any

is the only duty of a German student. He need not think he need not even remember. The highest success to which the system aspires, is to send out a youth crammed with the notions of his professors on a variety of subjects, without intellectual habits whatsoever, except one which is most hostile to all improvement, and subversive of the very end of education-the habit of complete intellectual passiveness. It is but seldom, even that a student carries away with him much information. As he is not taught to exert his faculties, he is never thoroughly penetrated with what he learns. That which he acquires to day lies loose in his mind, and is washed away by the new knowledge contained in to-morrow's lecture, till he is launched into the world, having learned much, but knowing nothing.

The information contained in this volume on the state of religion in Germany, and on the approximation which has been of late years made towards a complete union of the Lutheran and Calvinistic churches, though very interesting, would occupy too much space for an extract, and we must, therefore, refer our readers to the work itself. We conclude our quotations with the following description of a sabbath evening on the banks of the Rhine.

"The bell was sounding for Vespers at Lorsch; and the peasants were slowly moving towards the church, or loitering about in the full enjoyment of rest and a lovely evening. The villages in the Bergstrasse, as we drove through them, were all animated in the gay ce lebration of Sunday evening. Groupes of both sexes, above the lower orders, were either returning early from some place of convivial rendezvous, or lounging under the shade of the fruit trees, which make the road a continued avenue. The beer houses were overflowing with peasants; and the inns, promenades, and gardens, with parties refreshing themselves after their evening's wander in the vineyards, or on the wooded mountains.-There was more gaiety and enjoyment in this close of the Sabbath than we are accustomed to see in England; but the recreation was of an innocent, a rural, and a decorous kind-there was no riotous mirth or noisy excess-the Churches had been well attended in the morning and the afternoon,--and I know not why an innocent dance or a social party under a fine sky, among the luxuriant beauties of nature, should be held offensive to a Creator who is to be worshipped in the enjoyment of his bounties, and with the pure gladness of the heart, as well as in the more solemn thanksgivings of his holy religion." (P. 159, 160.)

The amusements mentioned here may be very innocent in themselves, but it is not every employment, which is in itself harmless, that is a proper observance of the first day of the week. The sabbath never continues long to be a day of religious worship, where temporal amusements have been once

allowed to encroach upon part of it. The author himself seems elsewhere doubtful of the truth of his remark.

"The pastors and their flocks go on tranquilly, with their sermon and hymns in the morning, their pipe, their waltz, or their opera in the Sunday evening; and no excessive earnestness or spiritual zeal has as yet stimulated the one or the other to an inquiry whether more of the Sabbath was not intended for sacred uses; whether this pleasant recreation from the fatigues of the week is or is not what the commandment intends by a day of rest." (P. 452.)

We travel to find amusement, to enlarge the mind by the survey of new objects, and to add to our stores of acquired knowledge. We read, or ought to read, books of travels with similar views; and all these ends are well fulfilled by this volume. It is full of amusement; it excites the mind to reflection; it furnishes much valuable information. We observed a few slight inaccuracies in it, but of so trifling a kind, that they have already escaped our recollection. The GrandDuchess of Baden (the wife of the late Duke) is said to have been a Demoiselle Tascher, and niece of the empress Josephine. She was indeed a niece of Josephine, for she was a daughter of Josephine's brother; but her name was Stephanie de Beauharnois. The Demoiselle Tascher married, if our recollection is correct, the prince d'Aremberg. The text is sometimes unnecessarily interlarded with German words, in which typographical errors now and then occur. Where we have only defects like these to note, our readers will probably think that silence is the best performance of our duty.

ART. XII.-A Vindication of 1 John v. 7, from the Objections of M. Griesbach, in which is given a new View of the external Evidence, with Greek Authorities for the Authenticity of the Verse, not hitherto adduced in its Defence. By the Bishop of St. David's. 8vo. Rivingtons. London, 1821.

THE seventh and eighth verses of the fifth chapter of the first epistle of St. John are, in the received Greek text of the New Testament, in the words following.

Verse 7.

ة

Ότι τρεις εισιν οι μαρτυρέντες [εν τω ουρανῳ, ὁ Πατης, ὁ Λογος, και το άγιον Πνεύμα, και έτσι οι τρεις ἓν εἰσιν.

Verse 8.

μαρτυρέντες εν τη γη,] το πνεύμα και το ύδως και

το αιμα; και οι τρεις εις το ἓν εισιν.

The disputed passage is between the brackets. In our English Testament the seventh and eighth verses run thus: 7. "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one. 8. And there are three that bear witness on earth, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood; and these three agree in one." The disputed words are in italics. If the words in dispute be withdrawn as spurious the verse will stand thus:

。

Ότι τρεις εισιν οι μαρτυρούντες, το πνευμα, και το ύδωρ, και το αιμα και τρεις εις το έν εισιν. "For there are three that bear record, the Spirit, and the Water, and the Blood; and these three agree in one.

