pendent nationality in Italy, we shall admit a moral miracle almost unparalleled in the history of the world,

And if the principle of the balance of power is of any value in modern politics, it might, we think, be applied to check incipient designs plainly inconsistent with it, and threatening to disturb the repose of the world. The doctrine of neutrality, at present so much in favour with our people and rulers, is not a very dignified, nor a consistent, nor, as many states have learned by bitter experience, always a safe one. "Neutrality," says Burke, "strongly indicates the love of peace; but mere love does not always lead to enjoyment." The policy of all the nations which were successively destroyed by Rome, was a policy of non-interference. Each state looked on with indifference while its neighbour was in the agonies of a life-struggle, and perhaps enjoyed a malignant satisfaction in watching its dying convulsions, little thinking that the weapons and the spoils of the plundered state would be made use of for its own immediate destruction.

The treaty of peace, which has been so suddenly concluded by the principal belligerent powers, opens questions of great importance to Europe. If the arrangements with respect to Italy, which were made with the concurrence of all the great powers, parties to the treaty of Vienna, can be set aside, or materially modified by another, to which only two of them are parties, a precedent will be established which must render all treaties illusory and insecure. It is scarcely to be supposed that the populations in Italy, whose hopes have been excited, and whose passions have been roused, will tamely submit to the deceit which has been practised on them. The patriotic spirit which has been evoked by Sardinia, and taken advantage of by France, will not subside at the bidding of one by whom the people of Italy justly feel themselves insulted and betrayed. Whether a French army can be intrusted with the task of coercing a nation which they were so recently told it was their glorious mission to free, remains to be seen; but either Austria must resume her material preponderance in the peninsula, and be permitted to "keep down the revolution," or Italy must be henceforth garrisoned by a French army of occupation. We entertain but little doubt that such will be the only positive result of the late intervention. Austrian influence will probably be restricted to the Venetian territory, and Napoleonic liberty will be established, if not "from the Alps to the Adriatic," at least from the Alps to the Mincio, and the pressure of French power will be felt over almost the whole of the Italian peninsula.

Dr Buchanan's Clerical Furlough.

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ART XII.-RECENT PUBLICATIONS.

By

Notes of a Clerical Furlough, spent chiefly in the Holy Land. ROBERT BUCHANAN, D.D. Third Thousand. London: Blackie and Son.

SOME of our readers may be familiar with "The Travels and Voyages" of William Lithgow, the first Scotchman, we believe, who wrote a popular account of Palestine. The success of Lithgow's volume, at a time when books were neither so numerous nor so cheap as they are now, was another proof, added to many, of the affectionate eagerness with which the people of Christendom have turned to every narrative which seemed likely to increase their knowledge of the land of Israel. Not more earnestly did the exiled Jew, when

"Flashed Zion's gilded dome to summer skies,"

welcome tidings from the land of his fathers, or from the "City of Delights," than the people of the West hail accounts of the places on which the Saviour's eyes looked in the days of His sojourn on the earth. Thus, altogether apart from intrinsic merit, almost any volume on Palestine is sure of a remunerative sale. Even in the case of the work of the seventeenth century Scottish traveller, it was so. Lithgow "set forward from Faris," as he quaintly tells us, "in the year of God 1609, March 7th, being brought three leagues on my way with a number of my country gallants, young Aiton, young Hutonhal, with divers other gentlemen: where, when my kindest thanks had overclouded their courtesies, and farewel bid on both sides, I bequeathed my proceedings to God, my body to turmoilpains, my hands to the burden, and my feet to the hard bruising way." In 1770, Lithgow's work had reached an eleventh edition, and, though it has now in some quarters passed out of sight, it may still be met with in the dwellings of the rural population of the south of Scotland, lying beside "The Hind let Loose," "The Scottish Worthies," "Boston's Fourfold State," and "Rutherford's Letters." The author's narratives of hairbreadth 'scapes, of persecutions at the hands of the Papacy, his graphic pictures of Popish and Mohammedan licentiousness, and his easiness of belief when the marvels imposed on him harmonised with his strong prejudices, were sure to make his work a popular favourite. We have referred to "The Travels and Voyages" for the sake of contrast. Nothing can be more unlike the literature of recent Syrian travel than Lithgow's volume. The mode of journeying is equally dissimilar. The "turmoiling-pains," "the hands to the burden," and the weary "feet to the bruising way," might all be looked for in Central Africa, in the footsteps of Barth or of Livingstone; but even young ladies can now "do the Nile at seventeen," and you may travel from Dan to Beersheba, and back again, with less risk of life and limb and purse, than a fellow-citizen of Dr Buchanan might count on from "garotters" in the less frequented streets of Glasgow after dusk.

