Christian dispensation. These benefits can be ascertained only by a close and habitual intercourse with persons who experience the sanctifying effects of Divine truth in their hearts, and bring forth correspondent fruits in their lives; but such persons are despised and rejected by unbelievers they are generally found in the lower [or middle] walks of society, often in the haunts of poverty and disease, haunts which it is notorious the scorner seldom frequents. He may descant upon the iniquitous wars of popes, or the cruel oppressions of governors, and exclaim with the unhappy man, to whom allusion has been made,

Behold the fruits of Christianity! but he

cannot refer to the millions whom the religion of Jesus silently guides in youth, and preserves from crime, misery, and destruction; or, in sickness, adversity, and age, inspires with consolation; whose broken spirits it heals, or whose contrite hearts it cherishes; to whom it imparts a peace passing all understanding-a peace to which popes and rulers, unless renewed in the spirit of their minds, remain as much strangers as was Voltaire himself, notwithstanding they bear the Christian name, and make religion the pretence of their actions." pp. viii-xi.

These last are the fruits, and the only genuine fruits, of Christianity. It is, when we can hear the apparently defenceless comfort one another with these words, "Forget not that the shield of the Almighty is spread over us" (p. 164); when we can hear the dying wife appeal to her afflicted husband, "I know you would not change situations with our monarch: you would rather be the oppressed than the oppressor : he is an object of compassion, not of resentment; and we cannot be sufficiently thankful that the sun has never gone down upon our anger, and that we are enabled daily to pray that godly repentance may arrest him in his wicked course, and that he may yet reign in peace and prosperity (p. 165)—it is when we can hear the persecuted father address his children, (and thrice happy the parent who, under any circumstances, can thus appeal to them!) "The love of God is, you know, generally the theme of our conversation" (p. 163);-it is

The

when, with a benevolence and a boldness which nothing but such principles could inspire, the great Saurin addressed his sublime and touching apostrophe to Louis: "And you, dreadful prince, whom I once honoured as my king, and whom I yet respect as a scourge in the hand of Almighty God, you also shall have part in my good wishes. provinces which you threaten, but which the arm of the Lord protects; this country which you fill with fugitives, but with fugitives exulting in love; these walls which contain a thousand martyrs of your making, but whom religion renders victorious; all these yet resound benedictions in your favour. God grant the fatal bandage that hides the off. truth from your eyes may yet fall

May God forget the rivers of blood with which you have deluged the earth. May God blot out of his book the injuries which you have done unto us and while he rewards the sufferers, may he pardon you who caused us to suffer. Oh may God, who hath made you to us, and to the whole church, a minister of his judgments, make you a dispenser of his favours, and administrator of his mercy!"—it is, when we hear such sentiments and desires as these, that we may triumphantly hurl back the exclamation of Voltaire, "Behold the fruits of Christianity!"

archal, Levitical, and Christian. The materials for this comparison he draws both from sacred and pagan antiquity; tracing with a very watchful eye, as we have already observed, the obliquities of Bishop Warburton, in going over the same ground. Indeed, without narrowing Mr. Faber's work into a mere general disquisition and criticism on the scriptural scheme of that eminent prelate, we might still represent it as peculiarly valuable, from the view it systematically takes of all the principal points and positions in "The Divine Legation of Moses :" neither can we conceive a more complete notice, than that which is here given, to the truly scriptural theologian, of the imperfect and very hazardous tendency of that far-famed "Demonstration." The great aim of Bishop Warburton, throughout his elaborate though unfinished work, was in effect to reduce both the Patriarchal and the Levitical dispensations into a kind of modification of what is called natural religion; and to shew that some of the most important doctrines now fully embodied in the scheme of Christianity were wholly unknown till Christianity itself was specifically promulgated. In thus limiting Christian doctrines wholly to points "brought to light by the Gospel," the Bishop even shut out "life and immortality," and all notion of redemption by the sacrifice of the appointed Redeemer, from the knowledge of the ancient world. It is to the destruction of this formidable theological hydra, as we fear it must be called, that Mr. Faber applies the whole bent of his powerful mind; and none will duly appreciate the service he has rendered to English theology by so doing, who do not first estimate the extent to which the Warburtonian theory has made itself felt and admired. In the preceding age it is much to be feared that learning, research, and intellectual genius were commodities far more currently in estimation than sound scriptural

