character of our seamen ? But what device can be imagined of higher potency to degrade and brutify the mind, than to exhibit a large body of men to each other in scenes of the most beastly pollution? Can it be hoped that any man shall escape from such a scene without the blunting of his moral sensibility, or even the extinction of what is pure and honourable in his nature?

Or is it a part of the policy of the country to render the naval service reputable and attractive to the taste of the better part of the community? What honest mind must not turn with disgust from a service, dishonoured by the practices to which we have referred? What parent, when deciding upon the profession of the child of his affections, will, with a knowledge of such facts, force him not merely on the risks of rocks, and tempests, and battle, but on the tremendous certainties of moral degradation and ruin?

As to the humanity of the question, it is needless to say a word. A contempt of the eternal interests of our fellow-creatures is the highest of all injuries in human nature. How astonishing is the infatuation of men on this point! Imagine fifty thousand of our fellow-subjects driven out in vessels full of leaks into the wide and tempestuous ocean, and about to sink in its angry depths, and a general cry of horror would arise, and each man spring up to perform his part in averting so awful a catastrophe. And yet the same individuals, with the Bible in their hands; with a belief in the immortality of the soul; with the admitted truth in their memories, that "without holiness no man can see the Lord;" shall contemplate what may be termed this wreck of immortal souls, this wanton destruction of the immortal part of our nature, without the smallest emotion. We build hospitals for the bodies of our sailors. We joyfully add our quota towards the mainte

nance of the magnificent erection which adorns the banks of our metropolitan river, where an asylum is provided for the decrepitude of age, and the anguish of disease; and, yet, we perhaps voluntarily perpetuate a system whose direct and almost necessary consequence is to nullify every other contrivance for the consolation of old age, and to entail upon the thousands of our seamen, present disease of body, and anguish of mind, and, without repentance, an eternity of misery.

We know, indeed, there are persons who justify the relaxation of all discipline on the point in question, by contending that the licence to commit one vice is a check to the indulgence of still worse vices. But what a mere assumption is this? In what part of the Book of God is such a principle asserted? By what single experiment is it established ? Does not the practice of vice create a habit of vice? And when this habit is formed is not the mind more accessible to temptation— more insensible to the gradations of crime-more prone to break through all ordinary barriers, and to seek the gratification in one vice which is denied in another? Is not sin the school of sin, and one vice the pander to another? It is one of the features by which the moral administration of this country has been distinguished from neighbouring nations-that we have resolutely resisted all public sanctions of vice. May the distinction never be abolished, except by our neighbours condescending to profit from our better example. "The curse of the Lord is in the house of the wicked;" and that state cannot prosper which winks at the abominations it is able to correct, or nurses up its defenders in the arms of profligacy and pollution.

In discharging, as briefly as we are able, this public and most unpleasant duty, we will confess that our main design has been to draw the attention of Parliament to the subject. Let any real friend to his

tians.

A Treatise on the Genius and Olject of the Patriarchal, the Levitical, and the Christian Dispensations. By G. S. FABER, B. D. Rector of Long Newton. 2 vols. 8vo. 1823. ll. ls.

THE theological history of the past century will afford materials, curious as important, to the future ecclesiastical històrian. Beginning with a fearful tide of irreligion and infidelity, and ending with an unparalleled overflow of Scriptural knowledge and religious feeling, the past century exhibited in its course—we speak mainly of this country-some of the most remarkable phenomena perhaps ever presented to the theological inquirer. Two men there were in particular, certainly of preeminent talent, who at once were the produce of the times and contributed much to form them: in naming whom, although many might imagine we were about to summon up the memory of Whitfield and Wesley, we are led by the present publication to mention two very different personages, namely, Warburton and Bryant. Warburton, a very Corypheus in intellect, wild in temper, and irregular in education, was almost lashed into madness by the growing and shameless infidelity of CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 265.

the day: whilst, with powers pecu liar to himself, and with equal ingenuity and boldness, he invented and defended theory after theory to overturn the works of the boasting Freethinkers. Unfortunately, foe and friend suffered alike under his death-dealing blows: and, whilst the dust and feathers of infidelity were effectually blown away by every breath he uttered in defence of the Sacred Records, it happened that something of the more precious and substantial material of truth. also suffered very unnecessary dilapidation. In plain words, he adopted the natural religion of the Deist, and fitted it into the Scriptural system: he took up the secularity of the age, and made it an actual demonstration of the Divine Legation. of Moses. In the extraordinary work so denominated, he overthrew for ever the hopes of the infidels, by bringing the powers of his stupendous intellect to bear upon the evidences of the Sacred word: and, whatever he did, or did not, demorstrate, he at least demonstrated the utter futility of all attempts made by petty sciolists, of his own or future. days, to impugn those evidences. If his education, his habits, and the. times in which he lived, had led him to a better understanding of the contents, the spirit, and the scope of the volume which he thus upheld, we should doubtless not have seen his own series of unwarranted comments upon some of its most weighty portions. We should least of all, have seen the two main foundations of revealed religion— namely, the knowledge of a Redeemer, and the knowledge of a future state-so nearly discarded from the archeological, rather than theological, system which he offers to fix upon the Old Testament dispensation. But of this more hereafter. Fa

Next comes Jacob Bryant. voured with a regular education, and a far happier constitution of temper, though doubtless with less comprehension of thought, and amplitude of range in his objects of study, he

F

had this important advantage against the infidels, that he was, like themselves, as they would boast, unshackled by the prejudices or the pledges of a sacred profession. As a layman, he came forward in the defence of the holy Record of the church; and he chose the department above all others suited to the education and studies of a scholar, the department of ancient mythology, as connected with the traditionary records of Divine Revelation. His great work, the Analysis of Ancient Mythology, demonstrates far more effectively and surely the Divine Legation of Moses as an historian, than Warburton's work had demonstrated it before as a legislator: and, by tracing up all the records of pagan antiquity, all its traditions, its heroolatry, demonolatry, and idolatry, to the history of the eight persons in the ark "saved by water," and there staying, as at a fountain-head, all further research backward into antiquity, shews clearly, that, as far as the Flood, no reasonable objection can be raised against the details of the Divine Record.

