majesty of this first utterance of mediatorial authority, which for one moment sought its answer deeper than Scripture-"Get thee behind Me, Satan!" But the tempter had also aimed once more to pervert the nature which He had assumed from its integrity in the supreme worship of God: hence the human words which he heard as he retreated, and which told him that Man had vanquished him again,-"It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and Him only shalt thou serve." Thus was all the temptation ended, as it respects both the tempter and the Tempted. The devil departed for a season: but, when he returned, he had no new temptation to bring; nor did the Redeemer, this side His atoning sufferings, encounter any new and unknown trial at the hands of Satan. The issues of the temptation were decisive: it accomplished the will of God, and the first agent in man's ruin was thus pressed into the service of his redemption. The devil left Jesus Conqueror. It is saying but little, that he was foiled in his attempt to thwart the purpose of the Son of God. He lost his cause utterly; his reign in human nature was destroyed; the kingdom passed from him. Get thee behind Me, Satan! was a word of victory, complete and final, over the devil, the enemy of redemption; and the Son of God went on His way to encounter a greater than Satan-sin, his master ; to vanquish it, in its curse, and penalty, and power over man. Redemption was not accomplished in the wilderness, because the hour of atonement was not yet come; but it was decided there that no contradiction of devils should ever hinder it. Hell gave up its power; the strong man was bound; the cross, as it regards the unseen powers of evil, was the final declaration of a victory long since gained,-the open triumph over foes already vanquished. The same truth is placed under another aspect when we regard the temptation as the trial of our Lord's perfect holiness, and its issue as the enforced attestation of Satan to the sinlessness of the Lamb of God. The active victory over the devil must be consummated by the passive expiation of sin. The sacrificial Person whom God had prepared, at once to prove and to procure His grace toward human kind, could not otherwise restore man to the favour of God than by offering up a spotless humanity. Before He received that atonement, it pleased God that the Victim should have a threefold attestation of His worthiness to bear away the sins of the world. These three witnesses on earth were Himself, and Satan, and man. His own attestation-thrice uttered audibly, and always uttered in the secret spirit of Jesus-might have been enough; but He condescended to appeal to the head of all sin, and even to sinful man. Man's testimony, alas, was reluctantly given; but the Which of you convinceth Me of sin? was at last answered in honest sincerity by one man for all :-Truly this was the Son of God. The witness of Satan, the accuser, was of more importance; and that was silently given when he fled from our Lord. "The prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in Me," was met by no denial. He who under heaven knew best the secrets of the Redeemer's spirit durst not, could not, impeach the spotlessness of the final Sacrifice. If our reverence would permit us to suppose the possibility of a renewal of the challenge and counter-challenge touching the integrity of Job, how much more glorious must we suppose the issue to have been! The tempter could not deny, though the father of lies, that Jesus had kept the perfect integrity of His human nature. Nay, he must confess that He had retrieved the honour of our race in those specific points in which it had from the beginning offended God. Man had separated his life from the breath of God, and had taken the apple from Satan instead; but the New Man had gone back from the creature to God again. Man had tempted God in disobedience; but this New Man had gone back to a perfect dependence upon His will. Man had fallen from the law of his being, the supreme worship of his Maker; but Man in Jesus had lived, and moved, and had his being, in God alone. Satan knew that the world must be redeemed: he now saw by what virtue he had been strangely conquered even by feeble men from the beginning. He felt that his hour was come; and that though men, through their unbelief, might share his doom, he had lost humanity. (To be concluded.) SELECT LITERARY NOTICES. [The insertion of any article in this list is not to be considered as pledging us to the approbation of its contents, unless it be accompanied by some express notice of our favourable opinion. Nor is the omission of any such notice to be regarded as indicating a contrary opinion; as our limits, and other reasons, impose on us the necessity of selection and brevity.] The Congregational Lecture for 1855. Ages of Christendom: before the Reformation. By John Stoughton. Jackson and Walford. 1857.-An arduous design is here very creditably executed. "After the revelation of the Divine ideal of truth and order," says the lecturer, "there are four main classes into which the facts of history may be grouped :first, theological processes and conclusions; secondly, ecclesiastical institutes and proceedings; thirdly, spiritual life and experience; and fourthly, various complications of these with the political and secular world without. To point out some of the principal relations in which these classes of events stand to each other, to give such a broad reading of church-history as to show that, in A its multifarious details, there is the working out of a grand epic unity, -to indicate how, amidst changes in theology and polity, spiritual religion, though modified, has not perished, and to trace some of the causes which have produced those changes;-such is our task.” glance at so comprehensive a programme will fascinate that order of readers whom, in particular, the author addresses; and not the less because of the queries which a discussion of these nice and recondite problems is sure to evoke. Many will be disposed to qualify the passages which assume that an Established Church is, of necessity, an Erastian one; and not a few will deem the lectures on "Innovation," A.D. 100-325, amenable to historical criticism. Whether the manybranching theory of sacerdotalism can be traced so far back as to the date here assigned, is, verily, a grave doubt. The affirmative is not to be inferred from the absence, in surviving literature of that early time, of precise and guarded definitions of sacrament or any of the kindred terms; nor is it to be taken as proved by an efflorescence of figurative language in the pages of Tertullian, or by the high episcopal claims of his admirer, Cyprian. Some of us, again, who can appreciate the lecturer's reverential love for great names of the past, may yet confess to some feeling of surprise when he selects for comparative favour