5. Lastly, the resemblance between Moses and Christ appears in the character of the revelations which they respectively communicated to mankind. Moses was admitted to lofty intercourse with the Almighty. He was called up into Mount Sinai, and held communion with God for forty days, during which he received the Decalogue written by the finger of Jehovah. He settled the Jewish polity by the immediate and express direction of Heaven, and reared the tabernacle "according to the pattern which was showed him in the mount." We are told that the Almighty "spake unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend." From time to time Jehovah communicated His will to him concerning the children of Israel, and Moses faithfully declared each successive message to the people.

In this respect, also, is Christ a Prophet "like unto" Moses. The Only-Begotten Son, however, who was in the bosom of the Father, hath in an infinitely higher degree declared the Divine will unto the world. "I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in His mouth; and He shall speak unto them all that I shall command Him." That revelation is complete and final.

Here, too, Christ, while He is compared to Moses, is preferred before him. For Moses brought down from the mount the Ten Commandments written upon two tables of stone. These he carried in his hands. But the law which Christ came to fulfil in His life and teach with His lips, the doctrine which He taught, was written on His heart, and was delivered authoritatively by Himself as the eternal Word. He came, moreover, to introduce a milder dispensation than that of Moses. "The law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ." Thus we have at that early age of the world, the promise of Christ as a Prophet, to communicate saving knowledge to the souls of men. Let us hearken to Him who "spake as never man spake." As our Prophet He reveals the Divine will, and communicates light and understanding to the mind. He speaks to us as "unto children." We have received the rudiments of saving knowledge from His lips, and He will carry on and perfect that which He has begun, until He is made of God unto His people" wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption." Nor will Christ, as our Wisdom, cease to exercise the office and functions of a Prophet even in heaven, leading the redeemed, as He will, farther and farther into the knowledge of the "unsearchable riches" of redeeming grace and mercy. How reasonably are we called upon to hearken to His voice: "Incline your ear, and come unto Me: hear, and your soul shall live; and I will make an everlasting covenant with you, even the sure mercies of David." Such is the invitation. Happy are they who even now listen and obey.

T. T.

VOL. XI.-FIFTH SERIES.

8 F

LIMITS OF HEARING.

FROM various experiments (says a writer in the "Intellectual Observer") it has been shown that the human ear can, under favourable circumstances of intensity, distinguish as continuous sounds vibrations ranging from fourteen to sixteen, in the second of time, up to quite forty-eight thousand vibrations in the same time.* As there is some reason to suppose that those persons who can best distinguish very acute, are least able to hear very grave notes, we may probably assume that a range of about twelve octaves, as expressed in musical notation, includes the hearing capacity of human ears; to all vibrations of greater or less rapidity, such ears are absolutely deaf. To produce this range of sound on an organ would require pipes varying in length from one hundred and forty feet to about the third of an inch.

No reason whatever can be assigned why vibrations not included in such a scale should not, though quite inaudible to us, be distinguished as sounds by ears adapted for the purpose, and whose range of hearing, though perhaps not more extensive than our own, embraces a different series of notes. This is rendered more probable by the fact that the ordinary voices of many small animals do but just come within the range of the human ear. To many persons the voice of the common shrew-mouse is inaudible; some cannot hear the sound of the cricket; and a few are deaf to the chirp of the house-sparrow. Very few persons are conscious of the scream of the common bat. Though well enough acquainted with that animal, I can hear no sound uttered by it. I have seen a bat scream when I have held it in my hand, that is, I judged from its struggles, and the action of the jaws and tongue that it was shrieking; but I could hear no sound whatever. Yet a friend, who hears more acute notes than I can, tells me that bats are very noisy little creatures.

The average tone of the human voice is not far from holding the middle place in the range of sound audible to the human ear: being about six octaves above the lowest, and six octaves below the most acute sounds distinguishable. Should the range of hearing of the bat be as extensive as our own, and, as is likely, hold about the same relative position with regard to its voice as ours does to the human voice, it would follow that sounds would be audible to the bat which were six octaves higher in tone than the most acute audible to us. Such sounds would require two and a half millions of vibrations in the second to produce them.

