one's associations require, it is all there; and one's first and constant emotion here is of thankfulness that Jesus was reared amidst such natural beauty. Fifteen hills congregate to form the basin in which Nazareth lies; a basin of fertility, high up among the hills; not deep enough for extreme heat,—at a breezy elevation,-and abundantly watered by springs in the rock and streams from the surrounding heights. The town lies at one end of this oblong depression; and some of its buildings stretch a little way up a slope. Before the town lies a little green plain, where we longed to pitch our tents.”—III.

219.

Here, too, is a graphic description, which, however, is not improved by the introductory words, "As every one knows,"-which, or the like of which, occur very often, as if the writer felt the need of giving a sort of apology for the triteness of her topics, though in some instances everybody is said to know what we venture to assert is known to very few (see III. 80), if to any (II. 266).

6

"As every one knows, the summit of Carmel commands a magnificent expanse of sea; and below that ridge it was that Elijah sat, with his head bowed on his knees, while his servant watched for signs of rain.* That servant looked abroad long and patiently, over the salt sea and desolated land, and at last he saw only a little cloud arising out of the sea, no bigger than a man's hand;' and when he had come down, the whole heaven was black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain.' I looked abroad over the same scene this night. The whole mountain side, dressed with blossoms and flowering shrubs and fragrant herbs, was receiving the dews of the night. The plain, ready for harvest, lay dim below; the undulating line of the surf just shewed where the land and the waters met; and over the very horizon line of the heaving sea, just where that little cloud might have come up,the slender crescent of the young moon was dropping into the waves. is my vision of the excellency of Carmel.””—III. 233.

Such

That these volumes are deficient in originality is rather the author's misfortune than her fault. She has an eye for what is new, as may be seen in these words:

"I do not remember to have read of one great atmospheric beauty of Egypt -the after-glow, as we used to call it. I watched this nightly for ten weeks on the Nile, and often afterwards in the Desert, and was continually more impressed with the peculiarity as well as the beauty of this appearance. That the sunset in Egypt is gorgeous, everybody knows; but I, for one, was not aware that there is a renewal of beauty, some time after the sun has departed and left all grey. This discharge of colour is here much what it is among the Alps, where the flame-coloured peaks become grey and ghastly as the last sunbeam leaves them. But here, every thing begins to brighten again in twenty minutes; the hills are again purple or golden,-the sands orange, the palms verdant, the moonlight on the water, a pale green ripple on a lilac surface; and this after-glow continues for ten minutes, when it slowly fades away.”I. 17, 18.

If, indeed, we put singularity of opinion into the category of the original, we could give several instances,-which, however, we are unable to reckon among the merits of "Eastern Life." Thus she strangely holds that it is a moral impossibility for intelligent and upright Jews to become Christians :

"Those who are intimate with the minds of educated and conscientious Jews are aware that such cannot be converted to Christianity; that the very foundation of their faith cannot support that superstructure; that there can be to them no reason why they should change, and every conceivable reason

* "1 Kings xviii. 42—45,

why they should not. They well know that it is only the ill-grounded Jew who can be converted; the weak, the ignorant, or the needy and immoral.”— III. 112.

But while she gives free utterance to her own opinions, she is tolerant of those of others. There are, indeed, traces of a certain impatience with errors and superstitions as she accounts them-connected with Judaism and modern Christianity;-an impatience which is scarcely in keeping with the liberal and even sympathizing spirit with which even the corruptions of Egyptian worship are regarded, and what she believes their intrinsic import is expounded. Had the same calm philosophy, and the same deep and broad views of religious truth and duty, which actuate the writer in her exposition of the religion of ancient Egypt, been allowed to follow her and keep by her side when she entered and passed through Palestine, some harsh and unjust judgments would have been avoided, and views of the Hebrew and Christian systems have been put forth which, imbued with the deep, rich hues of her own mind, would have instructed the wise, delighted the good, and benefited all. We regret that the opportunity has not been made the most of, and we are disposed to ascribe the failure to a darkening influence having crossed the disk of her mind during the composition of the latter part of her work. Assuredly no one could write in a sympathizing spirit who had without reserve yielded his mind to the inculpatory, carping and sombre tone of the work entitled "A History of the Hebrew Monarchy." But, however unsparing Miss Martineau is in her disallowal of the "Traditions of Palestine," she never fails to speak in terms of deep reverence of Him to whose presence its scenes chiefly owe their everlasting interest. In the vividness with which the past is re-produced, and with the past the presence of the Saviour of the world, lies the great value of this work; and in this particular it possesses an interest and a recommendation which are of the highest and most durable nature. We have space for only one example :

