"descries the features of a beloved disciple." The youth whom Jesus presented to the twelve was John.

From the general character of the fourth gospel, as well as from several detached passages, Mr. M'Conochie argues that it was not the production of a fisherman, nor of one who had been born, or commonly resided in Galilee. The most material arguments are drawn from the conclusion of this gospel; and many circumstances are pointed out, which tend to shew that the transactions of the night preceding the crucifixion, lead to the conviction, that the disciple who leaned on the breast of Jesus, was not the son of Zebedee. Two of these we shall here select.

"He," John the Evangelist, "went with Jesus into the palace of the high priest, and he intimates the reason he was known to the high priest. Here I would ask, if this was John the apostle, what opportunities had he of being known to the high priest? His occupation had confined him to the sea of Tiberias and its banks; and since he became a follower of Jesus, he was in the wrong way to become acquainted with Caiaphas. But if he was an inhabitant of Jerusalem, and a person of some reputation among the Jews there, he might well be acquainted with Caiaphas before he became high priest."

"John was so well known in the palace, that as soon as he spake to the damsel who kept the door, Peter was admitted. He is no sooner admitted, however, than his air and habit discover him to be a stranger, and his speech bewrayeth him to be a Galilean. First one servant attacks him with questions, then another, and then a third. All this time the least suspicion falls not upon John. If then it was John the apostle who was now present in the hall of the high priest, how came it that his air, garb, and language, did not bewray him also to be a Galilean? whence came it that John, the son of Zebedee, should have got so much the better of his Galilean accent, and his rustie appearance, as to escape all interrogatory; while poor Peter, who had been his companion for life, and who had come up from Galilee with him, was so hard put to it in these respects? I am persuaded that, on the common hypothesis, these questions are unanswerable. But allowing that John the Evangelist was an inhabitant of Jerusalem or its vicinity, the whole matter is easily cleared. His air and accent were those of a townsman. These, with the circumstance of his being known to the high priest and his family, set him above all suspicion of being connected with Jesus.

No two persons could be more differently eircumstanced than John and Peter in

the palace of the high priest. Every thing that befals Peter indicates the stranger; the conduct of John implies acquaintance, if not intimacy."

This reasoning proceeds upon the supposition, that by the phrase "another disciple" the Evangelist denotes himself. Of this there have been considerable doubts: but as these have arisen from its never having been supposed that the Evangelist was not the apostle, if the other arguments advanced by the author before us should induce any one to believe that they were different per sons, the fact here produced will be acknowledged to add much to the con firmation of the hypothesis. Again,

"Jesus seeing his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, he saith unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son; and to that disciple he saith, behold thy mother.' These words have a brevity and emphasis peculiar to themselves. To me it appears the parents of the disciple to whom Jesus here addresses himself were dead; at least that he had no mother, to call off his attention from the duty which Jesus lays upon him. Now we know that the mother, of Zebedee's children was yet alive; that she was one of the company which came up with Jesus to this passover; and was, at this moment, a mournful spectator of the awful scene. The words of Jesus to John I would

thus paraphrase Thou art deprived of thy parents, my mother is about to be deprived of her son; treat her as a mother for my sake: and his words to his mother thus, Thou art about to be left childless; behold, in this young man, the disciple whom I love, in him thou wilt experience a son; treat him

as such.'

solve what have hitherto been considered as very serious difficulties; and, in the hands of some one more accustomed to conduct investigations of this nature,

than we suspect the author is, it may be made to assume a form which may produce a fuller conviction of its truth.

WE read with more attention, than we were soon convinced they deserve, the Remarks of Granville Sharp, and the letters addressed to him by Mr. Wordsworth. It appeared to us, according to the motto selected by the writer before us from bishop Pearson's works, that the deity ascribed to our Saviour ought not to be tried by any such kind of school divinity: and that no fundamental doctrine should be examined, censured, and condemned by 6,, To. The theory of Mr. Sharp was how. ever proposed and defended with such imposing confidence, and so many hard words and illiberal reflections were cast out against those, whose creed is not exactly such as is generally professed upon the subject of the person of Christ, that we not only expected, but were desirous that some champion would ap pear to take up the gauntlet which the redoubted knights of the Greek article had thrown down. Gregory Blunt, though skilful and valorous, is not exactly the person upon whom our choice would have rested; nor does he use his weapons according to the rules which we should have prescribed. He has fought, however; and impartiality compels us to confess that he has prevailed: and no wonder, since he opposed the weak flourishes of a magician's airy wand, by a ponderous club of argument; and sent against the rust-eaten armour of mouldering fathers, the arrows of reason,

firmly believe you to be as honest and good a man as myself, and am willing to suppose that you may be a much better, already possessed of many virtues which I am only labouring to acquire; and that in this per suasion I greatly reverence your character, and should be sorry to give you pain: though

must say, that you don't know much about the Greek article, nor about christianity, or you would never have dreamt of looking for the latter in the former.

