Dark no longer, but all illumined with love, and the pathway Which she had climbed so far lying smooth and fair in the distance." But we may also reverse our view, and say that, as the Bible is the interpreter of the experience of life, so the experience of life is the interpreter of the Bible. As circumstances arise, as feelings change, as the habits of thought and the tendencies of character are modified, as time develops new perceptions in the mind and new wants in the heart, so do our interpretations of Scripture enlarge and our personal commentaries accumulate. Responsibilities bring out the power of one passage, and sorrows that of another. Struggles with the world, conflicts with self, the shame of a fall, and the bitterness of sin, leave in clear light before our minds the words which we had scarcely noticed before. The sweet experience of mutual affection, married life, parental love, domestic happiness, add elucidations to the sacred page. A visit of death brings new discoveries; and in the darkened chamber its views of human life are recognized, and its deep consolations understood. The widowed heart finds sympathy and companionship where it had been missed in happier hours; and, in declining years and the season of decay, we read by the lights of evening things which the morning and the midday had failed to show. This wonderful and exquisite adaptation of the Book to the conditions of human life and the wants of the human heart, is best known to those who have tried it most, and is itself the strongest proof that the words are the words of God, and that He meant them to be the habitual counsellors and daily companions of individual life.

Still, we doubt not, many will revert to the thought that the perpetual going over again of that which is fully known must become a form, and partake of the nature of a superstition. Only those can think so whose condition of mind prevents them from appreciating such purposes and effects of devotional study of Scripture as have been already noted. But how many are there in that condition! How many of those whom we now hear urging that the Bible must be dealt with "like any other book," and who know that such use of any other book would be intolerable, and well-nigh impossible. Would that these men, and those that hear them, would give due reflection to this very fact, that human hearts do find in it the companion which they need, one that associates itself intimately with all their experience, and ever wears a freshness of aspect which only an inward life can supply.

Doubtless it is a remarkable thing to see men engaged through the successive days of successive years of a longcontinued life with the same psalms and proverbs, the same parables and prophecies, the same histories and discourses. Yet even in the scenes of nature the same objects may be contemplated through a long life with ever-accumulating associations

and ever-growing interest. Here is one who sits in his own peculiar seat, and from the window of his home eyes the scene before him with "boundless love." Ask if he be not weary of looking continually on the same objects, in which nothing new can be discovered. He will tell you that, though he has been pleased to visit other scenes, he never feels at home but in this; and that, far from being of unvarying sameness, the life that is in nature makes it always new. The morning sun throws the lights on one side, and the shadow on the other side, of the church-tower and of the distant hills; the declining day reverses them. Now, the mists are rising in floating wreaths from the meadows; now, breadths of clear sunshine and shadows of clouds chase each other over the fields; now, the scene is swept by coarse and gloomy weather; now, it is radiant in the glory and stillness of summer. How he watches the returning seasons on the familiar trees,-the bare stems, the welcome buds, the full foliage, the sere and yellow leaf! And in what different moods has he looked upon the scene! It has associated itself with his sadness and with his joy, with his "sweet and bitter fancies." The recollections of life are in it. It speaks to him of other days and people who are gone. He sat on that hill-side in the enchantment of youthful emotion; he walked under those trees in a well-remembered hour; on that lawn his children played; at that gate he has watched their departure or welcomed their return; he has walked up that churchyard path with a breaking heart; and under those elms there are graves which, in his apprehension, have made the earth more holy.

Thus, in minds of a certain cast, the scenes of nature gather to themselves all the associations of life, harmonizing in their own perpetual changes with the changing feelings of the heart; and thus does the same field of vision become continually more full of hoarded interest and various suggestion. In a far higher sense, and in a far more general experience, it is thus with the Scriptures of God. There are still the same scenes, characters, words; but the life that is in them allies itself with our own in the manner and with the effects which have been described. It does so, that is, if our life be a life in Christ: not otherwise; for then it is not the life for which the Scripture is provided. The Spirit of Christ has prepared it for the servants of Christ. They alone are possessed of the principles of thought which open its varied treasures, and are leading the life the exigencies of which it is fitted to meet, and the experience of which it is fitted to guide. Let all who propose that life to themselves be faithful in the use of the help ordained for them. In so doing they will become fresh witnesses to the origin and purposes of the word of God. No arguments are so strong as the testimony of those who say, "Thy testimonies are my delight and my counsellors. Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage."

T. D. B.

DR. HOOK'S LIVES OF THE ARCHBISHOPS OF CANTERBURY.

Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury. By Walter Farquhar Hook, D.D., Dean of Chichester. Vol. I. Anglo-Saxon period. Richard Bentley, London, 1860.

the

LIVES of ancient saints and worthies have lately issued from press in unusual numbers. With few exceptions they are fabricated from well-worn materials, presenting nothing new except the arrangement and the author's own reflections. Such works are often popular, and may be useful in their day; but their day is short, and they are soon forgotten.

The dean of Chichester's volume certainly does not belong to this class. It is the well-considered work of a laborious student and a fair scholar. It aspires, and not unreasonably, to something beyond an ephemeral existence. It professes to be something more than a mere record of the lives of individuals, many of whom even the high dignity of the metropolitan throne has not retrieved from insignificance. The prelate whose life is under review is made the centre of the piece; around him we see the ecclesiastical world revolve; and thus the work now presented to the reader becomes a history of the church of England. The idea, Dr. Hook tells us, presented itself to his mind at an early period of life, and now in his old age he resumes a task which he unwillingly relinquished, and which, he modestly says, "if it fail to afford amusement and instruction to others, will at least supply him with employment in the service of a Master who is not extreme to mark what is amiss."

