was to come; a testimony so extensive, so circumstantial, so exact, so decisive, as to render belief in him the most reasonable of moral conclusions, as it is also the first of religious duties. For myself, I look with adoring thankfulness to the FATHER OF LIGHTS, the author of all spiritual understanding and grace, who hath given and allowed me to draw from this sacred source such heartfelt and heart-cheering satisfaction as to the truth of his inspired word; and if he condescend to make me the humble instrument in his hand of conveying the like to others, to his name alone be the praise. He doeth according to his will in the army of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth.'His way is in the sea, and His path in the great waters, and His footsteps are not known,'-save where He hath enabled us to trace them by the clue of revelation. For in very deed He hath shewn us the former things what they be, and the things that are to come hereafter, that we may know that he is a just God and a Saviour, and none beside Him. O HOUSE OF JACOB, come ye, and let us walk in the light of the Lord!'- Look unto Him, and be ye saved ALL THE ENDS OF THE EARTH.'" P. 490.

The New Testament, arranged in Chronological and Historical Order, with copious Notes on the principal Subjects in Theology. The Gospels on the Basis of the Harmonies of Lightfoot, Doddridge, Pilkington, Newcome, and Michaelis; the Account of the Resurrection on the Authorities of West, Townson, and Cranfield: the Epistles in their places, and divided according to the Apostles' Arguments. By the Rev. GEORGE TOWNSEND, M.A. Prebendary of Durham; and Domestic Chaplain to the Bishop of Durham 2 Vols. 8vo. 21. London. Rivingtons. 1825.

It is a distinguished and Providential characteristic of Christianity, that it is easy of access and easy of comprehension. The most important and elevated of all knowledge-it is free from those impediments which obstruct our steps in every other direction of human attainment. It is not to be sought for, like the principles of Law, in the endless obscurity of ancient records and practices, or the still more fantastic and shifting glosses of modern authority. It is not, like the physical sciences, the exclusive reward of a peculiar soil and cultivation of mind, the tardy and doubtful prize of learned labour and intellectual subtlety. It is offered to mankind, plain, and beyond the compass of no man's understanding; brief, and within the easiest means of society. Every man may possess a Bible, and every possessor may com

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prehend it. For all practical purposes of virtue, he who runs may read. The displays of divine power and wisdom in the natural world have their glory: but it is of a peculiar kind, and intended for a peculiar condition; it is the writing on the wall of Belshazzar's feast, an effulgence reserved for the eyes of a separated class, and to be interpreted only by practised and lofty intelligence. The Gospel still bears the light of that vision of angels in which it was first proclaimed; a simpler yet a still loftier glory, shining out not in the chosen halls of state or philosophy, but in the open field, and giving its more than human wisdom to humble peasants.

Yet who can doubt the value of Scriptural elucidation, who recollects that the Bible consists of not less than eighty distinct documents, some of them the oldest in the world, alluding to nations and customs, wars and opinions, gone down to the grave, while Europe was yet a haunt of the wolf, and the savage that hunted him; that new races of men have grown up out of the dust of the writers and heroes of those histories; that cities have been raised upon the place of their cities, and the tide of barbarian conquest has over and over again swept the surface of the land, till even their ruins have been ruined? It must be presumed, that, as here is an infinite excitement for manly curiosity, there should be a large occasion for intelligent research; and that if there be a single mind infested by that perverse spirit which loves to reject the truth within its grasp, for the difficulty that eludes it; it is a duty to clear away the difficulty, and either leave unbelief without excuse, or enlighten it into conviction. Finally, the study of Divine Truth, in itself the most strengthening, cheering, and necessary preservative of holiness, cannot be pursued with a too heartfelt and solemn devotedness of the mind.

Mr. Townsend, the author of the present volumes, is already known for his successful labours in sacred literature. His Harmony of the Old Testament, on the basis of Lightfoot's Chronicle, has already received a high degree of public approbation. It would be unjust here to omit our tribute to the Bishop of Durham, a prelate who, to his many claims on national respect, has long added that of being zealous in the discovery of talent and virtue in the Church; and unbiassed and munificent in their protection and reward.

The history of Harmonies would make a volume of no trivial size. It might be curious-as an evidence of the tardiness and perplexity of the human mind, in ages which their posterity so idly laud and magnify-of the reluctance with which early prejudice is abandoned;-and of the striking and admirable im

provement of later Scriptural criticism, and the general power of Scriptural investigation.

Pilkington, Evangelical History, &c., Walchius, Bibliotheca Selecta, and Fabricius, Bibliotheca Græca, have given lists of these works. The Bibliotheca Græca has, by its last editor, continued the list down to 1795, and given the names of one hundred and seventy Harmonies-an immense number, yet still incomplete. Michaelis has added to the list; and Germany still teems, and will probably teem-till its undigested learning, its rabid love of labour, and its cloudy and extravagant mysticism, shall make books no more.

The Harmonies of the New Testament commenced in the earliest ages of the Church; the natural produce of a period, when the Christian Scriptures being fully published, but the writers, and first interpreters of them being passed away, there arose at once difficulties to solve, and the necessity of solving them by human means. Tatian, in the second century, Ammonius in the third, Eusebius in the fourth, and Augustine in the fifth, composed Harmonies. Those works are now of but little value, excepting as fragments of antiquity, and proofs that before the tyranny of Rome the Scriptures were the common study of the Christian world. But the sun of the Church was now hurrying down, and it soon set among storms of civil and warlike commotion. The purpose of Popery, first, midst, and without end, was the suppression of the public use of Scripture. Vigorous and salient minds sprang up, from time to time, to vindicate the common human right to the knowledge of those laws, by which our human nature was to be tried, and of those hopes, by which it was to be sustained. But they were fountains in the desert, soon absorbed by the sultry and blasted soil; and the feeble verdure round them perished with their disappearing.

