contending that the denial of any particular supposed doctrine of Christianity, as established by law, was ever punish able at common law as an offence against society, they have lately heard it asserted or insinuated, that the preamble of the Act of 9 and 10 William III. (which most unjustly and uncharitably classed the denial of the doctrine of the Trinity among certain undoubted offences which it denominated "detestable crimes") is to be taken even after its repeal as evidence of an assertion on the part of the Legislature, that the offence was and is as described by it, a crime against society, and as such cognizable at common law, without entering into the question whether the proposition of law supposed to be so made or implied was true or not. Your petitioners humbly submit that the recurrence to the preamble of a persecuting act (so disgraceful, cruel and unjust, that your petitioners have heard from high authority that "a man could have neither the feelings of an Englishman nor a Christian who could hesitate one moment to repeal it") is unworthy of the spirit which dictated its repeal is unconstitutional, dangerous and unjust. That in the same way various other supposed heresies might be argued to be still (as they were at the time of passing acts that disgraced our statute book thought to be) "detestable crimes;" errors in judgment would be once more held to infer moral turpitude and sin; and various offences might be revived, against which, in days of ignorance, bigotry or superstition, laws have passed, declaring all sorts of acts and opinions criminal; and all this might occur, although it might be plain (as in the case of your petitioners) that the assertion of illegality made by those laws was a priori untrue and untenable as a position of law. Your petitioners are sure that it is the dictate of common sense, as well as of justice, that a worship, which the law tolerates, sanctions, and provides for the exercise of, by licensing its places and ministers, "is not only exempted from punishment, but rendered innocent and lawful," and "that the law protects nothing in that very respect in which it is in the eye of the law unlawful.” To hold your petitioners punishable for the free exercise of such worship would, as they submit, be cruel and unjust, and would convert the enactments of the Legislature into a snare for the unwary, who might confide in its apparent promises and in the undoubted understanding of all persons, that a full and effectual relief was intended to be given. The doubts thus thrown out (however unfounded, as your petitioners submit them to be) tend to the serious annoyance of your petitioners, and shake to their foundation all charitable trusts connected with their institutions, at the same time that they leave an important constitutional question in a state which no government of a free state ought (as they submit) in justice to its subjects to allow. If no doubt exists, none should be raised; if it does exist, it should be removed; for your petitioners cannot conceive that in this age and in this country it can be held proper that opinions should be punished as "detestable crimes," which, whether true or false, are held by so many wise and good men, and which even the despotic Government of the Austrian Empire recognizes as forming one of the established religions of a great portion of its dominion. Your petitioners therefore humbly pray, that a full and efficient inquiry may take place into the state of the law as affecting your petitioners, and that if necessary a remedy may be provided for any defects in the measure by which it was intended, as they believe, that they should be effectually relieved. MISCELLANEOUS. A List of Joint-Stock Companies, the Proposals for which are now, or have been lately, before the Public. Amount of ascertained Capital, from p. 248, £220,754,000 402 Surrey, &c. Fire and Life Insurance .1,000,000 Solicitors, Bankers, &c., appointed to receive applications for Shares: 459 Sussex County and General Fire and Life Insur 221,754,000 200,000 £231,705,000 502 Ship Canal from the Harbour of Foway to Padstow. Sweet Erratum in the former List of Joint-Stock Companies : Page 247, for "Solicitors," read Solicitors, Bankers, or other Persons appointed to receive applications for Shares. FOREIGN. FRANCE. THE spirits of Frenchmen have been much excited by the preparations for the Coronation of Charles X., and by the ceremony itself, which took place on the 29th ult. at Rheims. The priests got up a grand spectacle: according to the newspapers, they gave out that there was miraculously preserved the Sancta Ampulla, Sainte Ampoulle, or Sacred Phial, which was brought from Heaven by a dove, with oil for the coronation of Clovis, the first Christian King. Napoleon disdained this trick at his coronation. [Mon. Repos. V. 240.] The Duke of Northumberland was sent over from this country with a splendid retinue to represent the King of England at the ceremony. France needed some new show to keep her people lively, for certain recent measures have alarmed the better part of them; especially the law for indemnifying the emigrants, and the law of sacrilege, which is perhaps the most barbarous that has been enacted in Europe for the last century: this precious speci men of the legislation of the most polished nation of Europe in the 19th century, affixes the punishment of death to a profanation of the host or sacramental elements. The priesthood is unusually active, and common report ascribes the evils under which the country is labouring to the Jesuits. The rites of sepulture are vexatiously refused to the bodies of such persons as during life were suspected of hostility to the Church; and no occasion is passed by of insulting and troubling the Protestants. Intelligence has been lately received that, in the town of Nerac, in the South of France, containing