You inquire, where are the agents and where the funds? The agents would be mostly voluntary: we must call out the volunteers; compel the volunteers to come out, that they may persuade the outsiders to come in. We must go to the highways and hedges at last; and as, in our vast towns, the hedges have disappeared and the crowded streets and courts have taken their place, we must, and we cannot too soon, occupy these as our outposts. Again you say, where are the agents, and where the funds? First, we could surely find some free agents from our elder Sundayschool teachers, and from our communicants. Perhaps, when a plan is carefully set out, some laymen may bethink them that it is high time to awake out of sleep, and to address themselves to the work of assisting to evangelize those masses who have aided them, or some of them, to turn over their capital profitably, and thus honour themselves as helpers, in Christ, to their minister. The napkin in which their long neglected talents have been wrapped up may serve them to wipe away their repentant tears! Something at least may be done; and if not what we would, let us do all we can. "She hath done what she could," is a grand epitaph to earn. Sir, I have been too long. My honoured father was a subscriber to the "Christian Observer" from the first, I believe, and I have been so for many years; but I never yet asked for the use of a column. Grant it me for once; and let me add, that we ought to take up this question in a spirit of deep seriousness and devotion. Think how the seeds of all that is earthly, sensual, and devilish, are being sown, and what a harvest may be expected! See the corruption of the imagination by the pestiferous and shameless novels that teem from the cheap publications, which you could not blame me if I should recognize as the unclean spirits like frogs" pouring forth from the dragon's mouth! See in these all the details of intrigue the basest, of seduction the most heartless, of murder the most ghastly, for ever poisoning the imagination, and familiarizing the mind with the most fiendish scenes, till it ceases to shudder at murder, and inhales the very inspiration of demons. This poison is not confined to the penny and halfpenny periodicals. Many of our higher serials have caught the infection; for the fact is, that nothing will now sell in that line, as a man lately said to me, "that has not a spice of devilry in it." 66 But we have weapons lying by in their rust, that are mighty, through God, to the demolition of these strongholds; and if the gospel were well, fully, and earnestly preached in the streets and lanes of our crowded cities, the factors of this merchandize would soon see their occupation going, if not gone. We have had many conferences that have come to nought, can we not have one for the home heathen? If so, may it be a fruitiful one. O that the salvation of Israel might thus come out of our Zion! When the Lord bringeth back the captivity of his people, Britain shall rejoice and Christendom shall be glad and so may God be merciful to us and bless us. Then shall our land yield a glorious spiritual increase, and God, even our own God, shall give us his blessing! GEO. S. BULL. St. Thomas's, Birmingham. :: PROFESSOR JOWETT ON ISAIAH'S PROPHETIC MENTION OF THE NAME OF CYRUS. IN the Quarterly Reviewer's* elaborate notice of "The Essays and Reviews," we meet with the following passage: "Mr. Jowett, amongst his complaints of the misinterpretation which the Scriptures have undergone from not being treated as any other book would be, remarks, quite incidentally, of the prophecy of Cyrus, Isai. xlv. 1;— The mention of a name later than the supposed age of the prophet is not allowed, as in other writings, to be taken in evidence of the date.' Mr. Jowett would thus seem to insinuate, or rather assert, that the forty-fifth chapter of Isaiah was not written until after the conquest of Babylon and the overthrow of the Chaldean dynasty. We had occasion to study this particular subject a few years ago, and request the attention of the candid reader to the brief remarks which we here proceed to lay before him. This assailant of scriptural prophecy overlooks the striking fact that Isaiah, who expressly mentions Cyrus by name, no where calls him a Persian; indeed he does not once introduce the word "Persian" into his predictions. It is true that formerly it was the general opinion of commentators that Elam was the appellation given to Persia in the Hebrew Scriptures until the time of Daniel. Accordingly, when the Hebrew seer said—“Go up, O Elam;. besiege, O Media"tthey understood him as saying "Go up, O Persia, besiege, &c." But the deciphering of the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions by Sir H. Rawlinson and Dr. Hinckes has proved this notion to be altogether erroneous. Elam was a separate nation, as distinct from Persia as from Media or Armenia. Hence it is plain, that Persia is not even once mentioned by name, either by Isaiah or Jeremiah. Perhaps Mr. Jowett may think that as Isaiah is the only one of the two who names Cyrus, it may be probably inferred that he is therefore