The voice of the bat is probably the shrillest sound audible to human ears; consequently all animals whose voices are still more acute are, as far

* M. Despretz gives thirty-two vibrations in a second as the limit of deep sounds; and seventy-three thousand seven hundred for acute sounds.-See Ganot's "Physics," by Atkinson, Savart gives seven to eight vibrations in the second as the lowest limit of audibility when the sound is very loud,—Vide Lardner's Handbook, "Acoustics."

as our senses are concerned, completely mute. It does not, however, at all follow that their muteness is absolute. That we cannot hear them is no evidence whatever that they cannot hear one another. As a general rule, the more minute animals have the more acute voices,-as from the laws of acoustics might be expected,-and though there are exceptions, as in the case of the frog; yet the acuteness of voice, and probably the range of hearing, usually bear relation to the size of the animal. It is therefore almost certain, judging from the size alone of insects, that we should be unable to hear any voices which they may possess, except perhaps in case of a few of the larger of them, as the death's-head moth, the cicada, the grasshopper, and the cricket.

If it be once admitted that insects and other minute animals may, and probably do, utter or make determinate sounds or voices, which we cannot perceive, we may readily imagine them to have, like birds, sounds expressive of alarm, or of encouragement, of want, or affection, of pleasure, or distress, and to be well enough able to communicate with one another. An ant-hill or a bee-hive may be to the inhabitants as noisy as a rookery appears to us; the sound of a spider may be to a fly as terrific as the roar of a lion is to an antelope; while the bat may distinguish the voice of the moths on which it preys, as readily as the wolf hears the bleating of the sheep.

DR. SHEDD'S HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.*

(Concluded from page 630.)

PASSING from sublime contemplations of the Divine nature, we now come to some of the diversities of opinion concerning man which have been agitated during fifteen or sixteen centuries, and which, although controversy is now less violent, and cardinal truths are more generally accepted, still occasion too much debate. From the Maccabean martyrs, down to those who suffered under Maximin and Diocletian, faithful men were content to lay down their lives "in sure and certain hope of a joyful resurrection," and seldom allowed themselves to be diverted from the prospect of immortality But by metaphysical speculations concerning the nature of the soul. speculations of the kind were often suggested; and so lively was their apprehension of the difference between soul and body, spirit and flesh, that some of the early Christians supposed the two to have had separate beginnings, the one remote from the other, both in time and space. The soul, they thought, was heaven-born. Its angelic nature must have been created before the material world; spirits before matter; the intellectual before the sensible. Perhaps from Plato, or from Pythagoras, or, rather, perhaps from the Jews, they had received some shadowy thought of a countless

* "A History of Christian Doctrine." By William G. T. Shedd, D.D. In Two Volumes. Vel. II. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.

multitude of angels, debased from their pristine dignity, banished out of heaven, doomed to be confined in fleshly bodies, millions of them so incarcerated, other millions waiting still, and so on, until the end of time, when the latest born of Adam's progeny should receive the last wandering apostate spirit to undergo the predestined imprisonment in suffering flesh. In that degraded state men, if men they be, might hope to expiate the sins of a former life. "Is it not very probable," says Origen to Celsus, "that each soul is, for certain secret reasons, (I speak now after Pythagoras, Plato, and Empedocles,) allotted to a body according to its desert, and that this allotment has been determined according to its former customs?"*

Well might Jerome call this a "foolish persuasion;" but this father adopted another notion which some have thought equally so, one which became prevalent in the East; namely, that at the birth of every human body a soul is created for it,-that while all such bodies derive their existence from the first man, for every soul required there goes forth a distinct creative fiat. A third theory, that the soul is propagated with the body, arose to dispute for acceptance with the doctrine of creationism; but while the Christian world has not yet conclusively agreed on either, we can only refer to the early dispute as a matter of history.

The present state of the soul is a more profitable subject of inquiry; and to this the attention of Christendom was directed from the very first.

