POETRY. THE HARP OF DAVID. Introductory. HARP of David, wake again Oh, I need such soothing lay As of old the monarch heard, When thy music charm'd away All the evils that he fear'd. Darkness gathers o'er the soul, Thoughts tumultuous work within; There the secret thunders roll, There the lightnings flash unseen. To disperse the clouds that lower, But can melody avail, Make the heart with rapture glow, When a thousand fears assail, And the bosom aches with woe? Yes, I feel that dying fall, All my sorrows vanish there; Those vibrations sweet recall David's last prophetic prayer. Harp by minstrel monarch strung, Inspiration touch'd thy chords, While Messiah's reign he sung, King of kings, and Lord of lords! The Seventy-second Psalm. Give the King thy judgments, LordGird with equity the Son; Righteousness attends his word, Justice to the poor is done. Peace his wide dominion fills, He shall give the needy rest, And the mountains and the hills Form a shelter for th' oppress'd. Thee, Messiah, shall they fear, While the sun and moon endure; Ages rise and disappear, But to make thy worship sure. He, his gracious influence pours, As the rain on meadows mown, Grateful as refreshing showers, When the earth is newly sown. Prosperous shall the just be found, Long as moons shall wax and wane. His dominion shall extend Far and wide, from sea to sea; To the earth's remotest end, From the river-it shall be. They that in the desert dwell, Bow before his presence low; Fear his enemies shall quell, And abased be every foe. Kings of Tarshish and the isles, With their gifts his power shall greet; All Arabia lay her spoils Grateful offerings at his feet Every sceptre, every throne, When the poor and needy cry, Sore afflicted and dismay'd; When no other help is nighHe shall interpose his aid. He the destitute shall spare, In the hour of anguish save, By his power shall be withstood Whom the foe would make a poil. He shall live-and Sheba's gold For him, prayer ascend to heaven. Thus his kingdom shall increase, Towering high o'er every hill; Fruits of righteousness and peace, Mountains, plains, and valleys fill. Barren summits where the corn Is but as a handful sown, Crops abundant shall adorn, Waving high like Lebanon. Cities multiply their throngs, As the grass in dewy meads; And the burden of their songs Only celebrate his deeds. Evermore his name shall last, All the world in him be bless'd, And when suns and time are pass'd, Blessings endless on him rest. Ever blessed be the Lord, To these wonders giving birth; Age to age his name record,- Ending with Messiah's reign, REVIEW OF RELIGIOUS PUBLICATIONS. CHRIST as PROPHET, PRIEST, and KING. WE feel unfeigned pleasure in directing the attention of our readers to these Lectures of Mr. Garbett. Though we differ from the author in his views of ecclesiastical polity, and on some other minor points, we can confidently recommend his work as a triumphant defence of the great doctrines of the Reformation. He has nobly attacked, and utterly demolished, the strong holds of Puseyism; and we congratulate the true Protestant members of the Church of England on the appearance in their ranks of a champion who is so admirably qualified to vindicate their cause. His volumes are rendered doubly attractive, by a rare combination of learning with enlarged views of Divine truth. The subjects discussed in the Lectures are-I. The Church and the Commission; II. Christ as High Priest and Sacrifice; III. The same subject continued; IV. Justification by Faith; V. Christ as Teacher and Illuminator; VI. Scripture the Instrument of National Education; VII. The Kingdom of Christ; VIII. Summary of the whole against Papal Rome and the Tractarian Theology. We rejoice that such wholesome truths as the following have been proclaimed from the University pulpit, and in the very face of the Tractarian heresiarchs. Mr. Garbett is showing that Christ is the ONLY PRIEST in his church; this point he proves, from the abrogation of the Jewish priesthood, without any re-enactment in the gospel; from its contrariety to the tone of the apostolic writings, the absence of mysteries, and all other sacerdotal elements. "The more closely you look," observes our author, "into the character of the two dispensations, the more evident it becomes that the presence of an earthly priesthood is not, in itself, any mark of supe. riority; and that, in like manner, the lack of it constitutes no sign in itself of a dispensation inferior in glory and power, if God is better than man, and if faith in heavenly things is a nobler condition than the sight of earthly ones. It is the contrary; and merely to look at the name, and its external trappings the sound and hollow show of an earthly priesthood-is a carnal view of the question, unworthy of the Christian spirit; it is a confusion of the circumstantial with the essential, and an imperfect apprehension of that church whose spirituality has been developed, and its vast superiority established, by the falling asunder of the law of ceremonies, with all its obstacles to a free access to God, and the sensuous representation of the then unknown realities! We have retrograded indeed in symbolical worship-that is not to be denied-but we have grown in the spirit and in the truth; and surely it is no matter of lamentation that realities have supplanted shadows, and the childhood of the elder covenant has been succeeded by that generous freedom into which it has naturally grown. We are men now, and may dispense with childish things; and this is, in short, the truth of the matter, as the gospel