relation to the wants and capabilities of the nature, on which it is designed to operate. Such is the province of the Christian theologian. We are to consider, how his peculiar and appropriate study connects him with the general departments of human knowledge-what it demands from them-and what stimulus and encouragement they may derive from it in return.

To study Christianity in the way that we have now described, requires an exact knowledge of three ancient languages, which may be regarded as connected respectively with three great periods in the progress of human civilisation. The books of the Old Testament have been transmitted to us in one or more of the dialects, spoken by that great family of nations, among whom the rudiments of art and science, the forms of social life, and perhaps the use of alphabetical characters, were first cultivated; the Hebrew is closely allied to the Arabic, the Phoenician, the old Persian, the Syriac and the Chaldee-languages, which were once the vehicle of the concentrated civilisation of the East. In the New Testament we find ourselves advanced a step further. Its materials bear witness, by their form and character, to the age when they were produced; they are conceived in the language of that extraordinary people, who gave the first example of a progressive civilisation-placed letters and philosophy under the shelter of free institutions, and repaid to the East with a hundred fold increase the seeds of mental life, which they had originally received from it. The Greek of the New Testament represents most exactly this relation between the Eastern and the Western worlds; it is Orientalism expressing itself in the accents of a Western civilisation. In tracing the history of Christianity, the knowledge of a third language the Latin becomes necessary. Through this medium, which was also, for centuries, the medium of the entire civilisation of the West of Europe, the medium of science, art and history-we must pursue the line of traditional filiation, which connects the monuments and institutions of the religion, from the time of its first planting in the Roman empire, with its present form and establishment among us. Now the study of these three languages the Latin, the Greek, and the Hebrew with its cognate dialects-opens a door into the immense and ever-widening field of philological research. The powerful interest of religion, sharpened by the controversies growing out of the Reformation, first put men upon these enquiries, that they might master the original sources of information, and enable themselves to see the truth in its primitive form. But the zeal once excited subsisted, and passed into kindred pursuits-long after the immediate object producing it had been accomplished; and in this way, Christianity became indirectly a most powerful incentive to the encouragement of general learning. We find the great scholars of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, Erasmus, the Stephenses, the Scaligers, Salmasius, Grotius and Casaubon, all more or less exercising their vast philological acquirements upon subjects of biblical criticism and interpretation, or of theological controversy, and bringing back into the service of the Scriptures the results of those extended enquiries, which a zeal for the Scriptures had been among the original causes of inducing them to undertake. The most injurious attacks upon Christianity gave fresh stimulus to the zeal, with which its records were explored, and led to a more exact acquaintance with the languages, in which they are contained. It is true, that in consequence of the direction, which European cultivation had taken at the revival of letters, and which was not essentially changed by the Reformation, the Orientalism, with which the whole Bible is so deeply impregnated, was viewed through a too purely Greek and Roman medium, and was often therefore very inadequately and erroneously conceived. But now for nearly a century a conviction has been gaining ground, which has been very extensively acted upon by the indefatigable scholars of Germany, that a correct interpretation of the Scriptures must be founded on a deep insight into the spirit of the East, derived from a study not merely of the Hebrew, but of the other kindred dialects, into which its roots so widely spread, and with which it has so many forms in common. The knowledge of these languages is indispensable to forming an adequate conception of Christianity in its pure and primitive state; as that of the Greek and the Latin, to understanding the modifications, which it has undergone, by coming into contact with the literature and philosophy of nations, whose manners, institutions, and modes of thought and feeling were so essentially different from those of the people, in whose bosom it arose. So long as Christianity continues to be a subject of intelligent interest with the enlightened portion of mankind, (and that it will always be so, we cannot doubt,) so long must the indispensable conditions of thoroughly understanding its nature and history uphold in unabated interest the cultivation of these three great branches of philological learning.

Intimately connected with philology is a branch of knowledge, to which philology is, or at least ought to be, merely subservient as an instrument of investigation-history-the history of opinions, manners and civilisation; and with history the right understanding of Christianity stands in the closest relation. Christianity, as we conceive it, is not to be understood in its whole extent and with a full comprehension of its manifold workings and influences, by looking for it exclusively in the mere letters of the written word. These contain its precious germ, and exhibit its earliest unfoldings; they authenticate its divine claims, and fix the time and the place of its origin in the

