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In the Gothic Edda we find a poem, 66 Voluspa," in which we are told that, in the beginning of time all was one vast abyss, without plant or verdure. Yet there then existed Muspelshena, a world luminous, glowing, not to be dwelt in by strangers, and situate at the extremity of the earth. Surtur reigns there: in his hand he holds a flaming sword. At the end of the world he shall come: shall vanquish all the gods, and shall give the universe a prey to the flames.

In the beginning, a breath of heat spreading itself over the vapours, they melted into drops, and of these drops was formed a man. This man was named Ymer: from him descended all the giants. While he slept he fell into a sweat, and from his armpit were born a male and female.

The tradition of the Phoenicians was preserved by Sanchoniathon, and handed down to us by Eusebius. They held that the universe originated from a dark air and a turbulent evening chaos. Ilus or Mot was the seed of the world, and the productive cause of all things. The sun, the moon, and the stars all equally sprang from Mot. The air beginning to emit light, winds and clouds were produced, and thus lightning and thunder were caused; males and females were stirred up in the earth and in the sea; and thus appeared the various tribes of the brute creation. Lastly, from the primæval wind, Colpia, and his consort Baout, were born the first two mortals.

The Egyptian belief is found in a book ascribed to Hermes or Thoth; it ran thus:-There was originally a boundless darkness in the great abyss; but water and an intelligent ethereal spirit acted by divine power in chaos. Then sprang forth holy light; then the elements were compacted of the moist sandy substance of the chaotic mixture: then all the gods made an orderly distribution of things out of seminative nature.

The Persian tradition is found in the Zend-Avesta, a translation of which was made by M. Anquetel de Perron. They held that the good Ormuzd created the world, at six different intervals, amounting in all to a year. In the first period he created the heavens; in the second, the waters. The third was allotted to the production of the earth: the fourth, to the formation of trees and plants. In the fifth, the animals were created; and the sixth period was devoted to the creation of man: The first father of the human race was compounded of a man and a bull. He was succeeded by a second bull-man, who flourished at the time of an universal deluge.

When we remember during how many centuries the children and descendants of Noah must have lived in the vicinity of Persia, we shall easily understand how so large a portion of the truth came to be handed down in the Persian tradition.

The ancient Etrurians had their tradition, of which Suidas gives us an outline. They believed that God created the world in six thousand years, and appointed the same period to be the length of its duration. In the first millenary he made the heaven and the earth; in the second, the visible firmament; in the third, the sea and all the waters; in the fourth, the sun, moon, and stars; in the fifth, the birds, reptiles, and quadrupeds; and in the sixth, man alone. It seems tolerably clear that both the Persians and the Etrurians had heard something of the Hebrew records.

The Hindoos have the Institutes of Menu, supposed by Sir W. Jones to have been composed in the time of the Judges. The history of the creation given in this treatise is too long to be copied at length; but it represents Menu, first, with a thought, creating the waters, and placing in them a productive seed. This seed became an egg, and from that egg he was born himself, in the form of Brahma. He, the supreme ruler, created an assemblage of inferior deities; gave being to time, to the stars, and to the planets, to rivers and oceans; and he then caused the four Hindoo castes of mankind to proceed from his mouth, his arm, his thigh, and his foot.

The Chinese account of the creation is still more wild. The first of men, they hold, was Puoncu. He was born out of chaos, as it were out of an egg. From this egg, also, were formed the heavens,-from the white of it, the atmosphere; and from the yolk, the earth.

The Greek cosmogonies are more modern, and less puerile. Hesiod tells us that, first existed chaos; next was produced the spacious earth, the firm seat of the immortals; Tartarus hid in its recesses; and Eros, the dispeller of care. From chaos sprang Erebus and black night; and from the union of night and Erebus were born ether and the day.

In the same poetic style wrote Aristophanes :-" Chaos, and night, and black Erebus, and wide Tartarus, first existed. At that time there was neither earth, air, nor heaven. But, in the bosom of Erebus, blackwinged night produced an aerial egg, from which, in due season, beautiful love, decked with golden wings, was born. Out of chaos, in the midst of wide-spreading Tartarus, he begot our race, and called us forth into light."