those of the medieval period. There is much reason to say, while allowance is made for exceptions on either hand, that the progress of error has been downward, and that the night was deepest just before the sunrise. Yet neither were the men of the fourteenth century all darkness, nor are those of the nineteenth all light. Not to add to the enumeration of queries, we simply note that recent authorities claim for the Vaudois a higher antiquity than Mr. Stoughton acknowledges. In characterizing his volume, we mark with pleasure an amplitude of view, a fidelity to vital truth, and a style flexible with the varieties of his large subject. He is a very moderate Calvinist, if a Calvinist at all; and a very moderate Congregationalist, if not, rather, an Eclectic in church-polity. For proof of the former, see the remarks on Augustine in Lecture VII., and the allusion in Lecture X. to "the narrow view of Christ's dying for the elect alone;"-of the latter, take the following sentences :-The Congregationalists" are wrong in splitting up what ought to be one church, the company of believers in modern towns, into several churches, each with its own Pastor, which in their independent individuality are patches and shreds, often incapable of a right self-government, because they have lost sight of the unity and kind of government existing in the earliest churches." * Again: "I cannot resist the conclusion, that some one of the Ephesian Pastors was chief superintendent of the ecclesia,......& primus inter pares." A few statements of a more general kind, culled from the volume, (ubi mel, ibi apis,) we commend to those who are seeking to hive as much nectar as the fields of modern theological research supply. The passages shall be given, though with the compression which our limits prescribe, yet mainly in the words of the author:-Certain coincidences between the church and the synagogue may be recognised; but archæologists have gone to a fanciful extreme in multiplying the points of resemblance. A Christian church was a new institute, in immeasurable advance of anything which the Jews had witnessed or conceived.-Among the heresies of the first age, when the nature of Christ formed a leading subject of speculation, the errors on that subject related to His humanity rather than to His divinity.-The error of Romanists in worshipping the Apostles as saints, in placing them on an elevation unapproachable, is one the spirit of which extends beyond the Roman pale. It is dangerous to deem apostolic piety the piety of a class; to look on the twelve in their moral endowments as an aristocratic order, in relation to whom all other believers must of necessity compose the commonalty of Christendom.-There is no trustworthy record of the ministry of Christ and the Apostles, except in the Bible. What the early Fathers give, in the way of additional information, is in * In this remark, quoted from Dr. Davidson, the lecturer fully concurs. VOL. IV.-FIFTII SERIES. F a significant; often, quite manifestly the occasion of the second Council held there: if so, for consistency of The Israel of the Alps; a complete History of the Vaudois of Piedmont, and their Colonies: prepared in great Part from unpublished Documents. By Alexis Muston, D.D., Pastor of the Protestant Church at Bourdeaux, Drôme, France. Translated by the Rev. John Montgomery, A.M. With numerous Illustrations. Two Volumes, 8vo. Blackie and Son. Hoping to return erelong to this most elaborate production, we satisfy ourselves for the present with a briefer notice than its high merits claim. On a subject which may be pronounced matchless, it is, undoubtedly, the classic work; and indispensable to those who seek an adequate acquaintance with the ancient Alpine churches, so greatly honoured, so deeply afflicted. It is needless to say that the record is an Iliadmore than an Iliad-of heroisms and calamities. Dr. Muston is warmly commended by Thierry, Michelet, Gilly, and others, whose testimony in regard to Waldensian questions is of the utmost value. He gives us the fruit of fifteen years' assiduous research; having drawn his information-much of it quite new to the public-from the State-Paper Office and the Royal Library of Turin, the Diplomatic Archives of France, the Records of the Council of Geneva, and heaps of official documents preserved at Baden, Stuttgart, Frankfort, Berlin, the principal Swiss cantons, Grenoble, &c.; as well as from a large library of works on the Vaudois, which he describes in a Bibliography of more than ninety closely-printed pages. Details relative to the Vaudois martyrs will be found here collected for the first time. Blanks in the memorable history are supplied. The style of narrative is lively, sometimes even pictorial; exhibiting a freedom from servility to the dry chronological method, and much of the power of a skilful analyst. In a word, (as the able translator observes,) Dr. Muston has succeeded, beyond any preceding author, in bringing "the whole history of the Vaudois into one view; not only that of the Church in the Piedmontese valleys from the earliest period to the present day, but also that of the Vaudois inhabit ing the French territory, of the Vaudois settlement in Calabria, and of the colonies which Vaudois exiles founded, who sought a refuge from persecution in different parts of Germany." Thanks are due to the publishers for the respectable form of the volumes, and the very beautiful engravings by which they are adorned. Josiah Conder: a Memoir. By Eustace R. Conder, M.A. Snow.Composed, to a large extent, of selections from free correspondence, private, literary, and editorial; varying, as the reader is prepared to find, in quality and interest; yet, in the combination, making up the portrait of a gentleman, a scholar, and a Christian. Mr. Conder rendered eminent service to the cause of Dissent; but, in his just esteem, Nonconformity was less than Protestantism, as Protestantism was less than Christianity. Many of his engagements were but little to his taste; and it was painful to a highly sensitive mind to discover that exhausting labours for the public are often requited with neglect, often even with pointed ingratitude. His political and ecclesiastical creed diverges, at sundry points, from our own; and there are passages in this volume, not a few, on which it would be easy to raise discussion. But it is more pleasing to refer to other passages, far more numerous, which contain much quiet, beautiful, devout sentiment, worthy the author of the well-known "Reverie." Geology and Genesis: a Reconciliation of the Two Records. By the Rev. George Wight. Recommendatory Note by Dr. W. L. Alexander. Snow.-Let not Christians be restless for some new mode of proving the agreement of the rocks with the inspired historian : but let them not frown on geology, while it keeps its place, and pursues a philosophical method, that is, a |