a population of about 5,600, of which nearly half is Protestant, the Protestants have been deprived of a church, which was granted them in 1804, and which they have occupied ever since. It was an old convent, and the authorities have summarily determined that it is still church property. On this decision, the Curé of Nerac took possession of the chapel, ordered Te Deum to be chaunted in token of victory, and declared from the pulpit of his new conquest, that "the hand of God had scourged the heretics from his temple." HANOVER. WE alluded, p. 124, to some recent regulations of the enlightened King of Hanover, having for their object the equitable administration of Church Revenues. We now give the extracts from the German papers which supplied us with this information. The higher clergy of England and Ireland will not feel much gratitude to the Hanoverian Sovereign for setting an example of intermeddling with ecclesiastical livings. The maximum of the income of the clergy of Hanover must astonish, if it do not alarm, our own dignitaries. Hanover, Jan. 14. The information which has been collected within some years past, respecting the incomes of the Protestant livings in the kingdom, having proved that on the one haud the classification of the Protestant livings according to their incomes, resting almost exclusively on the original foundation, required a rectification, because, in process of time, through the altered prices of things, &c., it has undergone modifications which, in many cases, do not correspond with the extent of the livings; and that on the other hand not only the number of livings with small endowments is too large in proportion: to the better ones, but there are even some on the present income of which, no clergyman can subsist, without being much distressed in his circumstances. Now that these evils may be gradually remedied as far as the existing means will allow, his Majesty, our most gracious King, has been pleased, by a general plan for the improvement of the Protestant livings, sanctioned by him, to make the following general regulations : All the Protestant livings in the kingdom shall be divided, according to their income, into three principal classes; each class rising 300 dollars above that below it, and each class to be divided into three subdivisions, differing 100 dollars from each other as far as the uncertainty of the receipts depending on casual circumstances will permit. To this end, from 1st July, 1824, all Protestant livings which were at that time under 300 rix-dollars shall be raised to that value, by a fixed increase, to be paid out of the public treasury either for ever, or at least till they can be incorpo rated with other neighbouring parishes. Hanover, Jan. 15. His Majesty, in order to ameliorate the condition of the evangelic parochial clergy, has ordered that they shall be divided into three classes, each of which is to have three subdivisions, in such a manner that the minimum of their income shall be from 300 to 400 crowns, and the maximum from 1100 to 1200 crowns. CORRESPONDENCE. Communicatious have been received from Messrs B. Mardon; D. Eaton; R Aubrey, Jun; H. B.; Almost a Christian; Kenilworth; a Subscriber; Anonymous on Quaker Unitarians; and Anonymous-Poems. We have received two more packets from our American Correspondent, the analyzer. "The Puritans," and several other papers and some intelligence are, much to our mortification, unavoidably postponed. The following corrections should have been made in the Stanzas on Riego, (pp. 304, 305,) viz. Stan. 1, line 8, for "the stranger's sword," read the invader's sword. ERRATA. possess." P. 296, col. 1, 23 lines from the top, dele the comma after the word " Monthly Repository. No. CCXXXV.} JULY, 1825. [Vol. XX. A Vindication of Minute Accuracy, in respect of the Text, Translation, and Interpretation, of the Scriptures. July 2, 1825. LUCRET. PERHAPS it may not the readers what signification it has been said? ERHAPS it may not be unsea- by ancient writers, and afterwards, in of the Monthly Repository a few observations on the value of minute accuracy in the criticism and interpre tation of the Bible. The strictures which I shall have occasion to make, will have been suggested by passages that presented themselves in a recent course of reading. Dr. Bruce appears to depreciate this accuracy, where the text of the Seriptures is concerned. He takes for granted, that his auditors and readers cannot "refrain from smiling, when they hear the nature of the Supreme Being, and the faith and salvation of Christendom, suspended on the transposition of a letter, or the construction of a particle, the insertion of a dot, or the omission of some grammatical or rhétorical mark." What is Dr. Bruce's meaning? His statement, if it be correct, should excite indignant disgust, rather than risibility. The question at issue, between Christians of opposite denominations, is, whether or no the texts under consideration, and as they stand in the received editions and translations, be genuine Scripture; whether or no they proceed from evangelists and apostles? Is there any thing which can fairly be deemed ludicrous, either in this inquiry itself, or in the legitimate and customary means of bringing it to a conclusion? Suppose that the point in dispute were the text and readings of the best MSS., &c. of a profane author-Cicero, for example, or Virgil:-suppose, too, (it is an allowable supposition,) that some very interest ing matter of fact or of opinion were suspended on the due arrangement of the controverted passage-what scholar would treat the case with levity? Is it not his business to ascertain, first, what has really been said The Persons well acquainted with polemical theology, know that Dr. Bruce's representation is exaggerated. whole stress of Trinitarianism is not placed on the texts which he has in view. Even