With whatever other various success, both these men have, on the whole, so far succeeded in their defence of Scriptural verity, as fairly to have driven back their opponents into Antediluvian researches. And, now, we find the infidels, as if ashamed any more to appear above ground, actually diving and delving into the depths below the surface, to "extract at least from thence a register; and prove, that He who made the earth, and revealed its date to Moses, was mistaken in its age." We, for our part, should have been heartily content there to have left them, to enjoy their claycold thoughts and muddy investigations, in all the darkness and frigidity of their chosen and most congenial atmosphere. But not so Mr. Faber. He pursues them even thither. Once more he condescends to reason with them even on this new and lower arena of contest.

He handles with them their dirt, their shells, their bones, and their incrustations. And if, like Warburton's in natural religion, Mr. Faber's concessions to them in natural geology, may be thought by some a little too gratuitous; still he places himself in the very foremost rank of Christian oryctologists: whilst, with his wonted courage, and, perhaps we must add, with all the success the subject at present admits, he has aimed to ferret out the opponents of Revelation from their last retreat.

To Mr. Faber indeed we must own ourselves, in common with the whole Christian world, under many long standing and most weighty obligations. Endued with a talent for research, and a quickness and vigour of style, which might well merit a comparison with both the names above mentioned; devoted through life to profound investigations on the most important of all subjects; and combining, we suppose through some hidden wisdom in the rewarders of ecclesiastical merit, the disinterestedness of lay services with the sobriety and seriousness of clerical writing; he had in former times, with a native originality of mind, been led into the ample and inviting range of prophetic illustration. Having, we may say, exhausted this department of Scriptural evidence; and having secured our confidence by further investigations, on the most temperate and judicious grounds, into Scriptural doctrine; we behold him now, in more than one publication, retracing the very steps we have before alluded to as the progressive and distinctive work of the last century. In his Origin and Progress of Pagan Idolatry, we find a complete pererration of the ground trodden over by Jacob Bryant. In his "Hora Mosaica," we find a true and solid foundation laid for demonstrating the Divine Legation of Moses; the basis in a great measure of the present account of the Three Dispensations. And finally, in the present work, with an ample dis

purpose of the Creator, as in the construction of an entire frame.

In proportion to the value and importance of such a work, we must of course expect, and even demand, a very ample range of learning, and many very deep and elaborate disquisitions. Whoever has toiled, or sported, (according to his taste,) through the pages of Bishop Warburton, will at once perceive, that a work mainly intended to correct the views of antiquity entertained by that eminent author, will have little less to do than to take a review of the whole ancient world, sacred and profane. As nothing escaped the gigantic grasp of Bishop Warburton, so, it must be felt, nothing can well, or properly, escape the notice of his avowed examiner. And of this Mr. Faber has made us fully sensible; for nothing has escaped the grasp of his own intelligent mind in tracing the outlines of his vast subject. He has examined with minute attention the whole bearing of each several dispensation, Patriarchal, Mosaic, and Christian. Having laid down the principles of each respectively, and determined the principle of the first to be that of universality; of the second, that of particularity; of the third, again, that of universality; he has dedicated the entire first book and volume, in seven chapters, to the minute consideration of the first of those dispensations, the Patriarchal, Subdividing this into Antediluvian and Postdiluvian, he has traced through each portion the grand aboriginal doctrine of Redemption; and likewise two corresponding apostacies with respect to that doctrine. The Antediluvian apostacy being, he considers, that of a proud rejection of the expected Redeemer; the Postdiluvian apostacy being a corruption rather of that expectation. Both Scriptural history, and the collateral annals of pagan idolatry, are ransacked in proof or illustration of these important points; and, of course, Bishop Warburton meets with his full share of animadversion

throughout the whole of this detail, on which it is well known he had so largely entered.

But before we go into any further detail ourselves, on what must be assumed as the main object of the present book; namely, an exposition of the early doctrine of Redemption; we must, notwithstanding our opening commendation of the author's boldness and reach of mind, in tracking the infidels to their last retreat, yet express our unfeigned regret, on the whole, that Mr. Faber should have mixed up with this first and very interesting era of Patriarchism, the still more remote, and, we must say, irrelevant development of a system of cosmogony. It was the great critic's admonition, not to commence the history of Trojan affairs ab ovo Leda: and we could wish it to have been applied on the present occasion. It will not be maintained, on any broad view of the case, that the mode of creating the world in six demiurgic days has any bearing upon the grand subject here placed before us, the promulgation of a Redeemer after the fall of man. And is it not too true, that, in this philosophical age, a discussion of this nature must have an unavoidable tendency to divide and distract the attention from that which is the main subject of the piece? Never, indeed, it must be allowed, could the two words, important and unimportant, be brought into more striking contrast than when applied to the two subjects, respectively, of human redemption and the exact process of mundane formation: the one shortly, and, according to Mr. Faber at least, obscurely, treated of in the first and second chapters of the Bible; the other, the primary, grand, and never-ceasing subject of the whole sacred volume: the one, a subject of contention to this day between a few speculative geologists; the other, the charter of eternal salvation to a fallen race. And yet do not our own pages, in former Numbers, bear convincing testimony to the bad effect of the introduction