of the question much ground of partisan appeal. It falls so completely into agreement with all that experience teaches us as to human nature, that any one can make out as fair an argument from experience as from Christianity. And in this, we think, Christians will rejoice, as it puts in so far a period to unseemly disputing over the most sacred truths.

We have not touched on all the points made in M. de Laveleye's most interesting paper, but we have omitted some of the principal. With many of his criticisms on the English school, we are thoroughly at war with him, and we are astonished at being obliged to say so much in their defence. But we do maintain with them, in opposition to their continental critics, that there is a science of economy, that it is a science whose function is to master laws common to both nature and human nature, and that all true economic progress, like all true political progress, is toward freedom.

ROBERT ELLIS THOMPSON.

NEW BOOKS.

JONAH, THE SELF-WILLED PROPHET.-A Practical Exposition of the Book of Jonah, together with a Translation and Exegetical Notes. By [Rev.] Stuart Mitchell. Pp. 247. 12mo. Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen & Haffelfinger.

THE BOOK OF THE PROPHET ISAIAH; with Introducton, Commentary and Critical Notes, by Rev. W. Kay, D. D., and the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, and his Lamentations; with Introduction, Commentary and Critical Notes, by R. Payne Smith, D. D., (being Vol. V. of The Holy Bible, according to the authorized Version, with an Explanatory and Critical Commentary, and a Revisal of the Translation, by Bishops and other Clergy of the Anglican Church. Edited by Rev. F. C. Cook, Canon of Exeter.) Pp. 606. Lexicon octavo. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co. These two volumes, differing in their size and style, as also in the nationality and the ecclesiastical affiliations of their authors, are yet books of strictly the same class,-half scientific, half popular com. mentaries upon Hebrew prophets for English readers. They mark the new and vigorous interest in the Bible which characterizes these days, and which has led to the publication of more works designed to explain and illustrate it, than ever appeared at any other period of the Church's history. Very few works on systematic theology

are now produced in England and America; comparatively few on ecclesiastical history. But the fertility of the expositors and the translators of expositions compensates for this deficiency. This is owing, we think, very largely to the extension of Sunday-Schools, and the consequent demand for biblical apparatus on the part of the teachers. It is partly owing also, no doubt, to the controversies raised in regard to the authenticity and genuineness of the books of the Bible, which have spread from Germany into England. Canon Cook's commentary, for instance, was begun at the time of the agitation over Bishop Colenso's assault on the Pentateuch, and is commonly known as "the Speaker's commentary," because the Speaker of the House of Commons presided at the meetings which decided on its preparation, and made the arrangements. A third cause of the growth of exegetical literature is in the reform of the pulpit and its methods. There probably never were so many good preachers as there are at present, and every fitting source of intelligent interest is freely used by them. Instead of the old logically constructed sermon, with its heads and tails, exordium and peroration, conclusions for use and conclusions for doctrine, there is an almost total freedom from conventional arrangement, and a growth of the homiletic method into a new popularity. Thus sermons grow into books of exegesis, as Mr. Stuart Mitchell's on Jonah have, and sermons excite the interest in the subject, which leads men to buy and to read commentaries.

Commentaries of the sort to which these two belong labor under the disadvantage of exactly suiting neither the learned nor the unlearned. Each class get too little of what they especially want; and too much of other matter. Even in Germany this is felt to be a very troublesome feature in such commentaries, and some writers-like Rudolph Stier, have for this reason reduplicated their commentaries, by making a separate book for each class of readers. Others publish their learned exegesis separate from the bulk of the book, and only for those who desire it, the rest being complete in itself. Mr. Mitchell has made a very strict separation of the two elements, confining the learned notes to the pages which immediately follow the revised translation, and devoting the bulk of the book to a series of homiletical expositions suited to all capacities. We should infer from these that Mr. Mitchell is a vigorous and interesting preacher, a man of strong convictions and decided speech. His theology is not variegated moonshine and pretty pettiness of thought and phrase; it is the theology of the Covenanters and of the Puritans. We do not say so as unqualified praise: a theology which takes tone from the spirit of our own age, and measures its conclusions by current opinions, is to our minds, as to Mr. Mitchell's, a very poor affair; but when a theology which takes tone from the spirit of the seventeenth century, and measures its opinions by the conclusions of that more vigorous age, is set over against the former, there is

