wonted place upon the page of the first. The instance is unique. Professor Tholuck has thought to add two or three more examples, but they are not to the point.

We asserted, however, a triple mould in which the image of the Christ is cast. There is a third mode of representing him. This comes from the writings of the Apostle Paul. Unlike his brethren, he had never seen his Lord in the flesh. All the wonderful events of the Evangelical story had swept by. He was persecuting the already gathered Church, when he was called to be its missionary. He could write from no memories. He did not care to confer with those who had them. This he has told us himself. Instead of seeking his older brothers, the primitive witnesses to what they had seen with their own eyes, and heard with their own ears, - instead of going up to Jerusalem, where those wondrous transactions had taken place, he went off to Arabia and Damascus. Three years were allowed to pass, before he made up his mind to look into the face of Peter who had walked to Jesus on the water, or of James who had seen him transfigured, or of the beloved disciple who had leaned upon his bosom and looked up at him on his cross, or of Thomas who had touched the prints of the nails and the stab of the spear in his risen body. This seems extremely strange; but he has told us that it was the fact. Nor will it be inexplicable, when we come to reflect upon it. If he had gone immediately to converse with the Twelve, he would have thrown suspicion upon his cause in the eyes of after generations. By thus "conferring with flesh and blood," he would have seemed to be seeking the counsel and subjecting himself to the influence of others. He would have placed himself in a subordinate position, or at least come down from his appropriate and solitary one. Besides, he could not be sure of the reception that he would meet with from the original disciples. If he felt some apprehension on this point, he had reason for it. For when he sought them at the end of his three years, and "essayed to join himself unto them, they were all afraid of him, and believed not that he was a disciple." He was indebted to his friend Barnabas for a recommendation to them; and, indeed, he plainly informs us that even then-though he abode fifteen days with Peter, and it was Peter who first had his eyes opened to the spread of Christ's religion among

the heathen other of the Apostles saw he none, save James the Lord's brother. And beyond and above these two considerations just mentioned, why should he have mingled at once, or at all, with the rest of the Apostles? His call was a peculiar one. His testimony was an independent one. His discipleship drew its date from the vision that he saw on his way to Damascus. He had no need of going behind the commission that he then received. He betook himself, therefore, to retirement and meditation. He had with him the immediate Christ, who had spoken to him from his glory, and who would not leave him now. He went to ponder the old predictions. He went to open his fervent soul to new revelations of God.

In consequence of these extraordinary circumstances, we should expect some peculiarity in the mode of exhibiting, if not of conceiving, the now ascended Master. And we find it. It is not the manner of Palestine. It is not the manner of Egypt. For the want of a more appropriate title, we will call it the Rabbinical manner. It may have taken its tinge or not from what he learned at the feet of Gamaliel. He delights in allegories, and in rather violent constructions of the Jewish Scriptures. His Messiah is the Hebrew one sublimated. He is determined to know him no longer "after the flesh," in any sense; but as the first-born of the whole creation; the first-born from the dead; the second Adam; the image of the heavenly; raised to the right hand of God, far above all principality and power and might and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this world, but also in that which is to come. He loves to heap up and crowd together epithets of honor, that he may thus show his sense of the majesty of this ViceRegent of the Almighty; whom, though man still, God had ordained to judge the quick and the dead at his second coming. Every thing with Paul carries an air of direct personality in it. In this respect he stands in opposition to John, who tends to abstractions, or conveys under sensuous images general truths. For example, when the Christ of the fourth Gospel declares that they who are in their graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God, we may suppose, as the best interpreters do, that he refers only to a moral resurrection. And again, when

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he says, "I am the resurrection and the life," the idea of a spiritual life rises into the minds of all. But when Paul enters upon his descriptions of the last things, we see the literalist as plainly as we do in the Christology of the Jewish doctors. He does not lead us to look any further than the descriptions themselves.

We have thus demonstrated, as we think, that there are three general ways of representing Christ in the Christian Scriptures; that of the first three Gospels, that of the fourth Gospel, and that of the Apostle Paul. The first is in the plain style of Palestine; the second in the style peculiar to the Alexandrian school; and the third in a manner less absolutely decided, which we may term the Rabbinical, or that of the Jewish Christology. We may make these distinctions more clear, or at least impress them in a deeper and livelier manner, by designating them under other titles. And if, in doing this, we have no care about discriminating very nicely between what belongs only to the character of the several writings themselves, and what relates to the Divine Person whom they describe, this need not be accounted of any essential importance to the object that we have in

view.

