rule it is not needful that we here recur to this most important element in the development of the Panslavic movement. Our remarks are, of necessity, very general: we fear also that they are somewhat crude: it is difficult to give to a subject so novel and so extensive a very brief and yet a comprehensive explanation. Enough however has, we think, been said to show that this question is something more than a mere "geographical question," as it was once styled by M. Guizot. Those of our readers who desire to learn more will do well to consult the work before us. It is the work of a nobleman evidently of high mind and generous sentiments: he treats vituperation where he meets with it with quiet dignity: he detects and exposes inaccuracy, as in the case of Mr. Cobden, without exulting over the offender: he has an intimate acquaintance with the political bearings of every question which he touches, and he writes well and lucidly on a subject as yet but little known in England. He is in exile, moreover, and every sentiment which he utters, if it does not always enforce conviction, therefore demands respect. We wish that we could predicate of the cause which he has at heart that which we can certainly promise to his work-success.

In rising from the contemplation of the subjects which the work before us has presented, the enquiry is suggested to the mind, "Whither do these great movements finally tend?" "What will be their result?" That such movements exist and are characteristic of the age in which we live, no one, we think, can deny; though each will endeavour to account for them according to his particular views and the forms in which he thinks. Will they, if they be successfully developed, throw us back into the condition of the middle ages? Or are they leading us to an altered condition of society, necessary in the hastened progress of God's great purposes to their final accomplishment? We do not share the faith nor the fears of many: we do not believe, with some, that the spirit of the past can be revived so as to fit it to all the wants of the present; nor can we apprehend, with others, a retrogression, wherein the experience of many centuries must go for nothing, and the enlightenment and advancement of modern times be totally forgotten. Neither the one nor the other are possible-every step in the growth of man develops some new exigency for which a new measure of wisdom and strength are necessary; and, whilst the decrepitude of age may simulate the feebleness of childhood, the unknowingness of a condition through which we have once passed, never to return to it, cannot occur to us again. No: every altered aspect in the social history of man is a step onward either to good or evil-a progression to a condition never before experienced. Our recollections and consent are with the past, but our faith

must be in the future. These great national movements are the more significant, because we have well nigh come to the pass when "power" amongst men is an idle word; the bases on which it legitimately rests men universally dispute; and there is ever manifest some antagonistic force successfully to oppose its proper exercise and nullify its virtue. We have seen dynasties falling on every hand through the abuse of its attributes and the questioning of its claims, and we have seen it assumed on popular grounds to be contested by elements still more democratic. There is true power nowhere, because the real source of power is disowned and denied on every hand. Men have worked on in their political struggles-have ruled and have resisted in presumptuous dependence upon fleshly strength alone-and God has been rejected alike by the triumphant and the fallen the true source of power has become with them a fable, and its true possession is therefore a nonentity. It is a subtle and a deep iniquity to give to human enlightenment and civilization the attributes which belong alone to God: it is a solemn mockery, whilst we mention with philosophic reverence his name, to deprive it of all the meaning which gives to faith its life and power. Such, however, are the tendencies of the age-such are the sins of this generation with all its social machinery of iron-hearted schemes-with all its dry statistics of crime and quacking nostrums of legislative economy for its cure. God will some day snap the whole in pieces like a broken reed: when we look abroad upon the heaving masses of mankind, convulsed by some internal leaven that is shaping them into forma~ tions meet for judgment, our conviction becomes the deeper that the day is not far distant. Who may abide it?

Nor ought we to forget that in these Panslavic and Germanic movements, there is a religious element, which gives to the political elements a greater depth and intensity: for some of those races belong to the Greek, some to the Roman, and some to the Protestant communion. Krasinski, in his former work on the rise and progress of the Reformation in Poland, has only described a state of things existing, to greater or less extent, in Bohemia, Prussia, and the other States; and the attempt made to amalgamate these heterogeneous elements by the union of Sandimir was only a foreshowing of the fruitlessness of all such endeavours; and ought to have prevented that repetition of them in the case of Prussia which we have witnessed in our own day. These things tend to dignify in the eyes of men that which would otherwise be regarded as mere political agitation, and hold out to the unsuccessful patriot the glory of the martyr's

crown.

406

ART. VII.-1. Biblia Ecclesia Polyglotta: the Proper Lessons for Sundays; together with the whole of the Book of Psalms in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English. Edited by FREDERIC ILIFF, D.D. Royal 4to. London: Bagster.

2. The English Hexapla, exhibiting the Six Important Translations of the New Testament Scriptures-Wicliff, Tyndale, Cranmer, Genevan, Anglo-Rhemish, Authorised. The Original Greek Text, after Scholz, with the Various Readings of the Textus Receptus, and the Principal Constantinopolitan and Alexandrine Manuscripts; and a Complete Collection of Scholz's Text, with Griesbach's Edition of MDCCCV.; preceded by a History of English Translations and Translators. Royal and demy 4to. Bagster.

4to.

3. The Hexapla Psalter : The Book of Psalms. Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English, in Six Parallel Columns. Bagster.

4. A Brief Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, A.D. 1554, about the Book of Common Prayer and Ceremonies of the Church. London: Potheram.

