We have expressed our sincere and undoubting belief in prophecy, as a mode of Divine communication employed in the earlier times. That this was the case is rendered probable by the very position of the Christian dispensation midway in the lapse of the ages. If Jesus of Nazareth marks the central point of man's religious history, it was as fitting that he should have been the "desire" of the earlier, as that he should be the confidence of the later generations of men. If all previous religious dispensations were to culminate in him, as all subsequent sources of spiritual good have flowed from him, should there not have been an onward direction given to human faith before he came, corresponding to the historical character which it has since borne ? In the Divine mercy, long ages of violence and darkness could not have been suffered to roll over our race before the "day-spring from on high" reddened the eastern sky, unless it were to prepare the world the better for the advent of the Redeemer. But what surer preparation could there have been than a gradual unfolding of the expectation and promise of his coming? And as for the prediction of intermediate events, (to deny which is to disallow the genuineness of almost all the prophetical books,) this must have greatly aided in sustaining the prospective character of Hebrew faith and trust. The inward eye could hardly have supported the tension of a prolonged gaze on the distant future, unless glimpses of a nearer future had been from time to time afforded, and verified by a substantial fulfilment. In fine, if humanity was waiting for its supreme leader and lawgiver, its "federal head," the representative and exponent of its true life, there was the same intrinsic fitness that warning, encouragement, motive, impulse, should have been derived from the future, as there now is that man should guide himself by the treasured experience of the ages that are gone.

That prophecy should have been employed by a paternal Providence for man's guidance in the earlier ages appears the more probable, when we consider the necessary scantiness and barrenness of his experience. A judicious father exercises at the outset a special supervision over his child's moral agency, expounds to him results and consequences, lifts for him the curtain from the future, and adjusts the lights and shadows of coming time so as they may best mark out the course of present duty. He thus saves his son from the solution in his own person of many perilous problems, the trial of

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many hazardous experiments, and furnishes him gradually with an instructive experience of his own. When this work is done, he withdraws his habitual interposition, and leaves the child to the teaching of a past now amply capable of holding a torch to the future. Just such seems to us to have been the course of the Supreme Father as regards the great family of man. In their infancy, he guided them step by step, pointed out the tendencies of actions, unrolled in part the volume of their future destiny, and thus aided them in shaping that experience which was in later times to be their teacher. But as a past full of admonition gradually grew with successive generations, the prophetic voice became less and less frequent, and, when the race had reached years of maturity, it altogether ceased. Under this aspect of the case, to deny the possibility of prophecy, on the ground that the last eighteen hundred years have given the world no prophet, is about as reasonable as it would be for a grown man to renounce his belief in leading-strings, because he had walked for a quarter of a century without them.

The fact, that prophecy acted an important part in Jewish history, derives additional probability from one of the peculiar characteristics of Hebrew literature. The poetry, mythology, and imaginative literature of all other ancient nations draw forms and hues from the past. The golden age of Greek and Roman fable lay far back in primeval antiquity. The chief themes of classic verse, whether lyric, epic, or dramatic, were derived from the mythical eras of history. Virgil's Fourth Eclogue is, we believe, the only prophetical piece that has come down to us, except through Jewish sources; and there are valid reasons for believing that Virgil drew the conception that pervades this Eclogue, and many of its materials, from the Old Testament. But Jewish literature

has throughout an onward pointing. It has indeed a golden age in the past; but that is dismissed in the very exordium of Genesis, and never recurred to afterwards by historian, prophet, or psalmist. But through the whole, from the narrative of the expulsion from Eden to Malachi's announcement of the rising of the sun of righteousness with healing in his wings," there runs a reference, more or less distinct, to a future brighter than the past, and to one personage who is to be the author of the new creation, and the founder of an everlasting kingdom. Now the Jews had in their history all the elements that gave a retrospective character to the litera

ture of other nations. They had traditions of surpassing richness and beauty. They had illustrious names and exploits in abundance on their records. They were second to no nation in reverence for their ancestry, and in a proud regard for the monuments of national glory. They sustained the severest reverses of fortune; and all their books but the Pentateuch were probably written after the separation of the kingdom, under Rehoboam, and with the most manifest symptoms of inevitable decline and decay in the internal condition and the external relations of the states, both of Judah and Israel. To have made any literature, under such circumstances, prospective and hopeful demanded, as we think, some class of impulses or influences altogether peculiar in kind and degree; and for the problem which Hebrew literature presents in this regard, prophecy offers an obvious and adequate solution.