"When I say christianity, I do not mean practical christianity, which, in my opinion, formed upon a careful perusal of my bible, though not it seems in your's, is the only real, genuine christianity; containing all that Jesus and his apostles ever put into their religion. No, Sir; God forbid I should derogate in the smallest degree from your know. ledge of that christianity, which cannot be described in fewer, or better words than those of the apostle, "the cross of Christ;" and which consists in crucifying all our worldly and selfish appetites and lusts, and in being christianity, which, because it was so plain and simple, and had so little to do with learned systems, disputes, and controversies, was foolishness to the Greeks of old, as it still continues to be to many modern Greeks and disputers of this world, and is in danger of being rendered every day more and more foolish by such labours as your's-this chris tianity you and I, and all of us, understand well enough; because the true religion of Jesus is so plain, that no one ever did, or could inisunderstand it; though none of us cultivate it with such care and strictness as we ought to do; and for that reason alone we live so uncomfortably together, and have so much wretchedness and misery to complain of among us; and must continue so to live and to complain till our christianity be less in our heads, and more in our hearts.

dead indeed unto sin." This

No, Sir; when I say that you do not know much about christianity, I mean the and many others, for want of knowing bet oretical christianity;-a thing which you ter, suppose to be, in some shape or other, the christianity of the scriptures, but which, in every shape that it can assume, and it can and does occasionally assume a greater va riety of forms than ever Proteus did, has nothing of christianity belonging to it but the name. I mean the motley christianity which men fabricate by sewing scraps and bits of texts together, as they make a history of the Jews out of Homer, or of the gos

pel out of Virgil: a christianity which must be dug out of Greek articles and plural Hebrew nouns and verbs, and such abominable' holes, as no christian, who is not so hoodwinked by the nursery, the church, or the state, as to be quite blind to the broad religion of the bible, would ever think of groping in for the light of the world.' (John viii. 12.)

"We are told, that apostolical christian ity, which is to this, Hyperion to a satyr, was not hidden in a corner, (Acts xxvi. 26.); but this thing of shreds and patches' is to be found nowhere in the bible but in holes and corners. And when, by observing times, and using enchantments and witchcraft, and by dealing with familiar spirits and wizards,' (2 Chron. xxxiii. 6.) some theological Manasseh drags it forth to view, it comes reluctantly by inches, and appears at last in such a questionable shape, that if a christian can but muster up courage to look it steadily in the face, he will soon see what an unsubstantial visionary form it is, and will behold it instantly shrink from his sight; and if he will but continue to pursue it with a fearless eye, and fixed regard, will find it vanish into air, and what seemed corporal, melt as breath into the wind.' Let him but follow the apostle's advice (1 Cor. xiv. 20.), and not be, what the generality of christians are upon all questions of this sort, children, afraid to use their understandings; but let him be upon this, as upon every other matter that concerns his religion, though a child in malice, yet a man in understanding, and he will see and know, what I have said you at present seem to know so little of, that all theoretical christianity is man's device' (Acts xvii. 29.), the mere coinage of the brain, the trumpery' of fathers and councils, of theologues and schoolmen, of eremites and friars, white, black and gray."

In the course of the contest he deals this mighty blow:

Virgilius Evangelizans."

may shew that there is no difference, not only between a street and a lane (Luke xiv, 21.), but between a high-way and a hedge (ibid. verse 28.); not only between love and peace (2 Cor. xiii. 11.), but between consolation and salvation (2 Cor. i. 6.) You may prove not only that high-priests and scribes, (Matt. ii. 4.), that scribes and pharisces, (Matt. v. 20.), that scribes and elders, (ib. xxvii. 41.), and that publicans and sinners, (ibid. ix. 11.) were the same per sons; but moreover, that pharisees and sadducees, (Matt. iii. 7. xvi. 1, 6, 11, 12.), apostles and prophets, (Ephes. ii. 20.), buyers and sellers, (Matt. xxi. 12.), were the same; that Mary Magdalene was the same as Mary the mother of Joses, (Mark xv. 47.); and that there was no difference between Joses himself and his brother James, (Matt. xxvii. 56.), between Peter and John, (Acts viii. 14.)