something to be said on both sides. And if there is no Spirit of all ages to reconcile these partial views, and lead us into truth larger than either, then the history of theology is to be forever a miserable squabble between old and new, with no chance or prospect of unity, instead of a wise bringing forth out of the treasure things old and new. Mr. Mitchell's book, in all its theological substance, belongs to the past; there is nothing new in it, save more vigorous statement and fresh illustration of conclusions which had already been reached when the Westminster Assembly met. And he is a type of a very large class of modern theologians, who think that no change or advance is needed, except in the manner, style and tone of the modern churches.

Considered as a work of exposition, Mr. Mitchell's book is rather above the average of such books. All the details are handled with udgment and with learning. There is a freedom from platitudes, and from wordiness, which is excellent. But in grasping the whole purpose and compass of the book, we think he comes short of the mark. Jonah is a very remarkable piece of writing, and a very bold man he must have been that wrote it. There is no such rebuke of the narrow and Pharisaic notion of God's kingdom, as entertained by the Jews in later times, to be found anywhere, except in some of the Parables of Christ and the Epistle to the Romans. All that is narrow and bitter in the Jewish people seems to be condensed to its quintessence in this bilious prophet; his state of mind is exactly that of the older son in that Parable, which we call the Parable of the Prodigal Son, but is really the Parable of the other son. That parable, we do not hesitate to say, is the masterpiece of all literature; and one of its finest touches is the abruptness of its closedivine and fatherly mercy pleading with human stupidity and respectability for sympathy. And how like to it is the close of Jonah, save that the prophet's surly but manly "Yea, I do well!" carries us just one step farther ere the curtain drops on the representative of Jewish exclusiveness and bigotry. Mr. Mitchell does not see any such meaning in the book; chiefly-we think because he was looking everywhere for lessons and warnings to a class of persons entirely different from those at whom the book was aimed. Dr. Hay's commentary on Isaiah, and Dr. Smith's on Jeremiah, are the productions of men who represent very different schools in the Church of England, and of men who differ in a very marked way as regards their mental idiosyncrasies. They are both scholars, men of learning and of patience, if not of great insight and critical divination. What their actual gifts are capable of achieving, they have achieved, each in his own way. Dr. Kay possesses much patristic and rabbinical scholarship, and uses it judiciously. He is a severe traditionalist, and has no craving for new conclusions, nor even for new sources of knowledge. He rejects the light cast on the period of Isaiah by the decipherment of the cuneiform inscriptions, as

utterly uncertain, pleading the contradictory interpretations of dif ferent decipherers. In this he has the sanction of nearly all the scholarship of Germany, and even of such an impartial critic as Marcus Niebuhr, the worthy son of the Historian of Rome. Only in England and in France have Assyrian studies attained general recognition as a basis of historical reconstructions. We think, however, that Dr. Kay has lost more than he has gained by this proceeding, if his object be to bring home to his readers the reality of Isaiah's life and mission, and the lessons it conveys to us. The concession that the decipherment is trustworthy, might, indeed, carry with it some admissions as to the literal accuracy of some of the predictions. We think that between the literalists and the negativists, the prophets suffer about equally on either hand. And it is curious that the same passage is sometimes a stumbling stone for them both. For instance, in the famous prediction (chap. x., v. 28, etc.) in which Isaiah depicts the eager and hasty march of the Assyrians upon Jerusalem, he describes them as leaving the ordinary road to take a short cut across deep wadys and nearly impassable defiles. Now, if the prophesy had been written after the event, as one party asserts of nearly all the prophecies, no such route would have been described, for none such was pursued. And if the prophets were gifted with the arbitrary power of literal prediction, beyond and farther than a divinely given insight into the great principles which underlie and determine the historic movement of the world, this inaccuracy would have been equally avoided. But from the true point of view, the passage is devoid of all difficulty; the language it employs is simply the strong, fervent language of passionate warning, by which Isaiah would awaken his people to the fierce and relentless character of their dangerous enemy in the East.