wide field of the past; but Christianity itself has a moral existence distinct from this literal form; it is a fruitful principle of thought, feeling and action, which took root in men's minds in the apostolic times, and has thence propagated itself in an endless variety of forms, and with ever-multiplying results-now pure and triumphant, and now darkened and depressed, through the long succession of ages to the present day. It differs in this from other institutions, which are merely the work of man, that it did not exhaust its efficiency in the course of a century or two; but adapted, in its essential qualities, to the progressive character of the human race had kept pace with their advancement and expanded with the expansion of their faculties and developed new light and energy in its onward course; so that the world has not yet experienced the full effect of its influence, and in those periods of greater freedom and intelligence, which are preparing for society, will witness results, of which at present no adequate conception can be formed. Christianity is Knμas an an everlasting possession-for mankind; though not in the sense that is often supposed, as if the institutions, the practices and the speculative opinions, unconnected with essential principles, of the age of Christ and his apostles, were to be a perpetual model to all coming generations; but because Christianity, from the time of its publication till now, has constituted one great continuous fact in the order of providence, exhibiting an unbroken series of moral developments, one rising above the other in magnitude and importance, and still passing on into wider results. How different, for example, is the influence of Christ's teachings and fate from that of the greatest events, that have marked the page of history! The effects of Alexander's conquests, which wrought the most extraordinary and extended revolution in the ancient world, are nearly obliterat d from the face of the earth. Of the institutions founded by Mahomet with such unexampled rapidity, and carried, in the course of a century, on the tide of war from the heart of the East to the shores of the Atlantic-the stability is weakened and the influence perceptibly declining; and the same lands, which were the scene of the early triumphs of his religion, are destined, in all human probability, to become its grave. But the utility of the simple teachings and unobtrusive example of the meek prophet of Nazareth is yet unimpaired. They still retain their influence in the enlightened veneration of the most cultivated nations; they are still a fountain of instruction, which learning delights to trace to its source, and from which philosophy disdains not to borrow; their sphere of influence widens with the prospects of the human race; and they go forth with the colonies of Europe to consecrate new settlements of humanity and to inspire with a holier life the rising forms of future civilization. Of a

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religion, thus spreading and progressive in its influence, the whole power and character must not be sought in the divine germ, out of which it has sprung. Christianity cannot be fully understood what it is what it has done-and what may yet be expected from it-without an impartial review of its history. This is a work yet to be accomplished. Not only can we as yet form no sufficient idea what Christianity may hereafter become; but even of what it has been in times past, we have hitherto had no satisfactory information. A distinct conception of the manners, institutions, fortunes and character of the singular people, among whom Christianity arose of the moral condition of society at the period of its origin of the state of opinion, religious and philosophical, at that time among the cultivated inhabitants of the great cities of the Roman empire-of the condition of the inferior classes and of the immense mass of slave population-of the mode, in which the religion secretly worked its way into the heart of society-of the habits, views, employments and social state of its professors during the three first centuries, and of their relation to the refined and educated portion of the community-of the whole extent and precise character of the change wrought in it by its incorporation with the state of the struggles between it and the declining philosophy of Paganism of their mutual influence-and of the new spirit breathed by it into the last periods of Greek and Roman literature of its relation to the new forms of society, which sprang up in the middle ages, and of which it constituted the impregnating principle of its weakening and corruption under the Papal thraldom-of the effects of the Reformation-of the multiplicity of sects, that have grown out of the principles of that great revolution-of the exclusive and persecuting spirit by which they have been too often actuated towards each other and of the tendency of more refined and liberal views to promote ultimate union and peace among all good men-in fine, a distinct conception of the effect produced by Christianity, under all these phases, on manners, literature, arts, philosophy, commerce and the moral and social condition of the great mass of human beings is indispensable to an adequate appreciation of the whole power and value of this unspeakable gift of God, and to a discernment of the great work, which it has accomplished, is now accomplishing, and has yet to accomplish, in the universal plans of providence. The history of human improvement is bound up with that of Christianity; they should never be separated, for they are unintelligible apart from each other.

The natural sciences do not stand in so obvious a relation to theology as those branches of knowledge, to which we have already alluded; but indirectly their connection with it is not unimportant. The prosecution of them has contributed to

enlarge and rectify our ideas of the order of nature; and, by leading us to compare the discoveries of modern philosophy with the representations of Scripture, and to perceive their frequent incompatibility, has confined the object of biblical interpretation within its proper limits the unfolding of moral and religious, as contra-distinguished from physical, truth. Frequently too has the wish to ascertain, how far the accounts of Scripture are to be taken in a strictly literal sense, drawn enquirers into the fields of scientific research, and given a new stimulus to philosophical enquiry. How many, for example, have applied themselves to geological pursuits, from the intense interest which is felt in the origin of the present order of things, and from a desire to confront the sublime cosmogony of Moses with the still subsisting testimonies of nature herself. And whatever opinion may be entertained of the form, in which Moses has clothed certain portions of his narrative; to the great theological truth which it embodies, that the world, as it now exists, had its origin in time from the will of an intelligent Creator-and to the historical fact, that the series of years elapsed since that event, cannot be much longer than what Scripture assigns-the general results of geological investigation seem to bear a tolerably unanimous witness.

In some respects, scientific views may exert a more direct influence in the development and confirmation of religious opinions. The infinity, which they unfold to us, every where replete with proofs of the power, the wisdom and the benignity of the Being, who fills it with his presence, strengthens in the mind all those convictions of a universal Father and an all-pervading Providence, which the more familiar language of Scripture early impressed upon it, and, in the survey of such boundless resources, will not allow us to despair of any consummation, however wonderful and however inconceivable by us in our present state, which Revelation authorises us to hope for, and which the instinctive longings of our hearts prompt us earnestly to desire. Till the mind's eye has been purged by the light of a comprehensive philosophy, its vision is bounded by the form and substance of things present to the sense, and cannot pierce - the material veil which encircles it. What is not seen, is not

believed; what cannot be distinctly represented, is supposed impossible. But how many of the most powerful agencies in nature are viewless and impalpable! When the body moulders away, and the once breathing and animated form has ceased to exist, who, that has ever reflected on the wonders unfolded by chemistry, can doubt, that properties once subsisting in connection with it, and of which it was but the material organ, may have merely passed into some new combination, and preserve an existence as certain, as positive, and as distinct as before, in