ments, giving glory to God in Christ. Presbyterianism has traditions of a very different kind. It was at no time, and in no part of the States, except in New York, before its cession to England, the exponent of the national religion. Every where, down to the revolution, where it existed at all, it existed as a barely tolerated sect, thwarted by the policy, as well as often oppressed by the superior power of a dominant Episcopacy.

Mr Baird, as a Presbyterian, is cordially, though very unconsciously, imbued with the prepossessions of the body to which he belongs, and thus, with an evident and honest desire to be impartial, his statements are cast in a form dictated by these prepossessions. Thus he devotes the closing four chapters of his first book to the obstacles which the Voluntary system has had to encounter in the States, but not a word is said as to the peculiar advantages that system has enjoyed there, and to which equal space might have been easily and suitably devoted. Again, we have not a word about the disadvantages which the Establishment principle had to encounter, though these evidently force themselves on the reader's attention as he proceeds. Thus, if the colonists brought erroneous opinions on the subject of Christian liberty, these were sure to mar, as they grieviously did mar, the churches which they established. Again, the multiplicity of sects arising from the variety of quarters from which the Colonists came, must have proved a great hinderance to the quiet extension and operations even of the most pure, just, and peacable Established Church. And, lastly, we shall be forgiven as Presbyterians, for maintaining that, to have established Presbytery, which in no case was done, would in itself have either removed or mitigated many of those evils with which the established Episcopacy in the Southern States, and the established Congregationalism of the north, were oppressed and finally over-borne.

That

Among other expressions that have called forth bursts of applause from the maintainers of anti-establishment principles, has been this, that Voluntaryism is the law of nature.' But if it be really the law of nature, in this, at least, she has been singularly disobedient to one of her own laws. In the United States even, we can clearly perceive a reluctance on the part of the wills of the people, as well as obstacles arising from the nature of things, to the carrying out of the principle to its legitimate extent. principle, in fact, involves monstrosities which must ever prove revolting to an enlightened Christian. It says to the legislator charged with the moral education of a mighty people, on whose character millions of slaves at home, and millions of the inhabitants of weaker states abroad, are dependent for an incalculable amount of good or evil, of justice or oppression, of happiness or of miseryto the man loaded with such a weight of responsibility it says, 'You

must apply the means placed at the disposal of yourself and fellowlegislators, for the accomplishment of the great objects of government, in some other way and according to some other system, than that of which the Creator himself has set an example-according to some system, in short, which being the pure creation of man, must, like him, be imperfect, weak, erring. You yourself have been brought into habitual conformity with good laws, by means that are at once cheap, mild, efficient; but those you must employ for bringing your ignorant and depraved fellow-citizens into the same state must be expensive, harsh, inefficient."

But the truth is that, albeit the United States are usually regarded here as the paradise of Voluntaryism, the legislators and the people of that country have not by any means adopted the pure theory of Voluntaryism-that of the absolute exclusion of religion from politics, and an absolute indifference to the religious opinions of the citizens. This is proved by the subjects of the following chapters of Book III.

"Chapter V. Whether the General Government of the U. S. has the power to promote Religion. Chap. VI. Whether the Government of the U. S. may justly be called Infidel or Atheistical. Chap. VII. The Government of the U. S. shown to be Christian by its acts. Chap. VIII. The Government of the Individual States organised on the basis of Christianity. Chap. IX. The Legislation of the U. S. shown to be in favour of Christianity. Chap. X. The Legislation of the U. S. often bears incidentally on the cause of Religion"; and

so on.

Thus we see that Christianity, and that of the Bible too, is the professed basis of the American commonwealth. This is proved by the vain attempts of the Roman Catholics to exclude the Bible from primary schools. And if so, what more absurd than to debar a state from teaching the citizens the fundamental principles of their own government?

Mr Baird establishes, by the most decisive evidence, that all the original thirteen provinces were founded with ostensibly religious views, that in all but one of them, the civil state owned, supported, and endowed one or other form of the Christian church,that for a period of nearly a hundred and fifty years, the accessions to the population received from Europe, consisted of bodies of persecuted Protestants fleeing from oppression, and martyrs to conscientious principle, that the early fathers of New England, and vast numbers of the Scotch, Scoto-Irish, Welsh, Dutch, French, and Germans, who settled in the territories of the United States, were religious men-sound in the faith, and real Christians.

Now, in every case in which religious establishments had been created they have been removed. The question then naturally arises, Was it in a declining or a reviving state of Christian godliness that this took place? Was it under the prevalence of an ab

sorbing Christian or of an absorbing worldly philosophy? Was it in consequence of failure in the correction of abuses and corruptions, or as the operation of principles which would have destroyed any establishment, however pure? And, lastly, is there any ground to believe that the revival of religion in the United States, since the downfall of establishments, would not have been equally great, had they had their corruptions removed instead of being themselves destroyed altogether?

The careful study of Mr Baird's volume throws a flood of light on these points. The times when the American states took in hand to abandon, not to purify the churches they had been wont to support, were evil times in every sense of the word. The prevailing opinions were those of an absorbing worldly philosophy, not of an absorbing Christianity. The churches were in a state of manifest decline, alike in life and doctrine. And as revivals fully as remarkable as any recorded in more modern times, had taken place in America long before the dissolution of the connection between Church and State; as, moreover, similar revivals have visited England, Scotland, and Ireland, and especially Churches connected in one way or other with the State, we have every reason to presume that the dissolution of that connection in America by no means of itself favoured the return of those times of refreshing.

