together with clapping wings among the studded stars; the Almighty spreads His arms of command, and the coursers of the morning leap forth; the silent-rushing dragons of the night issue into its purple hollows; and, as it were, hidden in "a vacant interlunar cave," Job and his friends behold and meditate on these things. And again on other wonders: Behemoth tramps the earth; Leviathan wallows in the deep. Then, farther on, "Satan falls as lightning from heaven;" the shadows flee; the sweet returns of the Divine favour brighten on the head of Job, while they flash condemnation on the heads of his sceptical friends. Still farther, the altar of grateful sacrifice sends its pyramid of flame into the heaven of heavens.

In the border of this invention are drawn, curiously enough, a palette and pencils and a graver. We never see this without surmising some personal allusion in it, and thinking of George Herbert's poem of The Flower

"Who would have thought my shrivelled heart

Could have recovered greenness? It was gone

Quite underground: as flowers depart

To see their mother-root when they have blown,
Where they together

All the hard weather

Dead to the world keep house unknown.
"And now in age I bud again,

After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing. O my onely light!
It cannot be

That I am he

On whom Thy tempests fell all night !"

How sweet and grave is the next chapter of the story. Dappled lights break over the newly-fruited fig-tree; corn waves in the morning wind. Subdued, but with more than his old dignity, the restored patriarch unresentfully and thankfully receives from "every one a piece of money.'

Time flows on, and in future years we look on him once again. In "a chamber of imagery," frescoed round with reminiscences of the long past "days of darkness," Job sits. Three daughters, more lovely than those he lost, clasp his knees; while he, with longer waving beard, and an aspect of deeper eld, recounts-his arms wide floating in grateful joy-the story of his trial and his deliverance.

In the last scene of all, a full-voiced pæan rises. Under

the aged oak, where we saw the former family gathered in prayer, we now see standing, in the exultation of praise, a group of sons more strong and active, of daughters more beautiful and sweet. The psalm swells on the evening air; resonant harp keeps time with warbling lute; the uplifted silver trumpets peal; the pastoral reed soothes the closecrowding, white-fleeced flocks; a crescent rises as of yore; while the sun, darting its rays to the zenith, sinks over the hills of God, who blesses "the latter end of Job more than the beginning."

If we might have our wish, we would select some accessible but far removed, quiet vale, where Corinthian capitals could never intrude. Here we would have built a strong, enduring, grey-stone, simple building of one long chamber, lighted from above. This chamber should be divided into niches. In each niche, and of the size of life, there should be done in fresco, in low tones of simple, deep colour, one of these grand designs, inlaid in a broad gold flat, which should be incised in deep brown lines with the sub-signification of Blake's Marginalia. They should be executed by men well paid by the Government-men like G. F. Watts and D. G. Rossetti, and Madox Brown and Burne Jones, and W. B. Scott. At the inner end of this hall of power there should be a marble statue of Blake, by Woolner

"His looks commercing with the skies,
His rapt soul sitting in his eyes."

He should be standing on a rock, its solid strength overlapped by pale, marmoreal flames, while below his feet twined gently the " Serpent of Eternity." The admission should be by ticket-the claim to life-tickets founded upon a short examination passed before a "Blake commission." None who could not pass this examination satisfactorily should be admitted to those sacred precincts. The trees should whisper, the brook should murmur in the glade, for the delectation of those who had earned their title to enter; and the lodge-gates, kept by "a decayed historical painter," should never open to any who would be likely to laugh at the "queer little figures up in the air," which are the symbols of heavenly realities in the little grey or dark designs we have been endeavouring to describe.

Some partially-finished and very grand and awful subjects from Dante, also commissioned by John Linnell, succeeded; and these lasted in various stages of completion till the

His Solitary Place in Art.

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cunning, patient hand stiffened in death, and the over-informing mind fled to other regions of existence.

We cannot afford room for gathering up further traits of character, or narrating other incidents in his history. He died on August 12, 1827. His wife survived him till the 18th of October, 1831, having subsisted, during the years of widowhood, by the judicious, gradual sale of his remaining drawings and books, befriended and consoled by a few faithful ones, among whom Mr. and Mrs. Tatham were conspicuous. The "Kate," the details of whose history, rising up in these volumes here and there, was so fit a companion for such a husband, died in Mrs. Tatham's arms. Mr. Tatham, from whom we remember some years ago receiving some graphic touches of description of Blake's person and habits, we hope still survives. He painted the portrait of Edward Irving which is so well known by the engraving, and was intimately acquainted with him.

