described to bring his philosophy or theology into musical science, he would then assert that each note, or any number of notes, being works of God, must be perfect notes and make perfect music. But whatever impression his argument might produce upon juvenile reason, the ear and the feelings would remain dissatisfied. In like manner men reason about prophecy. They take it for granted that because prophecy is called a Divine revelation, therefore each prophet's word must constitute a separate and individual perfection, and they labour very hard, with such logic as their principles admit of, to prove it so to their own understandings and those of other people, though they have before their minds' eye the divinely acknowledged and asserted imperfection of the law of Moses, the very root and stock of all that is admitted to be revelation in the Western world. But, like the one-note music, their logic makes but little impression. One prophet is like one man, or one musical note; he may form a discord or imperfect concord; he is a particular, not a universal work of God. Prophecy (i. e. revelation by voice and vision), as a generic whole, as an element of Divine government, like music in the abstract, is perfection (that is, in a qualified sense, for generic wholes are not the absolute whole); but no individual revelation whatever can be perfect any more than any other individual or particular work of God. It is a part, and it even antagonises another part and con

tradicts another part and resists it, whilst that part resists it in return with equal right and authority, until each finds its place in the great whole, and the music of the Divine arrangement is completed by an harmonious combination of the units.

Prophecy is a universal agent. There never was an age without prophets. They exist now as real and as genuine, though not so eminent and authoritative, as they ever did exist; and through all ages of the church we find them innumerable, seeing visions and hearing voices, and speaking as of old in the name of the Spirit. But as only one particular nation had a mission to personify this element of Divine government, the membra disjecta, or Sibyl's leaves of the Gentiles, are not collected and compiled into a volume like the ancient literature of the Hebrews, who, being the people chosen to begin the career of civilisation, are of all others best entitled to exemplify the juvenile or primitive inspiration, which comes in mystic vision and dark sayings before the mind is matured and has learned the use of its logical faculties. Hence prophets abounded in Israel, chiefly in its primitive era, before the captivity; for, during the captivity, the people mixed with the Gentiles, and learned the languages and the philosophies of the Chaldeans and the Greeks, and began, for the first time in their history, to interpret and comment, and form Rabbinical schools of theology and philosophy. Prophecy then ceased, or rather they ceased to

compile prophecies, having advanced beyond the age in which man is disposed to follow any inspiration which does not co-operate with his own understanding. Not, however, understanding the nature of the mystic phenomena, they established a creed, which prevails to this day, that revelation has ceased, and that modern pretenders to inspiration are either madmen or impostors-the only intelligible mode of avoiding the difficulties which presented themselves to their minds-a mode still resorted to by Jews, Christians, Philosophers, Deists, and Atheists, to account for all spiritual visitations, such as the mission of Mahomet or Swedenborg, which they cannot understand, for the reason above given, their belief being that even a particular and local revelation from God can never be characterised by any imperfection or any contradiction to lately discovered truths in science and philosophy. In other words, there is no gradation in their musical scale of revelation-no teaching adapted for the times no discords, no imperfect concords. In fact all must be unisons, all octaves, or all fifths, absolutes, not relatives, or it does not accord with their ideas of perfection. And thus falsely primed with first principles, believers stumble at the Word and are afraid of science, and infidels triumph through the weakness of believers, and popular teachers have learned to support one form of truth by hiding their face from another; whilst enemies assail and batter down the paper walls of the letter, in which

there is no strength, and shout like children, as if they had gained a glorious victory.

Both

But there is neither victory nor defeat. armies have possession of a portion of the field, and both will keep their possession till a mutual understanding take place. Meanwhile facts are stubborn things, and, as if to facilitate the means of effecting this final understanding, Providence has taken special care to introduce into the revelations of the very highest authority, not only sayings irreconcileable with modern scientific knowledge, but precepts incompatible with modern ideas of refinement, as well as literal errors and contradictions which are inconsistent with particular perfection, like rude and imperfectly developed forms in the early history of creation. And yet the whole, as the book of destiny that takes the lead in the civilisation of the world, and collects all the other modes of inspiration around it, is a perfect work for the purpose for which it was intended, however morally defective or scientifically and historically inaccurate in any of its particular parts. It is the collective literature of a nation, an entire people, a vox Dei; and its Divinity lies in its collective mission, as the book of the first act of the Divine Drama, not in the mission of any of its individual writers, or the perfect and reliable truth, vulgarly interpreted, of any of his words. In this collective and universal sense, the Bible exceeds all other books that ever were published. It is the only book in the Western

world of which you can say, that if it had not existed, the face of the whole civilised world would have been different. Take any one literary work of equal size-take even a collection of works, our best epic or dramatic poets, Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Milton-civilisation might have existed just as it is without any or all of them. But suppose the Jewish literature had no existence, then the whole face of society would have been different, and we might have been sacrificing bulls to Jupiter and walking in procession with images of Venus, Pan and Priapus, riding on donkeys through the streets of London, or keeping up the old Saturnalia, Lupercalia, and Bacchanalia of the free and easy, the merry and the mischievous deities. This one book, or rather this national collection of books, this Jewish library, has conquered the Western world, and is now engaged in the conquest of the East; and whatever its particular imperfections may be, it must, as a totality, be possessed of a higher order of Divinity than any other book, not only because it has done a greater work in the political world, but also because, more than any other book, it inspires the soul of man with the richest hopes, and presents the strongest motives to the pursuit of virtue, that have yet been discovered. When once its successor comes and supersedes it, we shall be logically prepared to give it a second place in the literary world; but till then it is the king of books, and its successor can be nothing else than its son,