The Reformation came, with the Scriptures in its hand; a mighty deliverance had been wrought, and the chain of Christianity, and of the human understanding, seemed to have been broken together. The intellectual blaze of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has long since exhausted all wonder. The restoration of classical learning, that august and legitimate dynasty, to its throne, there to sit for every future age, in antique pomp and sovereignty; the recovery of law, so long trampled on by the arbitrary violence of barbarians and idolatrous pontiffs; the new freedom and federal constitution of the European commonwealth; the sudden vigour of sciencegive that period the rank of almost a new creation, a glorious rising up of the world from the deluge of civil convulsion,

superstitious darkness, and frenzied tyranny, which had covered the wrecks of the ancient empire.

But among the most memorable changes of that memorable time, was the manlier mind of Christian enquiry. The old frivolous controversies of the corrupted ages were extinguished at once-men quarrelled no more for a letter or a date, a mystical conception, or a metaphysical subtlety. The reign of the schoolmen, and of the more hazardous and furious controversialists on the essence and attributes of the Deity, was over; and the controversies which have since arisen in the Reformed Church, have been, with few exceptions, raised on questions not incapable of human determination; and worthy, in the highest degree, of Christian solicitude.

In the course of this long pupillage to truth, the general mental capability improved. Genius had reached its sublime in the earlier ages; but if those intellectual splendours, which like the angels in the patriarchal day seem to have visited the nations oftenest in their remotest times, appear no more among us; their work has been done, and we have been delivered over to other influences less splendid, yet perhaps not less powerful.

No writer of our day would venture to load his page with the ostentatious, though rich and picturesque imagery of Taylor; no man, with the original vigour of Barrow, would impede his logic by the extravagant, far-fetched, and cumbrous quotation of that very eminent divine. We shall not pursue this generation further, through their various forms of diffuse and wordy eloquence, crude and misplaced jest, and unwieldy and inapplicable learning. Those styles, however, were fitted to the time; their masters were the lords of popularity in their day. Mighty and bold, magnificently equipped with whatever of weight or lustre was to be found in the armoury of elder times, they came into the field, giants, rejoicing in their strength, and trampled down all opposing controversy by the mere weight of their charge. But we live in an era when the system and the weapons of this ponderous warfare have been abolished together. The armour of our fathers must be hung up with their trophies in our halls. We have become a critical age; and no man can now hope to make an impression on the public mind, but by clearness and common sense, directness of argument, and accuracy of investigation.

The "Harmonies" of that long period from the sixth to the sixteenth century, those thousand years given to the kingdom of darkness, the millennium of popery, the antagonist period of that kingdom which is yet to shine out upon all nations in an

illustrious efflux of knowledge, holiness, and Christianity; bear the native character of the middle ages-perplexed, subtle, and unscriptural. The names of Comestor, Cassia, Gerson, Ludolph, Perpiniano, even of Peter Lombard, and Aquinas, are now preserved only in the lists of useless and extravagant labour.

The first Harmony of any value to the student, is that of Osiander, a German Protestant divine. It is entitled, Andrea Osiandri Harmonic Evangelica Libri Quatuor, Græce et Latine, Basileæ, 1537, folio; subsequently published by Robert Stephens, at Paris, 1545, in twelves. This work is rare, but curious, even from its being the first public attempt of the Reformed Divines to illustrate the Scriptures. Osiander too hastily adopted the principle, that the evangelical narratives followed each a chronological order; and he is thus led into misconceptions as to the location of particular facts, miracles, &c.

The next popular Harmony was by Chemnitz, who gave the model to the principal writers on this subject, for the next half century. His work is entitled, Martini Chemnitii Harmonia Quatuor Evangeliorum; quam ab eodem feliciter inchoatam Polycarpus Lyserus et Joannes Gerhardus, is quidem continuavit, hic perfecit; Hamburgi, folio, 1704. Chemnitz took for his groundwork the earlier Harmonists, but with many corrections of their plan and principles, and with some important illustrations in the chronology of the Gospel narratives. The whole was originally printed at Geneva, in 1628. Mr. Townsend mentions the "Rules" of this work as peculiarly valuable to him.

A rapid succession then appeared:

The Harmony, Chronicle, and Order of the New Testament, by the celebrated Lightfoot, published in 1654, folio.

The Harmony of the four Evangelists, by Cradock, a work made remarkable by its being preserved from the great fire, in 1666, by Tillotson, (afterwards Archbishop) and revised by him; London, 1668, folio.

Lamy Historia, sive Concordia Evangelistarum, Parisiis, 1689, which, by a rare modesty in that age of colossal volumes, was first published in duodecimo. Its Commentarius in Harmoniam, however, distended into a quarto, in 1699.

J. Clerici Harmonia Evangelica, cui Subjecta est Historia. Christi ex quatuor Evangeliis concinnata, &c.; Amstelodami, 1699, folio. This work was long held in estimation; it gave the arrangement of the four Gospels in chronological order, in parallel columns in Greek and Latin, with a Latin paraphrase at the foot.