articles on separate books of Holy Scripture, in which the author has been generally successful in retaining orthodox views, without neglecting the conclusions of modern critical science. It must probably be attributed to the design of the work that the Hebrew and Greek words are written throughout in English characters, and that, as a rule, critical conclusions, as, eg. to authenticity and authorship of the various books, are simply stated, and little or no explanation given of the arguments by which these are arrived at and supported. Generally speaking, however, this class of articles are done very satisfactorily according to their proposed scale, and with praiseworthy care and accuracy.

The compiler, however, has chosen to combine with the Bible Dictionary a theological and doctrinal one, and, looking at the book in this light, we can by no means report so favourably of it. Under the head of doctrine we get too often the crude and one-sided utterances which form the shibboleths of a party, without even the pretence of impartiality; and, as might be expected, these articles, in too many instances, bear inadequacy on their face. Thus, for instance, the 'Power of the Keys' is referred to only casually under 'Key,' and we are then told that it was given to Peter and the other Apostles, only at times, when and in so far as Christ made him and them infallible '—a statement which appears to us either ludicrous or unintelligible. Under 'Priest' occurs a good summary of Old Testament facts; but this is preceded by a marvellous tissue of assertions, beginning with the bald dictum that the notion is contrary to Scripture, that Christ is High Priest, and Christian ministers priests;' and to pass over a number of similar statements, ending with the no less remarkable conclusion that, 'as sacrificing was the Temple priest's duty, so Gospel preaching is the Christian minister's duty.' For 'Sacrament' we look altogether in vain. While he treats of the succession of the Scribes, he leaves out Apostolical Succession altogether. 'Lord's Supper' is not so violent as we might have expected, but the author fights the air and combats an imaginary` doctrine, that the Lord's Supper is not a repetition of the sacrifice on Calvary a theory which never has been upheld by any party in the Church. The article on 'Creation' is excellent, and the geographical articles generally have profited by the latest researches. The biographical element is also adequate; the narratives are clear and definite, and embody a vast number of well-chosen and skilfully arranged facts. The numerous woodcuts are very helpful to the understanding of the text, though the beauty of the details is much affected by their small size. Upon the whole, this work is so generally painstaking, and so good in many respects, that we must strongly regret that it has not been confined to the function of a Bible dictionary, and left theology alone. The one is discharged on the whole very well; the other (although there are good articles on 'Atonement,' 'High Priest,' and Law) as ill as possible. The book is worth having as a very good, though condensed, Bible dictionary; though less really valuable to Churchmen than its size and fulness, and the care, industry, and learning which have been spent on its composi

tion, would have made it, with a little more breadth of view and less of dogmatism.

The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament, with an English Translation, and with Various Readings and Critical Notes. Small 4to, pp. vi.—1134. (London: S. Bagster and Sons, 1879.) THIS handsome book is beautifully printed in small, but very clear Greek and English types, in double columns, but, owing to the unfortunately narrow rule adopted by Messrs. Bagster in all their Biblical publications, it does not contain the whole LXX., since the Deuterocanonical books belonging to the Egypto-Hebrew Canon are omitted -a practice which, whatever insufficient defence may be set up for it on doctrinal grounds in works intended for merely popular use, is quite unpardonable in those designed for the use of scholars and for literary purposes: since Ecclesiasticus and Maccabees are quite as likely to be so needed as Proverbs and Esther. We may just observe that this crotchet is not entertained by German or Slavonic Protestants, and that the Bible Society's versions, cheap as they are, find no sale with them, because of the same foolish omission. A slight introductory sketch of the history of the version is prefixed to the volume, but it is not critical enough in execution, nor is any reference given us later than to the recensions of Lucian of Antioch and Hesychius. Nothing is said as to the labours of Aldus, of the Complutensian and Vatican editors, or of Grabe, Holmes, Mai, and Tischendorf; nor are we told what text is presented to us, though a brief inspection seems to show it to be the Roman. The translation is, on the whole, fairly executed, but the translator has allowed himself to be too much swayed by the A.V. and by the Prayer-Book version of the Psalter, so that not infrequently, while we get the general sense of a passage correctly enough, we do not get a literal version of the actual Greek text before us. Thus, for example, in Psalm lxxviii. 33, the phrase καὶ ἐξέλιπον ἐν ματαιότητι αἱ ἡμέραι αὐτῶν is translated, And their days were consumed in vanity,' adopting here the Prayer-Book verb in a sense which the intransitive λain never has, whereas the literal rendering failed or came short would equally convey the idea of the Greek and, indeed, of the Hebrew original. Thus, this edition cannot be depended on by students unversed in Hellenistic Greek, for giving any finer shades of meaning, much less for throwing light on passages where the Hebrew text is now unintelligible, but where a clearer reading seems to have been in the hands of the Seventy. A book of this sort, to be of any real value, must be critical; and critical, unfortunately, is exactly what the volume before us is not.