We shall attempt no final summary of Blake's powers and position as an artist. To pay some small tribute to his memory, from whom for many years we have received such unbounded delight and instruction, has been a growing wish; and, in our humble measure, we have been able now to carry it into effect.

He stands, and must always stand, eminently alone. The fountain of thought and knowledge to others, he could never be the head of a school. What is best in him is wholly inimitable. "The fire of God was in him." And as all through his works this subtle element plays and penetrates, so in all he did and said the ethereal force flamed outward, warming all who knew how to use it aright, scorching or scathing all who came impertinently near to it. He can never be popular in the ordinary sense of the word, write we never so many songs in his praise; simply because the region in which he lived was remote from the common concerns of life; and still more by reason of the truth of the mystic sentence " uttered by his own lips, and once before cited in these pages

66

"Nor is it possible to thought

A greater than itself to know."

ART. II.-1. Some Plain Statements respecting Christian Ministry. Birmingham: C. Caswell.

2. The Law, Ministry, and the Sabbath. By C. HALL.

THE history of error in the Christian Church is well known to follow the circular course which recent science has proved to mark the tracks of tempest in the material world. Church history can never become a palimpsest, in which the forgotten story of the past is overlaid for ever by the fresher inscriptions of the present; for, though centuries may intervene, it will still bring us face to face with substantially the same story of opinion. This curious periodicity of religious doctrine is nowhere more remarkably exemplified than in the history of the Plymouth Brethren, who are a modern edition of the Puritan sectaries of the seventeenth century. It would seem, by the tactics and temper of this aggressive party, as if the Antinomian controversies of the Cromwellian age had been rather adjourned than adjusted; and that the weary strife of polemics is now resumed, with all its old manœuvres and its curious stock of pious truisms and mystical paradoxes. There is not a single doctrine peculiar to modern Brethrenism— whether we refer to its views of the Ministry, the Moral Law, the Sabbath, Faith, Repentance, Justification, or Sanctification, that we cannot find in the published works of the Antinomian Errorists; and not a single argument in interpretation of Brethrenism that was not fully refuted or exposed more than two centuries ago by Rutherford, Baxter, Hall, Brinsley, and the Assembly Divines. We know that there are various schools of Brethrenism-Darbyism, Newtonism, and Müllerism, and that considerable diversities of opinion upon minor points exist even among Brethren of the same school; but the same varieties of opinion prevailed among the Commonwealth sectaries, who were yet leagued in a common hostility against all the other denominations of Christendom. The Brethren never cease to complain of being misinterpreted and misunderstood. If we attempt to give a sketch or abridgment of their doctrine, we are sure to omit some minute element imperceptible to the naked eye

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of the uninitiated, but essential to the working out of the system of doctrine, as the balance-spring to the movements of the watch. And if we attempt to let their doctrine declare itself by quotations, we are sure to take them from the wrong place, and to represent them in false juxtaposition. But when we come to the more purely controversial part of their literature, in which they declare their views on, say, the question of the ministry, there is no risk whatever of misapprehending their meaning, for here they make war upon all the churches with a plainness of speech which defies misconstruction. The spirit of their writings, too, is exactly that of the Puritan sectaries. With a remarkable air of candour and charity and simplicity of purpose, they display toward the churches a rancorous enmity and a tenacious hatred without parallel; they eschew all ideas of evangelical brotherhood and conventional courtesy; their policy is "to gather churches out of churches"-to open a door in existing bodies, not for the exit of the faithless and falsehearted, but of the pious and the good-and to leave to the denominations generally the exclusive privilege of evangelising the masses. Besides, they are most disingenuous in the method of propagating their opinions. When they visit a town for the first time, they simply preach the Gospel in some public hall, and announce themselves as the most catholic and pacific of Christians, with a marked abhorrence of all sectarianism; but when they have succeeded in making a few proselytes, the peculiar doctrines of Brethrenism are then urged in their private meetings-at first with caution, but afterwards with no esoteric reserve-till the neophytes are ultimately induced to withdraw altogether from the communion of their respective churches. It is unnecessary to say more upon this aspect of their conduct; but their policy towards the churches wears an aspect far too aggressive and sectarian to admit of farther connivance or encouragement. They are bitterly opposed to every church which assumes to bridle the wantonness of individual pride, and which offends that pride by putting one man in a position of official superiority toward his fellows.

We purpose, in the present paper, to discuss the leading doctrine of Brethrenism upon the question of the ministry, especially as even well-informed Christians may be sometimes puzzled by the peculiarly plausible character of their arguments.

The Plymouth Brethren affirm that all the churchesIndependent, Episcopalian, Presbyterian,-maintain a oneman, man-made ministry: that they all equally sin by