On the controversy, started last century by Koppe, as to the unity of authorship, Dr. Kay opposes himself to the great preponderance of critical authority in maintaining that Isaiah wrote not only the greater part of the first forty chapters, but the whole sixty-six. We think the conclusion is correct, but for very different reasons from those that he urges. Every prophecy has its own local atmosphere; and such a thing as counterfeiting or inventing this is unknown to ancient literature. Now the horizon of the last twenty-six chapters, as well as of the whole book, is that of Palestine; never that of the land of the captivity, in which the negative school find their Deutero-Isaiah, their Great Unkown. Her vineyards, and cornfields, and threshing-floors, are the mental furniture of the prophet. He has never seen, and he belongs to a people who have never seen, the things that suggest the imagery of Ezekiel and Daniel. We admit the force of the difficulty presented by the mention of Cyrus. The prophet was no utterer of oracles; he was a practical teacher, speaking to men of his own times, in language which ought to be intelligible to those who heard him, and which only the hardness of

their hearts should have made meaningless to them. Therefore we are puzzled at finding him apparently specifying the name of a deliverer, who lived nearly two centuries after his era. Solutions have been offered, as for instance that of Möller and Strachey, that for Koresh or Cyrus, we should read Kadosh or Holy One, the only difference being the exchange of two Hebrew letters which are exceedingly like each other. Others suggest that Cyrus was like Pharaoh, the generic name of the Persian Kings, and that the overthrow of the great idolatrous power of the Euphrates valley by the vigorous idol-hating Aryans of the mountains beyond the valley might have been foreseen by a man of divine insight, and might have been both intelligible and comforting to a nation of idol-haters who were already trembling before the threatenings of Assyria. These solutions may not be satisfactory; some other and better may or may not be offered. But we can neither give up the true conception of the Hebrew prophet nor the unity of the works of the greatest.

In Jeremiah Dr. Payne Smith has even a more difficult task than Dr. Kay had in Isaiah. Few prophets deserve so much study, and few display so fully the workings of a human heart under the divine education which made the man a prophet. Few offer such difficulties to those who hold any of those mechanical and pagan theories of inspiration, which pass for orthodox with the religious world, and which rest on a bald antithesis of divine and human. While Ezekiel is the Milton, and Isaiah the Wordsworth plus Burns of the prophets, Jeremiah is now Cowper, now Tennyson. His is a sensitive and shrinking nature, shaken to its very core by the stern message he is sent to bear. That men saw both Elijah and Jeremiah in Christ— both the sternest and the tenderest of the prophets shows how rounded and complete a nature was there. Our commentator is fairly alive to all this, and there is more freshness and warmth of life in his work than in Dr. Kay's. There is also a fuller acquaintance with the results of modern critical investigation, and a greater readiness to receive suggestions from it. Dr. Payne Smith definitely accepts the cuneiform decipherments as settled and authoritative, a disagreement of Doctors which reads rather funnily in two works bound up in the same volume, and revised by a common editor.

ers.

We observe that both expositions have been very unfavorably criticised by English reviewers, but mostly because the standpoint occupied by their authors did not coincide with those of the reviewBut we think that a more candid catholic view of the subject will lead to the conclusion that they are the best works of their class on the subject that have appeared in English. We say of their class, for they do not fairly come into comparison with commentaries meant for scholars only. On the other hand, we think that the pith of these books is given much more clearly in the compass of a few sermons in Maurice's Prophets and Kings, and that Sir Edward Strachey's Hebrew Politics in the Times of Sargon and Sennacherib