The Microscope of the New Testament. By the late Rev. WILLIAM SEWELL, D.D. Edited by the Rev. W. J. CRICHTON, M.A. (London, Oxford, and Cambridge: Rivingtons.)

FEW Anglican Churchmen of the present century have contributed more largely or more effectually to the advancement of Church and classical education in their more practical and higher aspects than the late Dr. W. Sewell, the well-known founder of S. Columba's VOL. VII.-NO. XIV.

I I

College, in Ireland, and of S. Peter's College, Radley, near Oxford. The closing and more secluded years of his long and laborious life were spent on a labour of delight in the composition of the Microscope of the New Testament, with a twofold object of disproving the destructive theories of modern neologians and of exploding the supposition that the Alexandrine Greek of the New Testament is not in its expression as minutely accurate as the Greek of the classics. With such unclassical forms as orýkw and others before us in the Greek Testament, we are scarcely in a position to accord a very high measure of success to Dr. Sewell's singularly ingenious attempt to put the Greek of the Greek Testament on the high level of the Greek of the classics in point of minute accuracy; we can, however, most cordially accord him our fullest gratitude for his most successful refutation of the various destructive theories set forth by the neologian school. Most fully, too, do we enter into the impression produced on Dr. Sewell's own mind by his microscopic study of the Greek Testament when he declares, 'Yet the more I study, the more minutely I look into the force, the exactness, the deep meaning of every single word, the profounder becomes my reverence, the more awful my sense of the importance of every jot and every tittle of Holy Writ.' The most striking and original portion of the work is that which treats of the origin of the Gospels as declared in Scripture itself. Here our author's arguments rest on testimony which even from a human standpoint is clearly conclusive, because it is concurrent and independent. The fact most prominently set forth, then, in dealing with the history of the four Gospels is that they were arrangements of narratives given by the Twelve Apostles, or confirmed by them, as in the case of S. Paul's Evangelium. According to Dr. Sewell's theory, the Gospel of S. John (against which the neologians have exhausted their arguments and learning) was pro vided, under Apostolical sanction, with the guarantee and testimony of the Apostolic body to its accuracy, to supply more advanced teaching in the deeper mysteries of the faith, when this became more needed. Dr. Sewell maintains that this Gospel was not published in the early days of the Church, because it was not desirable at that time to raise questions surrounded with strong temptations to human curiosity, controversy, and speculation. To such a twofold arrangement of Divine teaching, elementary and advanced, Dr. Sewell finds a parallel in our Church teaching, in the catechism for the young and the articles for the more advanced minds.

In his treatment of the force of particular words and phrases in the Greek Testament (and especially in the treatment of the Greek article and the tenses of Greek verbs), Dr. Sewell is for the most part especially happy, and the successful results of his subtle scholarship and discriminating criticism find a singular corroboration in the critical works of Canon Lightfoot, the greatest living authority on the subject. This is all the more satisfactory when we come to bear in mind that so many of Dr. Sewell's arguments in defence of the Divine origin of the Gospel are more or less intimately bound up with the special force he finds in the terms used. It is, however, not

