Correspondents will please To Correspondents. address, " Thomas Cooper, 5, Park Row, Knightsbridge, London," "A Learner."-The Greeks themselves wrote Sokrates, Phokion, Alkibiades: the Romans substituted a c for the k, and, most likely pronounced the c hard, as in our word card'; while we pronounce the c in such names like 8. Mr. Grote, in his new History of Greece (the best ever yet written), is restoring the proper Greek spelling. If Learner' cannot get hold of Mr. Grote's work (which is very dear), Walker's Key to the Pronunciation of Classical Names' will give him the accents. Alcibiades is, by us at present, pronounced Al-se-bi-a-dees: accent on the third syllable. Nearly all Greek and Latin terminations in 'es' are pronounced like our English word ease. Charles Paul, Islington."-I cannot address the persons he names without a great deal more knowledge of the circumstances. The hint respecting the paper he mentions should have been sent to its editors. "G. B."-His poetry is so near excellence that I do not decline it without considerable hesitation. Give it up? No. He must persevere, studying the best models: his faculty will ripen. "D. G., Dundee."-The handbills shall be sent as directed. "P. H. Eastwood, Middleton."I never derived assistance from any system of 'Phrenotypics.' To practice the memory is the most infallible way to strengthen it. The Venetian ducat men tioned so often in the Merchant of Venice' is reckoned at 3s. 6d. "Committee of the Young Man's Mutual Instruction Society, Little Dean-street, Soho;" "G. B.;""Geo. Lombard;" and others. Their approvals of the proposed Progress Union are received, and valued. "Cincinnatus."-The poetry is respectfully declined. His additional suggestions respecting a Progress Union would be proper subjects for consideration by a Conference "A. L. B."-Obliged by his letter. The questions he puts respecting the owners of vessels can only be answered by the agents who advertise them in the newspapers. I have no means of answering the enquiry, "Osmond Martin;" "John P.;" "T. J. Birch;" their poetry is respectfully declined. "F. R. Nugent."-His lines are good; but they are too fragmentary. Let him try his hand at something more complete: nineteen lines, rather than nine and a half. "S. W., Bath."-Theodore Parker's Thoughts on Matters pertaining to Religion,' is one of the best works he can read. Joseph Barker has published an edition of it, nicely got up in cloth, at the low price of 1s. 9d. Mr. Watson is the London publisher, and any bookseller in Bath can send for it. Lectures, in London, for the ensuing Week. SUNDAY, Feb. 17, at 7, Hall of Science, (near Finsbury Square, City Road.) "Christ's transcendent excellence as a moral examplar; and the consonance of his religion with the Religion of Human Nature"-Thomas Cooper. At 7, Literary Institution, John-street, Fitzroy Square. "Necessity of Union for progress -Robert Owen. (See Advt.) MONDAY, Feb. 18, at 8, Temperance Hall, Broadway, Westminster. "Life and Genius of Milton"-Thomas Cooper. At half-past 8, Mechanics' Institute, Gould Square, Crutched Friars. "Life and Genius of William Hazlitt"-C. Walter. At a quarter to 9, Finsbury Hall, 66, Bunhill Row. "The Settler's Life in Australia"-J. Wade. At half past 8, Pentonville Athenæum, 17, Chapel Street. "Life and Writings of James Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd"-D. Milne. MORALITY OF ACTIONS.-The morality of an action depends upon the motive from which we act. If I fling half-a-crown to a beggar with the intention to break his head, and he picks it up and buys victuals with it, the physical effect is good; but with respect to me the action is very wrong.-Johnson. PURSUIT OF KNOWLEDGE.-He that enlarges his curiosity after the works of nature, demonstrably multiplies the inlets to happiness; therefore we should cherish ardour in the pursuit of useful knowledge, and remember that a blighted spring makes a barren year, and that the vernal flowers, however beautiful and gay, are only intended by nature as preparatives to autumnal fruit.-Ib. EXPECTATION.-It is proper for all to remember, that they ought not to raise expectation which it is not in their power to satisfy, and that it is more pleasing to see smoke brightening into flame, than flame sinking into smoke.—Ib. CONFIDENCE.-There is something captivating in spirit and intrepidity, to which we often yield as to a resistless power; nor can he reasonably expect the confidence of others who too apparently distrusts himself.--Ib. COMBINATIONS OF WICKEDNESS would overwhelm the world, by the advantage which licentious principles afford, did not those who have long practised perfidy grow faithless to each other.-16 THINKINGS, FROM THOMAS CARLYLE. DEMOCRACY.-Universal Democracy, whatever we may think of it, has declare d itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we live; and he who has any chance to instruct, or lead, in these days must begin by admitting that new street-barricades, and new anarchies, still more scandalous if still less sanguinary, must return and again return, till governing persons everywhere know and admit that. Democracy, it may be said everywhere, is here :—for sixty years now, ever since the grand or First French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all the world; in message after message, some of them very terrible indeed; and now at last all the world ought really to believe it. That the world does believe it; that even Kings now as good as believe it, and know, or with just terror surmise, that they are but temporary phantasm Playactors, and that Democracy is the grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality: this, among the scandalous phases we witnessed in the last two years, is a phasis full of hope: a sign that we are advanc. ing closer and closer to the very Problem itself, which it will behove us to solve or die; -that all fighting and campaigning and coalitioning in regard to the existence of the Problem, is hopeless and superfluous henceforth. The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt, nor body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise. Democracy, sure enough, is here: one knows not how long it will keep hidden underground even in Russia ;-and here in England, though we object to it resolutely in the form of street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, and decidedly will not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its million feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its bewildered thousandfold voice is in all writings and speakings, in all thinkings and modes and activities of men. SHAMS. Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not permitted to regret its being here,-for, who that had, for this divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue? No: at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may cease. Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to many a man seems strange! Yet strange to many a man it does seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and big with mere ruin. He has been used to decent forms long since fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown ceremonial,-what you in your iconoclast humour call shams,-all his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that there was any getting on without them. Did not cotton spin itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams? Kings reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers pleaded, bishops preached, and honourable members perorated; and to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did not scrip continue saleable, and the banker pay in bullion, or paper with a metallic basis? JUSTICE.-Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth, cannot make unjust just. The grand question still remains, Was the judgment just? If unjust, it will not and cannot get harbour for itself, or continue to have footing in this Universe, which was made by other than One Unjust. Enforce it by never such statuting, three readings, royal assents; blow it to the four winds with all manner of quilted trumpeters and pursuivants, in the rear of them never so many gibbets and hangmen, it will not stand, it cannot stand. From all souls of men, from all ends of Nature, from the Throne of God above, there are voices bidding it: Away, away! Does it take no warning; does it stand, strong in its three readings, in its gibbets and artillery-parks? The more woe is to it, the frightfuller woe. It will continue standing, for its day, for its year, for its century, doing evil all the while; but it has One enemy who is Almighty dissolution, explosion, and the everlasting Laws of Nature incessantly advance towards it; and the deeper its rooting, more obstinate its continuing, the deeper also, and huger will its ruin and overturn be. LIFE. He that embarks on the voyage of life will always wish to advance, rather by the simple impulse of the wind, than the strokes of the oar; and many founder in their passage, while they lie waiting for the gale.-Johnson, A MOORLAND CAROL. To skip along the daisied lea, In the early months o' spring, To loiter by the wimpling brook, To scale the rugged mountain's brow, The lonely and mysterious moor : The wild, the lonely moor for me, Where fairy mists roll o'er the scene, The wild, the lonely moor for me, The curlew's wail, and the bee's deep hum, The lambkins bleat, the heath-fowl's birr, For save the cottage on the brae, There's nought but nature to be found, Of dwellings 'neath the ground! The wild, the lonely moor for me, There we've no wants and woes, O, sweet may distant scenes appear, Where the heath-bell sweetly droops its head, Like the lonely and mysterious moor: And the streamlet gently flows, The wild, wide moor for me! Ayr. WILLAM WYLIE. THE CRY OF THE UNEMPLOYED. Tis' hard! tis' hard! to wander on through this bright world of ours,— With music in the woods, as there were nought but pleasure known, Gold art thou not a blessed thing? A charm above all other, Lord, what right have the poor to wed? Love's for the gilded great! GERALD MASSEY CRITICAL EXEGESIS OF GOSPEL HISTORY, ON THE BASIS OF STRAUSS'S 'LEBEN JESU.' A SERIES OF EIGHT DISCOURSES; DELIVERED AT THE LITERARY INSTITUTION, JOHN STREET, TOTTENHAM COURT ROAD, AND AT THE HALL OF SCIENCE, CITY ROAD, ON SUNDAY EVENINGS, DURING THE WINTERS OF 1848-9, AND 1849-50. BY THOMAS COOPER, Author of The Purgatory of Suicides.' III. THE MIRACLES. IF Nature, or the Universe, had no Laws, there could be no talk about Miracles. The very use of a word which means something out of the course of Nature, proves that even those who use it recognise that regular course of phenomena which we term the Laws of Nature. These laws exist. All men recognise them. True, there are some distinctions to be made when the universality of this recognition is affirmed. For instance; an inhabitant of Central Africa who had neither been out of that climate, nor conversed with any one who had, -nor read a book,—could have no knowledge of that law of Nature whereby water may become solid: he had never seen ice, and it is not likely that, in that hot climate, he would dream of it. Again: a peasant of the Dark Ages could have no knowledge of the laws of nature which attach to our Planetary system: he could no more suspect that the Earth revolved round the Sun, than he could believe that he walked on his head. Nay, again : even a philosopher of the Dark Ages, if he could now be resuscitated, and told that we were able to exchange thoughts by means of a wire with persons hundreds of miles distant from us, and