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some easier way of getting the sunken masses elevated, and the waste places of society reclaimed; they would fain have the State to do it for them; they would fain be relieved from the toil and discomfort of making so many appeals to those around them for sympathy and aid; they would like to get to Canaan without going through the wilderness. But it cannot be. If the Churches will not awake and arise-if they will not deny themselves and take up their cross-the field cannot be won. In point of fact, it is, we firmly believe, by conflicting with the difficulties of the enterprise-by being driven to feel that in no other way than by personal sacrifices-sacrifices of pains and prayer-sacrifices of time, and money, and labour

-can the end be gained; it is in this very way that the religious life of the Churches will be quickened and called out into energetic action, so that they shall at length, by God's blessing, be prepared to do battle in right earnest with the adversary, and to cast him down.

ART. VIII-Sir William Hamilton and the Apocalypse.- His Reply to the "British and Foreign Evangelical Review.”

In the new edition of his "Discussions," Sir William Hamilton has thought proper to reply, at considerable length, to our remarks on his treatment of the Apocalypse in the first edition. In ordinary circumstances, it is not the part of a Review to notice such animadversions on its contents. But the quarter from which, in this case, the criticism comes, and the bearing of the criticism itself on the character and credit of our Journal, may justify, if it does not require, some relaxation of the rule. The following notes will enable our readers to judge for themselves how far Sir William Hamilton has succeeded in vindicating his statement regarding the Apocalypse, and illustrate his peculiar style of writing on subjects of this nature.

The first thing which surprises the reader of Sir William Hamilton's reply is, that he should be at such pains to answer what he affects to regard with sovereign contempt. Six pages of closely printed matter are spent in making out a case for his original statement, in reply to an objector whom he represents as ignorant of the very alphabet of his subject. The impartial reader will be apt to think that such stupid lucubrations should have been left to refute themselves, while a detailed and elaborate reply looks as if there were something in them which Sir William had not the generosity to admit.

The next thing one notices is the effort which the author makes to draw off the impression which the original statement was fitted to convey. His only object, he says, was to show "that the authenticity of the Apocalypse is an open question, and may be orthodoxly doubted, and in caution and diffidence canvassed." Had that been all, we should not have meddled with it. But both the connection in which it stands, and the language in which it is couched, con

vey a great deal more. He had been showing that the German rationalists, in the freedoms they take with the books of Scripture, are in very good company, Luther himself having shown as much irreverence towards several of the canonical books; in proof of which, he extracts some of the worst things the reformer wrote about certain books of Scripture, ending with the Apocalypse. On coming to this book, he expresses his wonder that fault should be found with any opinion that might be taken up regarding it; and asks his Cambridge opponent, if he was ignorant that the canonicity of that book had every Protestant and Calvinist name of any consequence more or less against it? It was to prove this point that Sir William produced his list of divines and scholars, reporting their views of the Apocalypse in terms of studied disrespect towards that book-terms the reverse, certainly, of" caution and diffidence." This list it was our one object to examine seriatim.

To do this necessarily required some space; but while we have been a great deal too long, we have at the same time been far too short to please our author. As his names began at the Reformation, our examination of them naturally did the same. But we ought, he says, to have gone into the whole history of opinions touching the Apocalypse in the early Church; failing which, he has been obliged to do it in part himself" from Caius the presbyter, c. 250," to "the fourth council of Toledo, 633." To have travelled so far out of our record would have been "prolixity" indeed. But it was for no such reason that we left out these facts of his, Sir William tells his readers. It was from sheer ignorance. Not only were we a stranger to what those who cannot read the original authorities will find in Bishop Cosin, Jeremiah Jones, or any good book on the Canon, and in every modern Introduction to the New Testament-facts which lay within a few yards of us in a dozen forms-but we had never heard of there being any "dubiety in the early Church" about the canonical claims of the Apocalypse; and on this generous supposition, the omission, says our author, "may be excused." In two other instances-one of which will presently be noticed, the other we decline to touch-Sir William has recourse to that most undignified of all controversial tricks-holding up his opponent as an ignoramus. If the learned baronet were not too much addicted to this species of warfare with opponents of higher name than ours, this might have discomposed us a little. As it is, we leave the matter with our readers, whose only business is with the statements advanced on the question at issue.

