Several other instances are mentioned, and on a view of the whole it is impossible to avoid the conviction that the taste for reading, and other mental occupations, greatly exceeds what can be found in towns of the same class in our own country. We are not, therefore, surprised to learn that drunkenness has disappeared. We need scarcely say that it was vastly different in former days. Fifty years ago the north of Germany and Denmark sustained a dishonorable pre-eminence in this matter. The habit of dram-drinking was universal, but it is now giving way so completely, that it would be thought as odd or disreputable now to take a dram in the morning or forenoon, as it would be in England among our upper educated classes. have not seen,' Mr. Laing tells us, a drunken man in Denmark or the duchies, although I have been living very much in country kros, or ale and spirit-houses in the villages.'

I

Before closing we must advert-though hurriedly-to one other topic. The ferocious character of our penal code was until lately the opprobrium of the nineteeth century. Happily it has been mitigated, but strange to say, there are menay, and good men too-who regard this with disfavor, and call upon us to stop short in the career of amelioration, They dread the evils which would follow a further mitigation of our Draconian code. Fear makes them cruel, and the functions of the hangman are, in consequence, sacred in their eyes. We would send such to Denmark, and if they did not there learn the expediency of abolishing capital punishments, we should apply to them the old proverb-There are none so blind as those who will not see.' Referring to this subject, Mr. Laing remarks:

The abolition of the punishment of death, in all cases, was proclaimed in Denmark in the beginning of this century, while England was still hanging three or four petty offenders of a morning, for the edification or amusement of the people. Denmark has quelled an insurrection and defeated the rebel army, although assisted by her faithless ally Prussia, in one of the most bloody battles of the age, by the science of her educated officers, and the courage and loyalty of her troops. But while France, Prussia, Austria, are condemning to death, or chains, hundreds of individuals on the bare suspicion of being concerned in imaginary conspiracies got up by the police, and imposed upon the credulous and weak governments, in Denmark no blood has been shed on the scaffold, and no political offender has been committed to prison, in consequence of this rebellion. The traitors and rebels have been simply deprived of the power of being traitors and rebels again, and have been dismissed to the punishment of ignominy in public opinion, and of their consciousness of merited degradation.'-p. 438.

We take our leave of Mr. Laing with much respect, and with many thanks for the information he has furnished us. His volume is one of the ablest and most valuable of its class, and we warmly commend it to our readers.

ART. IV.-The Beauties of the Bible; An Argument for Inspiration, in Ten Lectures. By William Leask. London: Partridge and Oakey. 2. The Bible and the Working Classes; being a Series of Lectures delivered to the Working Classes of Bradford, in 1851. By Alexander Wallace. London: Hamilton and Adams.

WE class the above two books together as similar in subject, and not dissimilar or unequal either in execution or in design. Both are tributes to the excellence of the Bible, and both profess to lead arguments in behalf of its inspiration; both are written, too, with much ability, and display on the part of their authors deep reverence and glowing affection for the Word of God. Ere speaking farther of their character and claims we have a few general remarks to offer.

It is curious to notice how many books have been written of late on the subject of the Bible. We have had, first, the Bards of the Bible,' and since these have appeared the 'Battles of the Bible,' the Boys of the Bible,' 'What the Bible is, does, and teaches' and now we have the volumes in hand, upon the 'Beauties of the Bible,' and its relation to the working classes. Glad as we are to see such wide attention directed to the Word of God, and convinced as we are that the very different modes of enforcing Bible truth and illustrating Bible beauty pursued by these various authors cannot fail to produce good results, it is not without a certain degree of concern that we have watched the working of the necessity which seems to have called them forth. When apologies for the Bible become rife, it is clear that, in the estimation of many, its authority is sinking, and its glory beginning to decay. And we could have wished that either of the authors before us had given us a chapter on this special topic-Why is the Bible held in less estimation by multitudes than it was once? To supply this lack of service, we have not at present room, but we must throw out a few hints on what we deem a matter of great moment.

Let us now proceed to state what we think are some of the principal causes why the Bible has undergone a degree of

depreciation. There is, of course, first, the natural enmity which exists in men's minds against its moral precepts, and the lofty spiritual ideal it presents. That there is such a baseness in human nature it were vain to deny. We find something like it in other things besides the depreciation of the Bible. The spirit which underrates genius and literature, which finds even Shakspeare and Milton overrated, which holds at arm's length every new effort of genius till it has acquired a name, which sees no beauty in the most glorious diamond till it is called the mountain of light,' and which quarrels with Nature herself; finding this landscape too tame, and that mountain too low, is a variety of the same spirit which, wearied of hearing the Bible always called the 'just,' is seeking to ostracise it for ever. There is, however, this difference-the hater of poetry and nature expresses principally his own selfish sense of intellectual inferiority; the hater of the Bible, his conscience-stricken sense of depravity. Besides, the book is not only too high, but too holy for him. Hence he hates it with a hatred compounded of the envy of imbecility and the rage of guilt. In vain to tell him that it is a friend, that it means him well, and wishes, by the very storms of its invectives against sin, to drive him on toward the haven of his happiness. He is determined to resist its benevolent interference, and would contemptuously unloosen the rough grasp which is dragging him to heaven. Notwithstanding all our boasted refinement and progress, we are afraid that the hatred of the Bible, in a great number of cases, may be resolved now, as formerly, into the love of those sins, whether of soul, body, or spirit, which the Bible condemns.