There is, however, an extreme view of the extent to which the prophetical gift was diffused and exercised, which, intrinsically irrational, finds no support in Scripture rightly understood. It is a view dogmatically stated, though not defended, in the works which we have named at the head of this article. According to Professor Alexander and other critics of the same school, the God-inspired prophet was a recognized and established functionary under the Jewish theocracy,

as much so as the priest or the Levite. He was a man sui generis, subject to a peculiar set of physical and mental laws, capable of definite and detailed description and analysis. Now this mode of regarding a miraculous gift makes it no longer miraculous. If it never ceased, it must have seemed too much the common order of the day to awaken surprise, excite attention, or attract reverence. In order to be of any avail, its bestowal must have been rare, without fixed laws or conditions, and in emergencies which seemed to demand the interposition of the Almighty. It may be that but a portion of those sixteen of the sacred writers, whose books refer chiefly to the future, were themselves the subjects of special Divine illumination. Some of them may have simply reiterated and enforced arguments for penitence and obedience founded on glimpses of the future derived from Isaiah or Ezekiel. But there was, whether through a larger or smaller number (and most probably through but a small number) of Divinely inspired men, a certain amount of knowledge of the future destiny of the nation and the world; and this formed

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the burden of public preaching and exhortation, of didactic and imaginative literature, of poetry and song. We are thus enabled to explain and to account for the extreme latitude with which the word "prophet" is employed in the Old Testament. Whoever held any communication with his fellow-men on any thing transcending the ordinary affairs of life drew his topics of argument, appeal, or illustration, his metaphors, his inspiration, from the future, the Divinely opened future, and thus acquired the sacred name of prophet. Those who rebuked abounding iniquity, and held forth a higher standard of duty, could not do so without constant reference to the promised reign of truth and righteousness, and therefore the preachers were all prophets. The national bards and minstrels sang almost solely of the Messiah and the coming age, and they too were prophets. It was, no doubt, with a company of travelling minstrels that Saul, in an access of unwonted fervor, "took a harp and prophesied all night." Young men, too, who, in preparation either for the religious duties of a private life, for the priesthood, or for the public interpretation of the Law, associated themselves under the tuition of eminently good men, whether inspired or not, communed, no doubt, more of the future than of the past, learned to cherish a glowing faith in the "sure word of prophecy," and were thus termed "sons," or disciples, of the prophets," and their assemblages "schools of the prophets." Of this same free use of the word prophet the New Testament offers repeated instances; but as, after the commencement of the Christian era, the past, rather than the future, furnished the material for religious communications, the term, no longer appropriate, soon fell into disuse.

But we have delayed too long our notice of the works, or rather work, which has given a title to our article. It is one of the most thorough and elaborate specimens of American scholarship in the department of Biblical criticism, so far as scholarship implies diligence and accumulation without the higher qualities of freedom and discrimination. The author seems to have made himself conversant with all that had been previously written on Isaiah, and has evidently made the original text the subject of the most patient and persevering study. His Introductions are admirably well written, and contain a series of sound and vigorous arguments in refutation of the German school of critics. The only exception which we can make to our praise of this portion of his labors is that

which we have already indicated, his tendency to a too technical, mechanical view of the prophetic function. The work is deficient, in presenting no separate translation or paraphrase, in which the reader might take a connected view of the English text that is made the basis of the commentary. The translation, which is for the most part faithful, clear, and well expressed, is given in separate verses and clauses, at the commencement of the successive expository paragraphs. In the commentary we find very little that is new or striking. The author, from his survey of the whole field, has fallen back upon the beaten track of Orthodox exposition, and, with an array of learning of which Henry and Scott would not have dared to dream, hardly gives an interpretation of a disputed or difficult passage, which has not the soundest anile authorities in its favor. The work, too, is excessively heavy, dull, and unattractive. We cannot but feel that it is to a great degree labor lost; and can only regret that such patient. scholarship and devoted industry should not have been united with a larger measure of intellectual freedom and enterprise. The work, if used, will do good, by its full, explicit, and accurate statements of what has been said and may be said on every point where a question can be raised; and, with all its deficiencies, it may be safely taken by the merely English reader as a valuable aid in the study of the "Evangelical prophet."

A. P. P.

ART. V. SOMERVILLE'S PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.*

THE records of history and science must be consulted for a full knowledge of the geography of our globe. Political Geography unfolds to us the map of the world as man has conquered, inhabited, and improved it; it points to the cities he has built, to the fields he has cultivated, to the roads, canals, and bridges which he has constructed, to the battlefields which he has covered with the bones of his fellow-men. Its colored outlines are the stains which his ambition or his

*Physical Geography. By MARY SOMERVILLE, Author of "The Connection of the Physical Sciences"; "Mechanism of the Heavens." Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard. 1848. 12mo. pp. 381.