We cannot trust ourselves to comment on a charge of "unfairness" brought against us by our author, the baselessness of which is only equalled by the shameful imputation of dishonesty with which it is coupled. He says, we "decapitated the quotation of his words [by omitting the words, "besides Luther," at the beginning of his statement], to avoid letting the reader know that the inspiration of the Apocalypse had been denied by Luther." What will our readers say, when we inform them, that the head we are charged with striking off was never on; that the words "with Luther," whose omission on our part is complained of, were neither the head nor the tail of Sir William's statement; that they are not in the passage at all, as it stood in

the only edition of the "Discussions" existing when we wrote our comment on it; and that they are now, for the first time, inserted in the second edition, some six months after the author was in possession of our critique! That Sir William knew he was charging us with omitting what had no existence when we wrote, we will not say, and do not for a moment believe; though, if one may judge from his antecedents, our author would, in like circumstances, have both said and believed it of any opponent whatever; but this we will say, that unfairness in controversy is about the last thing which, after this, Sir William Hamilton should charge upon any opponent.

"Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes?"

But now for the substance of the question between us-our author's list of "Protestant and Calvinist divines who have doubted or denied the canonicity of the Revelation." Foremost in this list, after Erasmus, stood Calvin and Beza. In opposition to this, we affirmed it to be "notorious that both Calvin and Beza held the Apocalypse to be a canonical book," referring any who might not be aware of the fact to their own writings. Sir William's answer is characteristic. The reviewer's "imagination (he says) that a divine quoting and reasoning from a scriptural book affords the best of all reasons to infer his conviction of its inspiration, shows that he is little versed in theological speculation, or read in theological writings of any kind." By way of proof positive, reference is made, as usual, to the writings of Luther, to which our author has paid a good deal of attention for some timewith what laudable object is pretty well known. He tells us numerically how many times" the Megalander" has cited," without proscription, those books of Scripture, the authenticity of which he more or less explicitly denied the Apocalypse, 103 times." All reference, therefore, to the way in which Calvin and Beza speak of or cite the Apocalypse, to prove their belief in its "canonicity," is useless. So confident is Sir William in this inference of his, that he sounds, in the following style, the trumpet of victory before he has fought the battle: The journalist's single commonplace of argument is thus shown to be radically naught; and the principle being subverted, it would be idle to evince the futility of its application in detail. And while the fact of the assumption being vicious is certain, why it is so is too manifest for mention." Now, on the simple principle that one fact is worth a thousand inferences, we shall convict Sir William of error, and turn his contemptuous language upon himself. We shall not be drawn into new matter, by considering how far, even as respects Luther, the facts stated by our author will be found to bear the weight which he lays upon them. We abide by our original assertion, that the writings of Calvin and Beza prove them to have held the canonical and divine authority of the Apocalypse.

To begin with Beza, the following is the commencement of his Prolegomena to the Apocalypse :-"Since it is long since some have hesitated about the authority of this book, I will first refute in a few words the arguments usually adduced on that side, and then state my own view. I will give the arguments as they have been carefully and industriously collected by Erasmus, whose own judgment, however, on

this as on many other subjects, seems to me to have been so wavering, that one cannot easily discover what he held, save that he seems at last to have come the length of inclining to think that some authority belongs to this book, though not what attaches to those books which have been received without controversy." He then proceeds to refute the five arguments to which he reduces all that has been alleged against the canonical authority and apostolic authorship of this book; concluding with that passage which we quoted in full in our former paper, but of which we must here repeat a sentence or two, that our readers may see what transparent evidence Sir William Hamilton can resist :"As to the book itself, although I confess myself one to whom these mysteries seem very obscure, yet when . . . . when, in fine, of the predictions which it contains some have already been manifestly fulfilled, as, for example, those relating to the destruction of the Asiatic churches, and to the kingdom of that harlot that sitteth upon the seven hills, I come to this conclusion, that it was the design of the Holy Ghost to collect into THIS MOST PRECIOUS BOOK (in hunc pretiosissimum librum) such of the predictions of the ancient prophets as remained to be fulfilled after the coming of Christ, and to add to these some others, such as he knew to be of importance to us. Very great obscurity, I acknowledge, there is in them; but this is nothing new in the writings of the prophets, and especially Ezekiel's. Farther, it is a shame to us that we do not study these matters more attentively in detail, and that, engrossed with our own private affairs, we do not observe those providential judgments of God which are daily occurring in the administration of his church. In a word, the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, has exactly tempered the light of the prophecies to what he foresaw it would be for the good of the Church to know. It remains, therefore, that men search these mysteries of a holy God, so far as allowable and profitable, with godly fear, but that all should ADORE the mysteries of God contained in this book-both those which they understand and those which they understand not-rather than, as some do, either DERIDE them, or by their fanatical comments pollute them."

