tive rendering of gevare is decidedly more congruent than the indicative, to the scope and requirements of the passage.

The Revisers translate vii. 39 as follows: "But thus spake he of the Spirit which they that believe in him were about to receive; for the Holy Ghost was not yet: because neither was Jesus yet glorified." We much dislike such a bare and literal version of this important passage. Translators must ever aim at conveying the same idea to their readers as was at first suggested to those to whom the original words were addressed. But there is a manifest danger lest, in this case, a meaning utterly abhorrent to the intention of the sacred writer should be suggested to the mind of an English reader by the version of the Revisers. The supplement "given" ought manifestly to be inserted, as it should also be in the analogous passage in Acts xix. 2.

We shall now merely mention, without any lengthened remarks, the following passages, in which the Revisers appear to us to have signally failed. Chap. vii. 51, " Doth our law judge a man, except it first hear from him, and learn what he doeth?"-an awkward and needless effort at rendering literally the unusual ag aurou of the original. Chap. viii. 25, "Therefore said they unto him, Who art thou? And Jesus said unto them, That which I also say (aλ) unto you from the beginning"-another useless attempt at literality in utter opposition to the genius of our language. Chap. ix. 25, "One thing I know, that, though a blind man, I now see"a very needless and hurtful alteration of the admirable rendering of A. V., "That whereas I was blind, now I see." Chap. xii. 6, “This he said, not because he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and kept the bag, and took away what was put therein." Although Baorál undoubtedly has the meaning of "take away" in some of the later Greek writers, there seems no sufficient reason for giving the word such a sense in this passage, and we prefer the rendering "bare" of the Peschito, A. V., and most other versions. Chap. xiii. 19, "From this time I tell you before it come to pass"-Chap. xv. 2, "Every branch that beareth fruit he cleanseth"-(xadaiges should be rendered "pruneth;" it is vain to attempt setting forth in English the connection between this word and zabagoi in ver. 3); chap. xvii. 17, "Sanctify them in thy truth;" ver. 19, "That they may be sanctified in truth,"-are all efforts at a literal rendering of the original, which are unfortunate and hurtful, since, by their servility to the letter of the Greek text, they fail to convey its true meaning to the mind of an English reader.

We now lay down this able and conscientious revision of the authorised version of St John's gospel with a feeling of the deepest

respect for its authors, and a renewed expression of our gratitude for the spirit they have manifested, and the success they have achieved in their labours. If we cannot agree with them in all the changes they have proposed, we are not the less sensible of the obligations under which their earnest and painstaking efforts have laid us. We rejoice that a body of such accomplished exegetes have been training themselves by actual experience for aiding in the great and holy work of presenting the sacred Scriptures in as perfect a form as possible to English readers. Ere long, we are persuaded, the call for Bible revision will again be heard more loudly and urgently than ever. And our earnest hope is, that when this mighty enterprise is really entered on, it may be entrusted to the hands of as able scholars, as patient inquirers, and as humble believers as are the five eminent divines whose work has now engaged our consideration.

R.

ART. VII.-Baden Powell on Miracles.

ONE of the most prominent and palpable forms in which the Rationalism of our age manifests itself, is in its repugnance to Miracles, meaning by that term all supernatural interpositions or interferences within the sphere of nature, or in the events and sequences of history. Nor is any distinction allowed to be made between one miracle, or set of miracles, and another, according to the different degrees of proof that can be alleged in support of them; they are all thrown into one indiscriminate heap and rejected en masse. It has been usual among protestant writers to distinguish between ecclesiastical miracles and the miracles of the Scriptures, and to maintain that there is an immense difference between the two sets of signs and wonders, not only in the evidence which supports them, but in their inherent characteristics and intrinsic claims to credibility. But all such distinctions are disregarded and set at nought by the advanced rationalists of our age; and the miracles of Christ and his apostles, of Moses and Elias, are visited with the same condemnation of unreality and. fiction as the lying wonders of the legends of the saints.

On the Continent, it is usual for this disbelief of the Christian miracles to be found associated with pantheistic views. Spinoza, the father of modern pantheism, held that a miracle was impossible, and as such was a priori incapable of proof.

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Strauss, the most celebrated pantheist of our day, is of the same opinion. The fundamental principle of his Life of Jesus is, that whatever is miraculous must needs be unhistorical; he has even the hardihood to assert that the assumption of this principle is essential to the true conception of history. "There is no such thing," he maintains, "as the purely historical sentiment, so long as men do not comprehend the indissolubility of the chain of finite causes, and the impossibility of miracles." In our own country pantheism has made no great progress apparently as yet, whatever may be its prospects, and the growing disbelief of miracles must be traced to a different cause; and that cause is evidently to be found in the influence of the physical sciences upon the minds of those who devote themselves too exclusively to these natural studies. For several generations back the cultivation of the science of nature has been uppermost in the national mind; natural forces and natural laws have been the grand engrossing objects of intellectual pursuit; and it is no wonder that this should have led to the formation of intellectual and moral habits of mind unfavourable to the study of theological truth. Theology has to do supremely with what is supernatural and immediately divine. Its chief objects of contemplation lie above and beyond the sphere of nature and sensible things; its methods of inquiry are, on all subjects of revealed religion, totally different from those of physical science; and equally different are its kinds of evidence and proof from those to which the mind of the physicist is habituated. Hence arises, first, an indisposedness on the part of the latter to go into theological inquiries, from a feeling that he is not at home in them, not in his own element; and next, a positive repugnance to the idea that the order and uniformity of nature should ever be, or should have ever been, disturbed by such supernatural interferences as theology puts forward; and finally, a complete and open breach with Christianity as a supernatural revelation attested and verified by miracles, as though its very claim to be such involved an insult to the system of nature and the whole body of science which expounds it as though nature could not have all the honour paid to her which is her due unless she were acknowledged to be as immutable and eternal as her divine Author himself,-nay, as though nature claimed to be superior to her Author and Lord, by imposing upon him a necessity never to interfere with her order when it is once established-never to speak to man save by her voice-never to legislate for man save by her laws and never to reveal himself to the world save within the limits of her undeviating uniformity. "The study of nature," said Professor Ernest Naville at Geneva, in the Conferences held there