erudition. In all ages, the corrupt pride of human reason will lend itself to the temptation of intellectual display; and this, whatever be the material upon which it shall operate. And when the theory upon which it is employed, happens to have much that is really true and useful in its composition, a praise justly due to Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, it is inconceivable to what an extent the deleterious admixture may proceed, in puffing up the head of an ambitious scholar, and in disturbing the faith of an unwary and speculative theologian.

To do Bishop Warburton full justice, it is however necessary to state somewhat more explicitly the nature and origin of his undertaking. A position by the infidel Tindal, that "Christianity is as old as the creation," had been broached with a view to annihilate every thing that is peculiar, as well in the Old as in the New Testament; and to reduce all revelation to the standard of a supposed natural religion, begun with the creation of man, and only republished in a revised form in the Christian code. This system, made public in the year 1730, seems to have originally suggested the idea of Warburton's Divine Legation of Moses, which was first published in part in 1738. That eminent prelate directs his whole argument to prove that Christianity was any thing but a republication of the law of nature; that it was wholly sui generis, a system of direct revelation of which nature was intended to give us no information whatever, and of which the two grand palmary, and as he contended newly revealed, topics were a future and immortal state, and the redemption of the world by the sacrifice of the Son of God. This being assumed as the exclusive subject of the Christian revelation, it then became necessary to provide another hypothesis for more ancient revelations. For such revelations, in

point of fact, existed, and must have revealed something. They did not, he contended, reveal a future state of rewards and punishments; therefore, he inferred, they must have kept mankind in order, by proposing a series of temporal rewards and punishments. And this, in fact, the Bishop makes to be the proof of the Divine Legation of Moses; namely, that he upheld and sanctioned his own peculiar revelation by an appeal to present, visible, and sensible interpositions of Divine Providence on its behalf. This, moreover, his lordship necessarily asserts to have been also the case, where any thing was revealed, even in the former Patriarchal dispensation. The Divine authority, he maintains, was upheld by temporal interpositions of blessing or cursing: as in the case of the Flood, and the conflagration of the cities of the plain, on the one hand; and of the deliverance of righteous Noah, and just Lot, on the other. But, in the absence of these occasional, or partial revelations, mankind, he argues, were left exclusively to the light of nature and natural religion; with no very clear avowal on the part of the Bishop, whether in that state, or indeed in any state before Christianity, they were really the heirs of immortality, or subject to mortality like the brutes that perish.

The actual knowledge of a future state, which the Bishop denies, not only to all the early participators of Divine revelation, but even to the later Prophets, was indeed clearly found, on evidence incontrovertible, to exist among their heathen contemporaries. This, which might have suggested an alarming difficulty to a less bold, or less ingenious mind, presented none to Warburton. It was rather a confirmation of his system. The heathen lawgivers, it seems, invented the notion of a future state of rewards and punishments, to supply and prop up their own laws under the deficiency, not found in the Law of Moses, of temporal providential

interferences on their behalf. This alleged invention, so necessary to the very existence of heathen states, at once, in the Bishop's view, relieves the Scriptural page from every charge of having prematurely revealed the doctrine; whilst the non-existence of it in the pages of truth as clearly prove their Divine origin, by shewing that they confined their disclosures closely to their own peculiar object,—which, according to his hypothesis, was to conduct the favoured race through a course of temporal interpositions, to the final development of life and immortality through the Gospel.