Scotland has not been behind in her contributions to the literature of travel in the Holy Land, and she can now show a goodly list of authors who have seen as much of Syria as they describe. Messrs M'Cheyne, A. Bonar, Wilson, Keith, H. Bonar, Stewart, Buchanan, Anderson, and Ritchie, have, more or less, spoken to some purpose on their return from the land of Israel. We have much pleasure in welcoming Dr Buchanan's "Clerical Furlough." We took it up after having read, for a special purpose, our old favourite William Lithgow, and could not help feeling that if every author be, even unwittingly, the interpreter of his age, write on what he may, we have not been standing still since Lithgow published his "Travels and Voyages." The contrast between the picturesque descriptions, graphic and animated sketches, and general completeness of solid information contained in the "Furlough," and the hampered style, the credulity, the gossip, and the outstanding, though almost loveable, vanity which cumber the narrative of old Lithgow is very great. It appears, too, that the change on the industrial and social habits of the people of the Holy Land is as striking. Notwithstanding all that has been said as to the men of the East being so devoted to old ways, that they are in their habits all but identical with those who lived in the days of Moses, of David, or at the time when Jesus wandered

"From Jordan's bank to Bethphage height,"

many things are stated by recent travellers which show that Western thought, politics, and, generally, western civilisation, have greatly influenced the so-called immoveable East. This might be very fully illustrated by setting a few extracts from Lithgow in parallel column with some sentences from Dr Buchanan's work, but the space at our disposal forbids.

The state of Dr Buchanan's health in the spring of 1857 made it necessary that he should leave Glasgow for a season. "Four-andtwenty years," he says, "of uninterrupted service in the Christian ministry in a large city" (and, we may add, many years' devoted and self-denying labours in connection with some of the most important and difficult undertakings of the Free Church, of which Dr Buchanan is a distinguished minister), "had begun at length to tell upon my constitution in effects which it seemed unsafe to trifle with. The medicine most needed was a good clerical furlough. .. Where was I to go?.... An esteemed friend, Mr Tennant of Wellpark, who had heard of my perplexity, came in and accosted me in some such words as these: My yacht, the St Ursula, is getting ready for sea. In a fortnight I sail for the Mediterranean. Come along with me. A week will carry you into a warmer climate. I shall go where you like-to Italy, to Egypt, or the Holy Land.'" Happy Dr Buchanan! We almost wish, as we write on this sultry July afternoon, that the "bile and dyspepsia" were ours, if we were sure of such a nobly generous offer as Mr Tennant's! But as there is not the slightest likelihood of this, we must content ourselves with glancing at the "Furlough," which bears not even the faintest trace of those thoughts

Man and His Dwelling-Place.

271

which the doctors say are ever associated with such bodily ills as are now referred to. Even when, in these circumstances, we might have expected that the "moralising mood" would become a snare to the author, we meet only with manly Christian reflections instead.

"The journey," says Dr Buchanan, "will be found to embrace a large proportion of the most interesting localities in the Holy Land. Conducted from Jaffa, on the shores of the Levant, to Jericho and the Dead Sea-from the vicinity of Hebron to the sources of the Jordan-the reader will travel over the entire breadth, and very nearly over the whole length of the land." The author's guiding thought has been, "to gather around his course the manifold associations of Scripture, and by connecting, as much as possible, each successive scene with the sacred history which it so vividly recalls, to make the reader participate in the delightful conviction, which at every step was forced more irresistibly upon his own mind, that the Bible history is, and must be, both real and true." This purpose has been so successfully realised, that Dr Buchanan's work deserves the attention not of personal friends only, but of the public also, and especially of that numerous class of readers who are already well acquainted with the recent literature of Eastern Travel. We believe that the highest testimony we can bear to its merits is, that we have found it fresh and interesting, even after having read the admirable works of Robinson, Van de Velde, Wilson, Stanley, Horatius Bonar, and Porter.

