fowl, including geese, ducks, storks, herons, and numerous others, swim along the surface, or stalk through the marshes. neighbouring villagers are expert in the chase, and with their long guns can bring down the birds from a great distance. There are paths by which they can penetrate during the summer months into the midst of the marshes. These, however, are so intricate, that it is with difficulty even those accustomed to them can follow them. I went some distance into the east lake, and my guide informed me that he had on one occasion lost his way near the place where we stood, and was three days and three nights among the marshes ere he could find his way out.

In

The country round the lakes has a gently undulating surface. Beyond these it slopes up to the foot of a range of hills with graceful, conical peaks, distant about four and a-half hours. this district there are no villages and no inhabitants; but I could see the ruins of three large castles, of the beauty and strength of which the peasants spake in glowing terms. I was anxious to visit them, but could get no guide; all were afraid of wandering parties of Arabs, with whom they wage a constant warfare. The range of the Telul, for so the hills referred to are called, terminates at a point about due east from Tell Heijâny, and from thence to the Jebl Haurân on the south there is plain far as the eye can see. One solitary blue peak rises up a little to the south of the Tellûl, but much more distant. This, I was informed, is in the centre o. the Safa.

THE INSPIRED CHARACTER OF THE FOUR

GOSPELS.

THE four Gospels are received by the Church, not merely as authentic records of the facts which, viewed in conjunction with the miracles and teaching of Christ and his apostles, constitute the essential basis of Christian faith and practice, but also as sacred writings inspired throughout by the same 'Spirit of Christ' which spake by the Prophets.a

We have, then, to distinguish between the characteristics of authenticity and inspiration predicated by the Church of these writings. The former denotes their historical character as records of supernatural events which actually took place; whilst the latter indicates, in addition to this, an infinitely higher degree of perfection, originating in a divine design in reference to which they are throughout constructed, both as a whole and in their several details.

In this paper we propose to attempt the application of the argument from analogy, to the support of the external testimony of the Church in favour of the inspired character of the Gospels. Such an investigation will include, to a certain extent, the vindication of the historical truth or authenticity of these records, but is properly concerned with the analogy of the mode in which the received truths and facts of Christianity are there exhibited and expressed, to what we observe in the constitution and course of nature and of providence, and of the general scheme of revelation viewed as proceeding from the same Divine Author.

Two opposite views of the scheme of Christianity have been conceived and disseminated amongst us, tending to impugn the early Church's view of the inspired character of the Gospels. On the one hand there are those who deny the completeness of the

a 1 Pet. i. 10, 11, 12. Hooker asserts, in regard to the inspired character of the prophetical writings, that the prophets neither spake nor wrote any word of their own, but uttered syllable by syllable as the Spirit put it into their mouth;' so that the result is as really to be attributed to God as its author, as the various sounds of an instrument are to be referred to the volition of the performer; the difference being that, whereas the instrument is an unconscious subject of the external operation, the prophets as inspired men were conscious to the fullest extent of the secret mind of the Spirit which spake by them, the arm of the Lord being mighty and strong upon them.'-HOOKER, Serm. V., §§ 5, 6.

b Viz., the Romish advocates of that theory of Development' which is based on the assumption that Christianity came into the world as an idea rather than as an institution' (Newman on Development); according to which, therefore, the unchangeable truth of the Gospel, regarded as the final dispensation of religion, is capable of improvement and actual change as the mind of the Church is exercised on its subject matter, and by meditation moulds and shapes it accordingly, so as to produce and create the precise dogmas which meet the newly discovered wants of

evangelical history as such, by alleging the necessity of supplementary truths, the additions of after ages, to the foundation of faith in the Gospels. Such thinkers impair the sufficiency of the historical basis of Christianity already fixed and determined. The tendency of an opposite train of thought is to supersede or replace that central object of Christian faith called by St. Paul the mystery of godliness,' 'God manifest in the flesh,' &c., by partial or merely subjective views of truth which are conceived to comprehend all that is essential to be believed, thus virtually nullifying more or less the testimony which the Gospels throughout bear to that great object of faith the Incarnate LORD who was conceived and born, who suffered and died, and rose again for our redemption.

In contradistinction to both these trains of thought, the inspiration predicated of the Gospels by the early Church, is a plenary inspiration, such, that is, as allows nothing either to be supplied or taken away from them by the supposed progressive enlightenment of after ages of the Church, whose office is simply to guard and transmit them, whole and entire, as constituting one unchangeable record of truth.