presents it to us. It would indeed be an evil, if we had no substitute for an earthly mediation, and if the once incommunicable privileges of the earthly priesthood had, on their removal, left the people of God in helpless separation from Him. But here is the mistake; it is not removed; the right is only enlarged, and the privilege diffused. And granting, for a moment, that the ministry has lost, it is richly compensated by the privileges of the body; the opening of a new way to Almighty God; and that equality of brotherhood, which, in spite of all the distinction of special office, is diffused through all the members of the spiritual family. We have not all an outward commission to teach and rule, nor would it be possible; but we have all alike an internal priesthood, capable in itself of approaching God. All of us who, from the name of Christ, are called Christians,' says Tertullian, 'offer unto God a daily sacrifice, being ordained by God priests of holiness.' So that in the whole priesthood, as in the specific case of intercession, it is a difference of degree, and not in kind, in which the ministry excels the people: the ministry is exalted for the sake of order and edification, but the people are not excluded. "When we consider that the necessity of a priesthood, in the proper sense, is now anything but self-evident, - the facility with which it might have been placed beyond a doubt, renders it incredible that either our Lord or his apostles should have omitted to fix a point of such vital importance to the church, beyond the possibility of mistake to a candid inquirer into the truth-I do not say to a mathematical demonstration, but at least a moral certainty. It is not a secondary question-it is only inferior to the great fact of redemption itself in importance. Yet our Lord is wholly silent upon it; so are the apostles; and no evidence or assertion external to Scripture, could in such a point overcome the scriptural SILENCE, even if that was all! the arguments in the Epistle to the Hebrews subvert it from the foundation; the practice of all the apostles contradicts it; their mode of speaking is irreconcilable with it; it is refuted ex abundanti—with conclusive reasons, and to spare. But We find them preaching everywhere the glad tidings of salvation by faith in Christ; and Almighty God testifying to their supernatural commission by wonders and signs following them. We find them, in the execution of their great office, speaking before kings and governors with an unpremeditated wisdom, which their enemies could neither gainsay nor resist. We find them presiding in councils; ordering churches; ordaining ministers to succeed them in their divine office of feeding and ruling the church. . . But in all this, we find nothing characteristic of a priesthood, or peculiar to its specific functions-nothing of sacrifice, of exclusive mediation, or of their being, as ministers of Christ, the depositaries of mysteries, and sole interpreters of divine things. To find them bearing their exalted charge with meekness of spirit, is only what we should expect, since such a temper is ever a sign and accompaniment of grace, and is compatible, as in the case of Moses, with the most exalted functions, and superiority of office. But there is far more than this-far more than a mere tempering down of an awful office to an occasional and acknowledged condescension; there is, in spite of an eminence above all other men, unapproachable and inimitable by their successors a perfect and evidently unaffected equality in treating on the leading mysteries of the gospel, a sameness of footing in all that regards the approach to God through Christ, and communion with the Spirit-a natural tone of common brotherhood which is hardly compatible with that impassable line which, in the proper priesthood, separates them that bear it, not only in degree and order, but in function and relation to God, from the great body of the church. With what simplicity does the great apostle, in his Epistle to the Romans, speak of his wish to come among them, as a desire to share with them in some spiritual gift of mutual edification. He speaks of no mediate belief, no vicarious trust in any interposing body as Christ's representative, or the substitute of a direct appropriation of the Saviour by faith. A personal and individual faith is the avowed burthen of the Pauline teaching, as it runs through and under that of the other apostles-faith as a living principle, the source and essence of the divine life-no sacramental justification, no priestly absolution, no resting upon men, however consecrated, has any place with him; but a personal peace and joy in believing-forgiveness of sins, in all fulness and freedom, by an individual interest in the Saviour-the inheritance of heaven assured to the heart of each believer, through the identification of the soul with Christ, its Head. The apostolic epistles are usually addressed to the whole body-the church of God which is at Corinth 'the saints which are at Ephesus' for if the apostles claimed as Christians no mysteries of knowledge, still less do they acknowledge it in others. If sins are to be confessed, it is to each othera singular name, as Luther once said, for confession to the priest; if comfort is to be given, it is to and by each other; if absolution and re-admittance of the excommunicated into the communion of the faithful, it is through the consent and co-operation of the whole church. But another decisive proof that the Christian ministry is not a priesthood, but a different order from the