From Luke ix. 28, you may, by virtue of your excellent rule, extract a new, secondary, apostolical trinity, by way of supplement to that commonly received; and that too, all from one text, without being forced, as is the case in manufacturing the old trinity, to dig a little bit of mystery out of a text in one corner of the bible, next to splice that to a bit more out of another corner, afterwards to eke out that with a bit from a third, thus hopping about from text to text; and after all the toil and labour bestowed on it, after all the twisting and turning, and vamp ing, and soleing and heel-piecing, to rest satisfied with producing what to a common eye, not tutored and trained from infancy to look askew at it, appears just as broad as it is long, though when it is squinted at, through a theological magnifying glass, such as you make use of to turn points of separation into lines of connection,' (p. 48.) many persons are apt to fancy that it looks 'nearly three times as long as it is broad.'¶

From Luke viii. 1, 2, you might shew,

by your rule, that the twelve apostles were all women; as you might make it appear, from the same evangelist, (xxiii. 27.), were likewise the great company of people that

"Macbeth."

followed Jesus to his crucifixion, and moreover, (from verse 49 of the same chapter) that all his acquaintance were persons of the same sex who followed him from Galilee. "From Acts xv. you might shew that Paul and Barnabas, who were very different persons at the beginning of the chapter (ver. 2.) and who, though without any express articles of separation subsisting between them, (and therefore, by virtue of your fifth rule and its exception, were beginning to grow rather ambiguous), still continued distinct for some time after (verse 12), got so confounded in the course of a few verses

more, (verse 22), that it was impossible to distinguish the one from the other, till the successful application of your wonderful discovery restored each of them again, (verses 25, 35), to his separate personal identity and diversity.

"Many more discoveries, equally notable, might you make from Luke xí. 27. Acts iv. 5, 6. xv. 2. xxiv. 1. Rom. ii. 5. 1 Cor. iv. 9. 2 Thes. i. 4. &c. &c. but I shall content myself with mentioning only one, to be found in 1 Tim. vi. 13. where 60s and 50s being connected in the way your rule requires, the former with, and the latter without the article, must necessarily be descriptive of one and the same person; but since each of these nouns is attended by a participle, and since the article which is prefixed to the first participle is repeated before the second, the two nouns must on that account be descriptive of different persons: and thus we have both the identity and diversity of God and Christ Established in the compass of a single verse, proving clearly, as I have somewhere seen, or heard it expressed, that they are "united, though divided; divided, though the same." "It makes no difference, I apprehend, in this reasoning, that the substantive of personal description, as you call pisos (p. 30), is followed by the proper name Jesus; since X50s here does not make any part of the proper name, but is merely an epithet, like the similar personal noun zupiss, in a similar situation. But what if it were unavoidably a proper name? We have seen that no reasoning nor practice of yours, will justify us in depriving it of the benefit of your rule on that account. Or, lastly, what if Paul had thought fit to have omitted the word Jesus altogether, which he might have done if he had chosen it, for any thing that I can see to the contrary?

Such are the curious consequences to which your theory of the article fairly and directly leads: consequences from which no arbitrary, groundless, and unsupported limi

tations can extricate you, as you must see, unless some theological ignis fatuus has completely dazzled your sight,"

As a bye-blow, the following will shew our knight's dexterity.

"Your conclusion is no less curious, when you infer (p. 8, and 9) that because Jesus is called a shepherd, and God is also called a shepherd, therefore Jesus is God. Oh! most lame and impotent conclusion!" (Shaksp.) Saul is called king of Israel (1 Sam. xxiv. 14), and God is also called king of Israel (Isa. xliv. 6) therefore Saul is God! The Lord have mercy upon us! If the Bible, in its object and design, had not been one of the plainest and simplest books in the world; if it had, not been its only purpose to make us good and happy; and if that purpose had not filled every page of it, it must long since have been overwhelmed by the treatment it has met with. No other book was ever so used, or rather so abused, as this has been. No other book could have survived such usage. That it still continues to answer its design, and to do good among us, after it has been so bedaubed, so pitched and plastered over with one silly conceit or another, proves its consummate excellence, proves how copious and full, how constant, steady, and true it is to its main end and object, so that there is no way of wholly putting out its moral light, unless every chapter, nay, almost every verse of it, be completely bunged up with theology. I wonder no body ever took it into his head to maintain, that it ought to be read Bespondov, one line forwards, and the next backwards, or up and down, like the Chinese, or that the two columns, where it is so printed, ought to be read across, in the manner of Papyrius Cursor. If it is to be explained so differently from all other books, I do not see why it may not be read differently from all other books. If common sense is to be wholly laid aside in expounding it, why may we not as well lay aside common sense in reading it? 1 verily believe, even then, it would look more like a book of morality than any thing else."

That Gregory Blunt has managed the contest ably, no one can deny; but many will think with us, that a little more attention to the feelings, and a little more forbearance towards the prejudices of those whose creed he attacks, would have been more becoming and

more wise.

WHETHER the articles of the church of England are strictly Calvinistic, or

not, has long been a topic of controversy. The spirit of the English church