itching to have a bishop or two burned for the benefit of Episcopacy and to "diminish Dissent;" and it may be large enough to fill up the gap into which its author thrusts it. COMMENTARY ON THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. By Dr. A. Tholuck. Transslated from the Fourth Revised and Enlarged Edition by the Rev. R. L. Brown, M.A. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, George-street. BIBLICAL COMMENTARY ON THE EPIS TLES OF ST. JOHN, in continuation of THESE two works constitute the seventh and eighth volumes in the Third Series of Clark's Foreign Theological Library, and are both entitled to more than mere ordinary attention. The Commentary of Tholuck has gone through so many editions, and been given over to the English public in so many forms, that it must now be pretty extensively known. The subject is one of almost unequalled breadth and depth; nor does even this exposition exhaust it. We do not say this to depreciate Dr. Tholuck's labours. Far from it. He has done much to elucidate the text, and to render more definite and certain the exegesis; but if the Sermon on the Mount be the law of moral being, and if obedience to the law has, on the part of man, the condition of life, then it still remains to be shown wherein lay the wisdom of the world's Great Teacher in giving such prominence to this fact at the introduction of Christianity, unless the perfect righteousness which He required in His followers as the condition of their entrance into the kingdom of heaven was represented as a reality in himself. This is the key to the interpretation of the Sermon; and until it is viewed and set forth in this light, it will ever prove a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. We accept the present work as one of the best on this great subject, persuaded that, as he has opened the door into this holiest, others will enter in. As to the Epistles of St. John, we hold them to be among the most profound utterances of the Christian Inspiration; and long and wistfully have we been looking for an exposition equal to their claim. The little volume of Lücke comes far short of the mark, though there are passages in it of much value, and which we should be sorry to lose. The work of Ebrard is a positive advance upon that of Lücke, and offers more to the student than has hitherto been within his reach on this portion of the Christian Testament. Our Author has rightly perceived that these writings appeal rather to the moral consciousness than to the intellect and the logic of the man; and as Huther says, "He who ventures upon them with only his analytical understanding and merely philological learning, will find that they remain unintelligible hieroglyphics; their internal essence being disclosed to us in proportion as we experience in our own souls that of which they speak. At the same time, there reigns throughout the Epistles a firm and manly tone-the perfect opposite of all effeminate and sentimental enthusiasm. While, on the one hand, the Apostle speaks to his readers as a father speaking to his children, he, on the other hand, never forgets that they are no longer babes to whom he has something new to communicate, but that they are altogether equal to himself, possessed like himself of all the truth which he announces, and of all the life which it is not for him to create in them, but only to preserve and increase." Thus, to the most profound Christian thinker, this writing is unfathomable, and yet to the simplest believer, with the consciousness of the Christian life in his soul, it is immediately and delightfully intelligible. The Homilist is, to a large extent, the embodiment of the principles laid down by Professor Porter, in his lectures, only several of the writers fall into the very error against which the Professor warns us, of drawing into our plan all that is relative to the subject in hand. In some of the sermons and homilies is an endless and most wearying number of divisions, which weakens the composition and leaves no distinct impression. To make the pulpit of our day a force, a power, thought must be concentrated, and truth presented in its soundness and fulness to the mind. Herein, we think, lies the chief defect of the "Homilist." In several of the papers there is a good deal of loose thinking and of imaginative writing. The logic and the theology are, in many instances, equally at fault. Still we are glad to find that the work holds on its way with increasing power and success; and we trust that the Editor may, according to his wish, be the instrument of making the pulpit of our age what it might be, and what it ought to be-a living power. A PRACTICAL AND EXEGETICAL COM. MENTARY ON THE EPISTLE TO TITUS. By the Rev. William Graham, D.D., M.R.I.A. Nisbet. An DR. GRAHAM'S aim, he tells us, is to unite criticism with popular exposition; he "seeks a class of readers that are discontented with the superficial theology of the popular sermons or religious novels of the day." odd association surely, and by no means complimentary, to either the preacher or the novelist. But does not Dr. Graham confound things that differ? What should we think of Lord St. Leonards publishing a legal treatise for the benefit of those who were discontented with the superficial law of Bleak House! And we question whether learned criticism and popular preaching either can, or ought, to be brought into combination; or whether the "great gap between Germany and England," which Dr. Graham says he is about to fill up, can, or ought, to be so filled. If the pulpit accomplish its proper work, its theology must not wear the pretence of learning: not even after the model in which Dr.Graham himself stitches together bits of Greek and Latin, and very high-flown rhetoric; it must be thoroughly and entirely popular; as much of learning in the preacher as is possible, and as much of learned investigation in the subject; but let him remember that the pulpit is the very last place in which he should display it; he wants all his learning to make things simple. We trust that our churches will increas ingly demand a sound scholarship and a sound theology in her ministers; but we trust also that the day has for ever gone by, when the excellency of the preacher was tested by the Greek