This may be thought strange language in the mouths of Free Churchmen; but every word of it is in perfect consistence with our Claim of Right, and no external circumstances shall shut our mouths, or lay an arrest on our pens, in proclaiming our convictions. Let us now turn to the second and third Books. Here Mr Baird's work may be regarded as a magnificent drama, in which not individual men, but bands of emigrants, churches, civil communities, and states, are the actors or sufferers, and which extends over above two centuries in point of time. We first behold one Protestant host after another, from the various nations of Europe, land at longer or shorter intervals on the American shore. All these gradually become more and more consolidated, and are subjected to manifold causes of progression and decline, not in their worldly circumstances only, but especially in their spiritual condition. Covetousness with its legion of satellite vices, war and intemperance, from time to time make sad havoc among them. Still the church survives-often in the furnace, but never consumed; and then, when the faith begins to revive afresh, after the longest and deepest decline, we behold a change in the arrangements of Providence. Thousands and tens of thousands of emigrants continue to crowd the Atlantic ports, and to hie towards the fertile west, where a virgin soil offers abundant prospects of food for an ever-increasing population for centuries to come. But these are no longer perse

cuted Protestants-men of tried faith and patience of apostolic zeal and devotedness. No; they consist, for the most part, of the speculative and the restless, who have found Europe too constrained a sphere for their energies; of the poor and the vicious also ; and of hosts of Roman Catholics and infidels, as well as Protestants. The arrival of these might well make the Americans despair for their country. But the same God who sends them for the trial of the faith and active graces of his people, greatly facilitates the moral improvement of the former by the latter, by so ordering matters, that the exhaustion of the resources of the older colonies shall send multitudes along with these European immigrants into the far west, with tastes and habits that not only admit of a rapid introduction of the gospel ministry and ordinances into those wilds, but which actually call for it. And thus is the wilderness and the solitary place made spiritually as well as materially, 'to rejoice and blossom as the rose.'

From these brief hints, the reader may guess how interesting Mr Baird's narrative becomes, when he has to relate the religious history of the individual states and churches during the colonial period-through the scenes of the revolution, and in what he calls the national period, down to our own day. The interest augments as he advances, for, as we approach our own times, the return of revivals, and the development of a religious zeal, and of energies altogether unknown in former periods, concurring with a vast increase in the number of the people and in their resources, fills the picture with an amazing multiplicity of interesting episodes, if we may call them so, which, nevertheless, instead of leading attention away from the grand staple of the narrative, rather enhances its interest, as the different arms and uniforms in the component parts of a fine army, while interesting in themselves, make the whole more imposing than were they all equipped and dressed alike.

ART. IV.-The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, translated from the original Hebrew; with a Commentary, Critical, Philological, and Exegetical; to which is prefixed an Introductory Dissertation on the Life and Times of the Prophet, &c. By the Rev. E. HENDERSON, D. Ph. London: Hanilton, Adams, & Co. 1840.

THERE are two manners of commenting upon the word of God, just as there are two ways of writing upon geology. An expounder of the latter science may devote his attention chiefly to the details of it, examining with minute and careful industry the characters

and composition of the several fossils and minerals which come under his observation; or he may, without neglecting these details, make them only subservient to discussions upon the history of our globe, the nature of the changes which have passed upon it, the relation of its several formations to each other, and the habits and instincts of the beings by which it was inhabited. The former of these methods will produce a work dry and uninviting; the other will invest the subject with surpassing interest. In like manner, the student of the Word of God may, in communicating his views to others, confine himself chiefly to the examination of individual words and sentences, or he may, without overlooking these, embrace a larger field of vision, and draw his materials for illustration not so much from Arabic and Sanscrit lore, as from kindred passages in the Word of God and an extended view of the purpose of its Author. Our author is a favourable example of the first of these modes of exegesis, and Horsley of the second.

In reviewing this work, we shall select the eighteenth chapter of Isaiah to form the groundwork of our remarks, as being a portion of the prophecy which shall afford us an opportunity of comparing these two modes of inquiry. But there is a preliminary question which we must first discuss, namely, whether it is possible that any prophecy can have a double sense. The determination of this point must necessarily affect our interpretation of prophecy, and the conclusion to which Dr Henderson has come in regard to it may be traced through every page of his commentary. After stating what is commonly understood by the double sense of prophecy, he thus proceeds:

"To this theory it may justly be objected, that it is unnecessary, unsatisfactory, and unwarranted. It is unnecessary, because there is really no prophecy which may not consistently be restricted to one sense-such a sense as fully meets all the exigencies of the connexion in which it occurs. It is unsatisfactory, because on the same principle that a second sense is brought out, it may be maintained that a third, and even a fourth is couched under the language; and some expositors have actually gone this length. Beyond the meaning which is elicited by a due examination of the language, and all the circumstances of the context, every thing must necessarily be indeterminate and arbitrary. In all other writings we expect to find one definite sense in which the authors have designed to be understood; unless, indeed, like the heathen oracles, what they wrote was expressly intended to be equivocal and deceptive. And we should naturally come to the Bible under the influence of a similar impression, were it not that we have been taught to look for a greater fulness of meaning than the primary interpretation seems to supply. We should expect that, in revealing his will to us, God has spoken, as men speak, in a fixed and determinate manner, and not left his meaning to be dependent upon the fertility or the freaks of human imagination. What is literal we should, at once, interpret literally; and what is figurative we should, without hesitation, interpret figuratively. To language which describes affairs belonging to the Jews, or to other nations, we should not scruple to give a direct historical interpretation: whereas that which sets forth our Saviour and