herodotus, Eratosthenes, and their successors, from Champollion and Young to Lepsius. Especially the dynastic records of the Ptolemaic priest Manetho * are compared with the accounts of the stone monuments. The result, if we can receive it, is to vindicate for the civilized kingdom of Egypt, from Menes downward, an antiquity of nearly four thousand years before Christ. There is no point in which archæologists of all shades were so nearly unanimous as in the belief that our biblical chronology was too narrow in its limits; and the enlargement of our views, deduced from Egyptian records, is extended by our author's reasonings on the development of commerce and government, and still more of languages, and physical features of race. He could not have vindi

* See an account of him and his tables in the Byzantine Syncellus, pp. 72-145, vol. i. ed. Dind., in the Corpus Historiæ Byzantinæ; Bonn. 1829. But with this is to be compared the Armenian version of Eusebius's Chronology, discovered by Cardinal Mai. The.text, the interpretation, and the historical fidelity, are all controverted. Baron Bunsen's treatment of them deserves the provisional acceptance due to elaborate research, with no slight concurrence of probabilities; and, if it should not ultimately win a favorable verdict from Egyptologers, no one who summarily rejects it as arbitrary or impossible can have a right to be on the jury.

cated the unity of mankind if he had not asked for a vast extension of time, whether his petition of twenty thousand years be granted or not. The mention of such a term may appear monstrous to those who regard six thousand years as a part of revelation. Yet it is easier to throw doubt on some of the arguments than to show that the conclusion in favor of a vast length is improbable. If pottery in a river's mud proves little, its tendency may agree with that of the discovery of very ancient pre-historic remains in many parts of the world. Again, how many years are needed to develop modern French out of Latin, and Latin itself out of its original crude forms? How un-* like is English to Welsh, and Greek to Sanscrit ! - yet all indubitably of one family of languages. What years were required to create the existing divergence of members of this family! How many more for other families, separated by a wide gulf from this, yet retaining traces of a primeval aboriginal affinity, to have developed themselves, either in priority or collaterally! The same consonantal roots, appearing either as verbs inflected with great variety of grammatical form or as nouns with case-endings in some languages, and with none in others, plead, as convincingly as the succession of strata in geology, for enormous lapses of time. When, again, we have traced our Gaelic and our Sanscrit to their inferential pre-Hellenic stem, and when reason has convinced us that the Semitic languages, which had as distinct an individuality four thousand years ago as they have now, require a cradle of larger dimensions than Archbishop Ussher's chronology, what further effort is not forced upon our imagination, if we would guess the measure of the dim background in which the Mongo

lian and Egyptian languages, older probably than the Hebrew, became fixed, growing early into the type which they retain? Do we see an historical area of nations and languages extending itself over nearly ten thousand years? and can we imagine less than another ten thousand, during which the possibilities of these things took body and form? Questions of this kind require from most of us a special training for each; but Baron Bunsen revels in them, and his theories are at least suggestive. He shows what Egypt had in common with that primeval Asiatic stock, represented by Ham, out of which, as raw material, he conceives the divergent families, termed Indo-European and Semitic (or the kindreds of Europe and of Palestine), to have been later developed. Nimrod is considered as the biblical representative of the earlier stock, whose ruder language is continued, by affiliation or by analogy, in the Mongolian races of Asia and in the Negroes of Africa.

*

The traditions of Babylon, Sidon, Assyria, and Iran, are brought by our author to illustrate and confirm, though to modify our interpretation of, Genesis. It is strange how nearly those ancient cosmogonies † approach what may be termed the philosophy of Moses, while they fall short in what Longinus called his "worthy conception of the divinity." Our Deluge takes its place among geological phenomena; no longer a disturbance of law from which science shrinks, but a

*The common term was Indo-Germanic. Dr. Prichard, on bringing the Gael and Cymry into the same family, required the wider term IndoEuropean. Historical reasons, chiefly in connection with Sanscrit, are bringing the term Aryan, or Aryas, into fashion. We may adopt whichever is intelligible, without excluding, perhaps, a Turanian or African element surviving in South Wales. Turanian means nearly Mongolian.

† Aegypten's Stelle in der Weltgeschichte, pp. 186-400; B. v. 1-3. Gotha, 1856.

*

prolonged play of the forces of fire and water, rendering the primeval regions of North Asia uninhabitable, and urging the nations to new abodes. We learn approximately its antiquity, and infer limitation in its range, from finding it recorded in the traditions of Iran and Palestine (or of Japhet and Shem), but unknown to the Egyptians and Mongolians, who left earlier the cradle of mankind. In the half-ideal, halftraditional notices of the beginnings of our race, compiled in Genesis, we are bid notice the combination of documents, and the recurrence of barely consistent genealogies. As the man Adam begets Cain, the man Enos begets Cainan. Jared and Irad, Methuselah and Methusael, are similarly compared. Seth, like El, is an old deity's appellation; and MAN was the son of Seth in one record, as Adam was the son of God in the other. One could wish the puzzling circumstance, that the etymology of some of the earlier names seems strained to suit the present form of the narrative had been explained. That our author would not shrink from noticing this, is shown by the firmness with which he relegates the long lives of the first patriarchs to the domain of legend or of symbolical cycle. He reasonably conceives that the historical portion begins with Abraham, where the lives become natural, and information was nearer. A sceptical criticism might, indeed, ask by what right he assumes that the moral dimensions of our spiritual heroes cannot have been idealized by tradition, as he admits to have been the case with physical events and with chronology rounded into epical shape; but the first principles of his philosophy, which fixes on personality

* Aegypten's Stelle, &c., B. v. 4, 5, pp. 50–142. Gotha, 1857.