that he could quote, or when the "painful preachers" of soporific systems of divinity sent to sleep even the most determined theological elder. We are persuaded that the quickened religious life of our day is largely owing to its more popular preaching; the reasonings of the theological treatise have given place to popular warm-hearted practical addresses, which bear the same relation to scientific theology that the fruit does to the botany of the tree that produced it, or the corn crop to the geology of the field in which it grew. We are decidedly of opinion, therefore, that the critical commentary and the popular sermon are utterly incompatible things, and that just in proportion as the attempt to blend them together succeeds, it will be destitute of the value of either. If, as from its rhetorical style we imagine, this book was preached, we are glad we did not hear the sermons; there is far too much Greek in it for any popular audience, since the days of Jeremy Taylor : if written as a commentary, there is far too much preaching, to make it pleasant reading for the student ; still there are many good things in it, notwithstanding Dr. Graham's itching to have a bishop or two burned for the benefit of Episcopacy and to "diminish Dissent;" and it may be large enough to fill up the gap into which its author thrusts it. COMMENTARY ON THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. By Dr. A. Tholuck. Transslated from the Fourth Revised and Enlarged Edition by the Rev. R. L. Brown, M.A. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, George-street. BIBLICAL COMMENTARY ON THE EPISTLES OF ST. JOHN, in continuation of the Work of Olshausen. With an Appendix on the Catholic Epistles, and an Introductory Essay on the Life and Writings of St. John. By Dr. John H. A. Ebrard. Translated by the Rev. W. B. Pope, Manchester. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, George-street. THESE two works constitute the seventh and eighth volumes in the Third Series of Clark's Foreign Theological Library, and are both entitled to more than mere ordinary attention. The Commentary of Tholuck has gone through so many editions, and been given over to the English public in so many forms, that it must now be pretty extensively known. The subject is one of almost unequalled breadth and depth; nor does even this exposition exhaust it. We do not say this to depreciate Dr. Tholuck's labours. Far from it. He has done much to elucidate the text, and to render more definite and certain the exegesis; but if the Sermon on the Mount be the law of moral being, and if obedience to the law has, on the part of man, the condition of life, then it still remains to be shown wherein lay the wisdom of the world's Great Teacher in giving such prominence to this fact at the introduction of Christianity, unless the perfect righteousness which He required in His followers as the condition of their entrance into the kingdom of heaven was represented as a reality in himself. This is the key to the interpretation of the Sermon; and until it is viewed and set forth in this light, it will ever prove a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence. We accept the present work as one of the best on this great subject, persuaded that, as he has opened the door into this holiest, others will enter in. As to the Epistles of St. John, we hold them to be among the most profound utterances of the Christian Inspiration; and long and wistfully have we been looking for an exposition equal to their claim. Our The little volume of Lücke comes far short of the mark, though there are passages in it of much value, and which we should be sorry to lose. The work of Ebrard is a positive advance upon that of Lücke, and offers more to the student than has hitherto been within his reach on this portion of the Christian Testament. Author has rightly perceived that these writings appeal rather to the moral consciousness than to the intellect and the logic of the man; and as Huther says, "He who ventures upon them with only his analytical understanding and merely philological learning, will find that they remain unintelligible hieroglyphics; their internal essence being disclosed to us in proportion as we experience in our own souls that of which they speak. . . At the same time, there reigns throughout the Epistles a firm and manly tone-the perfect opposite of all effeminate and sentimental enthusiasm. While, on the one hand, the Apostle speaks to his readers as a father speaking to his children, he, on the other hand, never forgets that they are no longer babes to whom he has something new to communicate, but that they are altogether equal to himself, possessed like himself of all the truth which he announces, and of all the life which it is not for him to create in them, but only to preserve and increase." Thus, to the most profound Christian thinker, this writing is unfathomable, and yet to the simplest believer, with the consciousness of the Christian life in his soul, it is immediately and delightfully intelligible. THE CHRISTIAN ELEMENT IN PLATO, AND THE PLATONIC PHILOSOPHY, UNFOLDED AND SET FORTH. By Dr. C. Ackermann, Archdeacon at Jena. Translated from the German by Samuel Ralph Asbury, B.A.; with an Introductory Note by William G. T. Shedd, D.D., Brown Professor in Andover Theological Seminary, U.S. Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, George-street. THIS is a book for the times. Though published some five-and-twenty years since, this is its first appearance in this country in an English translation. Nor could the publishers have bestowed a more valuable upon this age of deeper and wider inquiry. The Platonic and the non-Platonic philosophy are terms which easily pass from lip to lip among us, and yet by how few are they understood? Between Platonism, properly so called, and the non-Platonism, which is the offspring of the Alexandrian School, and belongs to the second century of the Evangelical era, our author carefully discriminates, and gives with great precision and faithfulness the distinctive features of the two systems. Nor this only. While his aim has been to find the Christian element in Plato and his philosophy, it does not once enter into his thoughts to put that philosophy on the same level with the Gospel; far less does he think that it can ever take its place. His words are: "When we say there has never been a more Christian philosophy outside the Church of Christ than the Platonicwhen we say that Christianity, which from the beginning lay in the womb of history, before its living appearance in the person and life of Jesus, came almost to the light and to a manifestation in a mind thinking and inquiring after Divine truth, and that this ideal Gospel is Platonism, we have expressed the highest and the best which we can with well-founded conviction say of it-more than an ideal power and magnitude, Platonism can and will never be." Nay more :-"If there is, confessedly, in the whole philosophical literature of ancient and modern times, no production which, in respect of the combination of aesthetic perfection of form, with depth and wealth of ideas, and the energy of a mind divinely animated, would be placed by the side of Platonisers, then how incomparably high stands the often mistaken and scorned Christianity, since we even perceive, far behind it, the most sublime system which human art and wisdom ever created!" While the work is occupied chiefly with those features in Platonism which have affinity with Revelation, and are favourable to the Evangelical scheme, the translator yet tells us, in all fidelity, that "there runs through all the views of Plato a want of any distinct apprehension of the claims of Divine Justice, in consequence of human sin" that "there is, probably, no single point in the moral relation of the creation, for which we are so entirely indebted to Revelation, as this of the enormity of sin, and the severity of Divine judgment;" and that the grand characteristic defect of all platonised Christianity is this, "a forgetfulness or inadequate commemoration of the most tremendous proof this part of the universe has ever been permitted to witness, of the reality of the Divine hatred of sinTHE FACT OF THE CHRISTIAN ATONEMENT." But we have exceeded our limits. Most earnestly do we recommend this work to the study of all who lay claim to the power of thought and reflection. WILL ADAMS, the first Englishman in Japan. By William Dalton. London: A. W. Bennett. JAPAN has achieved two things not often achieved in this world; it has utterly extirpated Christianity, and it has entirely excluded foreigners. Two very powerful ingredients, therefore, contribute to the interest with which we regard it-the repulse of religious faith and feeling, and the pique of baffled curiosity. Until just now, Japan has been a terra incognita to the western world of modern times; the dim traditions of 250 years ago, when it was accessible to European missionaries and merchants, affording just light enough for the creations of the imagination, but not enough for the certainties of knowledge. No traditions of aboriginal barbarians are found in Japanese annals. Like their neighbours, the Chinese, they boast an immemorial civilization, and this the popular imagination of the West had exaggerated into a utopian polity and an arcadian innocence, which Captain Sherard Osborne and Mr. Dalton very rudely dispel. Captain Osborne visited Japan in 1858, and in his Cruise in Japanese Waters" has given us a very vivid picture of Japanese character and life, as they presented themselves to a European visitor. Mr. Dalton does not appear to have visited Japan at all, but to have constructed his book as Tom Moore wrote Lalla Rookh, from a careful study of all that travellers have told respecting it. Captain Osborne's is a book of travels, dating 1858; Mr. Dalton's is a historical romance, dating 1600. Both conscientiously labour to present us with a faithful delineation of Japanese character and life. Our first impulse, therefore, is to compare the two, and assuming their equal fidelity, to compare the Japan of 1600 with the Japan of 1858. And perhaps the most remarkable result is the almost identity of impression, the difference chiefly lying in the decided moral improvement of the Japanese of 1858. The civilization of Japan is like that of China, not only in its aboriginal, but in its limited and stereotyped character. A kind of instinct, developed in the earliest ages, and not surpassed in the later; politeness without delicacy, order without morality, marvellous power of imitation without inventive genius, seem to be the invariable characteristics of the barbarous civilization of all orientals, Turk, Hindoo, Chinese, Japanese alike. The Government of Japan, like all oriental Governments, is an absolute despotism, only it is an anal instead of an individual despotism the Mikodo being the head of the church, and the Ziogoon the head of the state: and yet it is a despotism on certain recognised principles-there is a popular power behind the throne, which is greater than the throne. Like all despotisms, the throne of Japan is far more at the mercy of popular feeling than a constitutional throne. Mr. Dalton's book tells us of civil wars, bloody and devastating, reminding us of the later Roman Empire. A peculiarity of Japanese social life is, that their women are not subjected to the jealous seclusion of Oriental women everywhere else, but have the free intercourse with the opposite sex which they have in western nations. Will Adams himself is a historical character a brave old English shipman, who, in the year 1598, sailed from the Texel as the pilot of a Dutch fleet, and after a disastrous voyage, was, in 1600, with several of his shipmates, thrown upon the shores of Japan, where he gained the favour of the Ziogoon, and for twenty years lived as his confident and adviser, the first Englishman who ever set foot in Japan. He married a native lady; negotiated a treaty of commerce upon free trade principles with his own country; founded an important factory; made a will, which was afterwards brought to England, and then died. Considerable information respecting him exists in the state of contemporary letters and other documents; these Mr. Dalton has carefully collected, and out of them, with the help of Rundal's memorials of the Empire of Japan, in the 16th and 17th centuries, printed for the Hakluyt Society, he has woven his story. As a romance it is not very successful. The narrator of the story is Melchior von |