Any one who desires to peruse these cosmogonies at greater length, will find a more complete account of them in Mr. Faber's Origin of Pagan Idolatry.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE.

1. The Westminster Review. 2. The National Review.
3. Macmillan's Magazine.

WE are not ambitious to earn a transient importance by carping at our neighbours. We are more disposed to follow our own course, leaving it to others to follow theirs. But the aspect which our periodical literature just now presents, is so peculiar, that we must for once step aside and invite our readers to pause while they glance with us at the strange portentous spectacle.

1. The Westminster Review has now existed for some years; the avowed organ, and, beyond comparison, the ablest organ, of radicalism in religion and in politics. Of the latter, we say nothing; of its religion it is difficult to speak with confidence. Is it deism or is it atheism? In the sense in which Mr.

Maurice and his friends may be said to hold the doctrine of an atonement, it may, perhaps, be charitably conceded that Theism or Deism is its proper characteristic. In general it seems to recognise some unknown, superior, all-pervading intelligence; but as we come to investigate the nature of the deity to whom its homage is paid, for worship it has none, we are often seriously in doubt whether atheism, as at least one amongst other possibilities, does not lurk in the background of the writer's mind. Yet the Review is popular; it is read, quoted, and admired; and there is a rising school, possessing a certain degree of influence in society, who command us to reverence its authority on pain of incurring their own sovereign contempt.

In a

The October number contains an article on "Neo Christianity," which is thrown into the form of a Review; and the Oxford "Essays and Reviews," which furnishes the text. better cause, the courage of the Westminster would secure our admiration: there is no shuffling, no mean equivocation here at least. We know what the unhappy writers mean; so far, at any rate, as a meaning gleams through their creedless creed. They hail the Seven Essays with a cordial welcome. "This Review, at any rate," they say, "ought not to be silent while so much candour and courage call for recognition and support." Thus applauded, the essayists are introduced upon the stage, and with a flourish of trumpets presented to the audience. But soon the scene begins to change, and the new allies have intimations given them, that they have manoeuvres to practise and a discipline to undergo, for which, at present, they are but awkwardly prepared.

After a few pages devoted to their encouragement, the work of chastisement begins. The reviewer is said to be himself an Oxford man, and his chastisement is not the less severe because his words are courteous; nor will it be felt the less keenly because it proceeds not from an opponent, but from one who set out where the essayists themselves begin, and has had the daring to follow their own premises to their terrible but legitimate conclusion. The essayists, while undermining the authority of almost every part of the Bible in detail, still affect a certain respect, nay reverence, for the volume as a whole. The reviewer will have none of this hypocrisy. With an unfaltering pen he shows, that on their principles, and his own, the Bible is utterly worthless. He delights in showing up its apparent inconsistencies; he deprecates its influence; he scoffs at its pretended sanctity:-"was ever a literature," he exclaims, "so provokingly unreliable? The mind wanders over the waste of waters like the dove seeking dry land." And he challenges the essayists to say on what ground they still continue to commend such a collection of idle trash to the serious attention of mankind.

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It is well that this tremendous blow should be dealt to them in the house of their friends. They are charged with a base hyprocrisy, but not by us. It is intimated, in a way which admits of no other interpretation, that, if their preferments and worldly interests were not at stake, they would throw off the mask and stand before the world as the champions of Infidelity. They are jeered at because, having started so well, they lag behind at last. The enlightened world beats them at their own game; outruns them on their own ground: for they are heavy laden with the mire of honours and preferments. These are the charges, we repeat, not of narrow-minded pedants and ecclesiastics of the Evangelical school, but of their own favourite Westminster Review! Can they read the conclusion of this article without a shudder?" The newspaper, the review, the tale by every fire-side, are written by men who have long ceased to believe. So also the school book, the text book, the manuals for study of youth and manhood, the whole mental food of the day science, history, morals and politics, poetry, fiction, and essay-the very lesson of the school, the very sermon from the pulpit. And all this is done beneath a solemn or cynical hypocrisy. How long shall this last? All honour to these writers for the boldness with which they have at great risk urged their opinions. But what is wanted is strength, not merely to face the world, but to face one's own conclusions.