With all this before his eyes, Sir William Hamilton not only refuses to withdraw the name of Beza from his list of those who have "denied or doubted the canonicity of the Revelation,"-not only retains him in the same category with Erasmus, whose doubts about that book he elaborately refutes, but takes upon him to hold us up to ridicule for "imagining" that Beza's way of writing about the Apocalypse is any proof at all that he held it canonical; and, because we will not accept his inferences from Luther, as evidence of Beza's opinions, in the face of express testimony from Beza himself, represents us as ignorant of all theological literature. Offensive as this is, it is even more ridiculous.

Before leaving Beza, we request the reader's attention to the extreme diffidence which he expresses as to his ability to penetrate the mysteries of the Apocalypse, at the very time that he is rebutting objections to its canonical authority, characterising it as exceeding precious, rebuking the prevailing indifference to its disclosures, and inviting a devout and adoring study of its contents. Sir William Hamilton sets the one of these against the other-from the admitted diffidence of Beza as to the sense of the Revelation, he infers, in opposition to fact,

We

that he "denied or doubted the canonicity of the Revelation." pointed out, in our former paper, this confusion of two very different things into which our author had fallen. But the learned baronet is not the man to own a mistake. So far from owning it, he makes it a great deal worse; interpreting the humble acknowledgments of those great divines, that they were not able to expound the Revelation, into an assertion that "it actually reveals nothing." This is such a shameful perversion of facts staring him in the face while he was penning it, that we must give it in his own words: "Finally," says he, "before leaving generals, I have simply to state what I have presumed to be, and acted on as, true. 1st, Protestants prohibiting the ecclesiastical employment of a book, virtually express their suspicion, at the least, that such book is not the Word of God. [To this point we shall come by and by.] 2d, The same (suspicion of its not being the Word of God) is likewise implicitly confessed in the acknowledgment that what professes to be of revelation, nay calls itself The Revelation,' actually reveals nothing." He adds this artful sentence: "The application of these principles, it is surely not requisite in the following notes specially to signalise." So, although a number of divines should be found expressing, in so many words, their faith in a book of Scripture as divinely inspired, and refuting objections to its canonical authority, they may have after all denied or doubted the authority of said book, because Luther acted in that way; and when we find them regretting their inability to open the apocalyptic scheme, that means that there is nothing to open!

Having said so much about Beza, there is the less need to stay long upon Calvin. In opposition to our author's assertion, that he too "doubted or denied the canonicity of the Revelation," we said, that "any one, even moderately acquainted with his Institutes, could rebut Sir William's statement for himself." No matter, replies our author, what Calvin may have said, either in his Institutes or anywhere else; and whoever, after the way in which Luther treats the canonical books, will rely on the language of any other Reformers about any book in Scripture, as evidence of their faith in it, is a tyro in theology. Well, let us try the honesty of Calvin by this test.

In one place he distinguishes emphatically between an argument for Purgatory drawn from the Apocalypse, and one drawn from the Maccabees; repelling the former, not on the ground of any hesitation about the book, but simply as being based on a misinterpretation of the passage, while of the latter he says, "What is adduced from the Maccabean history, (2 M. xii. 43), I will not dignify with an answer, lest I should seem to place that work in the catalogue of the sacred books,"-adding that even those in the early church who admitted it as a useful book, distinctly disclaimed its authority in matters of doctrine.* The inference from this, as to Calvin's view of the Apocalypse, is obvious. He quotes, as "Scripture," Rev. xiv. 13, against praying for departed saints;+ against indulgences, Rev. vii. 14; against the Romish worship of angels, Rev. xix. 10, and xxii. 8, 9; § and Rev. xxii. 18, alongside of Deut. iv. 2, as jointly condemning those "who, rejecting the command

*Calv. Inst., i. v. 8.
Ibid., iii. v. 10.

† Ibid., iii. v. 2.
§ Ibid., i. xii. 3, and xiv. 10.

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