first travelling along the shores of the Mediterranean in that Apostle's footsteps, and thereafter writing their descriptions over again.

But by far the greater portion of voyagers to the countries bordering on this great Sea have been laymen, and their tastes and talents have turned their thoughts into a different channel. Of the few Ministers of the Church of Christ who have visited these hallowed regions, none of them seem to have thought of striking into this vein, rich and rare as the metal appears to be. Not a man of them has adopted the plan of mingling their geographical descriptions and biographical details of the Apostle, his doctrines and duties, with the incidents of their journey, and with their own personal observations as noticed at the time and place. The Author, being aware before he started that this literary and religious position had not been fully occupied by any of the previous travellers, resolved in all his wanderings through the lands of the Messiah, Mahomet, and the Pope, to adopt this field as his own, by describing the present state of St. Paul's Localities as he actually saw them with his own eyes. Believing that readers will peruse the journeyings of St. Paul with much more interest, when they are minutely informed as to everything relating to the different places mentioned in Scripture relative to him, the Author was as careful as he could be to take the very roads by which the Apostle travelled, and to make the very voyages his journeys were regulated by. The Author did this that he might be the better enabled to

make his readers sympathise with St. Paul's personal history, as the Missionary of the Heathen; and also that he might the more vividly recal his life of an age long gone past, and fill up the dim outline of former homebound biographers. With these views of thus countersigning the sacred record, with a correspondence which cannot be forged, the Author went from place to place, beginning at Tarsus, where St. Paul was born, and onward to Rome, where he suffered martyrdom. And from his clerical profession and earliest associations, the religious aspects of these hallowed regions were always to his heart the most interesting.

In some instances, the Author was conscious that the aspect of the spot presented to his eye was the same as that seen by St. Paul himself. Thus Tarsus still stands as fair to the burning sun as it did in the infantine days of Saul. The Cydnus is still as cold, from the melting snows of the Taurus range of mountains, as it was on that day in which Alexander the Great, weary and overheated, caught his fever from bathing rashly in its stream. The rock overhanging the Valley of Jehoshaphat on which Saul stood, consenting to the death of Stephen, is still there, as conspicuous and enduring as ever. The identical spot near Damascus where Saul was struck blind may still be seen, as pointed out by tradition, in all the stern realities of antiquity. The place off the Point of Koura, at Melita, where the perishing crew took up the ship's anchor and committed themselves to the sea, and loosed the rudder

bands, and hoisted up the mainsail to the wind, and made towards the shore, is still the same; and the very creek is still pointed out with the shore unto which the crew were minded, if it were possible, to thrust in the ship; and the two contending currents, at the junction of which the ship was wrecked, still flow into the bay between the Selmoon Island and the open sea, and it is still dreaded by mariners. The seaport Puteoli, where St. Paul landed in Italy, is seen to this day as prominent as ever; and the three fountains in the Ostium Road, without the Gate at Rome, are well known to all modern travellers. Even in countries where the cities were sadly altered from the lapse of time,— from the turning tide of civilization, and from wars and earthquakes,—it was still something for the traveller to know that the earth, the sea, and the sky, were the same as ever. And what is more interesting in these remote regions of the far East, the manners of the natives, their dresses, and their occupations, are to this day nearly what they were in the times of the Patriarch Job.

Some

of the cities have even ceased to exist, and the sites of several of them cannot now be ascertained; but in the dreary and deserted condition of such, lessons alike joyous and melancholy are to be learned, and reflections, both pious and political, not a few, are naturally suggested.

Moreover, if a work such as this is likely to be acceptable at all times to the religious public, from its descriptive geographical commentaries, it is surely to be still more interesting in the present state of matters in the East.

Almost all the localities described are situated within the dominion of the Grand Turk, and have lately become the seat of the great struggle which is at present involving the whole of the Old World in war. Every information, therefore, as to the present state of matters in these regions will certainly command attention, if given clearly and candidly. But on this point, as to the qualifications of the Author for the proper execution of his present task, it becomes him to write with delicacy; but still he may repeat, that having been long engaged in a religious profession,-having travelled the track, and freely availed himself of the travels of other writers, and having successfully written the general incidents of his own journey, he feels it the more incumbent on him to make this second effort to be useful, by producing another volume for the edification of the Church, and the information of the public.

For a time the Author hesitated whether his plan should embrace the Localities of all the Apostles, including descriptions of the island of Patmos and of the Seven Churches in Asia; but he found that to do justice to so wide a field might extend the present work beyond the proper bulk, or it might deteriorate the effect of the whole endeavour, by compelling the writer to abridge his details too much. The Life and Localities of St. John are, therefore, reserved, probably, to become the subject of another volume.

It may be well, at the very first, to state, that we found so many difficulties and differences of opinion existing as

to the chronology of the recorded events concerning St. Paul, that we have almost refrained from entering categorically on questions as to dates. The chronological obscurities are so great, that we have been constrained to narrate the biography, in a great measure, without any attempt to ascertain exactly the year either of St. Paul's own life, or of the Christian era when the particular events occurred. At first we thought of attempting what we hoped might have been an original investigation of this portion of the subject; but we were so far from the many books needed, and the difficulties of the task were such, and so contrary to the turn of our mind, that we would soon have landed ourselves in the same confusion and contradiction which are so apparent in the several conflicting statements that have been got up as so many systems, for the purpose of settling the interminable questions which have arisen on this head. Not only does one author seem to contradict another, but even the same writer sometimes seems to contradict himself. In a word, all that has been done hitherto on this most important point has failed to produce any satisfactory result. But when some writers have a pet theory to build up, or an objectionable one to demolish, they find their dates to fit as exactly as little wheels in their watches; and thus, by one remarkable and perhaps imaginary coincidence after another, the whole machinery is thereby regulated to their own time of day exactly. After all, therefore, that the most learned, accurate, and impartial historians have attempted on this subject, the