this in a second of time, might be expected to deny it. He might say he knew that a wire had no such property as that which we attributed to it, nor could it be made to have such a property it was contrary to the Laws of Nature. So then, even to comparatively cultivated minds some of these Laws have been unknown; while to rude or unexperienced persons many of these laws have remained unknown. Yet, after all the necessary expenditure of definition, the truth remains that Men universally, though in relation to the degree of their knowledge, recognise Nature as having fixed or regular laws. Do we ever see these Laws departed from? Never. If any man in this assembly were to say he had, all of us would tell him he was mistaken; and would demand the relation of what he had seen, in order to shew him that it was, after all, but an operation of a Law of Nature which he had witnessed. If this were an assembly of learned and orthodox Christian divines they would do the same; for they say the age of Miracles is past.' If a deeply pious man recovers in an unexpected manner from a grievous sickness, for instance, they do not say that a miracle has been performed upon him; but that God has blessed the means,'-or, that in the order of His Providence it has pleased God to restore him.' I am not speaking of the dreams about 'answers to faith' and answers to prayer' among fanatics: I repeat that, with every orthodox Christian divine making the slightest pretences to education, the idea of miracles being performed now is held to be absurd: the decided proclamation is that miracles have long ceased. Then, why, if it be absurd to suppose miracles are performed now, is it reasonable to believe that they ever were performed? Because, say the orthodox, a Revelation was necessary to guide man. He was a poor lost wandering creature-morally sunk and degraded and incapable of finding out the way of life-one divinely commissioned must be sent to teach him--and he who was sent must be able to prove his divine commission by doing what Omnipotence alone could enable him to do—that is, controvert the fixed laws of the Universe. To answer at length this à priori argument for Miracles would lead us far from our present purpose. We can but wonder at one fact of enormous magnitude that the Revelation which is meant, with all its supposed proofs of a Divine Commission, has, during the 1800 years which have elapsed since it is affirmed to have been given, not yet reached half of the human race. This fact would seem, at the outset, a barrier to the belief that it was miraculously given by Omnipotence, or by Infinite Benevolence, since if the Omnipotent compassionated his lost and fallen creation, He would have taken effectual means to proclaim His will without favouritism. Another argument would have to be entered into-namely, the proof that Man is unable to discover by his own reason the rules of a virtuous life, and unable to practice them. Here, we should stand prepared to deny the doctrine of Man's helplessness altogether; and to contend that no such Revelation is necessary that Nature, around Man and within Man, furnishes her own Revelation: that duty is but another name for law, and that the observance of his own nature is sufficient to shew man that frequent reflection upon his duties, or the moral laws, will inevitably influence his life, and lead him to cherish no thought, to speak no word, to perform no act, which can disturb his own happiness or the happiness of others but so to regulate his thoughts, and words, and deeds as to enchance his own happiness and that of the whole human race. This would be challenging both the need of a Revelation, and of Miracles to support it. But our present purpose is of another kind: it is to examine, by induction, whether what are called the Miracles of the Four Gospels be truths. There is but one legitimate way of doing this. We have to remember that they are the relations of a book, and of a book of a by-gone age. Who wrote the narratives we do not know. We have shewn, in the two introductory discourses, that there is no certain knowledge whatever upon this point; and we continue to call the Four Gospels by the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to avoid confusion, and for no other reason. We saw that the two first chapters of Matthew and Luke, respectively, were composed of independent narratives, partly, and in other parts were contradictory; that they set forth genealogies of Joseph the father of Jesus which were completely irreconcileable with each other; while they, more strangely still, affirm that Jesus was begotten without Joseph, and therefore render both the genealogies absurdly needless, or-if one only be the genealogy of Joseph, though the record does not say so,-render that one genealogy equally absurd and needless. We have seen that the Divine Being is related by Luke to have sent an angel with a heathen name to inform the Virgin at Nazareth, that she should be, supernaturally, the mother of the Messiah; and yet that this chosen vessel of the Divine purposes is left by the Divine Being in a state of suspicion and shame, and another revelation has to be made to her husband, according to Matthew, who knows not Nazareth as the original dwelling place of Joseph and Mary, but introduces them at the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem; that Luke's inspiration-the inspiration of him who had 'perfect understanding of all things from the very first'-gives him no knowledge of the shame to which Mary had been exposed, or of the revelation made to Joseph her husband about his espoused wife being with child of the Holy Ghost: that he relates as the occasion of their journey to Bethlehem a taxing of "all the world" by Augustus Cesar which was never made, or if it mean all Judea, |