IT matters but little to us, in this our day, who it was that originally selected the lessons which are appointed for our daily services. Whoever they were, they were probably men of high standing in the Church, and of acknowledged character within it; but, whether Archbishop Parker and Bishop Grindall were the men, as has been surmised-whether they alone or others with them is now nothing to the purpose, since their individual responsibility is wholly lost sight of in consequence of our Church having adopted the arrangement they proposed, and made it an essential part of her own system of public worship and general instruction. Whether the selections are well or ill made is another question: whether the subjects chosen, are the best that could be chosen, may admit of, enquiry; but we can form no clear opinion-we can come to no correct conclusions on the subject, nor fairly judge of these men's labours-until we obtain a clue to the principles which guided them in their selections. No doubt they acted upon some distinct plan and with some express object in view, and sat down to their work upon system and with an intelligible principle to work upon; but they have not left upon record what did govern them in choosing such lessons as they have chosen for the daily services; and, until we can discover what their motive in chief was in the arrangement, we are not in a condition to pass any opinion upon it nor even to give full effect to their object, while we are read

ing in public the lessons they have selected. Such as it was, however, their arrangement remains, and will long remain doubtless the law to the Church, which the ministers of the Church must conform to, however little they may comprehend the reasons for such an arrangement-whatever may be their individual opinion of the defectiveness of it, or of the unsuitableness of some of the chapters for public reading and general popular instruction. And there are very many, both of clergy and laity, who think that the lessons especially for Sundays might be much better appointed than they are that the Law and the Gospel in their mutual teaching and in their direct application to Christ might be much more impressively taught on every Lord's-day than by the present arrangement: certain it is that no man who desired to convey to the minds of his own household from two hundred and eight chapters of the Bible the greatest amount of Scriptural instruction, and to show forth the perfect agreement of the Old Testament with the New-their unity of purpose in reference to the Saviour, in reference also to the general commandments of God, and to the means of salvation afforded to men-would make use of the chapters as at present appointed to be read in our churches, simply because those chapters were selected for no such teaching-other objects pressing more upon the selectors' attention, and urging them rather to the condemnation of the prevailing error of their time than to the inculcation of the truth generally. The prevailing error was the gross idolatry of the Roman Church-its image worship, its numerous wooden idols, which crowned every roodloft and occupied every niche-which presided over every altar and claimed and received the homage from the knee, and the prayer from the lips, of all who approached them. This was the crying grievance of the age-the great abomination of the day; and it was mainly to rid the land of the evil of idolatry-to teach the people the heinousness of this sin-to prove to them how hateful it was to God--how sternly denounced by his prophets-how ruinous it was to the nations who practised it-that those portions of Scripture were selected for the first lessons, of the Lord's-day especially, which the more immediately referred to the foul and God-dishonouring sin of idolatry; while those chapters that alluded to the images that existed in the temple, and to the representations of the living creatures that were seen in visions, are most carefully excluded. Thus, it would seem to be, that the unity of God and the utter inadmissibility of any object of worship but him alone in this creation, were the great points which the selectors of the lessons were above all things the most anxious to establish, and to bring the more frequently

under the notice of our congregations. The prevailing evil of their day was idol worship, and they, therefore, chose such chapters for the lessons as would best, in their judgment, convince the people of the folly and the guilt of bowing down to images of wood and stone. Not that they, nor any of the originators nor arrangers of our liturgy, laid claim to infallibility in such matters-none but fools or kuaves ever did they were too learned and pious, too reasonable and humble, to stalk about upon stilts above the heads of other men, and to imagine themselves, in consequence, as giants in their generation: neither were they ever prating about divine inspiration, or most irreverently as some, or most blasphemously as others, using the name and boasting of the influence of the Holy Spirit as directing all their thoughts and perfecting all their labours; but they laboured in the fear of God, with the glory of God for their object, and with the hope of the blessing of God for their reward. They laboured, too, in most difficult and perplexing times, when the triumph of truth was far less considered than the triumph of party when the approbation of a few was the utmost that could be hoped for in the hostility of the many-when sour and bitter controversialists dipped their pens in vinegar and gall and called nothing good that was not as rabid and as poisonous as themselves. Great allowances must, therefore, be made for all who had to do with the arrangement of our Church services: the Geneva and the Roman divines were alike hostile to them on all matters of doctrine or discipline, and would never allow that anything they did or could do was well done; but the men were fully equal to the emergency: strong boats are always built for stormy coasts; and they accomplished, perhaps, all that was possible in their day, and all that the peculiar errors and heresies and political circumstances of their times called for at their hands.

It does not, however, follow from this that everything they did must necessarily remain to the end of time exactly as they left it nor did they lay claim to such super-eminent wisdom, or such prophetic foresight, as to legislate (if we may so express it) in the sixteenth century for the Church's circumstances in the twentieth nor have we done otherwise ever since than practically to deny that we considered their decisions as final or their arrangements as complete; since we have materially altered much that they left to us, and have added four entirely new services to those they prepared for us, and are every year printing new prayers for all sorts of purposes, even to the discarding those which they provided us with for precisely similar occasions.