corresponding one in the ancient dispensation, is the name which is given to it, and in holy writ applied, with undeviating uniformity, to the bearers of the office. Now the name given is not hiereus, but presbyteros. Had they been identical, it is a moral impossibility that the same title should not have been given, consecrated as it was by scriptural use, by immemorial and solemn association with Divine worship from its very beginning, and conveying not only familiar, but most definite and clear ideas to the Jewish mind.. No, not once is the term introduced into the sacred writings with this connexion; and on the only occasion when it is introduced at all, it applies, as we have seen, not to the ministry, but to the whole body of the church. Ye are a royal priesthood,' 1 Pet. ii. 9. And again in the Revelation, 'Who hath redeemed us by his blood, and made us kings and priests unto God.' Our lips name no other priest but Jesus, and beholding him through faith, the church denotes by its exclusive application of the title, the passing away of the old covenant, and the glorious nature of the new. It was an awful name, even in its ancient symbolism, when pregnant with the mysteries of the future gospel, and the incarnate Godhead; but it has now been so ineffably deepened and hallowed by the revelation of Christ's offices in it, that it is impossible we should attach too solemn a sanctity to it. We cannot be too jealous of its restriction to him, as a testimony on the one hand, to the end of the world, against those who would deny the atonement, and, on the other, against the perilous and unscriptural assumption of the inalienable attributes of the Redeemer by those who have neither warrant to assume the name, nor the strength and grace to sustain the awful burthen of the thing. And when the mind of Christians was quite fresh from the contemplation of Christ in the flesh, there was no such presumption manifested; when they looked at the mysteries of redemption and the exercise of the priesthood by the Son of God, with the poikwong Ovota, which was its accompaniment, even that blood which was once for all poured out upon Calvary, and still sprinkles the glorious vestments in which he mediates before God, there would be a shrinking back from assuming, even in the most remote sense, the title of an office so ineffably sublime-so unsustainable by a created being; and at any rate so utterly unapproachable by a sinful creature. Some of his offices we can, in our measure, discharge; and we have, to bless our ministrations, a portion of that Spirit which was poured on him without measure; but to stand between God and man is not one of them." We quote, also, the following admirable passage on Tradition : ex "The Apostolical Constitutions' hibit, in many respects, a state of things greatly degenerated from primitive principles and practice, and an usurpation of form over spirit, and the true liberty of the gospel, which is essentially judaical. At the same time the unhesitating forgery of the apostolic name, and the assumption of the apostolic authority to rites and precepts which have not the remotest claim to so majestic an origin, bespeak a want of reverential feeling, and a corresponding laxity in defining the bounds of moral principle. It proves, undeniably, an existing facility for the propagation of spurious writings in the Christian communities at large, which renders indispensable the most rigid and jealous scrutiny into traditions which there was so powerful an interest to establish, such unprincipled ingenuity to forge, such simplicity to accept, and such credulous obedience to follow. "The third and fourth centuries swarmed with pious frauds, among which I need only mention the Clementines, Dionysius Areop., the interpolations of Origen by Ruffinus, and many others. But to make it worse, it was done on principle. Deceit for holy purposes was a principle of Origen, drawn from the school of Ammonius, and transferred to the system of the Alexandrian divines. Even Jerome, whilst he vehemently inveighs against Origen's principle, is himself guilty of it; and one of the greatest of the Fathers, Chrysostom, in his book upon the priesthood, advocates deceit, μετ' ὑγιους γνωμης, and insists on entitling it not falsehood, but speaking кar' οικονομίαν και σοφιαν nor do his limitations at all make his position tenable or scriptural. Such are the substitutes whom, on ecclesiastical points, in which they were profoundly interested to exaggerate and misrepresent, we are called upon to put on a par with the 'very truth' of the inspired Scriptures!" We sincerely hope that Mr. Garbett's Lectures will be published in a smaller form, so as to become more generally accessible. In Dr. Davidson has already raised himself to the first rank as a biblical scholar. the sister island he has been long known as the indefatigable and highly accomplished teacher of sacred literature in the Belfast institution; and his late masterly work on Biblical Criticism has introduced him advantageously to the knowledge of learned men in this country, in America, and on the continent of Europe. We cannot but congratulate the friends and promoters of the Lancashire Independent College, upon their recent appointment of such a man as Dr. Davidson to the chair of sacred literature. He would be an honour to any collegiate institution in the world; and, with such a colleague as Dr. Vaughan in the theological chair, it cannot be that the College should not rise to a high standing. The work before us is, properly speak. ing, a continuation, or rather