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sense of these realities. There is a style of preaching in vogue which leaves these things, in a great degree, out of sight. It presents truth, indeed, truth interesting and useful, but still in its inferior aspects. It advocates religion much on mere economical considerations. It speculates ingeniously on the various problems and uses of social life. It urges moral enterprises on grounds of human compassion and public advantage. Its tone is taken almost solely from the present; and it is the strong impulse of the times to make preaching thus material. But what, in truth, are all these considerations compared with the sublime reality of a God whom we are to meet in judgment? What are all these social interests of men but mere adjuncts to that 'spiritual kingdom of which Christ is Head, and whose end is glory? What are all the motives which earth can furnish compared with the loyalty, the gratitude, the burning devotion, which we owe to Him who bought us with his blood? This is the "kingdom" into which the faithful preacher is to be "instructed." This kingdom he persuades men first to seek. From these realities he brings his most urgent arguments and his tenderest appeals. Recall the names of those throughout all time, who have been mighty in quickening the church and saving souls, and you will find that the secret of their power has been borrowed from vivid impressions of the eternal world. These are impressions which no age can outgrow, and which to no class of men are unsuitable. It was the power of these truths, as uttered by Whitefield, which seamed the faces of the Kingswood colliers with tears of repentance. It was to these truths that the great orator of New England paid tribute when he said, "I want my pastor to come to me, in the spirit of the gospel, saying, You are mortal. Your probation is brief. Your work must be done speedily. You are immortal too. You are hastening to the bar of God. The Judge standeth at the door.' When I am thus admonished, I have no disposition to muse or sleep." Not that the preacher must confine himself to that narrow round of topics which are immediately spiritual; or that he will incessantly aim at a monotonous solemnity: but that, be his preaching various as it may-be it however timely or humane-there will run beneath it all a deep under-tone of spiritual feeling. It will all be, and be felt to be, subsidiary to the establishment of Christ's spiritual kingdom in the individual heart and in the world.

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It is this sense of things unseen which makes the true religion of the affections. This lays hold of the deep springs of feeling. This alone draws forth a truly genial spirit, and teaches us to love men, not merely as brethren of the human race, but as fellow-immortals. This gives courage to toil, and patience to endure, as seeing Him that is invisible. It sweetens

sorrow; it breathes divine communion; it sheds abroad a calm delight; it wakens hope unfading; and, even in this imperfect state, enables saints to sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

He that would preach such a gospel must strive himself to "dwell near the fountain of grace," and drink deeply of its spiritual influences. Of such a man it has been strikingly said, "The most ordinary topics will open themselves with freshness and interest, and the things of the Spirit will display their inexhaustible variety and depth. He will pierce the invisible world. He will look, so to speak, into eternity, and will present the essence and core of religion; while so many, for want of spiritual discernment, rest satisfied with the surface and the shell. This spirit will not allow us to throw one grain of incense on the altar of vanity. It will make us forget ourselves so completely, as to convince our hearers we do so; and, displacing every thing else from the attention, leave nothing to be felt or thought of, but the majesty of truth and the realities of eternity."

It is wholly a mistake to regard the responsibility for the dispensation of truth as confined to the ministry. Not a hearer but has a part in shaping that public sentiment which, for good and for evil, is operating to modify preaching. If the people of God in this land desire a ministry, who, under all the change and pressure of our times, shall still instruct, search, persuade, and elevate their souls, let them remember that they make the preacher. The minister of Christ cannot preach much in advance of his people. If their sentiment is perverted from the simplicity that is in Christ; if they thirst for intellectual entertainment in the sanctuary; if they consider preaching which singles them out, which follows them to the everyday duties and circumstances of life, and probes their secret sins, as meddlesome; they bring a temptation on the ambassadors of Christ, which the most faithful and independent find it hard to bear. Let them rather see to it, that the influence, which assuredly reacts from every individual on the ministry of the day, shall tend to engage the whole force of their talent in the quickening of piety and the saving of souls. Let them require of their preachers that they be thoroughly men of the age; foremost in its movements, informed of its demands, quick to discern its opportunities. Let them require, also, that they be men and preachers for eternity; acknowledging no master but Christ, knowing no man after the flesh, yet knowing every human being as a lost and [it may be] ransomed brother, to whom they bring a message from the King.

ART. IX.-1. Narrative of a Journey round the Dead Sea, and in the Bible Lands, in 1850 and 1851. By F. DE SAULCY, Member of the French Institute. Edited, with Notes, by COUNT EDWARD DE WARREN. Second Edition. London Bentley, 1854.

2. Narrative of a Journey through Syria and Palestine in 1851 and 1852. By Lieut. VON DE VELDE, late of the Royal Dutch Navy, Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. 2 vols. Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons, 1854.

WE are indebted to an Abbot of Iona-that Iona which has been almost consecrated by apostolic Columba and his brethrenfor one of the very earliest accounts of Palestine, as it lay desolate and forsaken. Between the years 680 and 690, about a century after Columba's death, a traveller from that land was cast upon Iona. A vessel was seen labouring on the west coast of Scotland; it had been driven before the blast and was seeking a harbour, and perhaps in part from stress of weather, but in part too from knowledge of the faith that shone like the morning star in that little island, the captain of the vessel turned his helm towards its shore. The Abbot Adamnan hastened to the beach, eager to offer all the hospitality that the island could afford to strangers in distress, little thinking, however, what a treasure was coming into his possession! Among the tempest-tossed crew was Bishop Arculf, from France, a traveller in far-off lands, who had lately trodden the soil of patriarchal and apostolic Palestine, and now found himself, by a strange providence, cast on the soil of that island of the Gentiles which had sent forth its twelve presbyters like apostolic missionaries, to enlighten many nations, and was renowned withal as the burial-place of kings. How singular must have been the feelings of Arculf, so lately in the burning climes of the East, and now exposed to the cold winds of the Hebrides that sent the waves booming into the not far distant caves of Staffa ! What an incident in the life of Adamnan ! How the abbot and the bishop would spend that evening, the one exulting in the unlooked-for opportunity of learning about that land which all took interest in, and the other scarcely less delighted to tell what so few but himself had seen. We can imagine it quite such a scene as Virgil has described at Carthage, "multa super Priamo rogitans, super Hector multa."