a little remarkable that in discussing the exact sense to be assigned to the various Greek terms rendered in English by 'say' or 'speak,' to the confusion, if not to the entire exclusion, of the special force of the original, Dr. Sewell is not quite as satisfactory as we could wish, though he is sufficiently accurate to support his arguments by most of the distinctions he correctly points out and rightly insists upon. We cannot, for example, admit that Dr. Sewell exhausts the forces of, Aéyɛ in the Greek Testament when he limits them to 'the telling of a tale or the employment of words in connexion with reasoning;' nor can we accept without certain qualifications his remark that 'Our Lord six times over (Matt. v. 21-44) contrasts éppé0ŋ, 'it was said,' and Aéyw, 'I say.' Here we take λéyw as 'I command,' a sense given to the word even in classical Greek by Sophocles, Xenophon, and Demosthenes, and equivalent to Kɛɛów, but distinguished from it occasionally as a verbal and immediate command—a sense clearly assigned to it in many passages in the Greek Testament, as Matt. viii. 4, 9, Rom. iii. 19 (öra ó róμos λéyɛi). It is remarkable, too, how often S. Paul uses Aéyw of commands of the Law, Scripture, and of God, and in 1 Cor. ix. 8 we find the remarkable contrast karà ἄνθρωπον ταῦτα λαλῶ and ὁ νόμος ταῦτα λέγει, which is repeated in xiv. 21-34. It is entirely owing to this sense (command) of Aéyw that we have λoyos used in the sense of a commandant, as S. Mark vii. 13,. I John ii. 7, where our translators in the Authorised Version have actually rendered it by 'commandment'-a sense, too, which has passed into our long-naturalised English term decalogue. Two other cognate points we must here note-(1) that no sense could be more in harmony with the derivation and original sense of Aéyw, to lay down, as in English we have law (i.e. what is laid down by authority as a rule) from the old Saxon lagan (to lay down), and (2) no sense could be more appropriate to our Blessed Lord's character. as the Logos, speaking directly and immediately in His own person. It is precisely in this relation that we find Xéyw contrasted with éppéon by our Lord Himself. He speaks the Divine command directly and immediately, for His word is not spoken by the instrumentality of any prophet, according to the common formula, rò pn0èv dia Tou προφήτου λεγόντος. On the cognate term φημί Dr. Sewell tells us that, though 'so common in classical Greek,' it does not occur at all in the Greek Testament.' This is a singular oversight, and very misleading, for though onui itself does not often occur, yet on is of constant occurrence, or rather recurrence, in every part of the Greek Testament; but what is peculiar about onu is this, that usage appears limited to the First Epistle to the Corinthians, as I Cor. vii. 29 (TOũтo dé ønμɩ). (See also ch. x. 19, xv. 50.) The whole work, we regret to say, abounds in too many inadvertencies of this kind, happily not detracting much, if anything, from the solid strength and relevant application of the author's reasoning, which is well supported on other grounds, but such inadvertencies clearly indicate the sad want of Dr. Sewell's finishing touches and of his final revision for the press.

its

Commentary on S. Paul's Epistle to the Romans. By FREDERICK ADOLPH PHILIPPI, Doctor and Ordinary Professor of Theology at Rostock. (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark.)

THIS first instalment of Professor Philippi's Commentary forms the second of the two volumes issued to the subscribers to their Foreign Theological Library by Messrs. Clark. It is not a work of first rank, but sufficiently able and learned, and what we should call Evangelical in the theological character of the notes. In the Introduction the author lays down (we think rightly), in opposition to Baur, Schwegler, and Volkmar, that the purpose of the Epistle was not polemic or apologetic, but friendly and hortatory. Nor can he see that it is directed against the Judaizing movement which desired to exclude Gentiles from the Church.

'No other opposition, then, to Pauline universalism is even conceivable than that which all Judaistic false teachers and sects actually adopted. Besides, it is such an opposition alone that the Apostle combats in the Roman Epistle. He contends only against righteousness by works, not against a designed exclusion of the Gentile world altogether; and, indeed, against the work-righteousness of Judaism, not against the workrighteousness of the Jewish Christian portion of the Roman Church. Had the Roman Jewish Christians followed this course, he would have attacked it directly, and have withstood them as he did the Galatian false teachers and the Galatian churches, and no consideration of any kind whatever would have induced the Gentile Apostle to treat gently a tendency striking at the very root of the Gospel. For the rest, the same view must be held if the Roman Church had adopted not the ordinary Galatian exclusivism, but the one described by Baur; for this, so far from being, as Dr. Baur supposes, gentler, was harsher than the Galatian form, seeing that it excluded even the conditional admission of the Gentile world to the Messianic salvation. If now, on the other hand, we are reminded (Baur, i. 331) that Paul did not in Rome, as in Galatia, see his own work overthrown, and had not to encounter opposition to his Apostolic authority as directly hostile; that here he had not to do with a Church that was going back, but with a Church, as he might hope, advancing from imperfection to perfection,-it is obvious to rejoin that in that case Paul would the more decisively and fearlessly have repelled false teachers so misleading the Church, and would have plainly and forcibly admonished and warned the Church itself. But here indeed everything returns to the starting-point, namely, to the hypothesis that not only the Judaistic heresy of the Apostolic age, but Apostolic Jewish Christianity in general, was merely a particularism holding righteousness by works' (p. 16.)

The authenticity of this Epistle is so universally allowed both by friends and enemies, that the commentator is enabled to take this for granted. With the question of its date he does not deal. The Pauline Theory of the Inspiration of Holy Scripture: an Inquiry into the present Unsettled State of Opinion concerning the Nature of Personal Inspiration; with the view of placing on a Consistent and Scriptural Basis the Inspiration of Holy Scripture. By WILLIAM ERSKINE ATWELL, D.D., Rector of Clonoe. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1878.)

HOLY SCRIPTURE often asserts, but never defines, its own inspiration