in 1861, "has now realised the magnificent prophecies of Lord Bacon. It goes onward from conquest to conquest; and industry, the daughter of science, glorifies it in the eyes of men in our day. Its methods of attaining truth have acquired great ascendancy over the minds of men, and hence there is a very general disposition to consider physical and mathematical facts as the only truths which are solid and well proved, and to banish the wants of the heart and of the conscience, and the more elevated requirements of reason, to the land of chimeras and vain imaginations. The progress of science, a legitimate object of pride in our time, conceals therefore a dangerous rock. Minds fixed upon natural facts, as well as those shallow minds from whom the changeable surface of history hides its solid foundations, both arrive at one common result. The phenomena of time hide from them eternity. The two greatest edifices erected by hidden genius (science and industry) project the shadow of doubt over our generation. It seems as if every stone added to the building veiled from us a new portion of the eternal azure."

In the "Essays and Reviews," this antagonism of rationalism to the Christian miracles is expressed most fully and with the least disguise in the two papers contributed by the late Professor Baden Powell, and Mr Wilson, Vicar of Great Staughton. Mr Wilson pleads strongly for what is called the Ideological principle of interpretation, i. e., the principle which reduces all the miracles recorded in Scripture to the ideas which they were intended to embody, and denies the historical reality of the facts themselves. The facts go for nothing as history; they never really took place; they are a mere mythical body for the thoughts which animate them-symbols of thought, and nothing more, though allowed to be valuable, and even beautiful, as such unreal symbols. Strauss is the great master of Ideology, and his Life of Jesus is throughout an application of it to the gospel histories-an application so ruthless and unsparing, that it thrilled, when first published, all Christendom with a shudder.

Professor Powell proposed to himself a different task from Mr Wilson's, viz., to bring forward a new philosophy of miracles. His Essay is entitled, "On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity," and the drift of it is to make out that the Christian miracles form no real part of these evidences, although they have always been considered a highly important and indispensable part of them in every age from the days of Christ until now; and that, so far from being able to prove the truth of anything else, they do not admit, and in the nature of things cannot admit, of being proved themselves. He denies that they can be reckoned among the credentials

of Christianity; and though he seems willing sometimes to put them among the credenda, among the objects of faith, though not among the grounds of it, still it is hard to understand in what way they are to be conceived of even as objects of faith, since he will not allow us to think of them as physical facts or incidents at all, i. e., as having taken place at all within the sphere or limits of material nature. For how can we conceive, e. g., of the miracle of opening the eyes of the blind, if there were no actual natural blind eyes ever opened; or how can we frame an idea of the miracle of raising Lazarus from the dead, if we are not to suppose that the body of Lazarus was a real physical body, and that the process of corruption which the miracle arrested was an actual natural process? Truly, if, as he alleges, we can never have any rational knowledge or belief of such a miracle as wrought upon an actual natural body, it must be hugely more difficult to have any rational belief or conception of it, as wrought in any other sense-as wrought upon a body, and yet not a real natural body-as arresting a process of corruption, and yet not a natural material corruption. How plain and undeniable is it, that if such miracles as these, and all the other recorded miracles of Christ, were not wrought upon natural things, or within the sphere of nature, they were not in any sense wrought at all, and can as little be objects of faith, as credentials of faith can as little be believed as they can be grounds of believing.'

Mr Wilson is a bold man enough, but Professor Powell is vastly bolder. Mr Wilson follows in the footsteps of Strauss, but he follows him timidly, and leaves many of his footsteps untrod. He says much, a great deal too much for his own consistency as a minister of the Church of England, but he leaves a great deal more unsaid, which perhaps he would have said if he durst. But Mr Powell speaks out apparently his whole mind on the subject of miracles. He denies physical miracles altogether, in as complete and absolute a manner as Strauss denies them, or as Spinoza himself did.

Hume was one of the most advanced opponents of miracles that ever appeared in this country, but Powell has actually gone beyond Hume. He denies not only the possibility of proving a miracle by any amount of testimony, as Hume did, but he denies the possibility of a miracle at all. He goes farther in disbelief than even the French astronomer La Place, for the latter allowed that he would confess a miracle to have taken place if he saw it with his own eyes, and if, after scrupulously examining all the circumstances, he was assured that there was no trick or deception; but Powell declares that he would not believe it even upon the evidence of his own senses. "The essential question of miracles," says he, "stands quite