Under the first of the heads that have been named, we have the biographical Christ; under the second, the mystical; under the third, the idealized. The first includes most of the natural, the second of the metaphysical, the third of the glorified Redeemer. First appears the Son of man, next the Son of God, last the ascended to God; and we see him successively in the flesh, in the spirit, and in the skies. We begin with the practical or moral Christ; we pass on to the speculative or theological; we end with the imaginative or deified. He shines first through the narrative form; then through the dialogue; and then through the Epistle. Jesus the Christ leads the way. The Logos, the Divine and Eternal Word, follows. And finally comes forward the Great Head of the Church. Messiah the prophet arises out of Nazareth; the Only-Begotten descends from the Father; the Lord of Glory sits upon his throne. Finally, to close this enumeration, which should not be drawn out till it seems artificial, and rather invented than found, we look upon the first as the Christ of memory; upon the second

as the Christ of contemplation; and upon the third as the Christ of the preacher, -held up to the revering homage of all the world.

Two questions of grave importance arise out of the facts that have just been stated. Do these facts throw any suspicion over the authenticity of the records? Do they interfere with the unity of our impressions concerning the Redeemer, or blur our clear apprehension of him? To the first of these questions we answer, Not in the least degree. The discrepance of those accounts does but multiply the evidences of their truth. They who describe independently any object must always describe it diversely, according to their several habits of mind and points of view; and the larger the object is, the more variously will they be likely to represent it. We should not expect that the beloved disciple, the tender-hearted survivor of all his brethren, would speak of his Master in the same tone with others. As for the Epistles of Paul, they are so demonstrably his that all antiquity cannot show such an accumulation of proof for the genuineness of any writings. To the second question, also, we reply, Interfere with the unity, blur the distinctness, of our conceptions of Christ! Just the contrary. We need that divergency, which we have seen actually to exist, in order to spread a foundation wide enough to contain and hold up the full idea of so divine a person as the Lord Jesus. Who supposes that our view of the Grecian sage is confused, or that any doubt is cast upon what he really was, by the differing accounts of his disciples who wrote of him? How should they have written of him alike, though they both were his favorites and admirers, when one was a man of affairs and a great commander, and the other lived chiefly in the inward life? One was flattered by his countrymen with the title of "the Attic bee." He flew over Asia, to bring back, even from its fields of battle, sweets for his native hive. The other was saluted by the philosopher himself as "the academic. swan," dwelling in silence, purity, seclusion, and peace. The learned Professor of Greek at Harvard University has just told us, that a perfectly proportioned figure of Socrates can be made only by combining the three representations of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes.*

*North American Review for April, 1850, p. 523.

How vastly stronger is the case before us, when the figure to be displayed is that of the Saviour of men! That sacred form is nowhere and in no dress to be mistaken. No biographer could make him ordinary or tedious. No idealist could reach the height of his excelling nature. No ribald satirist could touch him with one stroke of ridicule.

In a word, we required the holy testimony, as we have it, in a triple bond of descriptions. This makes all complete. It is the "threefold cord that is not quickly broken"; — that will tie up its treasure secure and fast for all generations.

N. L. F.

ART. II. AGASSIZ'S TOUR TO LAKE SUPERIOR.*

LAKE Superior has, ever since its discovery, been regarded as one of the most remarkable features of the Western Continent. The philosophical traveller from the East has looked towards it, as towards Niagara, with longing eyes. A vast fresh-water sea, Atlantic in its storms and waves, Norwegian in its mountainous borders, set with innumerable islands, small and large, inhabited by savage Indians and Indian superstitions, and stored with copper and gold, with thirty unexplored rivers said to be pouring into its northern unexplored shores, and as many half explored, into the hollow crescent of its southern side, with unknown fishes, larger than swim in any other lakes, and waters so transparent that, as Jonathan Carver has taught us to believe, the canoe floating over them in a calm seems to be suspended between earth and heaven;- such has Lake Superior presented itself to the imagination. How came the lake where it is? What has given it its shape? What has uplifted the precipitous cliffs of its northern shores and islands? Whence its ores and metals? What is its

*Lake Superior: its Physical Character, Vegetation, and Animals, compared with those of other and similar Regions. BY LOUIS AGASSIZ. With a Narrative of the Tour, by J. ELLIOT CABOT. And Contributions by other Scientific Gentlemen. Elegantly illustrated. Boston: Gould, Kendall, & Lincoln. 1850. 8vo. pp. 428.