We can fancy the conscious self-importance visible in Arculf's travel-worn countenance while he speaks to his eager auditors, and by his graphic delineations turns them almost into spectators, as he tells that "he saw the Holy Sepulchre, and

VOL. III.-NO. IX.

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measured it with his own hands!" "He found few trees upon Olivet, except vines and olives, with wheat and barley in abundance.' "Everywhere he saw camels carrying their burdens, for carriages and waggons are very seldom met with through the whole of Judea." "He found the Lake of Galilee surrounded by thick woods." "He drank at Jacob's Well, which he found forty cubits deep." "He ate of a species of locust, slender and short, which, boiled in oil, forms a poor sort of food." "He saw at a distance the ruins of Capernaum, without walls, on a narrow piece of ground between the mountains and the lake." He intersperses a few wonders: "Alexandria was so large, that though he entered the city at nine in the morning, he hardly reached the other side before dark." "He saw within a church at Gilgal the twelve stones which Joshua took out of Jordan, so heavy that two strong men of the present day could hardly lift one of them!" These, and other such narratives, in which truth was mixed with the marvellous, fed the good abbot's curiosity; nor did he let his guest depart till he had written down from his lips the substance of all he had narrated. His work "Adamnanus (de Arculfo) de Locis Sanctis, Libri III," is still in existence, dedicated, A.D. 698, to Alfred, King of Northumberland.

We give the above as a fair specimen of the kind of information derived from visitors to Palestine in those days. From time to time there were such, fulfilling even then what Moses was led by the Spirit to anticipate,-"the stranger that shall come from a far land" (Deut. xxix. 22) to see "the sicknesses which the Lord had laid upon it." Travellers have multiplied as years have gone on. Once, something like a century would intervene between the record of one pilgrimage and another; then it became common every generation; and now, when, on other errands, “many run to and fro, and knowledge is increased," (Dan. xii. 4), every year furnishes some addition to the list of travellers. But all these we are now referring to are, after all, only travellers; they have not been explorers. They went, and saw, and were delighted, and came away to delight others by their more or less truthful and graphic delineations of places and scenery; but they did not take time to make searching inquiries, or to investigate what was by no means obviously certain. They were, as we have said, travellers, but not explorers; and it is with explorers that we have to do at present, though we could not but take notice of their predecessors, as they did possess the merit of giving an impulse and guiding the steps of their more accurate followers. Too often, however, they trod in the footsteps of those who went before them, or were very much the travellers of whom Bacon complains, that "made diaries in sea-voyages, where there is nothing to be

seen but sky and sea; but in land-travel, wherein so much is to be observed, omitted it for the most part."

Recent explorers have done much, but all readers are not equally pleased with the results of these explorers' diligence. Some would fain not lose old associations with spots which they were accustomed to revere as the undoubted localities spoken of in Holy Scripture. Others are even afraid of the results of such searching investigations; they have misgivings and alarms lest the credit of some Scripture fact be put in jeopardy by such rude hands. These would prefer to retain traditions, however difficult to be reconciled with stubborn facts, if the traditions affect spots long reckoned sacred, lest in disproving the value of these traditions we should suggest suspicions of the accuracy of Scripture itself. We have no sympathy with this class. They are of the same family with those who dread the discoveries of astronomy and geology, lest God should be found inconsistent with himself, instead of being found the God of truth alike in nature and revelation. In researches into the geography of Palestine, it has ever been found—as in all other fair and honest investigations-that if, as to particular spots, a long-existing delusion has been dissipated, it is only that other spots may be substituted on which our hallowed thoughts may rest with all the confidence that evidence can give. We abandon the old belief that Bireh, or Beer, is Michmash, for it has no Seneh or Bozez near it; and in consequence not only obtain all the associations which may be clustered round the Beer or Beeroth of Scripture, but also find ourselves in possession of another locality (to which our being driven from the former by force of conviction was the means of directing our eye), and that too bearing the name Muckmas, with two conical hills guarding its access. We go to visit the spot of Jeremiah's birth and bitter persecutions at Anâta, which is evidently the true Anathoth, and yet we lose nothing. For we join the pilgrims in their visit to Kuryat-el-enab (which they reckoned Anathoth), in order to recognise in it the memorable Kirjath-jearim, where the ark rested long among the humble "hewers of wood and drawers of water" that resided there. Between such cases and discoveries in the natural world a close analogy subsists. Who that believes firmly in a creating God ever for a moment trembled at the inquiries of the physiologist or anatomist, instead of expecting from him with perfect certainty an addition to our previously existing proofs of creative design? Who fears that an investigator in these departments will light on some blunder of the great Creator? Not otherwise ought we to regard researches into the facts and localities of revelation; the only result can be more ample proof in favour of its most perfect accuracy. Such confidence

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