"We were as sure now as we could feel at Jerusalem of our being on the tracks of the Teacher. Every where about the lake, he travelled and taught; and we might any where here look round us with the certainty of seeing what he saw. A mountain near our road to-day, about five hours, I think, from Nazareth, called by the natives the Horns of Hattein, is named by the Christians the Mount of the Beatitudes, from the tradition that here Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. With those who believe that that body of holy instructions was delivered on several occasions, and therefore most probably in different places, this tradition will have no weight: nor has it, I believe, with any but the local guides. It is an oblong hill, green and fertile on its eastern side, and with two eminences at one end of its ridge, from which it derives its native name. If Jesus did not sit there to teach, he probably reclined there, as on all the hills near, in the course of his wayfaring to look abroad and from hence he could see far. He could see over the plain of Jezreel, which was, to every Jew, so full of recollections at once religious and historical. He could overlook the lake of Galilee, and follow with his eye the fishing boats where were some whom he designed to make fishers of men. He could see on the shores, and in the recesses of the hills, and at the opening of the plain of Gennesareth to the North, the cities over whose hard worldliness he mourned, conceiving of them as lost, like Tyre and Sidon over to the West, and Sodom and Gomorrah to the South. Here were all his haunts in this district, in his view at once:-Mount Tabor near at hand; and

below the shore of the lake, the boats, Capernaum and Bethsaida, and the solitudes to which he withdrew himself for contemplation and prayer,—for rest to his soul. And here he could meditate how yet more strongly, yet more clearly and incessantly, he could convey to his followers and the multitude his warnings against the husky religion of the Pharisees, and his blessings on the pure, the sincere, the devoted, the peaceable and the humble spirit, of which it was hard for the pupils of the Scribes and Pharisees to conceive. And unlike indeed was his method of teaching to theirs. He taught as one having authority, and not as the Scribes.' The people were accustomed to book language, to legal terms, of admonitions about ritual matters; in short, to solemn trifling from mere expositors. Now they were refreshed through their whole heart and soul, by cheerful, familiar, colloquial, original teaching, from a prophet, who spoke without book, and so directly and simply that the children might understand. Our life-long reverence for him, and our sabbatical associations with the records of his words, naturally unfit us at home for perceiving the intense familiarity of his teachings, and the beauty of that method of appeal. What we feel to be so deeply true and beautiful, we utter reverently as we ought: and the imagery is to us something foreign, and belonging to a remote poetical and spiritual region; so that the names and images cannot slip over the tongue like those of the corresponding imagery at home. We even shrink from a full realization of the truth as from a kind of irreverence; so that, at this moment, I find it difficult to say plainly what I mean. What I mean is plainly this. If Jesus were of Saxon race, and came now to reform and free our souls, his imagery would be our rural cottages and the alleys of our towns; the redbreast, the dog-rose and bramble; as in Galilee they were the rock and sand-built houses, the ravens and the lilies of the field. He would call our political and religious sects, our Magistrates and Bishops, by their ordinary names; and so assuredly he would the towns which received, and those which rejected his teachings. It may sound irreverent, but it ought not to do so, to conceive of him as saying, 'Alas! for you, Liverpool-alas! for you, Bristol!'-and as declaring that proud Edinburgh or London should be humbled. When one stands where I stood this day, above the lake and among the wild flowers, and within sight of the places of the denounced cities, one feels a more intense relief, a more cheerful and animated love for those effectual discourses, than can ever be felt at home, except by such as have sufficient strength of imagination and of piety, and sufficient knowledge, to transport themselves to the Teacher's side, in his own native region, and learn from himself alone, putting aside all devices and superstitions of men, what it was that he would say to every one of us. To my apprehension, on the spot, and with the records of his life in my hand, and the recollections of Egypt and of Sinai fresh in my mind, nothing could be simpler than his recorded words, and nothing less like what is superstitiously and irreverently taught, as coming from him, in most of the churches of Christendom. Here he stood as the way, the truth and the life, to bring men into that closer connection with God as their Father which was to be added to their ancient relation to Jehovah as their King. He strove to detach their minds from the forms and means of religion, and fix their hearts upon its life and reality. He strove to raise them into a condition of earnestness, sincerity, and gentle affections towards God, and their neighbours and their enemies; and to fit them thus for entrance upon his new kingdom of righteousness, whose approaching establishment was his great topic of promise. And he used for all this a method of appeal, such as every effectual teacher must use,-appeal to their daily knowledge and observation, to their social experience, their domestic affections,-in short, their very commonest affairs and interests. He spoke of the kneading of bread, the bottling of wine, the sowing of seed, the mending of clothes, the moth and the rust, and the washing of dishes, as well as of thrones, of clouds, and of the lightning which shines from one end of the heaven to the other."-III. 241-245.

Among the inaccuracies of this work we may refer to a sentence without a verb (I. 281); Philo (always) for Philæ; "Book of Revelations" for Book of Revelation (I. 280); Machoerus for Machærus (III. 147). Manifest is the mistake made in the statement that the Jordan "is believed to have once flowed into the Red Sea at Akaba” (III. 258; see also II. 303). Had the writer said "was," instead of is," she would have been right. It is now admitted by scientific travellers and students of the subject, that the physical structure and conformation of the whole Arabah and neighbouring mountains make it impossible for the Jordan to have flowed into the Elanitic Gulf, at least within the present geological period.

66

In Vol. III. p. 228, we find these words: "I am not aware that we have any record of any appearance of Christ in the country west of Nazareth." Miss Martineau must have forgotten the distinct statement made by Mark (vii. 24; comp. 31), that Jesus, leaving the Sea of Tiberias, "went thence into the borders of Tyre and Sidon."