completion, of Dr. Davidson's Lectures on Biblical Criticism. In these Lectures the author, in a lucid and instructive manner, anfolded the various principles by which the sacred text is adjusted in the "Sacred Hermeneutics," he has laid open to the theological student the great general rules by which he is to be guided as a biblical expositor, in ascertaining and exhibiting the meaning of the accredited text. In executing this important task, Dr. Davidson has not only suggested the fundamental principles which must regulate a sound theory of interpretation, but he has fully exemplified them, and thereby rendered them at once intelligible and practical. "As it would have been comparatively useless to state naked precepts apart from the mode in which they should be applied in exegesis, numerous examples are given, which may lead the inquiring student to a right apprehension of the extensive operation of a few hermeneutical laws." We can have no hesitation in affirming, that no work has yet appeared in our language to render the production of such a volume as Dr. Davidson's unnecessary. Referring to treatises of similar pretension, our author very justly observes, that "they are unnecessarily brief, encumbered with a multiplicity of rules, deficient in examples, objectionable in arrangement, or partially antiquated." We cannot but commend the discretion which has excluded from these pages certain topics which have ordinarily been introduced into works devoted to hermeneutics. Dr. Davidson is of opinion that questions pertaining to emphasis and figures of speech belong to other departments than to the one which he has sought to occupy, and has therefore omitted them. In dealing, too, with the principles of prophetic interpretation, he has incorporated them with other portions of the volume, instead of treating them separately by themselves. One great recommendation of Dr. Davidson's plan, is the pains which he has taken to aid the student in making the Bible expound itself. "The book," he observes, " contains general, not special hermeneutics. With the former, it is wholly occupied. This arose from the leading idea that guided the author, viz., that the Bible should be, as far as possible, its own interpreter. The manifestation of such a plan is prominent throughout. It has been kept steadily in view. Hence special hermeneutics have been avoided, and hence, too, the hermeneutics of the Old and New Testaments have been combined, after the manner of the old writers. In special hermeneutics great room is afforded for the introduction of doctrinal sentiments previously held, and the influence of theological creeds previously prescribed. They embody, in general, the doctrinal systems of a particular individual, which is brought to bear upon the exposition VOL. XXI. of Scripture in an order the reverse of right. Avoiding a procedure so objectionable, the author of the present volume has studied to simplify the principles of interpretation as much as possible, so that all Christians, sincerely professing to receive the Bible as the word of God, may be disposed to acquiesce in them as certain and self-evident. They have been, in some degree, axiomated, which can only be done with success, by resting on the broad basis of Scripture and common sense together." Great labour has been bestowed by Dr. Davidson, on two branches of biblical interpretation, of great importance to the Christian student, viz., the quotations from the Old Testament in the New, and the apparent contradictions of Scripture. These two subjects are most copiously handled, and with a degree of conclusiveness most creditable to the research and learning of the author. The spirit in which this elaborate work has been undertaken and executed is pre-eminently Christian. "By the kind providence of God," the author says, "he has been enabled to bring it, such as it is, to a termination; and it is his humble prayer, that it may tend to promote the intelligent study of the Holy Scriptures, to restrain error, and to check the influence of unsound exposition. It is of pre-eminent importance, that a healthy piety, founded on clear apprehension of Divine truth, should be formed and matured. Dangerous sentiments, professedly drawn from the word of God, are widely afloat in the religious world. Delusive views of essential doctrines are fearfully prevalent. It becomes, therefore, the imperative duty of each one who undertakes to expound the Bible, to have certain fixed principles by which he may be guided amid the rubbish of antiquated notions, and the accumulation of ingenious novelties thrown in his path. Let him seek for truth, and truth alone, undismayed by the opprobrium of sect, the standard of party, the fear of heresy, the tyranny of prejudice, or the current of opinion-the Bible being his only infallible text book. To understand its paramount disclosures, he should bring all the perspicuity and learning he may possess, unswayed by the dogmas of any creed, however wisely framed, or industriously lauded. Let him strive to attain, under the influence of the Holy Ghost, those broad, comprehensive views of revelation, which shall at once settle and enlighten the mind, while purifying the heart from selfishness and sin. If rules have only a negative effect, they will not be worthless; if their only tendency be to keep away from false opinions, claiming to be derived from the word of God, they will not be propounded in vain but if they have a positive as well as negative character-if they be adopted to open up the true meaning, no less than to T |