"The universality of human sinfulness, and the need of Divine grace in Christ, in order to deliverance from it, were acknowledged in the doctrinal system of the Christian church from the beginning. There was no denial, except among the confessedly heretical sects, of the doctrines of sin and redemption stated in this general form. In constructing the more specific statements, there was, however, a difference of opinion in the ancient church, which showed itself in two great tendencies. The one resulted in what we shall denominate the Greek Anthropology; the other in the Latin Anthropology. These types of doctrine were not rigorously confined, the one to the Eastern and the other to the Western Church. But each was the predominating scheme within its own borders, while yet each found some advocates, and exerted some influence within the limits of the other."

Here Dr. Shedd notes from Neander, that, "while in the Western Church the Augustinian," or Calvinistic, "scheme of doctrine had become dominant, in the Greek Church the older and more indefinite mode of apprehending the doctrines of grace, of free-will, and of providence, a theory bordering upon Pelagianism, had been preserved." And here we must observe that Dr. Shedd does not conceal his Calvinistic bias, nor hesitate to confound the primitive Christian doctrine on these points with Pelagianism. The concession, however, that Augustine, after he fell under a powerful reaction against the Gnosticism and Manichæanism of his earlier

1605.

......KATÀ TÀ TρÓTEрa on. Origenis contra Celsum, p. 26. August. Vindat.,

life, departed from the teaching of the primitive Christians, could not be avoided; and the high tone of philosophical impartiality which generally distinguishes our author would have been perfectly maintained in his second volume, if he had been content to attribute to his favourite Augustine a less than predominating influence over the Western Church.

It is undeniable that the sincere piety of Augustine long gave him great influence over the more piously-disposed members of the Church of Rome, and that the Jansenists, especially, took him for their master. It is also certain that within the territory where Jansenism flourished, leading Protestant Reformers caught the fatalistic taint, and that Calvin, by consequence, became the Augustine of his time. The Reformed Church of France and Switzerland did not hold fast the theology of Melancthon and Zuinglius, but adopted that of Calvin, so long, at least, as Calvinism could avail to hold them up out of the depths of scepticism; but the Church of England, notwithstanding the efforts of Calvinists and Presbyterians to influence her discipline and faith at the Reformation could never be forced into the mould of Augustinianism. Augustine had departed, as Bishop Burnet truly says, from the opinion of the Greek, or, more properly speaking, the early Christian church. For a time the Church of England was threatened with Calvinism; the seventeenth Article (A.D. 1562) exhibits a timid admission of the doctrine, and has ever been an occasion of controversy rather than an Article of Faith. For a time the Calvinian party was the stronger, and the few divines who met at Lambeth in the reign of Queen Elizabeth managed to agree on the more formal and extreme declaration, that "God from all eternity predestinated some persons to life, and some He reprobated unto death," with a string of propositions of the same kind. But Queen Elizabeth, with characteristic good sense, suppressed those Lambeth Articles as being manifestly at variance with the general doctrine of the English Reformation. The Book of Homilies, published the same year as the Articles of Religion, affords clear evidence that, as the Article sets forth, the doctrine of predestination was considered unfit for the pulpit, "a most dangerous downfal, whereby the devil doth thrust curious and carnal persons either into desperation, or into wretchedness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation." Jewel, the great Apologist of the Church of England, and the accomplished theologians who concurred in the publication of Nowell's Catechism, condemned the "dangerous downfal." Harsnett, one of the most famous preachers at Paul's Cross, pronounced a vehement condemnation of it. The heads of the University of Cambridge, where the predestinarian delusion had almost prevailed, appealed through Lord Burleigh to the Queen for help to put to silence the distracting controversy it had raised, destroying the peace of the University, and imperilling the truth of religion. A long catalogue of illustrious names might be given to demonstrate that the Church of England has never taken Augustine for her master; and certain it is that, in the present day, the common Christianity of England is less than ever impressed by the teaching of the African bishop or the Genevan