:

We know the cost....The sense of despair, the shudder of the mind, the tearing up of dear associations, the agony of the family, have darkened the picture of every religious convulsion. IT MUST BE endured. LET EVERY ONE WITH HEARTS AND BRAINS CONCUR IN THE INEVITABLE TASK.”

Thus the fable ceases to be a myth. The playful gibbering spirit associates himself with the youth who has just gone astray; leads him with a smile through pastures soft to the tread, and among scenes enchanting to the senses. As they walk on together, the fiend begins to wear a graver face and a dictatorial air. He chides his pupil for his fears, and urges him onwards by unknown paths and through the tangled thicket. On a sudden they stand upon the brink of a frightful precipice. The mask falls from the hideous skeleton: the bones rattle and the death's head grins horribly. With a shriek he throws himself into the abyss, and challenges his appalled companion to follow his example, or to remain behind a lonely wanderer blighted, and disgraced for ever.

2. We turn to the National Review for October, and find an article on " Nature and God." Dr. Temple's sermon before the Association for the Promotion of Social Science stands, with several other pamphlets, at the head of the paper. How far Dr. Temple, or the other writers paraded in front, approve of the sentiments which follow, it is not our purpose at present to

inquire; we merely record the fact. After the appalling article in the Westminster, this is but a tame affair; presuming, pert, and shallow. Read what follows:-" The Scriptures, in the presence of the Baconian logic, have merely encountered the inevitable fate of any inflexible litera scripta existing side by side with ever widening inductions. Demoniacal possession (in mania and epilepsy) though in the Gospels giving form to the miracles and evidence to the Messiahship of Christ, has been unable to hold its ground against the exorcism of the College of Physicians. The common parentage of the human race has become an open question with the advance of ethnology, notwithstanding the absolute dependence upon it of the whole scheme of ecclesiastical theology. The Tower of Babel faded into a myth as the affinity of languages was better understood. Egypt, so long measured by the patriarchal chronology, and cowed by the song of Moses and Miriam, has at last taken a strange revenge upon her fugitives, by discrediting their traditions, and exposing the proofs of her dynasties and arts beyond the verge of their floods, nay, prior to their Eden. The terrestrial cosmogony of Genesis, in spite of all the clamps and holdfasts of a perverted exegesis, has long been knocked to pieces by the geological hammer. Nay, it is doubtful if the idea of a sudden creation of organised beings may not have to be altogether relinquished in favour of a principle of gradual modification."

Of course it was beneath so philosophical a writer to consider the arguments by which Mr. Rawlinson, in his Bampton lectures, has exposed the childish credulity of Baron Bunsen and his associates, with regard to the vast antiquity of Egypt and her dynasties. How the affinity of languages to one parent stock, supposing it proved, as no doubt it may be proved, affects the story of the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of mankind, is more than we can at present comprehend. We are even stupid enough to believe that it is a strong argument on the other side. The terrestrial cosmogony of Genesis must be a myth indeed, if in danger of being knocked to pieces by any sledge hammer which our reviewer can wield. And so of all the other points so flippantly dismissed. But what is it to such a writer that unearthly voices issue from the mounds in which Nineveh and Babylon have been long entombed, echoing the very words of prophecy, and proclaiming their exact and literal accomplishment? What is it to him that the caves of Edom, and the basaltic cities of the giant kings of Bashan, come forth, after more than three thousand years of silence and awful desolation, to bear witness to the verbal accuracy of the earliest and apparently wildest portions of the Old Testament history? A few declamatory sentences, a few sweeping assertions, an arrogant pen, a supercilious sneer, and his work is accomplished without

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