The first point particularly to be noticed with respect to the controverted verse is this, that it is found in the ancient liturgies of the Greek and Latin churches, that it was in the Latin Vulgate, was in the confession of faith of the Greek church, and was relied upon by the African bishops in their confession of faith at the council convened by Huneric, the Vandal king, in the latter end of the 5th century; and yet was never controverted until the beginning of the 16th century, when Erasmus published the first printed edition of the Greek New Testament, and the Spanish Divines, under the auspices of Cardinal Ximenes, executed the Complutensian Polyglott, begun in 1517, and completed in 1522. Erasmus having omitted to insert the seventh verse in the first two editions, 1516 and 1519, a dispute arose between him and the Spanish editors, and also one Lee, an Englishman, on the genuineness of the verse, maintained with great vivacity on both sides, and this we believe was the first instance of the public discussion of this great question. Erasmus, it is well known, promised to restore the verse if it could be found in a single Greek manuscript. This occasioned a diligent search, and the Codex Britannicus, since called the Codex Montfortianus, was produced, upon which Erasmus inserted the verse in his edition of 1522. This MS., called the Montfort, Griesbach places in the 15th or 16th century, and Porson has treated it with little respect; but Dr. Adam Clarke and Bishop Burgess have, with more reason, assigned it to the 13th century: and that can hardly be treated as unworthy of our attention which induced Erasmus, after vehemently contending against the verse, to insert it in his edition, published next after its discovery. The MS. is now in the archives of Trinity College, Dublin. We may here add, by the way, that when the hostility existing from the fourth century between the Greek and Latin churches is considered, it cannot be supposed that the Greek church would have adopted this verse, merely on the authority of the Latin version, without any confirmation of it from her own original Greek manuscripts.

The Complutensian editiors inserted it; but whether they copied it from MSS., which were the fruit of the great diligence used to procure them at the instigation and cost of Cardinal Ximenes, or adopted it out of pure deference to the Vulgate, by translating it from the Latin, is a point disputed. It must be admitted, that they did not answer the challenge of Erasmus, by producing a single Greek MS., till the Codex Britannicus was discovered, but relied on the authority of the Vulgate.

The verse is inserted in Robert Stephens's edition published in 1550. But the obelus, and the little crotchet or semicircle, his usual marks to signify the omission of a passage from the MS. quoted by him, placed, the one before , and the other after oupava, and which last the critics say should have been placed after Tyn, as it never has been pretended that in any Greek MS. the three words Ev To oupava only have been found omitted, have neutralized the argument from the insertion of the verse by that learned editor. The verse is inserted in all the editions of the Greek Testament by Beza, the last of which was published in 1598, and also in the Elzevir edition, first printed in 1624 at Leyden. Since whose edition, those of Mill, Bengelius, Wetstein, and Griesbach, have been the most important, all of whom have inserted the verse, but the two last have determined it to be spurious.

We have already mentioned the controversy between Erasmus and his two opponents, Lee, an English ecclesiastic, and Stunica, the Spanish divine, the principal conductor of the Complutensian edition. We pass over the intermediate contests, observing only that its authenticity was maintained by Selden in his Treatise de Synedriis Ebræorum; and that Sir Isaac Newton took the contrary side, in a work published under the title of Two Letters from Sir Isaac Newton to Mr. Le Clerc,-and come at once to the controversy started by the author of the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. xxxvii. note 118. Mr. Gibbon there asserts, that "the three witnesses have been established in our Greek Testament by the prudence of Erasmus; the honest bigotry of the Complutensian editors; the typographical fraud or error of Robert Stephens in the placing a crotchet; or the deliberate fraud, or strange misapprehension, of Theodore Beza." The controversy which grew upon this note between Mr. Travis, Archdeacon of Chester, who attacked it in three letters in the Gentleman's Magazine, and Mr. Porson, who exerted all his powers of criticism and sarcasm on the same side with Mr. Gibbon, and which controversy swelled afterwards into a voluminous war, and brought the Rev. Herbert Marsh, now Bishop of Peterborough, into the field, is too well known to need our exposition. We must not, however, omit to men

tion the powerful assistance the cause of the disputed verse has received from Ernesti, Bishop Horsley, and Mr. Nolan, to which list many others might be added.

With the powerful sanction and support of these last very able advocates, it is not too much to say, that the verse in question has, of late, been rising in credit. The Bishop of St. David's has, at length, brought his mature knowledge, critical experience, and cool discernment, to bear upon the subject, and it does appear to us that his success has been equal to his pious per

severance.

The Bishop's first object is to exhibit the inconsistency of Griesbach, whom he shows to have conducted the inquiry in a manner contrary to his own maxims of criticism, and his own rules for judging of the true reading of any passage." In his Symbolæ Criticæ," says the Bishop," the consideration of the interna bonitas of a reading precedes that of the external evidence. In judicandis lectionibus spectatur primo interna earum bonitas, quæ plurimis rebus cernitur; secundo testium (codicum, versionum, patrum) antiquorum et bonorum consensus. But in his diatribe on 1 John, v. 7, he consumes four-and-twenty pages on the testimony of manuscripts, versions, and fathers, and gives a single paragraph of half a page to the internal evidence, introducing it with these words: tandem tribus verbis attingimus argumenta interna;' and even of that short paragraph the greater part belongs to the external evidence."

The assertion of Griesbach that the seventh verse rests principally, if not solely, on the authority of Vigilius Tapsensis, is next shown to be without foundation. Vigilius Tapsensis was not the first who clearly quoted the verse; it was distinctly cited by Eucherius, Bishop of Lyons, nearly fifty years before him, and was also expressly appealed to by his contemporaries the African bishops. Griesbach thus speaks himself: "Eucherius, Episcopus Lugdunensis, primus esse putatur qui circa annum 440 aperte verba in dubium vocata excitavit in libro formularum, cap. ii. his verbis: III, (h. e. numerus ternarius) ad Trinitatem (sc. refertur) in Johannis epistola. Tres sunt qui testimonium dant in cœlo, Pater, Verbum, et Spiritus S., et Tres sunt qui testimonium dant in terra, Spiritus, Aqua, et Sanguis:" which, as the Bishop observes, is clearly the passage of St. John, though not the whole passage.

Truth derives, at least, great negative support from the inconsistencies of her opponents, and their contradictions of each other. Mr. Porson devolves the whole labour of supporting the verse upon Cyprian,* which, observes the Bishop of St. David's,

* See the tenth of his letters to Archdeacon Travis, p. 247.