-misled, so much we may assume, by impious pride; and further than this we must not attempt to go. Let us beg of Mr. Montgomery to remove this very objectionable passage from the next edition of his work. The essay on the temptation, in which it occurs, is on the whole a valuable composition. Highly to be commended is Mr. Montgomery's advocacy of the Christian claims of the poor, and the benefits conferred by their existence on their wealthier brethren. "God the Source of Liberty" contains some very striking remarks: "The essence of hell is self-contraction and self-absorption -an everlasting 'egoism' of the creature, undergoing the anguish of excluding the Creator from its own spiritual life " (p. 258). And again: "There is a law to define and fix our faith, and that is the creed. There is a law to rule and regulate our affections, and that is the Lord's prayer. There is a law to shape and mould our character, and that is the decalogue. Thus the doctrine of the Bible, in spirit, amounts to this: that in proportion as we believe in what God declares, love what God professes, and do what God commands, we are the freemen of light and the heirs of immortality. On the other hand, if men will not submit their minds to a divine creed, their hearts to a divine prayer, and their conduct to a divine law, then must they be the slaves of sin and bondsmen of the devil." A noble essay is that on "Realising Christ in Heaven" the introduction is especially valuable, calling attention, as it does, to the extraordinary calmness, the absence of all wonder, of all human emotion, or even apparent sympathy, on the part of the evangelists and other historians of holy writ-a fact which can only be accounted for by the supposition that the Spirit overswayed its organs, and kept all merely human feelings in abeyance. It is this circumstance which yields such an extraordinary character to the Gospels and other histories of holy writ: they are written in the most obvious and entire independence of human censure or applause; they never attempt to account for what may at first sight seem most extraordinary, but simply recount facts and leave the reader to draw his own conclusions. One more passage let us cite from p. 263, and therewith close our long list of quotations:

"If the apostles did not realise a living Saviour in heaven as their Almighty King, omniscient Prophet, prevailing Priest, and sympathising Head, neither their conduct nor their character, the composition of the New Testament, nor the present existence of Christianity and the Church, can be explained according to the known principles of reason or of common sense."

And now once more we thank Mr. Montgomery most sincerely for this very valuable work, or rather compilation of essays. We have discharged our duty hurriedly, it may be inefficiently; but we have felt it incumbent on us to recommend "God and Man" to our readers as a valuable antidote to the false philosophy of the day, and a work which reflects equal credit on its author and its publisher.

BY THE EDITOR.

[We had intended to close our notice of Mr. Montgomery here; but it has been suggested that his remarks" On the Sacramental Presence of the Divine Spirit in Baptism" are opposed to the general tenor of the articles which have appeared in former numbers of this review, and that, therefore, we should take some notice of these remarks. It is quite true that there is an apparent discrepancy, and that Mr. Montgomery's opinions do not in this case entirely correspond with our own-meaning the writers who regularly assist in conducting this review. But then, it is to be remembered, that these are only conflicting opinions-opinions of so many individuals—and that they carry with them not one iota of authority, and are entitled to no kind of deference beyond that which is due to the cogency of the arguments by which the opinions are enforced. But these opinions, which we have long held, have recently been solemnly adjudged to be an allowable interpretation of the doctrine of the Church of England, on the subject of baptism, by the highest authority in the land. If such an authority had declared the opinions we entertain to be unlawful, it would have been our duty to submit and to question the soundness of our own judgment; while, as a confirmation of the same, it has given us a confidence in that judgment which nothing can now shake.

We think, moreover, that the discrepancy between Mr. Montgomery and ourselves appears greater than it really is; partly from his dogmatic and confident manner, which often becomes habitual in persons who are in search of positive truth; but which has to be guarded against, lest it should imperceptibly become intolerance and ripen into bigotry. We have always believed that the Church of England meant to be tolerant both of those who held the conditional and of those who held the unconditional efficacy of baptism, but that it rather inclined to the former; which is allowed by Mr. Maskell to have been the almost unanimous doctrine of the English reformers for the first fifty years. Or, as "the judgment of the Privy Council" expresses it-" This view of the

baptismal service is, in our opinion, confirmed by the catechism, in which, although the respondent is made to state that in his baptism he was 'made a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven,' it is still declared that repentance and faith are required of persons to be baptized and when the question is asked-'Why then are infants baptized, when, by reason of their tender age, they cannot perform them?' the answer is not that infants are baptised, because by their innocence they cannot be unworthy. recipients, or cannot present an obex or hindrance to the grace of regeneration, and are, therefore, fit subjects for divine grace-but because they promise them both by their sureties, which promise when they come to age themselves are bound to perform.' The answer has direct reference to the condition on which the benefit is to depend."