assuming that it is, Arians would seem to be as truly and as deeply involved in the question of the genuineness of such passages as Unitarian Christians. All sincere and enlightened believers in the gospel, will be zealous to draw the line between spurious and authentic Scripture. How can the discrimination be effected without the aid of biblical criticism, without minute accuracy in the exercise of it? When we acknowledge the value of the end, yet despise the only means by which it can be attained, we are grossly inconsistent with our selves. It would be, in many respects, a happy circumstance, if the controversy of the Trinitarian with those who op pose him, were decided by criticism rather than interpretation. Expositors may be very learned, wise, and pious: nevertheless, in their charac teristic employment, we find them susceptible of various and hurtful in fluences, from causes not always under their controul. The canons of interpretation, so far as respects the prac tical use of them, depend greatly on men's prejudices, attachments, connexions, and diversities of sentiment; Not so the canons of criticism, in the restricted and just meaning of that term. These are fixed, impartial, universal, produced, fortified, occupied, by inquiries into facts, not into opinions. Accordingly, to the award of Biblical Criticism well-educated divines, of all denominations, bow with instant and implicit deference: whether they So the Unitarian Christian, on the authorities cited by Griesbach, surren* Sermons on the Study of the Bible, ders a part of the received text in Matt, &c., pp. 126, 127, 301, 302, VOL. XX. xix. 17. 3 D style themselves Trinitarians, Arians, or Unitarians, they reject, with hardly a single disagreeing voice, the forgery in 1 John v. 7. Has Dr. Bruce no controversy except with Unitarian Christians? The volume of Sermons, on a part of which I am animadverting, forbids this inference. Now is not Biblical Criticism, in the correctness of its researches and determinations, one of his instruments of vindication or attack with reference to Trinitarians?* those of Hemsterhuis and Ruhnken, of Dr. Samuel Clarke and Bishop Marsh, be added, in refutation of this error. In the critic no ordinary good sense and penetration must be united with accurate and extensive knowledge: by these qualities essential aid has been afforded to the progress of scriptural learning and religious truth. There have been discussions which Swift and Pope attempted to ridicule "abecedarian:" satire was levelled by those authors even against persons whose memory every man of letters will revere; and the most sagacious philologist of any country or age was pointed at as a as word-catcher, who lives on syllables." Can Dr. Bruce imagine that Bentley and criticism were degraded by such attacks? Will he not confess that the dishonour belonged exclusively to Pope and his associates ? But he seems to exult in the persuasion, that of the passages on which the Arian relies for his characteristic tenet, none are expunged by means of this criticism, or differently read. Granting, for a moment, the soundness of his conviction, I cannot therefore acquiesce in the propriety of his using such triumphant language. Arianism, under any modification, was no early or permanent article of faith in the Christian church: and the state, nature and result of The best critical editor of the New ancient theological controversies may, Testament, is Griesbach. Nor were in some measure, be known through his labours chiefly mechanical, or his the history of the text of the New merits little more than the merits of Testament. Passages, moreover, con- an indefatigable and plodding student. ceded to be genuine, will yet fall with- They who render themselves masters in the scope of interpretation. If of his Commentarius Criticus, will then the Scriptures are left to expound own the superiority of his intellectual themselves, the Unitarian Christian character, will be sensible that the has not more to dread from the wea- criticism of the Bible is no trivial and pons of his Arian than from those of subordinate occupation. This departhis Trinitarian antagonist. ment of theology, while it is far less precarious than interpretation, demands, however, equal, if not greater, discernment, and, in general, a more concentrated and fixed attention. That verbal and philological criticism on the Sacred Volume, which encounters Dr. Bruce's sneers, has exercised, and, by exercising, has invigorated, nighty minds. In controversies which this gentleman would describe as "abecedarian" and interminable, such men as Newton and Bentley and Porson have engaged; how honourably and successfully, no theological scholar can be ignorant. It is a mistake to conceive that the investigations of philology, whether they be directed towards classical writings or towards the Scriptures, can be pursued effectually by individuals of narrow understandings, or that they have a tendency to contract and weaken the mental powers. To the great names which I have mentioned, let * Sermons, ut sup. pp. 302, 303. + Ephes. iii. 9 (see Griesbach in loc.) disproves the assertion of Dr. Bruce. I take for granted that Dr. Bruce employs the interpretation of Scripture, when he reasons against Trinitarian Christians, on the one side, and Unitarian Christians, on the other. On controverted points of doctrine and of duty, it is a copious and legitimate source of argument. Yet how easily may a man of respectable talent, who, nevertheless, little relishes the toil of scriptural inquiry, jeer at studies of this nature! What," he may exclaim, "shall the questions, who is the object of a Christian's worship, and what are the tenets of the gospel-shall the faith and practice of Christendom, be suspended on the nicely-varying shades of words and phrases? Our scheme is consistent and rational, and requires no such |