to be regarded as having written after Jeremiah. Yet is it not very strange and unaccountable, the reader may ask, that these two Hebrew prophets should so thoroughly have ignored the Persian name? What should we have thought if Herodotus had done so? We may reply, that it is only doing bare justice to Isaiah and Jeremiah to believe, that if they, like Herodotus, had been merely historians of the past, they would have been as little likely as the venerable father of history himself, to have been guilty of such an extraordinary omission. And were we for a moment to suppose that the prophetic announcements of these two seers were really forged after the fall of Babylon, their ignoring the existence of the Persian name would be altogether inexplicable. Perhaps the following observations by the pious and able Auberlen, in his work upon Daniel and the Apocalypse, may assist us in the difficulty. "It is worthy of remark, that we do not find Syria and the individual kingdoms mentioned by name (in Daniel) any more than Rome. As yet these kingdoms lay * Quart. Rev. Jan. 1861. p. 265. + Isai. xxi. 2. quite BEYOND THE HISTORICAL HORIZON OF DANIEL; the angel therefore could not designate them by their names, Rome was separated from Daniel by space (its site was far distant towards the western coast of Italy); an independent Syrian kingdom by time (Seleucus did not become an independant sovereign until some two centuries and a half after Daniel). Syria, already conquered by the Assyrians, belonged afterwards as a province to the kingdoms of Babylon, Persia, and Greece successively, and was a very unimportant country in the time of Daniel. The angel designated the Syrian kings by the general appellation of the kings of the North. If the book of Daniel had been written so late as the time of the Maccabees, it would be difficult to assign a reason why Syria is not mentioned by name as well as Greece (Javan); nay, it might be expected that Syria should be mentioned even though Greece was not. This circumstance must be regarded as one of those minute and fine features which, because of their very insignificance and secondary position, are, to the unprejudiced student, the most eloquent witness for the antiquity and authenticity of a book." (Auberlen's Daniel, p. 59.) Now the Persians entered the domain of history with their illustrious leader Cyrus; nor is there any reason for supposing that their name had previously been heard at Babylon or Jerusalem. Herodotus does not bring them before us as a nation, until he has to record the career of Cyrus, though he had before spoken of them as one of the barbarous tribes subdued by the Median Phraortes, the father of Cyaxares. In fact, if we follow the chronology of Herodotus, we shall conclude that Persia continued to be a comparatively obscure province of Media, until circa B.C. 560. Hence, even so late as circa 595 B.C., when Jeremiah foretold the doom of Babylon, the Persian name was still below the historical horizon of the prophet, and remained as strange and unfamiliar to the Jewish ear, as it had been more than two centuries before, in the days of Isaiah. The name of Cyrus was revealed to the latter through the divine prescience of Him who knows the end from the beginning, and Jeremiah was subsequently moved by the spirit of prophecy to speak of the advance against the guilty city of the Medes, with their confederates of Ararat, Minni, and Aschenaz (Jer. li. 27); but the curtain of the future was not yet so far drawn aside as to reveal the name of the Persian nation. When did the Persian name first appear in the Hebrew scriptures ? In the interpretationt given by the heavenly messenger to Daniel of the vision of the ram and the he-goat; whence we may not unreasonably conclude that the Persians had only recently conquered Astyages and the Medes, when they thus first appeared above the political and historical horizon in the Jewish scriptures. It is very plain, from the contents of the chapter in question, that neither Elam nor Babylon had yet come under the Persian supremacy. It was, however, necessary that Elam should be separated from Chaldea, and become confederate with Cyrus and his Medes and Persians, before the fall of Belshazzar, in order that the Elamites might form a part of the besieging host, according to the prophetic injunction-"Go up, O Elam (against Babylon); besiege, O Media." Now, when we consider the striking omission of all mention of the Persian name in the professedly prophetic books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and notice the familiar mention of that name in the historical records of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther, it seems rather im Auberlen's test would seem to be especially applicable in examining the claims of prophetic documents to be received as such. † Dan. viii. 20. possible than improbable that any forger of imaginary predictions of the fall of Babylon (whether subtle or unskilful) should, while speaking of Medes and Elamites, of the men of Ararat and Minni, neglect to assign, in the most express terms, a prominent position among the invading nations to the Persians. Grant that Isaiah and Jeremiah were really what they professed to be, and what Jews and Christians have alike believed them to be,-prophets inspired by the Most High God, who knoweth the end from the beginning,-and who, under such inspiration, delivered genuine prophetic documents in the Hebrew language to the Jewish nation, and that which is otherwise perplexing and unaccountable, becomes at once comparatively simple and clear. G. NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. Tracts for Priests and People.