We close our review of these attractive volumes by subjoining the accomplished writer's last words on Palestine:

"These were our last hours in the Holy Land. From these heights, we looked back upon a land of most variegated scenery; and, I could not but feel, of faiths curiously commingled, strong as was the Jewish profession of unity of faith and race. The main feature of its faith, however, its monotheism, finally remained unchanged for so long as to serve as a basis for its distinctive character before the world. Though allegorically impaired by the Pharisaic sect before the time of Christ, and by the Alexandrian and other Christian parties ever since, that great doctrine has remained, on the whole, practically established; and this it is which distinguishes this birth-place of a religious faith above perhaps every other on earth. Next to this ranks the distinction given it by the appearance of Christ. When men shall have learned to receive his doctrine in the simplicity with which he gave it,—to receive it from himself, from his life and his words, they will probably become aware that it is its commixture with superstitions and institutions older than itself which is the cause of its not having been more extensive and effectual in its operation than the history of eighteen centuries shews it to have been. Encumbered with much that was never contemplated by the Teacher himself, and that is incompatible with the whole spirit of his gospel; encumbered with a priesthood and ritual of its own, and adulterated with more or fewer of the superstitions of all the nations who ministered to the Hebrew mind, it is no wonder that the true doctrine of Christ is overlaid and almost destroyed. The Paternity of God, extending to all men; the infallible operation of his Will or Providence; his strict Moral Government, by which moral retribution is inevitable; the brotherhood of the whole human race, and in that the promise of peace on earth and good-will towards men; and the establishment of a spiritual kingdom on earth, of which he should be Prince and his followers the administrators, the dead rising to enter into it, and the living without death; the expiration of the Jewish Law on the establishment of this kingdom, and the spiritual nature of the new religion, which was to have the heaven and the earth for its temple, and the whole body of believers for its priests;-these were the points of faith which appear to have been offered by Jesus himself, the simple Glad Tidings which the earnest disciple hears from him when listening to his voice alone in the retirements of Palestine, sequestered from the embarrassing echoes of other countries and later times. It was thus that Palestine and its Faith appeared to one at least, as I looked back this day, from the ridge of the Eastern hills, for the last time upon the Valley of the Jordan."-III. 265, 266.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.*

It was not till the year 1815 that Dr. Channing entered the lists of theological controversy. For twelve years he had carried on the work of the ministry without introducing into the pulpit direct confutations either of Trinitarian or Calvinistic doctrine. He preached as if no such doctrine as the Trinity had ever been known. In private, indeed, he spoke, when his opinion was asked, openly and directly. The union of the American Congregational churches which had subsisted for nearly two centuries, was on his entrance on the ministry still observed, and his own pulpit exchanges were by no means confined to those who afterwards ranged themselves with him on the Unitarian side. But a change was at hand. It had, indeed, been foreseen for several years.† Of the circumstances which preceded and led to Dr. Channing's engaging in controversy, his biographer has given no detail. He has contented himself with huddling together, in a manner we can only characterize as slovenly, about 100 pages of extracts from his letters (both private and printed), his sermons, and his contributions to periodicals. We cannot pretend to supply the biographer's deficiencies, but a few facts we will put together, which are interesting from their relation to the history of Unitarianism.

In his Life of Rev. Theophilus Lindsey, published in 1812, Mr. Belsham was led, when speaking of the adoption by the congregation at the King's chapel, Boston, of an Unitarian Liturgy, to devote a chapter (and it is by no means the least interesting portion of that valuable book) to the progress and state of the Unitarian churches in America. After stating that divine worship in many of the principal churches at Boston was carried on upon principles strictly, if not avowedly, Unitarian, he adds, "Being myself a friend to ingenuousness and candour, I could wish to see all who are truly Unitarians openly such, and to teach the doctrine of the simple, indivisible Unity of God, as well as to practise the rites of Unitarian worship." (P. 275.) In no friendly spirit towards his heterodox neighbours, Dr. Morse, a Calvinist clergyman of Boston, caused the chapter relating to American Unitarianism to be reprinted. It was reviewed in the June No. of the Panoplist, a periodical work edited by Dr. Morse. The reviewer described Unitarianism, as professed by Mr. Belsham, to include the belief that Jesus Christ is a mere man, who was liable during his mortal life to error and sin; that no gratitude is due to him for the benefits of the gospel; and that there is no reason to hope for his future

• Continued from p. 349.

† Six years before, Mr. Buckminster, in a letter to Mr. Belsham, dated Dec. 5, 1809, wrote thus: "We are as yet independent in Massachusetts, and, though with some inconveniences, retain our old Congregational connection, subject to no platform, subscribers to no articles, and united only so far as we please with one another, exchanging with whom we please, and acting with those only with whom we find we can best agree. But there is among us an increasing party of Calvinists and Hopkinsians who wish to promote a more exclusive union, on the basis of the Westminster Confession of Faith, and who will therefore form a schism in our Congregational connection and separate from us, and probably send delegates to the General Assembly. They are not yet the majority in our State, and it is much hoped they never will be."-Williams's Mem. of Belsham, p. 597.