In order to survey the framework of the history from the right point of view, and so to enable ourselves to form any adequate conception of the nature and extent of the inspiration predicable of them, we must premise some considerations tending towards the determination of the proper position to be assigned to these writings in the scheme of natural and revealed religion, viewed as proceeding from the same Divine Author. We may thus be enabled to infer the probable design of God in the gift of inspiration to the Evangelists, in relation to man, whether Jew or Gentile, as the subject of His moral government, and to the various and changing circumstances and relations of the Church and the

the Christian mind. Among the legitimate results of this process of thought, Dr. Newman classes the deification of the Blessed Virgin in a sense which constitutes her not only in common with other saints a recipient of divine grace, but also an original dispenser of it. The contrariety of this result to the plain teaching of Scripture, that the man Christ Jesus' is the one Mediator between God and man,' is obvious. The late Professor Butler has shown, in his answer to Dr. Newman's work, that by a moderately skilful application of the rules by which this process of thought is to be conducted, almost anything, however absurd and impious, might be developed from some known truth. He deduces sun-worship from Scripture on Dr. Newman's principles.'--Butler on Development, Letter III.

e That view, for instance, which resolves the revealed truth of God incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ into the opinion that he was the Man whom the Divine Word most perfectly inhabited, and who most realized the idea of the union of man with God. The gradation from this view, which may not be inconsistent with the recognition of the historical basis of the Gospel history, to that of the infidel German school, which resolves Jesus Christ into an ideal or mythical personification of human nature, in the perfection to which it can of itself attain, is easy.

world. The internal indications of this design, which our proposed analogical survey of the Gospels may then present, will be the measure of the presumption which the argument affords in favour of their plenary inspiration by the spirit of Him whom natural religion teaches us to recognise as the absolutely wise and perfect Creator and Disposer of all things, and who having 'in sundry times and in divers manners' spoken in times past unto the fathers by the prophets, hath in these last days, i. e. in the final dispensation of Christianity, spoken unto us by His Incarnate Son.

For this purpose, viz. the determination of the relative position to be assigned to these writings in the scheme of natural and revealed religion, a further preliminary inquiry suggests itself, viz. whether there be any leading idea to which the whole scheme of religion may be referred as the ultimate object of the faith to which revelation is addressed, and which by comprising in itself the essence of moral and revealed truth, unites in one 'desire 'd or expectation the subjects of every dispensation whose faith has been directed accordingly; and secondly, whether, and in what form, that idea is fully developed in the final dispensation of Christianity, and exhibited accordingly in the Gospels.

The former branch of this inquiry is interesting, whether we regard it from the same point of view as that occupied by the investigator of the history of the past, whose business and concern it is to trace and estimate the influence of so powerful an element (as he may term it) as religion, upon the moral, social, and political condition of the world in the manifold scenes and relations of society and of governments which the vast range of history presents to view; whether, with the mere political director of the present and future concerns of society, we trace the influence of the same cause upon the progress and extension of science and civilisation under the Christian era; or whether, lastly, we join the faithful of every age and under every dispensation, in extending our view through and beyond the visible results of religion, to that which is the proper scope and end of a revelation as such, viz. the drawing back the curtain which separates things visible from things invisible, the unfolding to the inward vision of faith the objective realities of that unseen world for which this stage of our existence is a probation and a preparation. Theologically speaking, however, it is, from the nature of the case, impossible that a true conception of the idea which natural and revealed religion was intended to germinate and unfold should be formed by those in whom implicit faith, at least, is not the basis and starting-point of their philosophical inquiries respecting the form of its develop

d Hag. ii. 7.

ment; who choose to view the scheme of revelation much as they would any great fact in the world's history, as something external to themselves, and which they survey only in its particular relation to the favourite object of their pursuits. The design and scope of revelation cannot, from the nature of the case, be thus limited. "The general design of Scripture,' says Bishop Butler, 'which contains in it this revelation, considered as historical, may be said to be to give us an account of the world in this one single view as God's world.' To assign therefore any finite purpose or end as comprehending the design of revelation, and as the realisation of the teaching and tendencies of natural religion, is a subversion of a first principle of religion, for it is virtually a denial of the infinite perfections of the Creator.

This consideration excludes all those answers to our inquiry, What, if any, is the leading idea of natural and revealed religion which revelation was intended to unfold? which are based upon partial or merely subjective views of its tendencies and effects, as one out of many elements by which the course and affairs of the world are affected. Revelation claims to be to the moral, social, and political world what the sun is to the natural world--the centre of life and light to which all the circumstances and relations of men in every form of society have a fixed and definite, but subordinate, relation; the original source of whatever degree of truth and wisdom the minds of men and the dark places of the earth have been gifted and enlightened with. In the comparatively small number of events which Divine wisdom saw fit to select and embody in a revelation, we see notwithstanding, as in a mirror, an exact image therein reflected of the character of man under all the circumstances of life and in the various forms of society, and are thus enabled to trace the design of God in the divine œconomies concerning him, and the correspondence of that design to the infinite wisdom and goodness of its Divine Author.

Those therefore are not to be heard who, in attempting to assign to revelation the development of any leading idea, limit their field of view to the present visible sphere of its operation; and judging from the known effects of Christianity on the world, are led to infer that the progress of universal benevolence and of civilisation, of arts and science and general freedom of intercourse, tending towards moral and material perfection, constitute the design of revelation, and comprehend, far more than any objective truth does, its essential idea, and the ultimate form of its full development. If, then, no answer can be regarded as theologically correct

See Dr. Waterland's Charge on 'The Wisdom of the Ancients borrowed from Divine Revelation,' vol. v., Oxf., 1843.