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BUNSEN'S BIBLICAL RESEARCHES.

BY ROWLAND WILLIAMS, D.D.

WHEN geologists began to ask whether changes

in the earth's structure might be explained by causes still in operation, they did not disprove the possibility of great convulsions, but they lessened the necessity for imagining them. So, if a theologian has his eyes opened to the Divine Energy as continuous and omnipresent, he lessens the sharp contrast of epochs in revelation, but need not assume that the stream has never varied in its flow. Devotion raises time present into the sacredness of the past; while criticism reduces the strangeness of the past into harmony with the present. Faith and prayer (and great marvels answering to them) do not pass away; but, in prolonging their range as a whole, we make their parts less exceptional. We hardly discern the truth, for which they are anxious, until we distinguish it from associations accidental to their domain. The truth itself may have been apprehended in various degrees by servants of God, of old, as now. Instead of, with Tertullian, "what was first is truest," we may say, What comes of God is true: and he is not only afar, but nigh at hand; though his mind is not changed.

Questions of miraculous interference do not turn merely upon our conceptions of physical law, as unbroken, or of the Divine Will, as all-pervading; but they include inquiries into evidence, and must abide by verdicts on the age of records. Nor should the distinction between poetry and prose, and the possi bility of imagination's allying itself with affection, be overlooked. We cannot encourage a remorseless criticism of Gentile histories, and escape its contagion when we approach Hebrew annals; nor acknowledge a Providence in Jewry, without owning that it may have comprehended sanctities elsewhere. But the moment we examine fairly the religions of India and of Arabia, or even those of primeval Hellas and Latium, we find they appealed to the better side of our nature; and their essential strength lay in the elements of good which they contained, rather than in any satanic corruption.

Thus considerations, religious and moral, no less than scientific and critical, have, where discussion was free, widened the idea of revelation for the old world, and deepened it for ourselves: not removing the footsteps of the Eternal from Palestine, but tracing them on other shores; and not making the saints of old, orphans, but ourselves partakers of their sonship. Conscience would not lose by exchanging that repressive idea of revelation, which is put over against it as an adversary, for one to which the echo of its best instincts should be the witness. The moral constituents of our nature, so often contrasted with revelation, should rather be considered parts of its instrumentality. Those cases in which we accept the miracle for the sake of the moral lesson prove the ethical element to be the more fundamental. We see this more clearly

if we imagine a miracle of cruelty wrought (as by Antichrist) for immoral ends; for then only the technically miraculous has its value isolated: whereas, by appealing to good "WORKS" (however wonderful) for his witness, Christ has taught us to have faith mainly in goodness. This is too much overlooked by some apologists. But there is hardly any greater question than whether history shows Almighty God to have trained mankind by a faith which has reason and conscience for its kindred, or by one to whose miraculous tests their pride must bow: that is, whether his Holy Spirit has acted through the channels which his providence ordained; or whether it has departed from these so signally, that comparative mistrust of them ever afterwards becomes a duty. The first alternative, though invidiously termed philosophical, is that to which free nations and evangelical thinkers tend: the second has a greater show of religion, but allies itself naturally with priestcraft or formalism, and not rarely with corruptness of administration or of life.

In this issue converge many questions anciently stirred, but recurring in our daylight with almost uniform* accession of strength to the liberal side. Such questions turn chiefly on the law of growth, traceable throughout the Bible as in the world; and partly on science, or historical inquiry: but no less on the deeper revelations of the New Testament, as compared to those of the Old. If we are to retain the

• It is very remarkable, that, amidst all our biblical illustration from recent travellers, Layard, Rawlinson, Robinson, Stanley, &c., no single point has been discovered to tell in favor of an irrational supernaturalism; whereas numerous discoveries have confirmed the more liberal (not to say, rationalizing) criticism which traces revelation historically within the sphere of nature and humanity. Such is the moral, both of the Assyrian discoveries and of all travels in the East, as well as the verdict of philologers at home. Mr. G. Rawlinson's proof of this is stronger, because undesigned.

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 agree ment.

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 wea risome 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 sucsessors, 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 nar row 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 Historie Byzantina; Bonn. 1829. But with this is to be compared the Armenian version of Eusebius's Chironology, 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.