The notion of sacrifice, as tending to expiate sin, and appease the Divine Being, was also a doctrine very widely diffused amongst heathen nations. This, then, the Bishop imagines to have been gradually invented likewise; beginning with the more natural and reasonable invention of men, eucharistical or precatory offerings, and thence proceeding to vicarious sacrifice;-an invention certainly very curious, if wholly dissevered from any tradiditional knowledge of an intended. sacrifice in the person of a Redeemer; but still an anticipation, no less remarkable than unaccountable, of that Divine and most consolatory doctrine of the Gospel, the doctrine of the Atonement. The Jewish sacrifices alone are made by the Bishop the subject of express revelation; and this, as partly in themselves vicarious, to obtain the temporal blessings of the Mosaic covenant; and partly as typical of the future vicarious sacrifice of the Redeemer, "though not seen or understood till the fulness of the time was come;" consequently not explaining to ancient believers the mode of redemption, nor intended to awaken their faith in the predicted victory over the serpent by means of the woman's Seed.

The absence of these two grand principles-a future state, and the true doctrine of sacrifice-from the whole ancient believing world,

leaves the system of Bishop Warburton, it must be owned, in a very destitute condition. Instead of taking the infidel at his word, and shewing Christianity to have been as old, at least, as the Fall, by shewing that the great object of faith and hope to fallen man, under a Divine revelation, was truly the same in all ages; instead of making all revelation to be one harmonious whole; and shewing that fallen man could never have been saved on Scriptural grounds but in one method, by faith in the proffered mercy of God through a Redeemer, more or less clearly revealed, until the fulness of the time was come; this system, virtually, or rather flatly, sets at variance the Old and the New Testament: it makes the one as restrictedly temporal as the other is plainly spiritual. It demoralizes, to the ancient at least, the whole ancient economy. It denies the very use to which it would always appear the primeval types and shadows were to be put. All appearances of such a use, at the time, it necessarily explains away; and it becomes, in consequence, chargeable with a greater number of opposing phenomena, than almost any system ever presented to the world. No hypothesis, perhaps, since the cycloidal and epicycloidal astronomy of the ancients, was ever encumbered with so many difficulties; difficulties, however, in the solution or rather confident encounter of which consists the chief charm of the Bishop's most extraordinary and elaborate work. But considered otherwise than in the light of a series of ingenious fancies, its mode of reasoning would offer a precedent of most dangerous effect, and would tend to confound all boundaries of right and wrong in Scriptural comment.

These fundamental points, in the system of Bishop Warburton, Mr. Faber most entirely and heartily sets himself to oppose; and really he must be excused, if in so very contagious an atmosphere, he is detected by his readers in something of the

same hypothetical mood as his great antagonist. The main position of Mr. Faber is, that the Patriarchs did know, and believe, a future state; that they did understand the true nature of sacrifice, and of deliverance through a Redeemer; that, in fact, at no time were these doctrines wholly lost; and that they must have been originally revealed from God to man. The pursuit of this more reasonable and supportable plan carries Mr. Faber into a very wide range, both of sacred and profane research, through his first and second books, which contain, respectively, the Patriarchal and Levitical dispensations. His first book, taking it up where we have already left it, and where we wish it had begun, with the beginning of all things known, discusses, to the end of the first volume, the knowledge possessed by the Patriarchs, both before and after the Flood, of the doctrine of redemption; maintains, that to enforce this was the peculiar object of the Patriarchal dispensation; and supposes the great Antediluvian apostacy to have been, in principle, the denial of this doctrine, a denial leading necessarily to the diluvian overthrow of the rebellious apostates.

This Patriarchal knowledge of the doctrine of redemption is more particularly argued, first, negatively; since nothing else could have been the subject of patriarchal revelation (chap. iv.); and secondly, positively, (1) by inference from the original promise of deliverance given in paradise; from Divine manifestations clearly intimated in that first period of the world, and from the application of those manifestations to that promise which our Patriarchal progenitors, he considers, could not have failed of making; and from the existence of primeval sacrificial rites (chap. v.): (2) by a statement of the general and essential nature of the most ancient Pagan theology (chap vi.): (3) by a conjecture respecting the nature of the Antediluvian apostacy (chap. vii.)