This method of treating his subject has some advantages. It has this at least, that when the subject of the biography happens to be an obscure person, or one of whom little is known, it gives the author a fair opportunity to make excursions into the more inviting fields of history. In truth, of the private lives of the Anglo-Saxon prelates there is little to relate. From the arrival of Augustine to the Norman conquest is a period of about six hundred years, during which thirtyfour archbishops of Canterbury ruled the English church. The names of most of these are all that is recorded; around the rest some events of great importance cluster. Great assistance has been rendered of late years to those who would investigate this portion of our history, in the publication of the Saxon Chronicle, the Anglo-Saxon laws, the histories of Bede, of Florence of Worcester, and other reprints of early monkish writers hitherto inaccessible and almost unknown. Of all these Dr. Hook has availed himself. His volume is an original contribution to our ecclesiastical history. We have often had

occasion to differ from him, and may have again to do so; but we are not insensible to his merits as an author, and have no wish to understate them. For his own sake, it would have been as well, we think, that in his opening chapter he should have displayed something less of an irritable temperament. We are not aware that his invectives will fall with any crushing force upon his opponents, but they betray a bitterness which neither becomes his dignified position nor the mellow gravity of his years. They come with the less grace because Dr. Hook himself has not always been a pattern of meekness even to his own ecclesiastical superiors. We can remember when that gentle prelate, bishop Ryder, having expressed his intention to preside at a meeting of the Bible Society to be held at Coventry, Dr. Hook, who was then the incumbent of a church in that city, warned him off, in terms scarcely less offensive, considering the relation of the two parties, than any which may have been made use of by Dr. Hook's theological opponents against himself. The passage to which we refer is this:

"What will the future historian have to say when the present has become a bygone generation? He will look, not to the action only, but to the principle from which it emanates. He will, on the one hand, admit that zeal for the propagation of the gospel, and for the maintenance of God's truth, is characteristic of the christian temper; but he will remark, on the other hand, that zeal without love ceases to be a christian grace, and becomes a diabolical passion. That passion, he will observe, is apparent in those malignant professors of godliness who, in times past, consigned a fellow-creature to the rack or the stake, for daring to differ from them in opinion. But he will point out the same malignant passion in the modern controversialists, who dip their pens in gall, or sharpen the arrows of a poisoned tongue, fo wound another's feelings, to expose him to the hatred of his contemporaries, or to assassinate his character. He will be able to assert, indeed, that the state, in its enlightenment or its indifference, has refused to sanction the public execution of the heretic, real or reputed; but, adverting to the anonymous letters, and the many paragraphs or pamphlets issuing from the low press, with the single purpose of inflicting pain upon those who venture to differ in opinion from the fanatical religious world, he will come to the conclusion that the security we enjoy from personal injury is to be attributed less to the improvement of the religious temper than to the care of a well-organized police"!

A clergyman writing history teaches by example as much as if he were a parish priest; and the example of ill-temper in this introductory chapter is unfortunate. "In every age," adds Dr. Hook, in the next paragraph, "including our own, as the poor will never cease from the land, so the hypocrite, the fanatic, the persecutor, and the fool will be found in the church." Very likely and the business of a wise writer, like that of a

wise preacher, is, we apprehend, not to scold and sneer at such, but with calmness and dignity to reprove and instruct, and, if possible, to reclaim them. We hope that Dr. Hook himself will see the propriety of removing these and some other offensive passages, which give to his. work that appearance of prejudice and onesidedness which is its greatest fault.

There are other points on which we differ much from Dr. Hook; and some few in which his prejudices have so warped his judgment that, in his haste to crush an adversary, he has even misstated well-known facts. For instance, when he writes thus:

"Still the progress of the Papal power was rapid and wonderful; and this must be attributed to that oneness in aim and act which is observable in all the Papal proceedings. So remarkable is this circumstance, that to it we may trace the Puritan notion, that by the Pope is meant an incarnation of the Evil one, who, from the time of the apostles to the present hour, has been actively employed in the destruction of souls, and in the elevation of himself to an equality with the Deity."

Now, Dr. Hook knows perfectly well that the "Puritan notion" that the pope is "an incarnation of the Evil one," or, to speak in language less ambiguous, and a great deal more correct, that the pope is Antichrist, hasexisted in the church at least from the beginning of the third century. He has a much higher reverence for the Fathers than we profess, and is, probably, as well acquainted with their writings. Were, then, the Fathers Puritans? We are not sure that the Puritans would have been proud of such an ancestry; but it is certain that on this point their doctrine was that which was both held and taught by the Fathers themselves; who speculated with as little reverence as John Bunyan upon "the number of the beast," and fixed it with as much precision. They found it in the spiritual head of the Latin Church. It is to one of them, indeed, we owe the very first suggestion that the mystical number 666 has its solution in the Greek word for the Latin man, and the Latin kingdom. Was Irenæus a Puritan? and is it one and the same thing to believe that the pope is Antichrist, and to teach that he is an incarnation of the Evil one?" If so, the Fathers are responsible for this folly, and not the Puritans, whose fault was, as we conceive, not that they pushed too far their war against the pope, but that they pointed their guns in a wrong direction, and wasted their strength in vain assaults upon "the Antichrist of Lambeth." It is dangerous, we all know, to play with twoedged weapons, and Dr. Hook, stepping out of his way to cast a stone at the hapless Puritans, and fighting in the dark, has given a rash blow to some of their opponents. In truth, the dean of Chichester was not meant for a controversialist. When