Man and his Dwelling-Place. An Essay towards the Interpretation of Nature. London: John W. Parker and Son. 1859. THE title of this book is modest enough, for, as we learn from the book itself, the writer proposes nothing less than "to unfold the conception that man is such as he is by a want of his true and perfect being, and that he is being raised from this state by having the true life imparted to him; and so to exhibit this conception in its relation to the facts of human life, that it shall be felt to be the solution of the problem of humanity, the true interpretation of history, the key both to what men have thought and what they are." Verily this is a great undertaking! The volume before us may be regarded as the bringing together into one self-consistent and harmonious whole, views which have been separately broached, and are to be found in the writings of a well-known school. In fact, we have here the Maurician exhibition of sin and salvation, and an interpretation of the experience of man as the subject of both.

The starting point of the author is, that "Nature," or the world, is not inert, as it appears to be, but Is; in other words, that behind visible matter is that which lives and acts—that a physical world and a spiritual world coexist, the former the phenomenon, the latter the fact; and that the reason why man is conversant with the phenomenon and ignores the fact, is the defectiveness or deadness of his state. He holds, moreover, that "the work of science is to rectify our thought of nature, and to show that the deadness we perceive is but our own." This

doctrine of man's deadness and the life of nature, is presented in a variety of lights, and illustrated from the Copernican astronomy, and sundry metaphysical arguments are pressed into the service. We are then told that the other great fact of human experience is, that Man (mankind, the race) is being made alive-that Christ is the Redeemer of the world, having obtained the absolute salvation of all men, without exception that men become partakers of the true life, which is the knowledge of God, by believing in Christ, and specially by believing that He saves man, and will subdue all to Himself-and that although many die without faith we are not to be stumbled, but ought to rest in the conviction, that every human being will be eventually saved; for has not the Saviour said, "I will draw all men unto Me." Such is the line of thought which the author pursues. The space at our disposal will not admit of a fuller statement.

The work is ably and earnestly written; the central idea is never lost sight of; and the style is so attractive, that, except in the metaphysical portions, the reader is sure to be absorbed and carried along with never-flagging interest. We regard the book as on this account full of danger to immature yet thoughtful minds, and would be glad to see it thoroughly analysed.

The author is fundamentally wrong both on the subject of man's ruin and on the subject of man's redemption,-sin and salvation. Indeed (however trite the remark may be), inadequate views of man's natural state are the root and spring of false and inadequate views of the Gospel. If the disease be not rightly comprehended or fully fathomed, the remedy cannot be truly known. Now, in this book we are repeatedly assured that man is dead, but nowhere is this deadness defined; and the author expressly refuses to say more in explanation, than that the subject of it is incapable of perceiving the spiritual world. True, he says that "spiritual death is actual death; death in respect to true life and being; the death which constitutes the world a dead world to us. Man is dead to the spiritual, dead to the eternal, dead to that which Is; so that mere passing forms are the realities to him." But then in another chapter he asserts that, "if there were no sin, man were not less dead;" and therefore the defectiveness of which he treats can hardly be that to which the apostle refers, when he speaks of being dead in trespasses and sins. Man's deadness is moral deadness. It consists in the power and prevalence of sin. The deadly thing has entrenched itself in his moral nature, and produced his alienation from the life of God. This death in sin is certainly characterised by blindness-insensibility to real goodignorance of God. Of the two worlds, the physical and the spiritual, he is alive to the former, and dead to the latter. He looks to the things seen and temporal, but has no vital perception of those that are unseen and eternal. He does not "know" God, in the Scripture sense of that expression.

On the subject of "Nature" we can scarcely acquit the author of juggling with words, otherwise he is the subject of a strange misconception. Most true it is, that the spiritual world is all about us;