But, secondly, the length of time during which the Bible has been among us, and the familiarity to which it has been admitted, have, however unjustly, operated upon many minds against it. It is a dangerous thing for an admirer to come too near a master-piece of painting, to have it always hanging up in his private apartment, or to get a long and favourite poem by heart. The flush of novelty and the feeling of surprise once over, indifference is very apt to succeed. That the Bible retains such freshness to this hour, and is continually, to careful and loving eyes, disclosing new beauty and new meaning, is a striking evidence of its divinity. But it is, at the same time, undeniable that thousands of our fastidious and fashionable readers are tired of the Bible. Willing to grant in words all you please to say about its paramount truth and power, they nevertheless feel it in their hearts to be a bore; it seems to belong to another age; it is at best a strange star in a strange firmament; and they turn with eagerness to the last paradoxes and impieties from Emerson or the last witticisms

and oddities from the pen of Dickens. This ought not so to be, but most certainly this is.

6

Thirdly. The vast multiplication of other books has been prejudicial to the power of the Bible. The mass of periodicals, pamphlets, and fictions pouring from the press in our day has too often acted as a grave-stone upon the word of God. For ages the Book had no competition to encounter. In many houses it was alone; in others it was flanked by volumes which were expressly founded on it, which sought to illustrate or to defend it. We even yet now and then stumble upon lowly dwellings, where the whole library consists of a Bible, a 'Pilgrim's Progress,' and a few simple books or tracts. But this is the exception. More frequently you find the Book elbowed by Shelley's Queen Mab,' Cooper's Purgatory of Suicides,' or other productions worse still, which have no mark or likelihood except from the virulent hatred and slanderous falsehood they have directed against the Bible. And even in libraries where such books dare not show their unclean visages, you can easily discern that the Bible holds a divided, if not a disputed dominion, and that the Waverley Novels,' Macaulay's England,' Vanity Fair,' and 'In Memoriam,' are far more valued than the oracle of the living God. They are read, devoured, dog-eared; it lies like a mummy carefully wrapt up in its case; or if occasionally lifted, it is with an air of patronage and decorous insult. A thing of Heaven, it has yet unquestionably suffered from the competition of earth.

Fourthly. We find this in part accounted for on the principle of reaction. With the reverence of the past for the Bible there was a degree of superstition mingled. The matter, the substance, the spirit, the genius, and, within certain limits, the style of Scripture cannot be reverenced too profoundly. But our fathers carried reverence to a ridiculous excess. While the papists showed their stupid respect for it as the Thibet people do theirs to the Grand Lama, by shutting it up, our ancestors found its every 'if' and 'and' equally inspired, and shrank from touching it with the point of the critical rod. It was as if men, in honour of their Mother Earth, were to see sacrilege in the use of the spade or plough, or as though admirers of the sun were to break the telescopes which showed the inequalities upon his surface and the spots upon his disk. As this folly still prevails to a considerable extent in the church, we forbear characterizing it in full. Enough at present to notice the fearful evils to which, by a sure and a foreseen reaction, it has led. Bibliolatry' has led to biblioclasm. Men, from believing that there was scarcely a recognisable human element in Scripture, have leapt to the conclusion that there is no divine one. Nor will many

of them, we fear, retrace their steps till the question of inspiration-in other words, of the relation and proportion of the divine and human elements in the book of God has been set by some master-hand upon its proper foundation.

Fifthly. In connexion with our last remark, we notice the evil which the Bible has sustained from the distance at which it has been placed from the wants and feelings of our modern humanity. It has been regarded too much as an oracle, and too little as a friend; it has been shut up and secluded by a rail of false reverence instead of running down and mingling with the general current of society; it has been regarded as a Sabbath-day book, and not as a book for every day-and for all classes and ages. Its width of view, its warm-hearted tenderness, its cosmopolitan spirit-its love to the human race, have been overlooked; while attention has been too much turned to its gloomier aspects and sterner truths. Men have acted like those who, in reading a book of medicine, should stop at the diagnosis of the symptoms, and omit the paragraphs describing the means and process of the cures. This, again, we trace to the influence of popery. Partly, in respect, and partly, in terror, it insulated the word of God; and invested it with a false and hollow dignity, pompously burying it as Glenara his bride, before she was dead. Very differently, we conceive, must the first Christians have used the letters of Paul, as well as the other inspired documents. They would-genuine love-letters as they were-lay them in their bosoms, read them with rapture, water them with their tears, and make them the kind companions of their solitary and social hours. How different this from the silly and superstitious reverence of after days!

Sixthly. Owing to this grand mistake, certain demands were made of the Bible, which time and culture have proved to be exorbitant, and which, not being satisfied, have tended to injure it in general repute. A certain vulgar faultlessness was believed to exist in it. It must be one of those 'perfect monsters which the world ne'er saw!'-just as there are still wiseacres who insist on it, that the earth, when originally created, was one entire and perfect chrysolite-that the magnificent mountains and rocks of its present form are ruins-and that its volcanoes and earthquakes are the tokens and voices of God's anger against the human race. Some practised on the Bible the plan of the Virgilian lots, and found an oracle in its every aperturam libri. Others detected mysteries in the depths of its plainest sentences-nay, in the hollows of many of its separate words; others imagined that it was designed to teach complete and final systems of astronomy, geology, &c.-nay, that every