That Mr. Montgomery is not really much at issue with us we infer from such passages as the following

"In the abstract, the sacramental efficacy of infant baptism will, perhaps, unto the end of the Church on earth, continue to present mysteries and parodoxes to human intelligence which no finite tribunal will be able to define or explain. We know but little of the internal workings of an invisible soul; nor how the viewless Spirit of Grace incorporates his power, or identifies his impulses with our faculties. And as to the dawnings of infantile reason and conscience, we are here more in the dark than even when advanced years have given their testimony to the presence of a moral principle within.........Our greatest requirement in the discussion is a clear idea of what the two opposing parties mean by 'regeneration. It is quite obvious that this term is not used in the same sense by low and high sacramentarians. Hence, till this be settled, the controversy is little more than a battle of words ......they confuse conversion with regeneration......it is constantly forgotten that Scripture makes no direct and authoritative reference to infant baptism at all. Hence, those who maintain the positive regeneration of all baptized infants cannot be confuted by texts of the New Testament which relate to baptized adults. In truth, there are only three or four ways by which Pædo-baptism can be maintained and justified. 1. By an analogy drawn from the circumcision of infants in the Judaic covenant. 2. By inferential reasonings on certain allusions and statements in Scripture. 3. By the supposed practice of the apostles themselves. Or, 4. By the uniform practice of the Church from the apostolical age down to the present hour. But still amid all this, it cannot be shown that Scripture gives any open, plain, and decisive precept to baptize infants, or any absolute declaration touching the internal efficacy of their baptism when applied" (296).

We hold the practice of the Church to be sufficient warrant for baptising infants; and we hold that they are therely brought within the bonds of the Christian covenant, and are

become responsible for fulfilling its obligations, and consequently receive grace and power to enable them to discharge the same. To these general propositions it may be assumed all Churchmen would agree; and here, we think, that wisdom and charity should stop, resting contented with unity in the substantial reality, without defining the nature of the grace and power, or the conditions necessary to receive it, or the manner in which it is imparted. For all these are questions of intellect, not questions of faith. In the institution of baptism, faith is indissolubly connected with the ordinance by our Lord, in his saying, "he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved." And we hold it to be the safer course to look for this faith in the sponsors rather than in the presumed capacity of infants to exercise faith, or than in the still less allowable procedure of dispensing with faith altogether.

"It is fundamental to all true conception of the Gospel remedy that we believe sin to have occasioned a separating chasm of guilt and corruption between God as the righteous Creator and man as a rebellious creature. Our faculties are in a rent and ruined condition, retaining their primal substance, as created, but having lost innocent qualities, as pure. In this powerless and polluted state they can never, apart from some prevenient act of divine mercy, recover themselves back into a blissful fellowship with their Almighty Original" (37).

In baptism God stretches out the hand of invitation, washes away the pollution, and makes us his children by adoption and grace.]

ART. X.-The East. Sketches of Travels in Egypt and the Holy Land. By the Rev. J. A. SPENCER, M.A. London: Murray. 1850.

MR. SPENCER is already advantageously known as the editor of a Greek Testament, with useful and instructive notes on the historical books, designed for biblical students, and published at New York in 1847. Invalided to Europe for the recovery of his health (no uncommon occurrence among the American clergy), he extended his travels into the East. Much as has been written about Egypt and the Holy Land, Mr. Spencer, in the "Sketches" which we now introduce to our readers, has shown himself to be an accurate, entertaining, and observant traveller, and has contributed some valuable additions to our previously acquired information concerning those countries. Though he professes only to "deal plainly, candidly,

and in earnest, with everything that came under his observation," such truthfulness as characterises his well-written descriptions and remarks gives this volume a just claim to a place in every judiciously selected library. It is illustrated with fifteen engravings, executed from the drawings of a fellow-travellerrather, eight engravings and seven wood-cuts.

The first thing that strikes an European, in visiting any of the renowned lands of the East, is the contrast between the splendid monuments of wealth and grandeur of ancient times and the miserable and impotent condition of the present inhabitants of the same regions. It would seem as if some nobler race of beings, some higher form of humanity, had raised those apparently imperishable memorials; when another race, as much below the ordinary standard as the former race was above it, took their place, having no ideas in common with their predecessors, and, if they think at all, only wondering how men could be at the pains of rearing such huge structures, which they deem so utterly useless.

It is only when we remember somewhat of the history, both of the buildings and of the present inhabitants, that we become alive to the change which centuries of misrule and neglect will produce on any people; breaking their spirit first, and then condemning them to such a state of hopeless, helpless, ignorance and degradation, as we behold throughout nearly the whole of the earliest civilised portions of the earth at the present day; for no region of Asia has been advancing, but the whole East has been retrograding. And it does not meet the case to say that the civilised districts were overrun by barbarians; for these monuments attest that those who raised them were powerful nations as well as wealthy and scientific, and, so far from being at the mercy of barbarians, were mighty conquerors and received homage and tribute from distant lands.

The four great empires of Assyria, Persia, Macedon, and Rome, have fallen in succession; and knowing, from authentic history, the causes of the decline and fall of the last of these universal monarchies, we may rest assured that similar causes produced the decline and fall of the preceding empires, though the history of the successive stages of declension may be lost in the obscurity of remote antiquity. The general process is much the same throughout. Corruption, and the effeminacy and ignorance which are its consequences, produced the fall of the Roman empire, and is sufficient to account for the degradation of the human species which we observe throughout the East, and will explain the contrast which is so remarkable between the monuments and the existing population. They