-No. 1. Religio Laici. By Thos. Hughes, Author of Tom Brown, &c.-No. 2. The Mote and the Beam. By the Rev. F. D. Maurice, &c. Macmillan and Co. 1861.—It appears evident that the abettors of the "Essays and Reviews are ill at ease. To prop them up against the censure of twenty-four bishops and 8000 clergymen of the church of England, not of one party, but of all parties save one, it has been determined to publish a series of apologetical supplementary Essays and Reviews under the title above quoted. In this crusade, Mr. Thomas Hughes takes the van, and inscribes on his banner" Religio Laici," as though there were one religion for a layman and a further or different creed for a clergyman. When an important Act of Parliament is issued from the Queen's Printer, we always look with much interest to "the interpretation clause." this clause the effect and meaning of the Act depend. These imitators (at a humble distance indeed) of the "Tracts for the Times" will never make themselves intelligible to any diligent and candid reader until they have published with each tract an interpretation clause. ""the Definitions of such terms as "faith," old faith," might have helped us to understand what Mr. Hughes all trammels of creeds or faiths," will attract all the youth who possess mind or position, and not a few who have ere now been content to follow where a Newton, a Butler, or more lately a Magee, have led. Yet who can trust a leader who pounces upon you with such a sentence as this?" We and all worlds are redeemed, and Christ is come.” His confident and rash statements that all men may enter the kingdom of God and be saved whenever they please, betray an utter ignorance, or else contempt, of the doctrine of man's fall in Adam, and his spiritual death "in trespasses and sins," from which only God's infinite mercy and grace can raise him. Yet doubtless some young men may think him a very fine dashing writer, and a fit preceptor for the "Tom Browns" of the day, who are his special charge. No. 2 is from the master of the movement, the Rev. F. D. Maurice, who takes care repeatedly to remind his readers that he is " a London clergyman." Mr. Maurice aspires to be a great leader. To glance at Mr. Maurice's opening pages, one would imagine that he was about to censure the Essayists and Reviewers. He does not entirely agree with Dr. Temple or his "colossal man." He whips him for slandering the Mosaic dispensation and the Jewish people as "existing to teach monotheism to the world." (page 9.) Yet we are to thank Dr. Temple! Mr. Maurice permits us to do so. Mr. Pattison's Essay is not to his mind; yet if Mr. P.'s argument "is a conclusion in which nothing is concluded" (p. 11), if some of his sentences "sound at first very sceptical and hopeless," we must not bear hard upon him; he is very passable. But as for Mr. Jowett, his Essay "is the best and the worst in the series," (p. 12,) and occasions Mr. Maurice so much perplexity, that it leads him to ask himself, "Does the Scripture then mean anything, everything, or nothing?" This is somewhat strong, and yet he deems Mr. Jowett to be a tutor "who, probably more than any other in the University, has taught young men that they may find a friend in a clergyman, and in that clergyman's Master." Is he joking? As for Mr. Wilson's Essay, he strangely remarks, "If since he (Wilson) has been a country clergyman, he entertains those who frequent his ministration, with discussions upon multitudinism, individualism, and ideology, I should think he has discovered an effectual and ingenious method of illustrating the worth and simplicity of prayers written centuries ago as compared with the most refined and advanced preaching of our own century." (p. 13.) If this means that our Liturgy is an antidote to Mr. Wilson's "ideology," the compliment is but a slight one. One of those prayers is, "From all false doctrine, heresy, and schism, good Lord, deliver us." Mr. Baden Powell comes next under review as one who, sympathizing with the Westminster Review, and as "an Englishman of science," regarded miracles "as departures from order, contradicting, in his judgment, the very idea of physical science, so that he could not reconcile them;" yet Mr. Maurice is persuaded that Mr. Wilson's faith " was a reality in him," which is almost as much as to say that Mr. Maurice's reason has departed from him. Strange that any man in his senses should deliberately write-"Let only a few men at Oxford declare that they believe in such a God, in whom peasants and scholars may trust, that they are sure His kingdom is established and |